Cole Clarke CCFL2EC-SRE and YouTube Shorts

"Birthday present." That was the rationale behind buying a new acoustic that is worth more than my car. Okay, I drive an old car.

It's a Cole Clarke CCFL2EC-SRE dreadnaught, serial 241142042, as mentioned in my last post about acoustics. I went back the next day and bought it. Managed to convince them to knock $100 off and throw in a set of strings but it still came in at $3.3k. Cole Clarke do many different woods for the CCFL2, and the price seems to vary within the $2k-$3k brackets...but of course I had to like the one with the increasingly rare gold standard of soundboards, a Sitka Spruce top, a wood that is hundreds of years old, Indian Rosewood back and sides, and my absolute favourite, Ebony fretboard and bridge. Neck/headstock is Australian Queensland Maple. So woods - kinda as good as it gets and therefore priced appropriately.

I showed it to my wife "yeah, looks boring, about what I expected" "But the exotic rare woods! And the simplicity of design with clean lines, it's beautiful! (looks at the rosette, which is two circles) Oh, okay, maybe it is a little boring. But listen to this!"

Acoustically it sounds great. I did a side by side with the Maton and the Cole Clarke and my wife immediately recognised the better tone. Plugged in is sensational, which is the primary use I'm going to have for it - playing through a house PA. Definitely needs an introductory video.

...which I decided I would have another crack at making a YouTube Short. I kinda tried a few years back and it all seemed too hard I gave up very quickly. After an extremely brief internet search, all I had to do was make a portrait video, keep it short, heh, and upload it. YouTube will recognise it is a short and deal with it accordingly.

Now I've seen some shorts, and I could picture one in my head, it's interesting how they always wrap and restart. So I mentally prepared it with a cool epilogue as a wrapper. Mentally reminiscent to Pink Floyd The Wall wrapper "Isn't this...where we came in?" or maybe a bit more like Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds "a green flare, coming from Mars". Yes I do think about these things. But ultimately it is wasted, only 15% of viewers made it to the end.

I set up the video camera in portrait mode and recorded me playing a few songs both with a mic and through my audio interface. I spoke a little. I played "Heart of Gold" fingerstyle, I played "Shine" with a pick, I played the first verse of "Wish You Were Here". Ultimately I only used Heart of Gold as the mic demo and Shine as the plugged in demo, which was a little unfair - I should have just played the same song and A/B'd it. I had too much going on in my brain at the time. And I failed on two and a half important points - I forgot to put my wedding ring on (I don't wear it overnight), I forgot to shave (it was Easter and I hadn't shaved for two days, being unshaven makes me look really old) and I should have put some lip balm on (my lips are always dry, the Australian sun was not kind to me as a child). So the one closeup made me wince a bit...when I was editing it "Argh, I need to do that again. Nope, I'm not doing all that again."

Shorts are a strange beast. Sure I'd had 1.5k views in the first day, but that is completely at the whim of YouTube. I've seen this profile before with my standard videos, was even more pronouced with the short. They give you a run, back off, give you another run, then stop. If you pay them money, you can be promoted. I guess that is great if you have something to sell, so the cost of promotion is less than the money to be made from selling. Maybe I will try that one day, record a short of me playing a favourite like Wish You Were Here, link it to a full playthrough, link that to my tab, and promote. As an interesting experiment. Not that I need to make a living from music and haven't agonised about what to do with tabs including my initial foray into Patreon.

So here's two interesting stats, views over time and percentage watched, blue is subscribed green is everyone else:

I can see why so many YouTubers are turning to shorts - they get a lot more eyeballs, and while it looks like the retention drops off really quickly, it's on par with normal form videos. YouTubers always ask you to subscribe - audience attention is much higher. But the real tell is still the same - you are still totally at the whim of YouTube how many eyeballs you get - look at this video, 91.9% of views are decided by YouTube!

My answer to YouTubers who are looking to make a living? You must have something to sell, ad revenue is just a bonus. Promote your videos as much as you need to convert viewers into customers. The cost of promotion is not free, just pay it, so long as the cost of promotion is less than your revenue, you can tweak around the edges as you go to maximise your cut.

Lucky I'm just an engineer dabbling in playing guitar purely for enjoyment and interest - being a YouTuber seems incredibly stressful!

Acoustics Again

This is an AI redraw in 3D animation style from a frame in a video feed of my son and I playing at church. Compared to the first time I posted an AI photo just slightly over two years ago this is astounding. What a world we live in, but I digress...

* * *

I have talked about my Maton EM225C in the past. It was the guitar I was playing in the heyday of youtube when I was getting millions of views. A guitar that I played so much I wore grooves into the frets so I had them redressed.  These days I take that work on personally, so the other week I had it on the bench yet again.

But before we go there, "what's the problem JAW?"

Here is a snippet of me isolated the other week at my local church:

That is gross on so many levels, but put aside I'm a boring rhythm guitarist and let's talk about the elephant in the room. First up there is just a general buzzy twang all the way through. I recently watched a video by Sor Hands in which he yet again bagged out steel string acoustic guitars. Some quotes of his: "Chains hanging off it" "Sounds like pots and pans" "No amount of money can be spent on a steel string that will sound any good". While I don't fully agree, I don't fully disagree either. That little snippet there did sound like chains were hanging off my guitar.

That section there was a crescendo, so I way playing full tilt which was bringing out the buzz. You can make any acoustic buzz, but it should be an extreme situation. You can also hear me hit some badly fretted chords, but come on, I was fretting an A chord. I have been fretting an A chord for 45 years, I can cleanly fret an A chord even on the worst day, and yet bleugh, buzzy buzzy bad fretting. No guitar should be so unforgiving that it buzzes out like that.

It *was* pots and pans.

So rewind, the week before I played this I had the Maton on the bench, strings off, straight endge out. There were clearly some high frets close to the body, and the neck was generally warped around where it hits the body. Very hard to take that photo, but this shot does reveal it somewhat:

So eyeballing the fretboard like this I could see that from around the twelfth fret and definitely by the 14th fret where the fretboard joins the body, the wood is high. Ideally the fretboard should be dead straight with a touch of neck relief right up at the nut. But what I've got here is lick a spoon - everything behind the 12th fret is down, so the latter half of the fretboard are all pretty much high frets and thus will buzz when you dig in.

I blocked back all the frets to straighten the neck out, until I thought there was no more fret left to give and then stopped. Re-crowned the frets and put it back together. In conjunction with this a few years ago I had put in a higher saddle - to get the strings up and reduce buzz - which helps - but it brought it's own troubles. The saddle was leaning forward, effectively making the string length shorter which means that the intonation is out and all the notes are sharp across the board. I tried to deal with this but cutting some compensation into the saddle, which again helped, but it is no cure.

This is an improvement, I recommend it if you have some minor intonation issues. Sure the saddle will wear a groove faster, but in ten years time, make another one!

It's all just bandaids over the actual issue. I need to pull all the frets, sand the fretboard back to being straight again, and put in new frets. I will take that job on, one day, but my mind turned back...

...to nearly three years ago when I was in Perth's historically significant music store "Kosmic Music". Side note, Kosmic has been around since 1969 - older than me - but during covid it went out of business. But I'm pretty sure it was Billy Hyde music that bought it and stood it back up again. Anyway, I played a few acoustics and a Cole Clarke really stood out, I was quite impressed with it. But at $4k I put it back on the shelf.

I revisted it again - it is my favourite shop alongside Mega Music and Mannys for looking at/playing guitars. Chatted with Paul, "I want a big dreadnaught acoustic I can really dig into without getting buzz." At the lower price point the Yamaha A3M was nice enough. I could make the Maton Troubadour buzz too easily. I played at least two Martins and every time I have played a Martin I don't dig the sound. Can't explain it. World famous American guitars played by so many people and I've never played a Martin that felt good or had a sound I liked.

But the Cole Clarke Fat Lady 2 with spruce top, rosewood back and sides and ebony fretboard, not bad! Cole Clarke guitars are all made in Melbourne and generally use local woods, this particular one wasn't - was all traditional woods. I had to fully thrash before I heard buzz. The intonation was spot on, even when I fretted a low F, which I notoriously fret too hard and push sharp - yep, not bad at all. But the real killer was the 3 way pickup. Undersaddle piezo, soundboard transducer AND in body condenser mic. Three knobs, twist to add more or less of the three pickups. Bass/Mid/Treble EQ. The sound was just gorgeous. And since I will only ever be playing the guitar through a PA, that is pretty important.

The FL2 model comes in many many wood configurations and a lot of them are around $AUD2.5k(2025). However this one with the most expensive woods...Sitka Spruce, Rosewood and Ebony... $AUD3.4k(2025)

Exhorbitant, but seeing as I bought the Maton for around $AUD1.2k(1997) and it has lasted me this long, I think I might be able to pull the money together...