Rgo music group catalogue

Further,

1. The ninja tale that Rgo can do that! — Rules of thumb shared by those who document the commonly available are trustworthy quick guides for DIY. Cf. on splitting humbuckers and tapping pickups, 2026 Jan 09. Those mods were applied to Skeletor at a time when going Super Rock was more big amps than retro chemistry. But Fender and Rgo have more tricks up their sleeves. Modders should not take out a factory Fender pickup or humbucker and deal with only the coil and wiring and guess their way to an Rgo-ish kinda customization then expect to get functional results. Rgo collaborated with Fender's labs and resources to not waste time and materials, a round-the-world global partnership not that readily available to the average guitar player.
The internal assembly of the TellmeMore pickup uses an expensive metallic substance costing $600 per ounce untreated, as much as gold at the time, discounted to Rgo at half price, to pay for Fender's Xmas gift to Jason. It is a “parent” compound of whatever today is expensive on the retail end but is not propietary any greater than how to make stainless steel out of the “parent” steel and other additive alloying. The substance is heated in a process dissimilar to firing ceramic, pressure wedged on as a plate with hand-cracked exposure of the metal's property top and bottom for NORTH alignment by an expert industrial material engineer buddy of Fender ($200 heat and cracking job), specializing in chemical treatments and using a pro rig for all metal plates and substances ($20,000 engineer's unique personal rig kept available for Fender; $10,000 cost to remove hazardous materials from rig after so many cycles of firing).
Ha guessed the North alignment incorrectly without using a magnet the first time. Flip, and the sautering could begin: attaching the wire side, the screw side, and pretty side plates to bookend the assembly. By holding their breaths and going neatly. Jason did the timing on his wristwatch, about 20 or 40 seconds each heated tacking with the iron, depending on North or South, screws or wiring; those variables were standard. Ha skipped a cycle of breathing away from the pickup to tap the half-cooled iron onto the “cracked” plate, which instantly burned caustic, dense, truly hazardous toxic invisible fumes. Nobody meant tapping like Ha pushing the boundary on safety. Jason chastised her and was the drummer keeping her on-pace. Militarily adroit, he had no sympathy how much time it took Ha's body to warm up; he definitely confirmed Ha is anemic and has low blood pressure. He took Ha's pulse, ordered her to reregulate, drink water, and finish the job.
The Rgo proprietary feature, related to tapping for the other pickup at the selection switch, is sautered in using a hand rig Ha specified ($0.50 plastic, upcharged to $5 by Fender for sample proof of printing, a lower threshold temperature for installer's proof like tapping and scratching to blank out a marked tuning fork), so disassembly destroys the exposed cracked surface of the alloy and permanently changes or deactivates the tone. If anyone wanted a guitar to sound like slinky smoky jazz, the amps had to be standard.
Ha bought a stake in a less expensive version of the metal for Rgo, with Chinese labs to produce more. The volunteer lab skipped calculations on computers and proceeded to mix up a batch immediately for sale to popular OEM manufacturers, $45,000 from Ha out of Rgo's budget. The national lab put in only $5,000, expecting a wholesale return of $300,000 gross and a proft of $15,000. The accountants were absolutely sure. Ha asked whether the Chinese government were privy to their country's popular culture. She was informed that Yes, they are, and they enjoy dabbling and sometimes being part of popular culture amongst their people.
Thomas bought 500 times more (!) batches in kilograms than Ha's round of investment, also from Rgo's budget, of the exact chemical compound used in the TellMeMore and did not believe it was excessive on his part. He calculated he could go 15 percent below end-of-year maxing out Rgo's budget and still give to himself that one Christmas gift. He told Ha so. More than $2 million first downpayment for the order, of which he wanted U.S. liquidity of 33 percent payout at the point of OEM wholesale purchase, all to himself and none for Rgo, as an advance before Christmas. The labs could not store the caustic compound at high quantity, so making the right blanks for storage at OEM work campuses was a strategy like bricks of gold at Fort Knox. Teens Rgo never even considered going shopping for a Xmas present for their HR manager Thomas. He said he deserved the holiday from too much personnel management, back to Earth treasures.
The side benefit was the special engineer collaborating with Fender received a kicker bonus promotion as newly minted emeritus with capacity to train 20 docents (university teachers). He chose a smaller training gig and handed over his prize as a scholarship for his professorial peers to lead, at an equal ratio of 1:5 funded scholarliness. He did the accounting and was not surprised: Thomas bid on Ha, labs matched Ha with a value vs demand offset, Thomas matched OEMs, individual experts took home the exact same share in profit as Rgo. All depending on youth culture's reception to Rgo and all the producers involved, not just dependent on Thomas's aging hippies. Worse comes to worse, Ha's modesty plan was for fools' buyback if the customers, young people in China, no longer wanted those offerings. We do listen to our children, the Chinese nationalists said. Happiness is all we want for their happiness. For Fender, side excursions for luxuries and alternatives happen all the time in business cycles and material components. They could care less about owning stocks in titanium or sheep wool, they thrive with the poindexters more as a happy mutual service than with the droll, regimented scientists. Scientist are not a brand people can bank on. The government feeds the scientists, corporations feed wonkers who are very close to culture.
Ha was concerned for OEM factories. They were mandated to serve their nation. They had no experience in storing hazardous materials, they had never worked with world-class university exotic materials, all a sudden being a Fender or a Gibson was better than being Yamaha in China. The factory workers, who were union party social industrialist groups, believed the fancy niche nonmarket commoditization was unfair pushiness, and they panicked. There was no need to build new factories, they simply had to have the money to employ more people. Unlike financing between USA and Japan, Thomas was going to threaten those OEMs with an old school Communist gung-ho lecture and do everything to not embarrass them. Hearing from organized labour was worth it to him. He pressured them to accept a service loan from their government in China and expand their service category offering to a different pool of fresh workers. He personally guaranteed the loan as long as Ha listened to her military caretakers and not try to pass out again. Ha was aghast the two-star was flexing, but she had to be mature and understand the factory workers' concerns were valid, not dangerous. Advocating for children's safety was a common denominator. The expert engineer had to gear up with his buddies and remeasure safety procedures for industrial applications handled by adult workers. And it was true a litle no-cancer, pre-cancer whiff early on was enough, aging hippies should not have to take such risks.
Picking the right variable out of the parameter, the extended cool-down time rather than the tack time, was luck and instict. Some months later when it was Jason's turn, he warmed up enough coiling the Strat-to-Skeletor pickup. Out of Jason's two Fenders, he lost one pickup that could not be refurbished and gained one basic factory pickup. Everything else was custom-made outside of a factory. The pickups on his Fenders cost many times more than all three rigger Fenders put together.
Immediately all allies on the project betted on both the cheaper alternative Ha proposed and a slimmer compromise of the luxury substance with the cracked surface. The chemical engineer went back to the physics end and assured them that there would be no problem in using copper below the top of the plate, at the third or fourth layer. They had to cut slices into plates because the process did not produce slim slivers. He could split the process into two parts, because the metal was inert at room temperature. But they would have to use magnifying glasses and microscopes to control everything. His new colleagues geeked out and went to work, like fine jewelers. It was not exactly a molten material that fitted a mold at that point. And they could not hammer it out, it was brittle. The OEM factories received word on how to proceed. That plan saved Rgo from an embarrasing fiasco in China. Thomas conceded and erased interest on the loan, into the negative territory, by buying U.S. copper reserved for those allied Chinese factories, who chose to splurge on HAZMAT suits and got to work right away.

2. Fender bought a market Seymour Duncan P90 pickup for Jason, which Ha used subsequently in an educational module for him. The two teenagers converted the pickup to a proprietary upgraded one with expensive metal coiling recommended by Jack, with a dual tap splice ratio done by Jason, to pass along to Fishman. There was a thin lead wire wound with the larger copper wire for the beginnings of a transistor radio, then something exotic, iridium potting and tipping not within the familiarity of guitarists. Jack liked Ha's idea of the iridium, so he donated a dysfunctional fountain pen. Melting iridium was better than melting silver and molding bullets to kill a vampire. Just for Jason and Ha to learn sautering. Jason thought about hiding the rest of the pen inside the guitar, still developing his Captain's Defense guitar.
The winding stopped at five big circles (5 representing the Pentagon) and got fancy, but Ha was not supposed to be privy to the exact decision. He used a crochet string she gave to him and measured out the feet and inches. One Pentagon ring was nearly his height. They multiplied a cycle (a Pentagon ring) into a loop, which altogether was more than a mile of copper. Ha measured with him and it was less than their spread armspan facing one another before the multiplier; they chose the Vetruvian Man as the divisor. From a difference on the negative end between 7/8 and 5/8, he calculated the positive side in his head but conservatively. Ha told him to pull on the cotton crochet string and measure out 7 feet, or as many as he had over-wound. He had to lasso it neatly back into his hands like a cowboy, pulling on the crochet thread to even it out, by thirds and fourths and fifths. Up to the octave and beyond. He used the logarithmic functuon and 8 in plain arithmetic for the first time, and a nifty anti-derivative for where to splice out the tap lead alloy guidewire. The silvery colored wire was going to be dysfunctional without a camera battery, so they saved pre-amping for Fishman. If there was going to be any metal left from the pen, they had to pulverize it and zebra-stripe the wire to add color of different piezo timbre to the coil.
Two decisions at the same time. One was to fix the mistake of overwinding the copper beyond a tap point. Why a tap point anyway? Because Jason's father Jack was an engineer joking on CIA about “interradii”. If CIA mistakens that the native service crew appeared to them as Borneo canabals, the TellMeMore could be upgraded with spytech to capture inquisitors on camera. What the Rgo Informer would show to FBI...would be a watered down version of the insides of a Pignose amp not worthy of Fender. We've got you on video, Jack! No, we've got you on camera, CIA! Wait for the reverb to dissipate, nobody will notice that shrill Punk note hid the snapping sound of the auto-triggered aperture. As long as it was not a CIA bug, Fishman was not in any danger. But wait! Instead of a spy camera, Teens Rgo could sneak into Casio's lab and make a wristwatch looper recorder disguised as an analog metronome, like a grandfather clock brass winchkey. That was Jack's idea. Jason was too shy to manufacture a winchkey instead of a toggle or switch, he scratched it off the ideas list for GuykerCo right away. Notch click, one revolution, another twist, click into notch, click click beyond the notch to feel the springs and levers straining. Inside the notch is Jazz, beyond the notch is Punk. Ohhh! Jason got it! He did not like the cartoon idea of pulling back on a winder key to expect the guitar is a giant jar for sardines inside. Too> G.I.
The other was to translate the bar switch into 24-hour military time clockwise circular winchkey-style like a tone knob. He said PRS had a dial switch. Ha said, We have a clock; Jack borrowed an analog metronome from artHaus. Jason had to divide 360 by five on paper and carefully align that greater than 5/8 but less than 7/8. Ha told him to divide by two first, to start in the middle of the length of the copper coil. He skipped 2 and 3 but did 4. Then he only wanted his math checked on 5. He was correct in long division but forgot to carry a placeholder when adding 2+2. He can divide by prime numbers. His positional math on paper sucked, he saved it for fretwork. So did he use 4/5? That condensed mini form factor was right to him, because they had the dense copper that cost 3 times more than the copper used on a regular single coil pickup. But he did not tell Ha the exact tap point formula he used. Ha guessed it was close enough between 3/5 and 4/5. If he plugged it in and timed the cycle of energy and lobbed off the overdrive tapering he can hear—all pickups and amps, not string vibrations, lob that off where the vibrations could no longer be driven by pickups—it had to match 60 bpm. He wanted above 70 (subwoofer style coming out of speaker-amps), then he thought about Ha's anemia. Ok, clockwork 60 for vampires every lunar day. Jason had to decide military 12 and 24 and and 120, to add back 2 and 3 and not leave his Archimedes triangle-inside-circle behind. Ha wanted him to test the Pignose 5 amp, the Fender practice 20 amps, a bass amp, a 100-watt amp, and quit before arena rock amps. For arena amps, they would do the math instead of the engineering. artHausDC told them Mesa was ready to do the engineering.
They tested the pickups on 40-watt Peavey amps. Ha's strumming style was too Country for Jason. He used his stopwatch to listen to what the pickups were doing. Ha's rhythm stayed the same. Then he listened to the added effect from the amps. Just a little buzzy taper happened. She handed his Tele back to him and told him to dial off and listen to the strings vibrate naturally. Then he was going to do whole notes on volume 4. Just letting the pickups ring out the note at three different switch selections. Those whole notes sounded too short to her. She used his wristwatch and tapped on a coffee table for one beat at 60 beats per minute. One second per beat. Okay, so half notes. When he was sure he was close enough to 60 bpm, he was right! Then back to focusing on the amps. He had to turn toward the amps to make sure interference was as latent as possible. There it was, the 60 Hz whirring ouch. A Strat five-position switch for a Tele with two pickups. One switch flick and it was gone. Cool how Punk that was! They proved it to themselves the noise was not a myth, it was actually there! Then Ha used her chorus conductor hands and got him into a quarter notes shuffle. He was satisfied he was still at 60 bpm. They used a piano metronome, she dialed in the number, it tapped out 60 bpm. Yes, he was on-beat, she confirmed, so she switched it off. Then he veered into Rock 'n Roll. Wow! It felt like how he should have been playing on the Stratocaster just as easily. He was impressed the music lessons went with the lutherie, that he could achieve playing rhythm guitar better than his beginner days. Voila! He's ready to hold a Gibson. So the pickups were actually too short at 120 bpm, except if Ha were playing around the 60 Hz barrier. Ack, half notes for Metal, good enough. They'll add overdrive and distortion and all that. They don't care about vibrations on the floor. Those pickups might have to go to Gibson and be put away so Seymour Duncan does not find out. Country music on electric guitar does ring shorter than a 12-string acoustic. Voila! Everything to standard. That's how Jason figured out where Metal music belonged and how to technically achieve what Metal guitarists wanted to hear.
One last test with the amps onvat volume above 4: flameco and jazz. Ha tapped on the coffee table a beat faster than 60 bpm. Jason had to listen again to the note vibrate off the string with the whole room effect. If his ears bent toward the amps and his hands were not in charge, he had to watch the rhythm made by the drummer; Ha was not going to dance. Another place for progressive music to show up was sliding down in technique from Jazz with pre-amps down to piezopuck on acoustic flamenco guitar. He knew the demo assignment. One short Jazz lead-in on the guitar, and he was ready to dance flamenco. Ha had to tap out flamenco on the coffee table instead of plain beats or he was going to stay in the sweet spot of progressive music measure after measure. She seitched to tapping out Rock. C'mon, get up and dance, don't be so anemic! So she got up and did a Spanish style of dancing close enough to flamenco. Foot stomping and hands over the head was important to circulate blood. Ha clapped over her head, and Jason punked out on the guitar. It was a dance-jam session with the Seymour Duncan pickup offset by an overworked double-pickup stacked humbucker, the last one at the bridge where Punk needed it to be.

3. The Telecaster had a bridge-neck S-H single coil plus humbucker set before vintage parts were poached for cleaning. Jason and Ha had to test the opposite, H-S ontop 1U-2U for the low end of Ha's bass-baritone mod for a wide guitar, which would make the Tele rigger a Super Singer's Tele. Anything that Jason did not want to keep would go into Thomas's Rgo Fenderized Gibson Les Paul. That was even scarier. Jason studied the difference and had two out of about five steps he planned in his head. Thomas was getting the drift of how to manage and sent Jason to Ha.
They were not yin-yang. They were not going at opposite ends at each other. If they were on a common path, they split first 2 steps Jason leads, next 3 steps Ha leads. They discussed their strengths in the workflow and how they deviated but not too importantly to over-argue. He was not to argue and get his way, because neither Ha nor Thomas wanted to stumble early.
Ha wanted to hear the humbucker at the neck, Jason rejected. Around Xmas time after his birthday in 1992, when the nickel hardware arrived, he took a power drill to Ha's house, went down to the basement with her, and drilled two holes into the vintage bridge plate. It was scary, but it fit. Out of the nickel set, he did not use the backplate and the bridge plate. He very much liked the newish nickel knobs. Ha tested placing the wide humbucker horizontally where Jason wanted its alternative position at the bridge; they got rid of using one of the vintage screws. Below the neck would be the freshly placed single humbucker. He used a nonmatching plastic plate to align the opposite 1-in-2, using new screws.
They spoke about Fender's patent stamping on the bridge plate, concluded Fender was exaggerating that placement of screws on metal is somehow patentable. Ha was not the best in teacher's mode at that point. There might have been a patent number on the plate, because Fender treated the bottom metal plate as integral to the electric function of the pickup on it. Or was it the Fender logo was a registered trademark? The old servicemarks (SM) from OEMs who did not pursue patents seemed to be obsolete because it was confusing. Not to Rgo under Fender's guidance. The same patent number or similar was stamped on the back of the headstock, but Ha does not remember anymore. She did compromise at the time, guessing Fender regarded the whole bridge assembly was one patent.
Attorney Jason understood Teacher Ha's criticism and compromise. His business acumen would not compromise.