Thank you for supporting Doug Short Guitar Blog for another year by visiting this website, watching my YouTube videos and subscribing to my YouTube channel. Although I didn’t plan to release YouTube videos on a regular basis in 2024, I produced 11 videos with Brian May related content on an approximately monthly basis this year. Three of these covered challenging design and fabrication mini projects (Jeanrenaud switch replicas, Red Special tremolo arm and tremolo arm tip) which required learning 3D SLA printing techniques.
The highlight of the year was when Brian May attended our enthusiast meet-up in Berkshire, U.K. My coverage of this part of the event produced my best performing YouTube video which has attracted over 180,000 views, 2,800 likes and hundreds of positive, supportive comments at the time of writing. Read a small selection of these in the screen captures below.
For those of you who are interested in the statistics, dsgb.net has been on line for four years and has welcomed over 27,000 visitors and received over 96,000 views in 2024. This represented another substantial increase in the number of visitors although with approximately the same number of overall views as in 2022 and 2023.
Collaborations with professional and amateur musicians, luthiers, YouTube content creators and Brian May enthusiasts is always inspiring and enriching; this year I worked with Julian Hemingway to better understand Brian May’s original home made Eclipse magnet pickups and this led to an update video in November. Andrew Guyton and Martin Pitcher helped me to produce a short video on the Guyton RS Transporter to round off the year by providing audio and video media.
Although my media output is primarily Queen and Brian May related, I enjoy listening to many different bands and like many millions of people all around the world, I was captivated by the resurgence of interest in Oasis resulting from their planned 2025 world tour. This motivated me to arrange a visit to Oasis design central, MicroDot Creative in Kendal, Cumbria on our February break and produce a large framed display of the reissued Definitely Maybe 7″ vinyl singles and a quantity of 1996 fabric tour passes I bought from eBay. I bought a very good value “Scran” overdrive pedal which is designed, hand wired and assembled by SoundLad in Liverpool and makes Oasis tones readily accessible.
I look forward to exploring new opportunities in 2025 and tapping into the talents of Will Barbero who lives a short drive away from me in Edinburgh. I plan to produce a YouTube video exploring the design and fabrication of the Brian May Red Special tremolo system steelwork in Q1 2025. I would like to produce a video in which I discuss and demonstrate how to characterise the response of a selection of popular guitar pickups across the full audio spectrum using an exciter coil and a PicoScope oscilloscope PC interface.
Links to my social media accounts are below. Please follow, subscribe, like and comment on my content because music can’t propagate in a vacuum.
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