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Shoreline Instruments Pickups/Preamps Amplifiers Accessories Specials Shipping Guitarists
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General questions • Do you offer a trial period or guarantee? Gear Questions • Do you sell used gear? Do you offer a trial period or guarantee? Yes. You can read the details of our guarantee by following the link marked "guarantee" at the top left of every page of the website, or by clicking here. For all of our accessories—tuners, strings, cables, capos, pickups, preamps, etc.—we try to keep at least one of everything in stock, and deeper inventory on top sellers. This means that for most orders, we will have your gear in stock, ready to ship the day you order it. But, backorders from manufacturers do happen occasionally. In most cases, vendors will drop-ship directly to you. If this is not possible, we'll let you know right away about any backorders, estimated fulfillment times, etc. With instruments, however, it is a different story. Our builders make anywhere from 20-60 instruments a year, often with 3-6 month wait times. While we occasionally have several guitars from any one builder in stock, it is more often the case that we are backordered, and taking waiting list signups. Therefore, when considering any new guitar from us, it's always best to call to confirm inventory. 99% of domestic orders placed on weekdays before 2:00 pm Colorado time
get shipped same-day, via US Priority Mail or First Class Mail. Most
of the rest get shipped within 2 business days. If we anticipate a delay,
you'll be notified immediately and given the option to modify or cancel
your order. International orders ship within 3 business days. Further
details can be found on our shipping page. Given our order volume—not to mention our email volume—we
cannot take orders outside our normal channels. This means no email orders.
We still take phone orders, but the single most reliable way to place
an order is to use the website and shopping cart. Even if you are placing
a custom order, we will ask you to enter your details through the website,
so that they're automatically entered into our order database. All domestic orders are shipped for free. Further details can be found
on our shipping page. Yes. Most orders under a pound can be shipped Express Mail in the US
for an additional $20, with greater additional fees for heavier packages.
This number is calculated right in our shopping cart, and you're given
the option to choose your shipping preference when checking out. Please
see our shipping page for details on
international shipping. Yes and no. Our entire instrument inventory is right here on the site—Shoreline is not
a secret Goodall or Lowden dealer, and every builder we represent
is shown on these pages. But our satellite stores on Amazon and eBay often have listings for accessories that don't yet appear on this website.
If you do a WHOIS lookup of current online guitar stores, you'll find that the creation date of "samusic.com" (our original website address) predates every one, often by many years. That's just the technical way of saying that Shoreline has been online longer than any other guitar store—we're even older than Amazon and eBay. However, we don't post lists of customer testimonials on this website,
for several reasons. First, although lots of stores solicit and display
a handful of testimonials from their customers, I've always thought this
approach was kind of fishy. I mean, it would be easy enough for any store
only to post the really good comments. So I decided to forgo the testimonial
listings. However, we do have a record of unsolicited customer responses
that is impossible to fake, and you're welcome to check that out: We
are one of the highest-rated merchants—in any category—on
Amazon.com, and we of course have plenty of eBay feedback, too. In fact,
between our Amazon
feedback and our eBay
feedback, you'll find over 8000 responses which, while only
a fraction of our overall customer base, should be enough to give you
a representative picture.
For now, we're keeping prices low by listing our inventory online, so we don't have print catalogs. Sorry. Yes, we do. You can find a list of what's available on our Closeouts page, where we also occasionally sell overstock and discontinued items. Sort of. While we have posted a handful of recordings on our MP3 page, you won't find any set of pickup recordings anywhere that's as comprehensive as the collection posted by Doug Young. Doug's a customer, and he has graciously allowed us to link our other customers to his site. If you have a lot of free time to spend listening to recordings of every guitar pickup under the sun, give his site a visit, and while you're there, be sure to check out his music. As far as guitar recordings go, we simply don't do them. Don't get me wrong—I understand the desire to hear comparison recordings of all sorts of guitars. In fact, this is what we set out to do when I bought this shop many years ago. The problem is that even with high-quality mics and digital recording, most recordings tend to misrepresent in some fundamental way the guitars being recorded. In fact, it's a well-known phenomenon that good recording guitars are often less satisfying to hold and play than guitars that don't record well. This means that the guitar that sounds great on the recording might very well be a dud in your hands. Given all this, I've just decided not to do any recordings. Yes...usually. Although there's lots of technical ways to describe it,
the gist is this: A preamp gives your pickup enough signal strength to
travel over long stretches of cable into your amp or mixing board. Passive
guitar pickups require much more gain to reach a good volume, and this
tends to result in thin and noisy tone, as well as poor gain before feedback.
Active pickup systems normally include the needed preamp onboard your
guitar, either in the endpin or mounted on the side. This onboard preamp
is often the only preamp you need. Passive systems have no such preamp,
and typically require one within 5 or 6 cable feet of your guitar. But
either type of system can benefit from an external preamp. For instance,
the Baggs
Para Acoustic DI not only gives the necessary signal boost to passive
pickups like the PUTW Guitar
Pickup, but can also provide useful tone control and feedback attenuation
for active pickups like the B-Band
AST or Baggs I-Beam Active.
It also helps that preamps like the Baggs PADI double as a DI box, saving
you one extra piece of gear. What are the names for the different parts of my guitar? Diagrams can be found on our guitar
parts page. |