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So now you want to adjust the intonation on your bass guitar. What that means is whether or not the instrument plays in tune with itself. The way you do that is you pluck the low E, and then fret the low E, at the twelfth fret and it should be the same note. Here, it’s really sharp. A good rule of thumb is… What you’re doing is you’re shortening or lengthening the scale, and one thing you can usually remember is if you shorten the scale, you sharpen the note. This is really sharp so you want to move the saddle back.

You move it back some and just repeat. You want to pluck your low E and tune the note, and then fret it at the twelfth fret. Still a little sharp, so you want to move back some more. Tune your note. Fret it at the twelfth fret. That’s almost perfect, just move it back a little more. Now the low E is intonated. You want to do the rest of the strings too. A string, tune it up. Fret it at the twelfth fret. That one’s in tune. Let’s try the next one, D string. Tune it up.

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So now, we’re going to string the guitar up, and we said before, we had 10
to 46 gauge strings. So, we’re going to grab the low E. String it through
the tail piece, over top of the bridge. Now, we’re going to come up here
and we want to wind around twice and through the hole. You want to make
sure the string comes over top of the wind. Now, you want to turn it up
some to get it nice and tight there.

Now, I like to cut the excess string off immediately, so it doesn’t hit me
in the face. Then, you grab the A string and work twice around, pull it
taught, give it a couple jerks. I like to stretch the strings when I’m
putting them on. When you’re turning it and tightening it up, you pull the
string up and hold it back.

Now, when you get to the unwound strings, I like wrap it around three
times. Always making sure, when I put it through the post hole, the string
comes over top the winds. Some people like to leave the excess string up
there and curl it around and stuff. I think it’s messy and definitely
doesn’t help the guitar stay in tune.

The B string, again, three winds instead of one or two.

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My name is Ricky. I work at Main Drag Music. I’m the head guitar buyer/seller, or more like curating these days. It’s pretty exciting. I grew up playing music. I’m still an active musician, as most of us are here. Coming in and getting to see these instruments that I read about when I was a child, not just the instruments, the amplifiers as well, spent so much time seeing them in books and magazines growing up and actually getting your hands on them and getting to know them a little more intimately is a pretty exciting part of the job.

Also, we get to help people figure out precisely what it is that they’re looking for whether it’s their kid’s first guitar and they know how excited that their child is going to be when they see that gift. It’s pretty nice because I remember my first guitar and I remember what that moment was like for me. It’s special to be a part of that, you know?

We have a variety of instruments. We have guitars, basses, amplifiers, both vintage and used. It’s a buy-sell-trade mentality. Most of our inventory is pre-owned, which is cool. I sort of prefer that vibe. You get instruments that were played and that have stories. You get to come in as a customer and continue that story. We are on South 1st and Wythe Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a really unique vibe here that has happened over many years. It’s been around since ’97? We’ve been at this location for, I think, six years now. I remember coming here as a customer. It was my choice.

This vibe that’s created here, it’s unique in that we have all of these different, you can’t even call them departments because it’s one big, big room, but we have so many different examples of vintage guitars, both sort of collector pieces and also the more affordable things. We try to keep everything geared towards the working musician, and in doing so have created this really special atmosphere to check things out in a no-pressure environment. You can definitely get your hands on things and feel them out for yourself and really be sure about what tool you want to buy.

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So, the tools you’re going to need to set up your Fender Bass are a short ruler, some wire snips for cutting strings, a radius gauge for checking the radius, fret guard for polishing the frets, a pair of dowel calipers for measuring string gauges, small flathead screwdriver, a Phillips head screwdriver that’s a little bit bigger, a really large flathead screwdriver for addressing the truss rod, a straight edge for checking neck relief, some guitar polish and a really good tuner . And those are the tools you’re going to need to set up a Fender Bass.

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Alright, so now we’re going to adjust the pickup heights on a Gibson Les Paul. This also can be personal preference. It depends on what kind of sound you like. Some guys like to bury the pickups further in the guitar and have to really play it and let the amp do more work.

There’s a good measurement to use. What you want to do is fret the guitar at the highest fret and measure from the pole to the bottom of the string. You want it to be about 5/64. You just want to push that string down and make sure that it’s not hitting the pickup itself. You want to adjust them by using the screw on the side. Usually it’s a flathead screwdriver.

Check it, and perfect. You want to do the same thing on the bridge pickup. Measuring from the pole to the bottom of the string. So, you’re going to do the same thing with the bridge pickup. Measuring from the pole to the bottom of the string to about 5/64.

That’s how you adjust the pickup height on a Gibson Les Paul.

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Now we’re going to learn how to clean the bass. That’s cleaning the frets, polishing the body. The first thing you want to do is take the strings off. It’s a really good idea to de-tune it as much as possible before you cut the strings off. You don’t want to have a sudden relief of tension on the neck. Tune it down a bit. Take your cutters. Make sure you discard your spring ends, or else your kids will kill themselves.

First thing I like to do is polish the frets. To do that you’re going to need some nice fine steel wool, usually quadruple O is good. Tear a piece off. Stewart MacDonald, which is a great guitar supply company, you can order from them on the internet, makes these little fret guards which slip right over the fret so you’re not going to damage the fret board when you do this. You just polish them up. That’s that. I like to keep a little brush around to try and get those little metal shards away from the steel wool, that way you don’t scratch your finish.

This is a polish that I made myself, actually. It’s Dawn and water. You can buy polishes. Fender makes good ones. There are a couple of other brands out there. But I actually like Dawn and water because it dries very quickly because of the soap that’s in it. And, the soap does not damage the finish. I like to use shop towels. I don’t ever like to spray directly on the guitar. I usually spray onto the towel itself. Get a good amount on there. Just do the whole guitar.

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Now you’re going to adjust the pick-up height on your bass guitar. Largely, this is a matter of personal preference. Some people like it really close to the string for a much louder tone. Some people like the hollow sound of having the pick up a little further away. A good way to start is to take a measurement going from the pole on the top of the pick-up to the bottom of the string. You want it to be about six or seven 64ths from the pole to the bottom of the string itself.

With a Fender bass you can do the outside strings first. Same thing there, probably about four to five 64ths away. Then you can actually just visually kind of match the radius of the neck which is the same as the bridge at this point. You’re going to raise or lower depending on what it looks like. This is not an exact match of the radius, it just kind of needs to look the same as the bridge. Then you want to actually plug it in and play it and see how it sounds. That’s how you adjust the pick-up height on a bass guitar.

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This is how you’re going to tune your bass guitar. You want to get a nice tuner. I like to use Peterson. You plug it in. Your first note is going to be E. On the Peterson, it’s a strobe tuner, so you want to play the note until the strobe stops running and it almost sits still. Do the same thing for A. That’s sharp so I’m going to tune it down. Do the same thing for D. That’s way flat. Right now it’s reading A so I’m going to tune it up to D. I’m going to do the same thing for G, and it’s way flat. It’s reading D-sharp, so I’m just going to up it to G.

You want to tune them again because once you’ve got them all tuned the neck is going to have moved and the pitch is not going to be the same. Then A. And the low E.

That’s how you tune your bass.

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So this is how you adjust the bridge saddles on a Fender bass guitar, and that’s actually setting the action too. That’s another way to say it. What you want to do is you want to take a measurement. You do that by pressing on the string of the first fret and measuring at the twelfth fret. I like to measure in 64ths. On the bass side, the low E, I like to get about six 64ths, and on the treble side which is the G, about five 64ths.

After you measure it, what you want to do is you do the two outside strings first, the E and the G string. If you need to lower it, you just adjust these screws here, putting them up or down. Take a measurement again. Don’t forget to always press the string down at the first fret to get the measurement. That’s a little low so I’m going to raise it up. Now it’s a little high. Now we’re going to get the G string which we want to be five 64ths. That’s a little low. Let me get the measurement, and that’s perfect.

Once you have those two outside strings, you’re going to take a radius gauge (looks like this, made by Stewart MacDonald) and the first thing you want to do is figure out what the radius of the neck is because you want to match that. This one is going to be, like most vintage Fender basses, this is going to be seven and a quarter. That’s seven and a quarter inch radius.

Then what you want to do is put it across the strings near the saddles. You want the strings to match that radius. Looks like this one, the A string and the D string, are a little bit low. You want to keep adjusting them until they’re all perfectly matched. The reason you want the radius to match is because it makes it more comfortable to play it if’s in line with the radius of the neck. That’s how you adjust the action on a bass guitar.

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There’s a couple of ways you can tell, one is if it’s oxidized and there’ll
be actual rust on the string, that generally means that it’s time to put
new ones on there. If they look okay and they feel okay, a lot of times
when the cores of the strings start to go bad they won’t stay in tune
anymore and you can tell that by checking to see if the bass is playing in
tune by playing into a tuner.

Some people like stings, on a bass
especially, to be very old and they’ll play them for as long as they
possibly can, I’ve known guys that kept them on there for a number of years
at a time. Some guys like them to be really new because if they’re new
they’re really bright and punchy. I like strings to be warm and kind of
older so I try to take it to the max. Generally the bass strings really
won’t break unless you’re a very, very aggressive player but most dudes
don’t do that.

If you’re trying to intonate the bass to get it to play in
tune with itself and it will not do it, it generally means that the core of
the string itself, it’s usually a solid piece of steel with one string on
top of that, the core of that has started to corrode. When you pluck it,
the string will not play in tune anymore. Usually they start to corrode on
the outside before that happens and you just don’t want to play rusty
strings, they don’t sound good they cause fret flies and stuff like that.

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You want to pick a nice set of strings that you like. It’s a matter of personal preference. These are D’Addario’s and they’re actually color coded and there’s a guide on the back to figure out what string is what. You can pretty much tell yourself though because they’re really thick and not thick at all. The thickest one, which is gold, is going to be the low E string. You want to thread it throw the hole on the low E string’s saddle. You want to bring it up to the tuning peg you’re going to put it into. I like to skip ahead one tuning peg up and cut it there.

There are different methods of doing this. You can hold it there if you want and pull it back a whole fret space there. I just do it that way. It seems to work well for me. You want to insert the end of the E string into the tuning peg, wrap it around once, pull it tight, and start tuning it up. I never worry about tuning the bass until we’ve got all of the strings on there.

Now I’m going to put the A string on. Feed it through the back of the bridge, go to the saddle, pull it up, skip one tuning peg, and cut it there. Insert it into the tuning peg and wrap it around once. You want to make sure that the string goes underneath where it curls at the top of the tuning peg.

Now I’m going to put the D string on. Feed it through the back of the bridge, pull it through to the saddle, bring it up, measure using an imaginary tuning peg, because there’s only one more up there, cut it there, insert it into the tuner, and wrap it around once. This one you’re going to want to see that underneath the string tree here keeps bridge angle correct on that string.

Now I’m going to put the G string on. Feed it through the back of the bridge, over the saddle, measure what would be two spaces, wrap it around once, and make sure it’s underneath the string tree.

Now that you have your guitar all strung up you’re going to want to stretch out the strings so it stays in tune. The best way to do that is really just, I like, on a bass guitar anyway, I like to grab a string and pull it up, and give it a couple of winds. Just pull it up and give it a couple of winds. You don’t want to tune it up too high though. Make sure not to put too much tension on it. And the next one. Pull it one, give it a couple of winds.

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Les Paul Standard versus Les Paul Studio. Same pick-up configuration, two hum bucking pickups, same tone control (so you’ve got volume, volume, tone, tone), a three-way pickup selector. The Les Paul Studio is pretty bare bones. They went to cheaper hardware, cheaper tuning keys. The pickups aren’t the same. While they are the same type of pickup, they are not the same pickup. They do sound a little different. A Les Paul Studio is a way to get a guitar with a Gibson name that’s a solid Les Paul, but without the hefty price tag that comes with a proper Gibson Les Paul standard. It’s still a great guitar.

They did things with the Les Paul Studio that they didn’t really get into with the traditional Les Paul Standard, things like stripping the finish off of them and releasing a guitar that was just basically an oil finish, which in turn actually makes the guitar more resonant. So, you’re sort of at an advantage there, and you paid less money for it. Budget-minded individuals look towards the Les Paul Studio if you can’t afford a Standard. It’s still a great guitar and you can always upgrade hardware and pickups like that eventually down the road. You get yourself a way in to see what a Les Paul is like without having to starve for too long. Traditional Les Paul’s are generally expensive. You’re looking at $2,600 new for a Les Paul. Used, you can get them for about $2,000, $2,200. Les Paul Studios you can find some for like $675 used. They’re definitely an affordable, good guitar.

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So we are looking at a seventies precision center bass or P bass. This is like the quintessential sort of rock bass that you see mostly. Sort of related to the jazz base but not. The neck shape is very different , pick up configuration , body size , over all sound. We talked about the jazz bass being a tighter sound the P bass is the one that’s more the growler.

If you want something that can certainly cut through mixes but doesn’t necessarily retain the tightness and the cleanness of the jazz bass. You need something that is more gritty you would go with the P bass. These pick-ups are actually working together as one. You have a master volume and a master tone. Let’s check it out sound wise. If you check out the neck profile. You’ll see it’s not quite as tapered as the jazz it stays thicker wider all the way through.

This particular one has a rose wood finger board. If it were maple it would be a bit brighter sounding for fender I’d say a precision bass the most seen bass of fenders line. Well it’s mostly the sound it suites a lot of players needs because it can do rock really well it can do R and B really well. You’d see a Donald duck dun playing a P bass from stacks Sam Dave focus Redding played with all those dudes. The P bass was and still is a sound.

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Basically, I’m going to describe now, briefly, the differences between passive electronics and active electronics. I’m going to show you these examples on basses. It can be applied to guitars. It’s the same principle. Typically you’d find, say, an active system on an acoustic guitar or acoustic-electric guitar. It just means that there’s a pre-amp built into it. There’s a whole circuit dedicated to a pre-amp. It requires a battery. If you put that into an electric guitar or bass you’re going to be dealing with higher output pickups because now you have an actual onboard system powering those pickups.

I have two examples. We have our 70s Precision bass, passive electronics. When you plug into an amplifier, you’re now using… It’s all the amp that’s taking care of the output of the guitar. I’m going to switch to an active bass. You can see on the back of this Limbeck, this is the control area for your volume and tone and all the switching. This would be the battery compartment here. That’s where the circuit is for the active pre-amp. This is the same volume setting, the same EQ setting as we had for the P bass.

You’re basically hearing hotter pickups. You’re hearing higher highs, lower lows. Everything is amplified before it gets to the amp. That’s the pre-amp. You’ll notice when you’re battery needs changing it’ll start to fuzz out. It won’t be quite as loud. It won’t sound as tight. The whole purpose of that is to have a tighter, louder sound which is why you would go for an active system in a bass or guitar.

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So a Gibson Les Paul. A Gibson Les Paul standard versus a Gibson Les Paul custom. It’s different woods used. They use more exotic woods on the fret board on the custom. And you’ll notice on a Les Paul custom, the whole thing is bound from headstock. The neck, the body, just has more accoutrement on the custom versus the standard. The standard is a pretty standard Les Paul model. It’s two humbuckers, three-way switch, volume, volume, tone, tone. The Les Paul custom has the same configuration controls. It’s just a little more dressed up and a bit of a step up from the standard. But that’s also a preferential thing. Some people prefer the standard to the custom or the other way around. I’m more of a Fender guy, but between the Gibsons, I’m as comfortable playing a standard as a custom. Custom is just a little nicer. It’s a little more decadent.

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Moving on from the Jaguar bass controls, which I demonstrated in the Jaguar guitar. We have here a Squire modified Jaguar bass. The body shape is the same as a Fender Jaguar bass. Fender makes different variations of their instruments. I think there are three models of the Jaguar bass right now. All of them are under the Squire name. They don’t make the Jaguar bass anymore.

This particular one that we have has a special pickup combination where you have a precision bass pickup and a jazz bass pickup. None of the switching system on this from a typical Jaguar bass. The pickup controls are volume, volume, there’s a boost circuit, and master tone. The boost circuit will just bring everything up, boost your signal. That’s an active circuit so it requires a nine-volt battery. The neck shape is a pretty chunky C shape. You can see that both the width and the depth of the neck are much bigger than a typical jazz bass. The body shape follows the pattern of any of Fender’s offset guitars. It’s meant to be a Jaguar shape.

That’s just the bridge pickup. That’s the P-bass pickup. I’m going to bring the jazz bass pickup in…and bring the boost circuit in…roll it off the tone control. That’s your Jaguar bass basics.

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The best electric guitar for a beginner, that’s a highly debatable topic. Much of choosing a guitar is based on personal taste, and how the instrument speaks to you when you pick it up.

I don’t believe in the idea that an acoustic guitar is better than an electric guitar for a beginner, or vice versa, one is better than the other to start off on.

The best way to answer that question is to simply go out and play as many different guitars as you can to figure out which guitar is most comfortable for you, for your hand size, for your body size, and which sounds best to you. You’ll know it when you find it. That is your first guitar.

If you are a total beginner, you can’t play a note, but you want to get into it, it’s cool, everybody has to start somewhere. What you can then do is go to your local shop.

We have guys that come in, who are picking up their first guitars in their 40s and don’t know how to play a note.

They usually have one of us sit down and play for them. They pick out guitars that they like, and then, we do the playing for them. If one speaks to them, that’s their first guitar.

I guess that’s the best answer to that question.

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Here with have the Squire by Fender Bronco Bass. It gets its namesake from the model guitar called the Fender Bronco that’s no longer in production. It has a student model as were the original Fenders – smaller body, smaller neck shape, single pickup, not so much in the way of controls to confuse the beginner. It’s pretty straightforward, just volume and tone for one pickup.

This particular one has a little bit more meat to the neck, which I rather like. It’s definitely more of a wider C. It’s a pretty basic bass. With a body shape being smaller it’s not only geared towards the beginner, it’s geared towards maybe the younger player, someone smaller in size. That wouldn’t stop someone of an adult size rocking out on one of these because it’s a pretty cool instrument.

This particular one sort of harkens back to the days of Fender Music Master bass and the Mustang bass, being of similar scale, smaller body shape, the Bronco bass having a single pickup versus the Mustang bass which had two staggered pickups, and then the music master bass which did have a single pickup. So basically, this instrument is more closely related to, say, a Music Master bass, but taking the Bronco guitar namesake.

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Right now, we’re dealing with a fendered-tube bass amp, it’s The Bassman 135, sitting on top of an Ampeg speaker cabinet. When you’re dealing with tube amps, it’s important to realize that there are certain things you need to do before you can actually get into it and take off. Especially when you’re not dealing with a combo. A combo is an amp that has the head and speaker together, built into it. This is actually, you know, what you call a piggy-back, it’s a head on top of its own separate speaker cabinet.

Before you plug in, or before you even turn on the head, it’s important that that head is seeing the correct matching impedance. If it says 4-Ohm, it needs to see a 4-Ohm or greater load from the speaker. That’s all plainly written on the back of the amp and on the back of the cabinet. Always remember that the head needs to be equal to or less than the load that’s shown on the back of the speaker cabinet. So, if the speaker cabinet is, say, 16-Ohm, then you can put a 4-Ohm head on it, an 8-Ohm head or a 16-Ohm head. If a speaker cabinet is 4-Ohm, you can only put a 4-Ohm head on it. If you put an 8-Ohm head, or 16-Ohm head, you will do catastrophic damage to the amp. No bueno.

So, there are two switches on these amps, generally. There’s an “on” switch, and a “standby” switch. When you’re in standby mode, you will not hear any sound coming out of the amp.

The amp is on, but we’re on standby. That, you know, gives you a chance to warm up the tubes, and get the amps settled, which is always a good idea. You usually tell people if you’re in a gigging situation to ensure that you have given the amp the proper warm-up time. Have that be the first thing you do is plug the head into the speaker cabinet, with the speaker cable, not a guitar cable, or an instrument cable, very different things. Turn the amp on and leave it on standby while you set up your effects or band gets ready or whatever. So, by the time you flip it off standby, you should be in the clear of not doing any damage. And, when you’re done playing, the first thing that you should do is put the amp back into standby mode, then pack up the rest of your stuff, and have powering down the amp and disassembling be the last thing you do just to ensure the proper cool-down time because just shutting the amp off is also, is also as bad as just firing it on.

You have four inputs but two channels. This bass side is dedicated to these controls, and these controls are dedicated to the normal channel. A bright switch which does, as it says, it brightens up the sound. Volume control, treble, for your high amp, middle for your mid-range and bass for your low-end. The thing about this amp is that it has a master volume control. So, you can turn the pre-amp volume up and get more of a dirty sound, control your overall volume with your master volume, so you can be gritty at a lower volume. Or, if you want to just max it out, you can do that too. So, those are your controls.

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We are going to get into the Jaguar and it’s controls. This is a ’65 Fender Jaguar. It’s been stripped to the bare wood with a light finish on it. A common thing people did in the 70s was strip away the finishes on a guitar and go for the all-natural vibe.

This control system they brought back for the Fender Jaguar bass. By going over this you will get a general idea of what that does as well. The switches bellow are only active when this switch is in the down position. When you put this in the up position it brings your controls to this control plate here. We will start down here. Neck pick-up on. Bridge pick-up on. And that is a tone cap. I’m going to play a little and show you how it sounds in each position.

Again, doing open chords just so you hear everything. When you move to the top position you notice that I was controlling everything from up here, because this top switch when you use it defeats everything below so you now have master volume and master tone which both pickups aren’t.

It’s a smaller scale. They were marketed towards students and beginner guitar players. They did pretty intense marketing campaign marketing to female guitar players. They put in sexy females and sexy guitar shape. The shorter scale neck was better for early teenage guys and females just because of smaller hands. They ended up becoming a very classic guitar. Recently the prices on the vintage ones have gone up considerably. They are really great rock guitars that have their own nasty sound rather than clean. They are very bright, especially when turned up, when you get to turn the amp up really loud.

So this is a Jaguar.

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This is a ’70s Telecaster Deluxe.

Basically, when they were coming out with this guitar, sort of an obvious attempt to capture the vibe of their competitor, which is Gibson. With two hum bucking pickups, three way toggle switch, and volume control for each pickup and a tone control for each pickup. They also went for this contoured body shape, which is characteristic of a Fender Stratacaster.
It’s sort of, like an amalgamation of many different guitars. This particular one has a C shaped neck. It’s a soft C. It’s a little thinner, profile wise. Great or somebody with small hands or smaller hands. Not your traditional Telecaster. You’re not gonna get the standard Telecaster sounds. Mostly because of the pickups. They’re hum bucker pickups. They’re higher output. They have a characteristically darker tone to them than Tele’s usually do.

Tele’s usually known for a cutting through mixes, cutting through other instruments onstage, in the studio. Typically, a Telecaster would have two single coil pickups. One in the bridge position, one in the neck position. A three-way switch. One volume, one tone. Those are master controls for each pickup. You can see that this is a very different design. In your bridge position.

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We have a Fender Jazz Bass, this is a Squire model. Basically the same controls, take-up layout, size, this is just sort of more Fender’s budget model. Two pickups, this one plays sort of, you know, strategically to get more of a deeper sound. Closer to the bridge, you’re going to get more treble sounds. Volume control for each pickup and a master tone control. Again, with a dual pickup, you get to blend different sounds in and out.

[plays guitar]

Jazz basses are very comfortable to play. The way the body is tapered, just sort of the length from this top to this bottom, the neck is usually smaller in its radius, shape is not another C but it’s tapered really thin at the knot and gets bigger, gets wider as the neck goes down the body. Characteristic sounds of the jazz bass, they’re not very growly, like it’s, you know, relative to the precision base. Jazz basses would be more in, you know, jazz fusion situations. I mean, you can’t count out the jazz bass out of a rock situation also. John Paul Jones played them, from Led Zeppelin, Getty Lee play them from Rush. Sound of a jazz bass I would say it more of a tighter sound. So if you’re looking for a tight sound, go for jazz bass. If you’re looking for something more gritty, P-bass.

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The Fender neck profile system. It’s the same designation for basses as it is for guitars. C shape, U shape, and V shape. There are different variations of each shape. You could have a hard V. It’s literally the cross section of the neck follows the shape of a letter. I have two examples here. I have an example of a U shape and an example of a C shape. This is from 79 P-Bass. This would be a C-shaped neck, a pretty soft C. If you have a hard V it really just points straight out like a V shape. If it’s a soft V it’s out a little more but rounded at the tip. A U-shape is like a big baseball bat style neck which I’ll show you in a second. This one is the C.

A lot of the reissues that they do, they go for the V. It’s sort of a classic like 50s vibe. That’s where it’s most commonly seen. A lot of the reissue guitars that Fender does are based on models of 50s guitars that those artists played, like the Clapton signature model. He played a 50s Stratocaster, so his custom shop Eric Clapton model Strat has a hard V-shape neck on it. An example of a U-shape neck would be on this Telecaster bass behind it. I’ll show you. You can see how much more depth there is to it than the C, and how abrupt the curve is on it. Ideal for players with large hands.