git shit
nels cline has this quote from lydia lunch on his website: "the only thing worse than a gtr is a gtrist." hahahahahaha.
talking to _any_ gtr player is like reading a fuckin' gtr player interview. who gives a shit?
i know you don't care, but anyway:
1) i refuse to participate in the collector-driven commodification of what are, essentially, work tools. i play cheap gtrs _exclusively_ -- mostly black stratocaster clones w/maple necks, because they are the only $150 gtrs left on earth. (i like strat-style gtrs, even tho they're shaped like toilet seats, because all the spring-loaded crap that holds the whammy bar in place makes the strings feel a li'l more elastic than on other gtrs.) i like to tell ppl that i only play gtrs i get for free out of cornflakes boxes, and when they break, i just buy another box of cornflakes. there isn't a piece of wood on earth that's worth $30,000 (which i was incredulous to hear they were charging for a stephen stills signature model martin flat-top 10 yrs ago), and why anyone would bring an instrument that costs as much as a car into a club, where drunks can knock it over or spill beer on it, is beyond me. (and we won't even get into the instrument-theft issue.) when my future ex-wife and i split up in '93, i immediately sold my groovy '66 cherry red gibson sg for what i'd paid for it in '78. i phoned in a classified ad and before the paper even ran, some dude came knocking on my door w/cash. a coupla months later i was at craig's music in weatherford (the town where the parking meters still take pennies!) and found the same model / yr axe on sale for over 10X what i'd gotten for mine. that's what i get for not staying in touch w/the marketplace. guh.
2) if i could have any gtr in the world, i'd prolly pick a gibson es-330 (the b.b. king "lucille" styled body, but with p-90s instead of humbuckers). i had one when i was a teenager. the headstock had been broken off and repaired. i foolishly traded it to a cat i usedta play with for a stratocaster. alternate choice: an old danelectro. (the new ones suck.) ppl usedta throw them away, but i think they really had character.
3) i like single-coil pickups, even tho they're noisy as shit. prolly 'cos the first good gtr i owned (a '65 sg) had p-90's. i also tend to favor the throatier sound of neck pickups to the treblier one of bridge pickups (altho i've learned to adapt, depending on what the mix of frequencies is onstage), because that same gtr had a bum bridge pickup that i never replaced.
4) possibly because i'm a musical illiterate who's spent an inordinate amount of time focused on _tone_ rather than _technique_, i agree with frank zappa that if you have a good tone, you can't play anything wrong. then again, i don't think equipment is that important because i believe that every experienced player has a set of freqs that sound good to his / her ear, and will tend to gravitate toward those freqs no matter what gtr /amp combination is being used.
5) i usedta have a real good amp -- fender '95 reissue twin reverb that the previous owner had modified so the normal channel was just a li'l bit hotter than the vibrato, and you could use the footswitch with either channel. the thing was way overpowered for the clubs i was playing, so i never ever ever ran it with the volume over 3 (except for one time in the store when i was having it worked on; i cranked it up to 5 and sent the kid running out to the street with his hands clamped over his ears). the downside: you couldn't turn it up loud enough to make it break up, so after a few yrs of playing straight-thru-the-amp in bluesbands and using the knob on the gtr to regulate volume, i started using boosters -- ibanez ts-9 tube screamer and danelectro daddio. later on i started getting back into analog stompboxes, basically the same ones i'd used as a teenager: dallas arbiter reissue fuzz face (a red one, which i wound up trading jim crye back for a dod overdrive 'cos my wah wouldn't work with it for some reason, no matter what connection sequence i used), vox wah (basically the same pedal as the crybaby but just a little more rugged in construction), mxr phase 90. i had a dunlop jh-1 "jimi hendrix" wah for awhile; hated it (narrower sweep than either the crybaby or the vox, with a distinct break point in the middle like a mu-tron or envelope filter, rather than a smooth effect). and for awhile i used a sansamp that made little solid state amps sound like they were about to blow up.
6) i sold the twin, along with my last two gtrs (peavey raptor tele clone and epiphone les paul jr.) to pay an attorney a coupla summers ago, then i made two nathan brown tours on borrowed gear -- a lone star strat and fender concert amp belonging to nick girgenti (whose gear i used on more gigs between '97-'04 than i used my own; thanks, nicky) and paul reed smith generously lent by daniel gomez thru some piece o' shit no-name bass amp nathan owned. then keith wingate (bless him) gifted me an indonesian squier strat w/rosewood fretboard and li'l roland cube 60 amp for my b-day in '04. while i've always preferred tube amps, the roland has the best tone i've enjoyed since my idjit ex-brother-in-law destroyed my tweed deluxe while i was overseas '82-'83. for the longest time, i couldn't take the thing out of the house w/o getting compliments on its tone. it's real thick, dark 'n' warm, except for certain occasions when we're playing in the li'l room a.k.a. "wreck west" w/the curtains / blinds open. it has an inline overdrive that sounds like ass, so i never use it (same reason i keep the tone on the dod pedal on zero at all times). i keep the gain on 10 and the master volume set according to the level the other players are at (or wherever andre tells me to set it). treble, mids, and bass are usually between 11 and 1 o'clock, except for the aforementioned "wreck west" contingency, in which case the treble comes down, the mids / bass go up, and the tone on the gtr gets rolled off. best part: when i am intact, i can carry all my shit in / out of the club in a single load. what's not to like?
7) i never change strings until they break. (i usedta wait until i broke _two_.) this is partly because i'm lazy / cheap, partly because with strat-style gtrs, it takes so long for strings to get seated in after you first put 'em on. since my sweetie bought me an in-line tuner a coupla yrs ago, onstage outta tune-ness is less of a prob for me than it usedta be, but who needs the grief? also...
8) i never practice. well, only when i'm learning material. lately i've been trying to play some acoustic gtr around the house, but i never really practice songs i'm going to play at the jam or anything. (once in a blue moon i'll hook up the "amplet" with all my toys for the sheer joy of making shitloads of noise in my music room, but most of the time, that seems like too much work.) next yr, however, i think i'm gonna buy a copy of mick goodrick's the advancing guitarist and work on expanding my admittedly primitive knowledge base and technique. i've been bullshitting my way through on stuff i learned when i was a teenager for so long, i only recently started feeling like maybe it woulda been better if i'd learned more than rudimentary theory (e.g., enough to sorta communicate w/other musos on the stand) when i was young. i've just gotten to where i feel like it'd be nice to have more choices onstage when i have to get from point a to point b. we may not be perfectable, but we damn sure oughtta be improvable.
talking to _any_ gtr player is like reading a fuckin' gtr player interview. who gives a shit?
i know you don't care, but anyway:
1) i refuse to participate in the collector-driven commodification of what are, essentially, work tools. i play cheap gtrs _exclusively_ -- mostly black stratocaster clones w/maple necks, because they are the only $150 gtrs left on earth. (i like strat-style gtrs, even tho they're shaped like toilet seats, because all the spring-loaded crap that holds the whammy bar in place makes the strings feel a li'l more elastic than on other gtrs.) i like to tell ppl that i only play gtrs i get for free out of cornflakes boxes, and when they break, i just buy another box of cornflakes. there isn't a piece of wood on earth that's worth $30,000 (which i was incredulous to hear they were charging for a stephen stills signature model martin flat-top 10 yrs ago), and why anyone would bring an instrument that costs as much as a car into a club, where drunks can knock it over or spill beer on it, is beyond me. (and we won't even get into the instrument-theft issue.) when my future ex-wife and i split up in '93, i immediately sold my groovy '66 cherry red gibson sg for what i'd paid for it in '78. i phoned in a classified ad and before the paper even ran, some dude came knocking on my door w/cash. a coupla months later i was at craig's music in weatherford (the town where the parking meters still take pennies!) and found the same model / yr axe on sale for over 10X what i'd gotten for mine. that's what i get for not staying in touch w/the marketplace. guh.
2) if i could have any gtr in the world, i'd prolly pick a gibson es-330 (the b.b. king "lucille" styled body, but with p-90s instead of humbuckers). i had one when i was a teenager. the headstock had been broken off and repaired. i foolishly traded it to a cat i usedta play with for a stratocaster. alternate choice: an old danelectro. (the new ones suck.) ppl usedta throw them away, but i think they really had character.
3) i like single-coil pickups, even tho they're noisy as shit. prolly 'cos the first good gtr i owned (a '65 sg) had p-90's. i also tend to favor the throatier sound of neck pickups to the treblier one of bridge pickups (altho i've learned to adapt, depending on what the mix of frequencies is onstage), because that same gtr had a bum bridge pickup that i never replaced.
4) possibly because i'm a musical illiterate who's spent an inordinate amount of time focused on _tone_ rather than _technique_, i agree with frank zappa that if you have a good tone, you can't play anything wrong. then again, i don't think equipment is that important because i believe that every experienced player has a set of freqs that sound good to his / her ear, and will tend to gravitate toward those freqs no matter what gtr /amp combination is being used.
5) i usedta have a real good amp -- fender '95 reissue twin reverb that the previous owner had modified so the normal channel was just a li'l bit hotter than the vibrato, and you could use the footswitch with either channel. the thing was way overpowered for the clubs i was playing, so i never ever ever ran it with the volume over 3 (except for one time in the store when i was having it worked on; i cranked it up to 5 and sent the kid running out to the street with his hands clamped over his ears). the downside: you couldn't turn it up loud enough to make it break up, so after a few yrs of playing straight-thru-the-amp in bluesbands and using the knob on the gtr to regulate volume, i started using boosters -- ibanez ts-9 tube screamer and danelectro daddio. later on i started getting back into analog stompboxes, basically the same ones i'd used as a teenager: dallas arbiter reissue fuzz face (a red one, which i wound up trading jim crye back for a dod overdrive 'cos my wah wouldn't work with it for some reason, no matter what connection sequence i used), vox wah (basically the same pedal as the crybaby but just a little more rugged in construction), mxr phase 90. i had a dunlop jh-1 "jimi hendrix" wah for awhile; hated it (narrower sweep than either the crybaby or the vox, with a distinct break point in the middle like a mu-tron or envelope filter, rather than a smooth effect). and for awhile i used a sansamp that made little solid state amps sound like they were about to blow up.
6) i sold the twin, along with my last two gtrs (peavey raptor tele clone and epiphone les paul jr.) to pay an attorney a coupla summers ago, then i made two nathan brown tours on borrowed gear -- a lone star strat and fender concert amp belonging to nick girgenti (whose gear i used on more gigs between '97-'04 than i used my own; thanks, nicky) and paul reed smith generously lent by daniel gomez thru some piece o' shit no-name bass amp nathan owned. then keith wingate (bless him) gifted me an indonesian squier strat w/rosewood fretboard and li'l roland cube 60 amp for my b-day in '04. while i've always preferred tube amps, the roland has the best tone i've enjoyed since my idjit ex-brother-in-law destroyed my tweed deluxe while i was overseas '82-'83. for the longest time, i couldn't take the thing out of the house w/o getting compliments on its tone. it's real thick, dark 'n' warm, except for certain occasions when we're playing in the li'l room a.k.a. "wreck west" w/the curtains / blinds open. it has an inline overdrive that sounds like ass, so i never use it (same reason i keep the tone on the dod pedal on zero at all times). i keep the gain on 10 and the master volume set according to the level the other players are at (or wherever andre tells me to set it). treble, mids, and bass are usually between 11 and 1 o'clock, except for the aforementioned "wreck west" contingency, in which case the treble comes down, the mids / bass go up, and the tone on the gtr gets rolled off. best part: when i am intact, i can carry all my shit in / out of the club in a single load. what's not to like?
7) i never change strings until they break. (i usedta wait until i broke _two_.) this is partly because i'm lazy / cheap, partly because with strat-style gtrs, it takes so long for strings to get seated in after you first put 'em on. since my sweetie bought me an in-line tuner a coupla yrs ago, onstage outta tune-ness is less of a prob for me than it usedta be, but who needs the grief? also...
8) i never practice. well, only when i'm learning material. lately i've been trying to play some acoustic gtr around the house, but i never really practice songs i'm going to play at the jam or anything. (once in a blue moon i'll hook up the "amplet" with all my toys for the sheer joy of making shitloads of noise in my music room, but most of the time, that seems like too much work.) next yr, however, i think i'm gonna buy a copy of mick goodrick's the advancing guitarist and work on expanding my admittedly primitive knowledge base and technique. i've been bullshitting my way through on stuff i learned when i was a teenager for so long, i only recently started feeling like maybe it woulda been better if i'd learned more than rudimentary theory (e.g., enough to sorta communicate w/other musos on the stand) when i was young. i've just gotten to where i feel like it'd be nice to have more choices onstage when i have to get from point a to point b. we may not be perfectable, but we damn sure oughtta be improvable.
posted by stashdauber at 8:37 PM
3 Comments:
yeah, sounds like capps mos def got hosed by g.c. the adjustments they wanna charge him $70 for shoulda been made at the factory. caveat emptor (latin for "if you don't know what you're looking for, take someone with you who does"). best advice: trade it in for a righty gtr that'll stay in toon and change out the nut so you can restring it a la jimi.
my spiel is pretty much the kinda stuff you hear from gtrists who don't know theory. again, who gives a shit? nels (who's also self-taught, but knows much more than i do) has it right: it's really more about how you touch the gtr and playing notes that sound good to you (which implies a certain knowledge of what notes sound good). i agree about the mystery, but that's always present, no matter how much you learn. having more knowledge is like having a bigger vocabulary: the more words you know, the more ideas you can express.
Skwoo the Gibson ES series. Yamaha SA2200 all the way , baby!
ha! gomez prolly made you say that. he sure makes those japanese-built dog kennels sing sweet.
but do they make one w/p-90s, one wonders?
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