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Holy crap! Now THAT’S a guitar string! Man, it pays to curate a blog frequented by smart people! I wrote last week about my experiment with silk-and-steel strings. It’s the latest chapter in my ongoing search for the right acoustic strings. Most available options simply sound far too harsh and bright to […] I’ve installed TriplePlay on the homemade strat. For the last few months I’ve been working with Fishman on the documentation for TriplePlay, their long-awaited wireless MIDI guitar system, which will finally ship this quarter. I had a blast demoing TriplePlay at MacWorld a few weeks ago, and I’m looking forward to doing so […] 
Sounds like MONEY! I’ve said it so many times, I feel like the parrot of pickups, but here goes again: These days the weakest links on inexpensive Asian and Mexican guitars are invariably the pickups. Upgrading them often yields a princely axe at a pauperly price. A perfect example is the Ibanez Art […] 
PLUS: New Contest! Name the Classic 6-String Bass Riffs and Win a Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster Pedal! "We both love candlelight, long walks on the beach, and really expensive old-school strings." NOTE: The contest is at the bottom of this post. You can skip ahead if you don’t care about rare and expensive […] 
Digitally enhanced versions of the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage prove that Bigfoot used flatwounds. Want to get a great ’60s-style Beatles/Byrds electric 12-string sound? Use flatwound strings. It’s almost guaranteed to up your jangle quotient. This advice is admittedly counter-intuitive—why should relatively dull-sounding flatwounds improve a guitar’s treble response? My best explanation is that […] 
My cat is skeptical. Multiple readers have asked some variation of that question since I launched this blog last month. I’ve been wondering myself as I prowled the local music emporia, searching for a fun, but seriously funky guitar to experiment on. […] 
Cheap chic: The Italia Maranello bass I’ve got this weird Italia Maranello bass I picked up years ago when I was playing in the Eels. It looks like it’s from the ’60, but is, in fact, a modern instrument designed by Brit luthier Trev Wilkinson and built in Korea. The only “Italy” in […] 
"Let me teach you a thing or two about CHUNK, sonny!" The other day I posted a few audio clips I’d recorded using a Guild Archtop fitted with a Seymour Duncan Custom Shop Dynasonic® pickup. Going with the ’50s theme, I strung the guitar with flatwounds and coughed up a few Eisenhower-era licks. […] 
The Dynasonic: one pretty pickup! Take my advice: When MJ says she has something cool to show you, drop everything and investigate. MJ, of course, is Maricela Juarez, the longtime manager of the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop. And the item in question was a clone of the DeArmond 200 pickup, also known as […] |
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