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Tag: guitar

  • Synth Guitar: Did They Finally Get It Right?

    Synth Guitar:
    Did They Finally Get It Right?

    Anyone here ever owned a synth guitar? Not a Keytar, but a guitar fitted with a hexaphonic pickup that transmits MIDI data to external devices? And if so, do you readily admit it?

    The synth guitar has had one of the most checkered histories outside of, well, checkers. Since the ’70s, many brilliant minds have tried to bridge the gap between the plucked string and the external tone generator. But despite a few notable exceptions (mostly in the prog/fusion realm), guitarists have been reluctant to embrace the technology.

    I’ve had a Yahama synth system (basically a clone of the Roland GK-2) for many years, though I rarely use it. Like a lot of players, I balk at the installation hassle and the ugly, cumbersome hardware. (Plus, I’ve played keys longer than I’ve played guitar, so I don’t really need a guitar to conjure synth sounds.) Also, those systems are expensive! Many players have been disappointed. Many businesses too — the Avatar guitar synth probably killed off the ARP company.

    But I’ve been thinking about guitar synth again since last January’s NAMM show, where Fishman previewed their Triple Play system, a new take on MIDI guitar which I mentioned at the time here. (Here’s much more info from the company’s Summer NAMM press release.)

    I finally got to play a late-stage prototype this weekend. But before I discuss the experience, I need to confide that a) Larry Fishman is a pal of mine, and b) I may be working with his company on the product’s documentation and marketing. (My words of praise are 100% sincere — but as always, consider the source.) (more…)

  • Do You Ever Give It a Rest?

    Do You Ever Give It a Rest?

    I got out of the studio for a few days…WAY out.
    Welcome to Metropolis, Nevada, population zero.

    Do you ever find it beneficial to put down the damn guitar and get out of the house?

    Usually, my answer is “no” — I like hanging out in the studio, and am immensely grateful that I get to do something I love most days. But after a long stretch of over-work, I was hankering for a nice, long road trip, and decided to go on a photo safari of remote ghost town sites in Northern Nevada — something I’ve never done, and a serious change of venue for an effete urbanite like me.

    The plan: explore by day and play with my mobile recording rig in the evening. Crank out a few posts on small audio interfaces and recording via GarageBand for iPad. So I tossed my Hello Kitty guitar into the back of my rented 4×4, figuring I could prop it in front of disintegrating shacks and abandoned mine shafts for maximum photo fun.

    And then right before departure, I unpacked all the music stuff and left it behind in San Francisco. :finger:

    I just had a last-minute hunch that it might be beneficial to not play music, or even think about it, for a few days. I didn’t even listen to the radio much — just a couple of audiobooks. (Holy cow, I forgot how amazing Heart of Darkness is — and I only just realized that title of that great Gang of Four song “We Live As We Dream, Alone” is pilfered from Joseph Conrad.)

    Abandoned mining equipment, Hamilton, Nevada.
    No Hello Kitty guitars here!

    So now I’m back home — and while I can’t claim I’m bursting with magical inspiration, the guitar necks feel fresh in my hands, and think I’m a little more mindful about choosing and shaping notes — or at least more relaxed about the process.

    Anyone have similar experiences? Instances when temporarily fleeing your musicianship improves, or at least refreshes, it?

  • How to Clean a Dirty, Filthy, Gross, Disgusting, NASTY Guitar

    How to Clean a Dirty, Filthy, Gross, Disgusting, NASTY Guitar

    This photo was digitally altered to make the guitar look even dirtier than it was — but not by much.

    Sometimes only the threat of public exposure can inspire a proper clean-up job. Case in point: I hadn’t groomed my battered ’63 Strat in years, and when I pupped it from the wall for my recent post on the instrument, the fact that I was about to show it to the world you guys made me finally admit how gross it had become.

    Now, it’s not like I wanted it to sparkle or anything — seems to me that an old guitar should look old, and removing 100% of the grime would be a little too much like those octogenarians with preternaturally white teeth. I mainly just wanted to remove the sticky crud that had accu

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  • How to Install Pickups

    How to Install Pickups

    “I always forget — which end gets hot?”

    Somewhat embarrassingly, I never got around to changing one of my own pickups until I was knocking on senility’s door recently. I owe part of the inspiration to that fabulous DIY Fest known as the Maker Fair, where each year hundreds of little kids learn to solder craft projects at long picnic tables. Or maybe it was the awesome soldering tutorial by 11-year old W0JAK. Well, after a buttload of pickup installs inspired by this blog, I guess I qualify as some sort of solder “expert,” because Seymour Duncan asked me to make a video designed to walk n00bs through the pickup install process for the first time. It was a lot of fun to prepare, and I learned some important things, like the fact that it’s hard to solder, talk, and operate a camera at the same time. Check it out:

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  • Those Times When It’s Good to NOT Play Like Yourself…

    Those Times When It’s Good to NOT Play Like Yourself…

    Can we all agree that it’s a good thing when guitarists and bassists cultivate their own style? Even a jaded old cuss experienced music journalist like me still gets a thrill upon discovering a new player with a startlingly original voice.

    I am not any of these people —but I pretended to be them.

    But there are times when it’s worth pursuing the opposite approach. (And not just for pragmatic reasons, such as the likelihood that you’ll get canned from your cover band gig if you mix it up too much, or the fact that the jingle client can’t afford to license that Black Keys song, but will happily pay you to record something “similar.”) Sometimes disconnecting your ego and completely immersing yourself in another player’s point of view can make you a better, and paradoxically, more original player. (I’m reminded of a Marc Ribot interview I once edited where the brilliant guitarist talked about learning Chuck Berry songs, clams and all — the “bad” notes, he suggested, were as much a part of Berry style as the “good” ones.)

    I had a chance to take this idea to an extreme a few years go when writer/composer Elise Malmberg and I collaborated on a massive internet hoax: a bogus website alleging to be the 50-year history of a “legendary” indie record label. Clubbo Records is easily the most obsessive-compulsive project I’ve undertaken. The site features hundreds of pages of music, bios, photos, and memorabilia memorializing dozens of fictitious artists. Even many external links are fake — we just made a lot of little mini-hoax websites.

    (Example: We licensed a photo of a beautiful ’60s blonde in a leopard-skin coat, which inspired a story about Ava & the Avalanches, the best known group of the Swiss Invasion. We wrote a story about how wearing the coat for the photo shoot horrified her, and launched her on a life path of animal activism. Where would she be now, we wondered? Running a big cat rescue charity, of course! Which inspired more than a few queries from journalists, including one from the BBC, asking to put us in touch with the non-existent Ava. And Ava’s signature “hit,” “Ski Baby Ski” has been licensed over and over, most recently for the silly Jonah Hill comedy The Babysitter.)

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  • How Nashville High-Stringing Works

    How Nashville High-Stringing Works

    You don’t have to be high in Nashville to enjoy Nashville high-strung.

    Nashville high-strung tuning is one of the guitar’s great magic tricks. It has a delicious, “secrets of the Guild” quality — you feel like an insider just knowing what it is.

    Not that I did know what it is until embarrassingly late in life. For the sake of my fellow late-bloomers, I’ll explain: You replace your guitar’s lowest four strings with thinner strings tuned an octave higher than normal.

    You can think of it as using the higher-pitched of a each pair in a 12-string string set. (Or the top two strings of a normal set, and the top four strings from another normal set, with the first string as the third string, the second string as the fourth, etc.)

    I love how this tuning can work subliminal magic, or step front and center for marquee riffs. Nashville session players conceived it as a way to add stereo shimmer to doubled acoustic guitar tracks. But rock players have used it to great effect as a foreground sound, as heard on the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Floyd’s “Hey You,” Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind,” and Tracy Chapman’s “The Promise.”

    Here’s a quick little demonstration, both solo and in a mix:

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  • Does a Guitar Ever Play You?

    The other day I posted a demo for a high-gain pickup, and I’m usually a lower-gain guy. Zyon said in comments that it sounded like Santana. (It sort of did, if you can imagine a clumsy, out-of-tune Santana with a really short attention span.)

    But I assure you, Carlos was far from my conscious mind. (Or at least 20 miles away at his place across the bridge.) It’s just that the pickup’s unaccustomed searing attack and saturated tone made me hork up those emotive, minor-key melodies.

    Which makes me pose this question:

    Isn’t it a rather pathetic rationale for having one of the main reasons for having a bunch of guitars? Not just the sounds they make, but sounds they force you to make?

    It’s not just me, is it?

  • Are Your Sinister — or Dextrous?

    Are Your Sinister — or Dextrous?

    “Why is everything upside-down?”

    You know the origin of the word “sinister,” don’t you? It’s the Latin word for “left,” which, according to etymologists, became associated with evil, thanks to the medieval belief that left-handed people were deceitful and probably possessed. Meanwhile, “dexterous,” which means adept with your hands or brain, is from the Latin “dexter,” meaning “right.”

    What are the odds that a right-handed person came up with those ideas? 😉

    Lefty guitarists have it tough. They have fewer instruments to choose from, and they usually can’t just pick up any old guitar and start jamming. When I wrote for Guitar Player, we tried hard not to be “side-ist,” and would always refer to the “picking hand” and “fretting hand” rather than the left and right when discussing technique. But still.

    I have left-handedness on the brain because I upgraded a left-handed guitar for a friend. I threw caution to the wind and recorded a demo video upside-down, without restringing. It ain’t pretty — but it sure is interesting! I’ve never undergone any sort of neurological testing, even though I look like the sort of person who should have electrodes permanently attached to his skull. But after playing upside down for a few minutes, I could practically feel parts of my brain pulsating with unaccustomed energy. I held a wine glass in my right hand, and it felt wrong. Then in my left, and it still felt wrong. And man, was it tough typing! It was a weird, disorienting mental high.  (more…)

  • Play Me Something I Don’t Already Know!

    Play Me Something I Don’t Already Know!

    Africa’s finest: The eternal Dr. Nico.

    Looking for some cool new stuff to listen to? Or some cool old stuff that just happens to be new to you? Me too!

    This thread’s goal is to share some personal guitar or bass favorites that aren’t as well known as they should be. You know — the sort of stuff you play for your best musician friends after murmuring “Oh man, you are not going to believe this!”

    This is not a contest. There are no rules. You can share anything in any musical style. It can be virtuosic or primitive. It can be new or ancient. It can even be something widely known, so long as you suspect it may be new to some of your fellow readers. Anything cool and inspiring is welcome.

    And as if to prove that there are no rules. I’m going to start the ball rolling with two favorite guitarists who were big stars — just not in English-speaking world.

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  • How to Install Onboard Effects

    How to Install Onboard Effects

    UPDATE: I’ve added a page listing all the “How To” posts on this site. Just click the cleverly titled How-To Posts Are Here! box at upper-right of each page.

    There’s got to be a better way!

    Several readers asked for more specific tech advice on how to wire up battery-powered effects inside a guitar or bass, so I created a step-by-step tutorial, which you can download here.

    Some historical background: Since the ’60s, many guitar companies have toyed with the notion of installing battery-operated effects inside guitars.

    And “toyed” is probably the perfect verb for it. Onboard effects have earned a reputation as cheesy, low-budget products. In many cases this reputation is justified. (And sometimes it’s not — the Electra guitars of the ’80s were never particularly popular, but their simple onboard distortion circuit has generated hundreds of “boutique” clones, not to mention our own Bad-Ass Distortion project).

    And why would you want to put an effect inside a guitar or bass? You can use a stompbox with any electric instrument, but an onboard effect is married to one axe till solder-do-they-part.

    I have an ironclad rebuttal to such concerns:  (more…)