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Guitar talk: acoustic, bass, classical, twelve string? You name it! Pt II

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All these 20 minute videos saying what could have been said in 3-4 minutes with a script what the hell?

Ad revenue, init. There's also a fact (or "fact") that says any video above a certain length can be started 30 secs in without losing any information.
 
Those vids are probably aimed more at providing entertainment than advice.
Had this conversation with a friend at the weekend around car-maintenance vids: both of us are the point where the first thing we look at is the length before going any further.
 
Is yours one with chambering? Mine is a rather pretty 2005 Standard, which as I understand it was the last year without. Much to my surprise it isn’t that heavy, we went through this prior to the thread split, though I can’t remember exactly what it weighed (it was actually at the lighter end of LPs), but it really will not stay put on my knee the way I play it. My Gordon Smith is just the same. I joke about it, but I do find it a barrier to playing them as I have to keep my thumb wrapped around the neck to keep it down. They are both fine on a strap, but that just isn’t how I play. The Yamaha and Strat both balance perfectly.

PS I keep meaning to stick an advert up here as I think it is time to move a few guitars on. Potentially Fat Lester, the Gordon Smith GS1, the AVRI Jazz Bass and just maybe the Dan Smith Strat are up for grabs! I do definitely like the latter, but I would swap it for a similar value Strat with a whammy bar as being a hard tail it is just too close to my Yam SC1200 (except to my taste not as good). I’m actually starting to think about jazz-friendly semis or hollows. I rather fancy trying a 335 or one of the smaller variants and would certainly swap Fat Lester for one. I’d not turn my nose up at a proper Japanese-made Yam or Ibanez semi either.

Mines a '96 don't know if it's chambered, 9.4lbs. It feels heavy after a strat or tele but not too bad.
 
This is a pretty bonkers pedal:


Some amazing technology in there given it is £200 and doesn’t need a special pickup or anything. I’ve never really worked out what I think of guitar synths, though I’ve never seen one that tracks like that before. It will be interesting to see what people do with it!
 

This one's been around for a few years. Kind of reminds me of the dog who can recite Shakespeare.

It's pretty amazing to hear that from a guitar, but if you heard those same tones from a keyboard you'd think it was crap - the cheapest Casio has better organ tones.
 
I’m a firm believer in the idea that all musical technology is valid, it just takes the right people to actually unleash the potential, e.g. analogue synths really only took off with Morton Subotnik, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk etc, the early days of playing Bach etc on them wasn’t their strongest suit, same with the TB-303 which went from an unwanted £50 failure to a truly genre-defining device once someone eventually figured out what it was for!

This Boss thing looks to fix the utterly hopeless tracking and latency issues that have rendered so many previous guitar synths useless so I’m genuinely interested to see if someone figures out an interesting new role for it. This will likely not be what it initially appears to be, as it never is! I bet you could get some interesting stuff by not treating the output as a synth, i.e. stuff it through a Rat or whatever and distort the living crap out of it! I’d also be very interested to see what it does with other inputs, e.g. stick drum loops, voice or other synths into it. I’d love to have a go on it for a day or two, but I can’t see myself buying one.

I have played with some early guitar synths, e.g. some early Roland, the pitch to CV feature of the Korg MS20, an early Casio MIDI guitar synth etc. The old analogue stuff is pure comedy gold, basically you get something entirely different to what you played a fair while later. The ‘90s Casio was little better, the latency rendering it useless for anything but texture and the lower the pitch the worse it got. If someone like Rabea can ‘shred’ with the new Boss the tracking/pitch recognition is clearly more than sufficient to make it useful, plus it is fully polyphonic. I’m genuinely amazed by it from a technology perspective and would love to know how it actually worked, but I’m not seeing the genre-defining use for it yet.
 

This one's been around for a few years. Kind of reminds me of the dog who can recite Shakespeare.

It's pretty amazing to hear that from a guitar, but if you heard those same tones from a keyboard you'd think it was crap - the cheapest Casio has better organ tones.

This one's better IMHO:


Why? Because 'tron. ;-)
 
I made the arguable mistake of paying for the thicker heavier body!

PS It is a great guitar, though in hindsight if I was going to have another single pickup guitar I think I’d go for a neck or middle position. Fantastic for punk, grunge etc though, just a monster!
 
Profile reminds me of the SD Curlee bass which was a pop punk bass par excellence

SDCstd78a.jpg
 
Ideally I’d have preferred the single cutaway but this ticked all the other boxes and seemed a bit of a steal. So deal was done and I’ve been really happy with it.
 
Are Gibson basses actually any good? I remember trying one back in the ‘80s, an EBO I think, and thinking it was dreadful! Any sound you like as long as you wanted a dull indistinct thud! Admittedly at the time I was looking for that typical new-wave/indie bright fresh round-wounds played with a pick sound, so I may like it more now.
 
Jack Bruce was also a well known eb0 player as was Gaye Advert, unfortunately that bass had a swastika on the headstock but was removed about the time of the “crossing the Red Sea” recording sessions. The shitty swastika punks using it for shock value period was brief — like Siouxsie Sioux and Jordan and epitomised by Sid, she saw good sense and peeled it off. Possibly because of TV appearances where it was covered with black gaffa and probably was peeled off when the gaffa was peeled off.

I wanted to be just like Gaye Advert... I get a second shot now but I never ever wanted a gibbo bass... dunno why, they look pretty comfy and models used to have built in fuzz and one of the few long scale neck models without a huge body to balance it.

They sound great going through a very old Sound City, Ampeg SVT or Marshall head and 4x12 combo — but then what doesn’t?

ce1f56c8989c063581b9435bd1eec800.jpg
 
Are Gibson basses actually any good? I remember trying one back in the ‘80s, an EBO I think, and thinking it was dreadful! Any sound you like as long as you wanted a dull indistinct thud! Admittedly at the time I was looking for that typical new-wave/indie bright fresh round-wounds played with a pick sound, so I may like it more now.

Gibson basses are good for getting the big muddy "tuba tone". Andy Fraser would have sounded wrong on anything else. The original EB-0, shaped like a Les Paul Jr instead of like an SG, was only made from 1959-1961, you don't see many of them. I thought this was the first I'd seen, but upon further reflection I recall seeing one in the used racks at Boyd Music when I was a kid, and sort of refused to allow myself to believe it existed because it was at variance to the ones in the catalogs.




What the bass at the swap meet had was that feeling of being "alive" just from playing it unplugged. Every part of the wood vibrated. It gives back everything you put into it.
 
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