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SLAIN by guitars

I love guitars! Though as a guy in a band, I usually think of the song first and the guitar second. At least that was the case up from my Pie days through Verst’s last album Starship Crash. But leading into our new album David Slain, that started to change. The songs on this new record are built around riffs and I did stuff with the sounds just to make the guitar louder, more cathartic, and more over the top than ever before. I don’t know why. It’s just the way I felt. Anyway, here are the guitars we used to record Verst's David Slain LP..

Rickenbacker 4003 Bass

Since he bought it a couple years ago, John Parsons has played only this instrument. I've never seen anything else in his hands. He just loves it.

JP's ricky sounds incredible, and stays in tune like an absolute champ - much better than you'd expect for such a lightweight bass. Like any stock Rickenbacker bass, it hummed quite a bit when he got it, because the single coil pickups do not come with reversed polarity. I have no idea why Rickenbacker doesn't set them up in humbucking mode. Weird. Anyway, I tried to do the polarity mod myself, but realized pretty quickly that there was a possibility that I was going to damage a pickup irreparably. So I backed away from that, and John had Chris Barnett do it. Now it doesn't hum when both pickups are selected. I don't think John ever sets it any other way. The both-pickups sound seems to be his jam and I just love it.

Speaking of Jam, Bruce Foxton played his Rickenbacker through Marshalls and it sounded like God’s piano.

I just see that bass and famous Ricky players come to mind - Lemmy, Paul Gray, Paul McCartney, Bruce Foxton, Lou Barlow.. the list goes on. I think that in order to play a Ricky you really need to be a BASS GUITAR player, not a low end or clean player. I suppose you could use it as a slap pop machine, but with no gain loading from the amp, it's a pretty thin sound. But run it through a cranked up tube amp, such as John Parsons' 200-watt Hovercraft, and you are on your way to achieving a very rich, thick, punchy, piano-like tone. Now that we have only one guitar in the band, there is a huge amount of space for John's bass to own. His Rickenbacker really does that space justice. You can hear nothing but this bass in the first couple minutes of Secret Sea.

That’s Paul Gray on the right here with The Damned. Gray’s extremely sick Rickenbacker tones and guitarish playing can be heard on The Black Album, Live at Shepperton, and Strawberries.

1993 Gibson Les Paul Custom

This guitar is the living document of just how far my Les Paul obsession has gone. Last time I wrote a blog entry, I said that I was obsessing over a cherry sunburst Custom. Then voila. LOOK at the thing.

It's gorgeous. And it plays like a big heavy brick of butter. Smooth as hell. Resonant, but not overly midrangey. It is so heavy that the notes it produces are like icebreakers smashing and cutting through a mix like so much glass. I'm pretty much playing this guitar 95% of the time and it pretty much comprises about that much of the guitar on the album, so I guess that makes me a real Les Paul guy. For all the fighting and ergonomic crime involved, it is so addictive and sounds so powerful that I just can't put it down. It’s the best instrument I’ve ever had.

While I was thinking about this album, and wanting the guitars to fucking completely take over, I kept going back to Iggy Pop's Raw Power - the sound of James Williamson's LP custom through a dimed Vox AC30. It’s so huge and in-your-face. I realized pretty quickly that the stock 90s pickups that came on my Custom were too heavily wound, too dark. The key to Williamson's sound is the brightness, the presence. So I got some fantastic pickups for this guitar - some Throbak PAF-style things that give it a holographic, smoky brightness. Man, that hit the spot. Because in a big way, I was tired of polite and pretty sounds. I wanted this record to be an aggressive guitar album. I wanted weaponized guitar. The LP Custom seemed to force all of that to happen anyway. My challenge was just to capture those sounds and mix them in a way that didn't puss out.

James Williamson wielding a generator of raw power back in the day.

I also changed the tuners on this guitar, from the big fat stock Grovers to Schaller knock-offs that I found on eBay. They're not quite as good as real Schallers, but they're much better than the Grovers. I don't know why people like the Grovers. They're heavy and they have all this unnecessary, undignified lash in the way the gears mate up and move. Now the guitar is incredibly stable. I can often play 4 or 5 songs with string bends and everything and it's still in tune. I love the dependability and stability of it. And that's a change for me, because in the past, one thing I've loved about Jazzmasters was their very unpredictability and the cool pitchy wooziness you can create with them. Now when I want to do that with the Les Paul, it all has to be in my left hand - not in a whammy bar or from waving the neck around. It's a different way of playing and I think it makes me a better, more deliberate player.

Homemade Stigmata Jazzblaster

For the first time since I started playing a Jazzmaster (1992?), my Jazzmaster took a back seat to another guitar - the Les Paul. But I did have to pull out the Stigmata. This is the best Jazzmaster I've ever owned, just incredible. And I made it! (See my old blog post about it). It is a weapons-grade Jazzmaster, with all top shelf bits, and it's black with that anodized aluminum pickguard. It's all business and looks like some kind of weapon. It just so happens that it plays beautifully and has incredible halo of harmonics ringing off the string lengths after the bridge. Somehow all those dimensions lined up perfectly to make that happen. And the light swamp ash isn't too light on this one. I think it's too light on the red Jazzmaster I made, but that's a topic for another post. Sadly, I sold that red guitar.

Even though I am still more comfortable playing a Jazzmaster than a Les Paul, I only played the Jazzblaster guitar on a handful of songs on this record.. Sick Pretty Pilots, Laid Off For The Summer, and (Nice). There are songs, like those, where the Jazzmaster sounds better, either because you can hear the notes of the chords more clearly, or because a whammy bar is needed to do the parts justice. When we rehearse, sometimes I stick with the Les Paul all the way through, even on those songs. But I don't think I'll ever get away from the Jazzmaster for shows and recording. It's in my bones.

Homemade Telemaster

"Burnt candy grind" is how my brother Matt so vividly describes the incredible and unique sound a Tele can produce with its bridge pickup and the right kind of bright clean amp setting. This is the sound you get just before breakup, when the tubes are loading up some compression, but not breaking up yet, bass is set on 0, treble is on 10. The first three Echo and the Bunnymen albums are rife with that sound (example: Do It Clean). I kept hearing some Will Sergeant style chords over the final ending section of Sick Pretty Pilots. For as long as I've been into EBM you'd think it would have been easy for me to get the sound. But I'd tried several times to get it right, using different guitars or having Mike play it on his Telemaster, and none of that quite worked.

Will Sergeant doing it right.

I finally got it right myself with my own Telemaster and a 70s silverface Fender Twin Reverb. Right when I hit record and it was sounding perfect, Christine and Eli came home and I was already late making dinner for them. So I just finished my one take, saved the file and that was it. But it was the perfect sound and take. Luckily, finally.

I guess the neck pickup isn’t quite aligned, but it’s still a cool guitar.

2014 Fender Johnny Marr Jaguar

This was not my guitar. I don't like Jaguars very much because of the short scale and the brittle-sounding pickups. But sometimes, that's just what's needed, and Fender did a really sweet job on this model. This guitar belonged to Brian Shultz, but I believe he has sold it by now. Brian is a super cool guy with fabulous taste in guitars. We share rehearsal space with him. I used his Jaguar for the left-channel rhythm guitar in Bath Salts & Me, where I needed a single coil sound that would provide just the barest but still great-sounding sketch of the chords and rhythm.

Squier Bass VI

This is also Brian Shultz' guitar. I used this to fatten up the power chord refrains in Bath Salts & Me, because it can actually dip down for the low D-flats that are in that part. It's in there sorta subliminally in the left channel, slamming through a Marshall Super Lead with the volumes on about 6.

Not quite sure what one would accomplish with the whammy bar on this thing but it must be fun to try.

"Plastic Hippie Values" - 1977 Yamaha FG-345 Acoustic (wounded)

Poor Plastic Hippie Values! A couple years ago I took it on a Summer camping trip to the Southwest where it was basically roasted in the back of my pickup truck for a week. Stupidly, I tried to adjust the truss rod while the neck was in the throes of warping and swelling. The truss rod snapped. So now the neck is permanently bowed inward and the guitar has painfully high action. This is my only acoustic guitar, unfortunately, so it's all I had to use to double the arpeggio parts in the choruses of Plastic Cow.

Sometimes I create parts I refer to as "music box" sections, where several layered guitars play the same or interlocking arpeggiative parts together to form a machine-like arrangement. It reminds me of a music box or player piano because of how prescriptive and interlocked the parts are. I don't know if that's how it comes across to other people when they hear the recording. But playing that particular part up around the 12th fret with some strings ringing open on this super high action guitar was really difficult. It's already the kind of part that I have to learn by muscle memory and not think about while I play it, or I'll screw it up. The high action made that all the more difficult to do.

Here’s a very little Eli back in San Leandro with Plastic Hippie Values and a couple Jazzmasters I don’t have anymore.

I do have an emotional attachment to this guitar, because it is the only acoustic I've owned in my adult life and I've had it since around 1991. But replacing a truss rod is very expensive, certainly costing more money than the guitar is worth. And what I really want for an acoustic guitar is a vintage arch top, like a Gretsch or Gibson. I'm not really an acoustic person anyway, so I don't know what I'm going to do.

#gibson #gibson les paul #yamaha fg-345 #jazzmaster #jazzblaster #les paul custom #rickenbacker #rickenbacker 4003 #fender #jaguar #squier #bass vi

Goin’ Over to the Dark Side (with a Les Paul)

In my previous description of the Hallmark 60 Custom that I used on the Verst Starship Crash album, I compared that guitar to my longtime favorite kind of guitar, the Fender Jazzmaster. I offered that the Hallmark, despite its obvious surf music associations, is actually less like a Jazzmaster than it is like a Les Paul. This still rings true to me. From the glued-in neck set at an angle, through the carved top, the bound neck, to the heavy weight of it.. all much more Les Paul-ish than Jazzmaster-ish. I also teased that the Hallmark had been my gateway drug into a new and possibly unhealthy obsession with Les Pauls. Well, this is quite true, now more than ever.

I had been trying very hard to make my offset builds lightweight. That’s easy to do when you can get a swamp ash body weighing only 4 pounds, and my finished offset guitars all weigh around 7 1/2 pounds. I’ve preferred lighter guitars because they’re easy to wear and throw around, and they have a lovely bright, resonant sound and feel - especially Jazzmasters, with that long segment of string they have behind the bridge. The whole guitar really thrums, and getting feedback from a loud amp is a particularly awesome, ghost-channeling kinda feeling. The lightweight guitar / single coil pickups / big loud amp combo is a system that really works for me.

This is how it feels to play a Jazzmaster through a dimed Marshall Super Lead..

I bought the Hallmark guitar for other reasons, though, ignoring my own facism about light weight, and maybe deliberately bucking my own trend in order to shake things up. I actually didn’t know the Hallmark was such a heavy guitar until it arrived. Holy shit, it felt like an anvil! That guitar weighs a little over 9 pounds. It’s bigger than a Fender, plus it’s made of alder that, as far as I know, was not selected by anyone for its weight one way or another. But what’s interesting is that I didn’t dislike the weight. In fact, it became interesting to play precisely because it was heavier. The Hallmark is not a very resonant guitar, and, either because it’s heavier or because it’s made of alder or has a thicker finish, or all of that, it’s not as resonant or as bright as the swamp ash offsets. That was a bit of a disappointment at the beginning, but it is real fun to run that thing around. Playing it, I feel like I’m ramming a big fucking battleship through the seas. It is definitely phallic. When you wear it low and stand with your legs apart, that elongated lower horn feels like a big hard banana bobbing against your leg. There is no mystery to me now why Johnny Ramone stood that way with his guitars! So there’s that, and there’s also something else about that weight.. the sheer, heedless inertia of it.

It’s also probably true that good un-amplified sound does not translate to good amplified sound. My lightweight offsets sound great both unplugged and plugged-in. The Hallmark sounds dull unplugged but sound fabulous through the amps, especially once I changed the potentiometers from 250k to 500k. It’s bright and rich, but midrange-girthy too in a way that the single coil Fenders are not. Check out the intro to Secrets of Me to hear what I mean. I also recorded the long solo in Starship Crash with it.

So there I was - accepting a heavy, thicker-sounding instrument into my life. What was going on with me? For decades I have eschewed dark & heavy instruments. Those adjectives were anathema to almost everything I’ve done with guitars. Yeah, I owned an Epiphone Explorer. But I almost never played it and ultimately got rid of it, without shedding a tear. I am a huge Fender fan. I am super into the sounds that Will Sergeant of Echo and the Bunnymen got. Sonic Youth, MBV too.

So I could have stopped right there with the Hallmark and Mosrites generally. But there was also something else going on in the background. There’s this ultra-fetishization of guitars that has developed over the past few years. The whole notion of Guitar Aficionado magazine. Reverb.com. Ebay. The multitude of online forums where cork sniffers bicker and split hairs endlessly over arcane points of fine, vintage and even cheap & shitty guitars… all instead of actually playing them! On most levels, I’m against it. I am a player, and more than that, I am a maker. I don’t consume, I make. I write songs and make recordings. That’s how I see myself. But as someone who is into using gear, I do like to think about it and research it. So I do pick up the magazines. I read stuff online. People buy me the coffee table books for my birthday and Christmas. And look at me now! I’m writing about guitars instead of playing them, Jeeez.

My point, though, is that in these books that I have, there’s no shortage of homage to the hallowed Gibson Les Paul. And as soon as I had accepted weight, darkness, and a complex, more 3-dimensional build into my psyche, I began actually absorbing some of that enthusiasm to which I’d been immune for so long. I spoke to a couple folks, like my friend Paul Mathus, who enthused over the ebony necks of Les Paul Customs. By description, the hardness of ebony appeared to align with my pro-maple-neck bias for Fenders. Then I picked up a couple Les Pauls with ebony necks, which I hadn’t done since college, when I would occasionally get to play my bandmate Keith Berets' wine red Custom in our band Daedalus. I tried them again and oh yeah. I was hooked. Ebony isn’t just hard. It also has a dense, waxy anti-matter thing going on that just makes you want to touch it.

Ladies and gentleman, I have gone over to the dark side. I am now playing a Gibson Les Paul as my main guitar. Me, the former Fender fascist!

Figuring it was entirely possible that this was but a passing phase, for my own Les Paul I aimed for the best deal I could get on the classic Les Paul recipe of mahogany body and maple top. Of course this means I ended up getting a Studio, which are much less pricey than Standards and Customs, due to the Studio's less demanding build - no binding, no pretty wood, no big inlays. The Studio I got is a 1993 that I bought from a metal dude in Santa Rosa who had put it on Craigslist. Except for a couple small chips and some light stains from guitar stand rubber, it is pretty pristine. It is not chambered and it has an ebony fingerboard, which I just love. It's white but is yellowing ever so slightly from age. It is pretty heavy, at 9 1/2 pounds. As soon as he saw it, my boy Eli called it "The Butter Block," and that name has stuck.

Behold the Butter Block..

I just love this guitar. If I'm at home, chances are it is in my hands. And at rehearsal I always reach for it first. I only take a break from it when a song staunchly demands Fender tones or a whammy bar. I had to change the pickups and wiring right away, because Les Pauls have been coming with foggy, dark-sounding, overwound pickups for a long time now. All you can play on those kinda pickups is power chords and leads. So I decided on Lollar Imperials and 50s wiring, and it was a massive help. The tone really opened up. It's not nearly as clear and even as my Jazzblaster with Novak wide range humbuckers in it - it's still very midrangey - but now I can play the more layered voicings I'm used to.

In an abortive attempt to try to use it on songs that require a whammy bar, I added a Bigsby B7. What a horrible, paleolithic design that thing is. After playing Fenders, playing a guitar with a Bigsby feels like bringing a 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood to a Formula 1 race. I’m sure it also pushed the guitar to nearly 11 pounds. So that didn't last long. It looked kinda cool though..

The absolute coolest thing about a Les Paul is the sustain. You have to say that word in a Nigel Tufnel voice - suss-tain. The LP has it. You especially feel it high up on the neck, where most guitars - especially Jazzmasters - really fizzle out. The only Fender guitar that gets a similarly unfettered supervibrating feel is a Telecaster, with it’s string-through-body architecture and metal ashtray bridge/pickup assembly. My Telemaster has that setup, so it’s no wonder that I recorded the sustainy leads in the outro to Your Kindness on that guitar. These days I play that song on the Les Paul, though.

The problem with the sustain and the sheer addictiveness of playing leads on this thing, though, is that nowadays pretty much all I’m doing all the time is playing leads. I’m not writing very many songs anymore. The Fender Jazzmaster is still my song machine.

Ahhhh LOOK at the fucking ebony right here in the magic upper register..

This guitar is also making me appreciate other music that I’d forgetten about or ignored. Right away with this thing I got deeply back into Blue Oyster Cult and Buck Dharma. I learned And Then Came The Last Days of May, and the band and I started playing Tattoo Vampire in earnest. Fucking Mick Ronson. Robert Fripp, man. There is nothing quite like a Les Paul through a Marshall Super Lead. It is just so thick and gigantic. That recipe - so ubiquitous in the 70s - is instantly recognizable to my ears. It really is a self-indulgent thing, I get that. But I’m still shamelessly wanking on this thing and I’m not even close to finished.

The big problem with a Studio, though, is that it’s a Studio. There’s nothing wrong with the guitar itself, but Gibson are shrewd product marketers who have never stinted with the bling. Oh, I am quite acutely aware now of all the flamey sunburst Standards and Customs out there. They all cost 2x-4x what this Studio costed me, though, so I’m cooling my heels for now. I did get a chance to live with Tim Baker’s late 90s R9 Standard for a while. This scrumptious creature..

When you play one, it becomes pretty clear that these higher-end Gibsons get all the good wood. Not just the pretty maple cap - the mahogany in Tim’s guitar is lighter, brighter and more resonant than what’s in my Studio. It has more mojo and real elves of tone inside of it.

But I’m not a Standard fan. I don’t like rosewood fingerboards, never have. I love the ebony. Also, everyone has a Standard. Any stereotypical Les Paul player, and all those Southern rock dudes. But not everyone has a Custom. And the Custom is currently IT for me, man. The double binding, the ebony fretboard, the big block position markers... ah God, I must have one. I know I will have one. I love Steve Jones’ and Mick Jones’ white ones, Robert Fripp’s black beauty. But the one I’m most drawn to is the cherry sunburst, like this one that Zappa played..

It’s kinda Ronald McDonald, but so what. I love the retro look. I’ve played a couple too, and they are just divine. I’m trying to decide now whether I want to shoot for a late 70s / early 80s when they still did the sunburst on the neck and the back of the guitar, or if I want a 90s or early 2000s one that’s going to be in better shape. My impression too is that the Les Pauls made in the 90s were really excellent, with great wood and really well-made.

Ok that’s plenty about Les Pauls for now. Hopefully I’ll be fiddling with a Custom and some other pickups soon. Thanks for reading!

#gibson #gibson les paul #gibson les paul studio #gibson les paul custom #hallmark guitars #hallmark 60 custom #johnny ramone #verst #starship crash #will sergeant #echo and the bunnymen #bigsby b7 #robert fripp #blue oyster cult #buck dharma #mick jones #steve jones #frank zappa

Stigmata Blaster

Behold this fucking rad guitar I made..

It’s a Fender Jazzmaster made from parts. Probably more of a JazzBLASTER, actually, since it has wide-range humbucker pickups in it, a la Lee Ranaldo.

This build took place last year around this time. For some reason I was missing having a black guitar, and I kept thinking about how badass it would be to have a Jazzmaster that was all blacked out. Plus I’d gradually bought a pair of Curtis Novak JM-WR pickups over the previous year or so, I’d heard some guitars with Fender wide range humbuckers, and I wanted to use some. It was time. Plus I just love building guitars.

So for this one I contacted MJT again and they got me another light swamp ash body, again weighing about 4lbs with nothing on it. Only this time I asked them to do something kinda weird. My red Jazzmaster got all scratched up right away after I started using it. I don’t even know why, really. But the white primer shows through in all the scratches, which makes them really noticeable. I thought I’d get MJT to prime the black one with some darker color so that the inevitable scratches wouldn’t show so starkly. But then I got another idea.. what if I had them do a layer of candy apple red beneath the black so that when the guitar got scratched, it would “bleed?” And so my kinda goth “stigmata” paint concept was born. I’ve ordered so many guitar bodies from them that they did the two colors for no extra charge. Nice guys. I love MJT!

I used the Fender vintage hot rod strat neck off the old Creamsicle Jazzmaster. That guitar is now finally dead, I think I can say. I kinda messed it up when I experimented with bridges once, sloppily. Ah well, it was an alder body anyway (not my favorite wood).. a Crafted-in-Japan reissue that I’d ruined long ago by spraying it with orange spray paint. Goodbye Creamsicle.

Just like on the red Jazzmaster, I used a Mastery bridge and tailpiece on the Stigmata Blaster. Goddamn that stuff makes for a smooth and resonant guitar!

This one turned out especially nicely, just from an acoustic point of view. Somehow the string length and height is just a bit more ideal than on the red Jazzmaster. The chime from behind the bridge is INSANE. Maybe a bit much, actually, but I have no problem damping it with the heel of my right hand when I don’t want it.

And the pickups, WOW. Curtis Novak is a true artist. And I suppose I really have to say hats off to Seth Lover as well, for his wide-range humbucker concept. The problem with single coils is that they buzz and hum a lot. Actually, this can be kind of cool. I like single coils best for recording because, in addition to their sounding fabulous, I can include or avoid those buzz & hum artifacts when I want. But for live playing, sometimes you show up at a place and the pickups just hate something in the room and you’re all BZZZZZZZZZZZ through the whole show. People think you’re an ass, chicks leave, etc. The problem with the original bar-magnet-fueled PAF humbucker design (also designed by Seth Lover!) is that they’re so midrangey even when they’re at their best, and just dark, woofy and indistinct most of the rest of the time. This is the old Fender vs. Gibson war - Fender = bright, Gibson = dark. Honestly I like them both in their place, but “my” voice is a Fender voice. There’s just so much more complexity and richness from single coil pickups. People who complain that they’re too thin just don’t turn their amps up enough. Get a real amp, turn it up to 11 and stop whining!

But the wide-range humbucker is different. Instead of using a bar magnet like a PAF, Seth Lover used magnetic pole pieces like a Fender single coil. The result is a completely different sound from a PAF. It’s much more like a single coil pickup in timbre. But it has higher output than a vintage-style single coil. It’s still bright, still has all the complexity of all the frequencies in even proportion, but it’s loud. It pushes amps nicely, and each note is more “there” and present than with a single coil. It also doesn’t buzz and hum. But even better, the WR humbucker imparts its own unique aura and halo to the sound. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s this luminous quality to the notes that I haven’t heard anywhere else.

Lauren Larson of Ume has a rad sound with her Tele that has WR humbuckers in it. Listen to my fave track of theirs Rubicon and maybe you’ll hear that luminous thing. She rocks.

I’ve heard it said by the real cork-sniffers that the real WR humbucker, in its original bigger form, sounds different from the Jazzmaster-sized ones. I’m sure that’s true, because, being bigger, they “hear” more of the string. They’re probably a little more rich-sounding because theoretically they’d be picking up more overtones. Yeah so someday I’ll get the real deal on a nice 70s Tele or something, or really get serious and build a totally Ranaldo-style Jazzblaster. But I’m already in love with these Curtis Novak JM-WR pickups and I have lots more playing to do on this guitar.

There are a couple little details I should mention about the Stigmata Blaster. That little red switch changes the phase of the neck pickup so I can get an out-of-phase both pickups sound if I want. The red color is a hint about the bleeding, I guess. And that pickup selector switch tip is actually a turned nickel tip off a real Mosrite.. the vintage 60s yellow Mark I 12-string I owned and butchered for a while in the 90s. Also, I’ve gone back & forth about the knobs, starting with black Gibson speed knobs and now using black witch hats. I can’t decide which is best.

Here’s Lee Ranaldo's Jazzblaster containing real bonafide Fender WR humbuckers..

This black guitar has become one of two main guitars for playing live with my band Verst. It sounds fabulous, makes incredible feedback in combination with the Marshall or Hiwatt amps. It doesn’t hum, it plays like butter with perfect action, it stays in tune, it looks rad, all the good stuff.

Here’s a rad live photo of moi by Andy Strong..

The only thing it really hasn’t done yet is bleed. For some reason I am not hurting this guitar. At this point it has a couple very small chips that go all the way to the wood, without revealing red along the way. I probably just need to be rougher with it. I’ll work on that.

Rock On,

John

#jazzblaster #mastery #curitsnovak #widerangehumbucker #mjt #verst #leeranaldo #ume #laurenlarson

I Built Mark’s Hot Rod

I don’t know if I’m actually on the other side of it or not, but for a while there, building my own guitars may have become somewhat of an addiction. This is a funny way to look at it because my first build actually arose from an addiction of another kind.

I’ve been off booze for four years now. Life has been much better without it, let me tell you. One of the most fun things to come out of my quitting was a conversation I had with a therapist, in which she asked me, “How much money do you think you spent monthly on drinking?” The answer was a rather embarrassingly large figure. So then she said, “Well, how about you take one month’s drinking budget and spend it on something nice and lasting that you can have as a reminder of your accomplishment and commitment?” The mind of a guitar guy with acute Gear Acquisition Syndrome (G.A.S.) needs very little prompting to go straight to the notion that he deserves a new guitar. But on this occasion I felt that I really did deserve it. I still do, actually. In fact, I continue to believe that, as long I remain sober, I deserve at least one new guitar a year. After all, this still represents a massive savings over a year’s worth of drinking. Ha ha!

Ahh, the spoils of sobriety..

I love putting guitars together, and it certainly helps that I’ve been a Fender player, because they’re so modular and there are so many aftermarket and super boutique parts. The first guitar I made at my therapist’s prompting was my black Telemaster. I used all top shelf parts and it turned out fabulously. Then a year later I built the red Jazzmaster, because I was missing the Jazzmaster sound & feel. After building those two guitars, I just wanted to keep building more of them, but I couldn’t quite conscience doing more than one a year.

Enter Mark Marvelous...

Mark had been using his 80s reissue Fender Mary Kaye strat for Verst duties. It’s a lovely guitar that plays and sounds wonderful. He was finding, though, that it didn’t quite have the output required to push the silverface Fender amps into compression and to hang in the mix with my more saturated sounds. It also doesn’t stay in tune as well as a guitar with a fixed bridge. We futzed with it, adding a Seymour Duncan Antiquity II Surf bridge pickup that pushed a bit harder while still keeping that twangy Fender sound. But the notes still didn’t have the edge and body that my Telemaster does. So evenutally Mark decided that he wanted his own Telemaster.

This was cool because it meant I could build a guitar using someone else’s money! We collaborated on the specs. Mark bought some parts and I bought others. He ended up getting the swamp ash body from Warmoth and had it finished by the guys at MJT, whereas I’ve had MJT source my guitar bodies and finish them all together. I think Warmoth’s Telemaster design is slightly different. I can’t really tell how but it just feels a bit different. The wood is a little bit heavier too. By itself, the body was maybe close to 5 lbs instead of the 4 lbs I got from MJT.

Mark bought a Baja vintage Tele neck for it too, I believe. This is still a lovely neck and represented a substantial savings vs. the US-made necks I had used in my two previous builds. But that’s where the thrift ended. Everything else on the guitar is pretty expensitivo stuff - a Mastery bridge and Fred Stuart pickups all around - 60s spec strat pups in the neck and middle, and a Black Guard Tele pickup in the bridge. I also got some silver hookup wire and military grade volume & tone pots from Dirk Wacker in Germany (singlecoil.com). These are not cheap, but they are the best.

So how does it sound? It sounds fucking awesome. Mark loves it. I love it too, when I get the chance to play it, which is rarely. It’s different from the black Telemaster in a few ways. Obviously it’s yellow and it has that extra, middle pickup, which enables Mark to get those clucky strat tones that he would otherwise miss without the Mary Kaye strat. The guitar is a little heavier than mine too, and MJT seemed to apply more finish to this guitar than to the black one. The body has a different, maybe bigger, glossier feel.

The biggest difference is the Mastery bridge. I love the Mastery bridge and vibrato tailpiece for the Jazzmaster. Mastery just revolutionalized that guitar, man. I can’t say enough good stuff about that. But this Tele version I’m not so sure about. On my guitar I have a vintage Fender Tele ashtray bridge plate, with Glendale compensated brass saddles. It intonates perfectly and the sound is exactly the kind of thick, biting, sustainy Tele growl I was hearing in my head when I imagined the build. It might be the heavier body and thicker finish on Mark’s guitar, but I do suspect that the Mastery bridge imparts a slightly less thick and resonant sound than the Fender/Glendale combination does. If that’s true, it kinda begs the question of Mastery as to why they even made a Tele bridge kit? I suppose theirs intonates better than the non-compensated stock kit, but I do suspect that the tone is a bit off the classic Tele growl.

Still it sounds damned good, especially when played for the first time, and through the old Pro Reverb as here..

Mark also has an issue with the wiring, which is that his volume and tone pots seem to do everything in the first couple degrees of rotation. At first I thought this was due to Dirk’s treble bleed circuit on the volume pot. But I pulled that off and Mark still doesn’t feel that the taper is right.

So there is still a frontier with this guitar - some work yet to do in order to get it just right. If I can pry it out of his hands again, I may swap out the pots and bridge. If it’s down for a week or two, we might even see the Mary Kaye strat again.

XO - Dickey

#Fender #Telemaster #mastery #seymour duncan #mjt #fred stuart #warmoth #glendale #verst

The Guitars of Starship Crash

Now that the Verst album Starship Crash is out, people have been asking me which guitars and amps are used on which tracks and stuff like that. Here’s a quick rundown.

Roadstar Bass

John Parsons used his Ibanez Roadstar p-bass copy for the whole album. Originally, the bass tracks were recorded live along with guitar & drums basics. But over time we liked the sound less and less. Then John got a Hovercraft Elder Giant 200-watt tube amp and it sounded so rad that we knew he had to redo the bass. So that’s what he did. In just one session in our Novato rehearsal space, John played the Ibanez straight through the Elder Giant and an Ampeg 2x15″ cabinet. The result is thunderous and I believe it makes the album.

Marvelous Strat

Mark Marvelous has a gorgeous ‘87-ish Fender 1962 reissue Mary Kaye Stratocaster on which he played all of his Starship Crash parts. You can hear him through the right channel on most tracks. The Mark Marvelous guitar parts were all recorded by Damien Rasmussen when we got the basics live in our rehearsal space. Mark played this strat straight through his 70s Fender Super Six Reverb amplifier, which, like Mark himself, is tall and dangerous!

Black Telemaster

I played the black Telemaster I built a few years ago on lots of tracks. This guitar has a killer grindy and pure Tele sound, and I love it more than any other guitar for recording. It has gobs of sustain and I’m pretty sure it would still be in tune after a nuclear assault. The pickup isn’t wax-potted so you can really hear the pick bite into the strings. Listen to the solo on I have been with Hubert. That whole tune is Telemaster. This guitar is also in the left channel of Black Sybian Mantis, it is the main rhythm guitar in 7 Halos, and it does some k-changgg chords in the verses of En Garde! It is the lead guitar during the outro of Your Kindness, because it’s so rad to do bends on. I mainly played it through “Mars” - the 1969 Marshall Super Lead amplifier I’ve owned forever, except for on Black Sybian Mantis, where I used a 1978 Hiwatt 100 watt head. Both amps were played through a 1973 Marshall 8x10″ cabinet.

Red Jazzmaster

I had just built this guitar when we recorded the album basics. It’s candy apple red and has a light swamp ash body, a maple strat neck, some Lollar pickups and mastery hardware. It sounds incredible and plays even better. It first appears on 3-Way (left channel), then The Year of the Idiot, rhythm guitar on Your Kindness, lead guitar on Black Sybian Mantis (right channel and then the solo down the middle at the end), rhythm guitar on Starship Crash, and it’s the main guitar on En Garde! and Amateurs. I played this guitar through Mars on most tracks except for Black Sybian Mantis and Starship Crash, which went through the Hiwatt.

Hallmark 60 Custom

At a certain point last year I got all misty over an ink blue Mosrite Mark I that I once owned briefly in the 90s. That was easily the prettiest guitar I’ve ever owned, but I couldn’t afford it and had to sell it back after only a couple months. So last year I got a bit obsessed and did a bunch of research to see if something like that would be within my reach now. Sadly, the Mosrites are still not attainable for me, but it turns out that Hallmark makes this gorgeous 60 Custom, which is nearly identical to my old Mark I, but the Hallmark is more playable than the Mosrite, with a slightly wider neck and less microphonic pickups. With its surf music heritage, you’d think that this guitar would have more in common with the Fender Jazzmaster. Oddly, it feels more closely related to a Les Paul than anything Fender, and actually ended up being the gateway drug that sent me into my current death spiral of total Les Paul obsession (more on this in a future post). The 60 Custom has a glued-in neck that is set at an angle, it has a carved top, binding all the way around, and the thing is heavy as all ungodly fuck. With bar magnets instead of magnetic pole pieces, the pickups have more in common with P-90s than they do with Jazzmaster pickups, and they are hot too, wound to 14k. So, like a Les Paul, it pushes the Marshall amp nicely and is quite bitchin’ for solos, which is what I used it for on the record. I played the Starship Crash solo on this guitar, through Mars. I used the same setup on Secrets of Me (intro/left channel) and for the lead guitar that plays harmonics on 7 Halos.

Yeah so that was our guitar scene for Starship Crash. The album took us a longass time to make, so we’re already playing some new and different stuff that I’ll post about when I get organized. XO

#Verst #Starship Crash #Fender #Jazzmaster #Telemaster #Ibanez #roadstar #hallmark 60 custom #hallmark guitar #mosrite #marshall #hiwatt #hovercraft #elder giant #Mark Marvelous #John Parsons #John Dickey #Damien Rasmussen

Feedback Is Still Holy

I've neglected Feedback is Holy for a while, mainly because I had to shut down my earthlink hosting which is where most of the images on this blog were hosted. I'm gradually going back now into the old blog posts to add the pics.

So much has happened since October 2012 in my little world of guitars that almost all of the old blog posts are now inaccurate. Oh well, if I meant it at the time then I guess it's still valid in some way. But let's cover a few quick updates to bring things current, shall we?

Epiphones Get Sold

I sold both the Epiphone Casino and the Explorer. I know, it's kinda sad. I ended up just totally changing my mind about the Casino. You know what changed it? When I brought Mike Margulies' Epiphone Casino ELITIST home with me, the comparison between it and my Casino was just too brutal. The main difference between the two is that the Elitist is made in Japan while my regular Casino is made in China. This translates into better materials, parts and build quality in the Elitist. Much better. It also costs twice as much money, and it's worth it. Qualitatively speaking I think I can still say that the Elitist is just a way more lively guitar. The wood is lighter, thinner and much more resonant. The whole guitar is just much more alive. Plus it sounds better, plays better, and even looks better. In five minutes that guitar spoiled everything for my Chinese Casino. Bye bye Chinese Casino.

Here are the Chinese (left) and Japanese (right) Casinos side by side.

I sold the "Coffee Table" Explorer more recently. I just wasn't ever playing it, mainly because of how big it is. But also because it has no whammy bar and because I am not really a Gibson guy - the short scale length, the thicker and less complex tones. But it's a sentimental favorite, so I do miss it. The talented kid I sold it to seemed completely stoked with it, so it'll see a lot more action now.

Here is John Parsons puzzling over the absurdity of the Explorer while simultaneously looking very cool.

Red Jazzmaster Gets Even Nicer

I made two key upgrades to the candy apple red Jazzmaster - new pickups and vibrato. Almost right away I decided that the pickups I had first installed (AVRI neck, Seymour Hot bridge) just weren't cutting it. The Jazzmaster's tone was being so heavily eclipsed by the superior tone of the Telemaster with the Fred Stuart blackguard pickup that I was just never recording with the Jazzmaster. I realized that one of the key reasons why the Fred Stuart pickup sounds so good is because it is not wax potted. This gives it a really open, harmonically complex sound. It just has way more depth, range and articulation than other pickups I've tried. I dug around and asked around to see what the options were. I ended up having a positive and informative exchange with Jason Lollar that pretty much convinced me to buy his regular "Jazzmaster Style" pickup. I was interested in getting someone to make me some Jazzmaster pickups without wax potting. Jason explained that Jazzmaster pickups actually need some light potting just to hold them together. They're different from Tele pickups, which are held together with that nice tight string that's wound around the coil. But he explained his potting process and how minimal it is. Anyway I got the pickups and they truly are all that. They are amazing. Just wonderful. They are way more open and broad sounding than the AVRI or Seymour Duncan pickups I've used. Now I use the Jazzmaster on recordings when I don't even have to. It has meatier, warmer sound than the Telemaster.

I also got a Mastery vibrato tailpiece for the Jazzmaster. Man, the original Jazzmaster design is so fraught - the stock JM bridge has always sucked. Thank God for Mastery's replacement bridge. Well, then I noticed that I'd always been wrestling with the vibrato tailpiece. The little screws that hold the baseplate and .. wiggle unit? together stick up in a screwey way, often causing the E string to unwind or snap down near the end. The AVRI vibrato I had was also binding up and not moving smoothly through its range of motion. I was just living with this stuff until I saw that Mastery had designed a re-thought-through, much improved replacement vibrato tailpiece. They were out of stock for a while, but then when they came up again I pounced and voila - another huge improvement over stock. Goddamn I love my Jazzmaster now!

I love it and I play it so much that it's taken a bit of a beating...

Mars Makes A Friend

I have always been amazed by and quite thoroughly proud of my 1969 Marshall Super Lead amplifier. So it was sorta unnerving whenever my neighbor Ric Wilson would acknowledge the greatness of my amp but then explain, in a patient smiling way, that he prefers Hiwatts. "It's like a Marshall, but with tone controls that work," he said. Eventually I had to try one. Then I had to have one.

Mine is a pretty damned minty 1978 DR103 Custom 100 watt built by Hylight Electronics (the original company). It differs from the original DR103 in that it has two inputs and a hotter setup of the V1 12AX7. That setup was a little hot for my tastes, actually, so Chris Barnett put a less gainy 12AT7 in the V1 position. Otherwise, it has 4 EL34s, big huge Partridge transformers and it's the same amp as the classics used by Townsend, Page, Gilmour, etc.

This is where I want to be all day every day.

Apart from being British and using 4 EL34 power tubes, the Hiwatt is actually very different from the Marshall. It has a lot more gain from a mathematical perspective (if not from a sonic one) because it has several more preamp tube gain stages than the Marshall does. But those stages are set up in a very clean and stable way, so it doesn't end up sounding like a foamy, mushy preamp-focused "modern" or metal amp, a la Mesa Boogie or whatever. Also, the way the tone section is set up, the tone controls act almost like volume controls .. they use gain in frequency-bounded silos to add or subtract a whole lot of tone color and gain at the same time. Evidently the phase inverter (PI) that drives the power stage is set up differently as well. I don't know enough to go into it, but the net effect is that through much of its volume range, the power stage of the Hiwatt is more stable and less distorted than the Marshall. I say "through much of its volume range.." because the amp definitely does crush out, roar and scream at the top of its range. People (who probably don't live with Hiwatts) like to say that Hiwatts are super clean or are cleaner than Marshalls. I've found that that's partly true, in that the Hiwatt has much more headroom, or loud clean volume, than the Marshall. But it's absolutely not true that you can't get great big saturated distortion and feedback from a Hiwatt. Just like I do with the Marshall, I leave this amp wide open and use my volume pedal to wield the whole continuum of gain and distortion, from clean to completely hairy. That usable range is a lot wider on the Hiwatt. But just like with the Marshall, when my foot is all the way down, all Hell is breaking loose.

The Hiwatt can also get brighter and has more low end girth than the Marshall. The brightness is not Fendery. It's more crispy than that. It's almost like the sound of an amp with an EF86 in the preamp, where the tone of guitar is being inhaled and then given a truer rendering. So most of the time I'm getting a sound that is more clear and the component notes of chords are easier to hear as distinct from one another even when the amp is heavily distorted. And I know this sounds hokey, but with this amp I can fucking hear the wood of the guitar.

One thing the Hiwatt lacks, and the reason I do go back to the Marshall for certain parts, is the mystical smokey low and middle mids that only a Marshall has. The Marshall cathode follower tone section may not be very versatile but it does something that no other amp can do.. it creates that gloriously warm luminous holographic harmonic feedback thing. The Don't Fear The Reaper thing. The Eric Clapton on the Beano album thing. The Hiwatt gets close enough, but it's not quite the same.

Aww, look at the buddies.

It's just super lovely to have both. I've been using mainly the Hiwatt for rehearsal and live playing, but some day I'll hook them both up.

Enter Lurch

Damn it's been so long since I've updated this blog that I haven't even introduced Lurch. Lurch is a 1973 Marshall 2034 8x10" cabinet for guitar. I found it at Bananas At Large in San Rafael and just fell in love with it. It is in beautiful shape and cost me kind of a lot. But I offset much of that cost by selling off the original Celestion 7332 speakers individually and replacing them with Eminence Ramrods. Heresy, some may say, but I say fuck you! It sounds incredible, and way better than it did before. Plus some beard-stroking vintage enthusiasts now own some near-pristine 7332s.

I've thought about pimping it all the way out with some Celestion golds or some Webers. But at this point my own experimental foray into the low-watt Alnico realm can only be described as inconclusive. That's a future blog post in the making, so let's shelve the Celestion vs. The Rest Of The World and Alnico vs. Ceramic subjects for now.

Here is Lurch during initial test drive at Bananas.

I had no small amount of trouble rewiring it, figuring out whether it should be 16 ohms or 4 ohms. I tried 16 ohms, but the Marshall did not like that for some reason. And honestly, something about running two 32 ohm loads per side in parallel (to get 16 ohms) freaked me out too. When I say the Marshall didn't like it, I mean there was a strangely damped, flat dynamic feel and there may have been a couple screeching incidents. No cabinet is worth risking Mars' output transformer, so I quickly rewired to 4 ohms, which has always had a bit more thump anyway.

Before^

After^

Jim Marshall's signature!

So the sound is fucking huge. Despite the fact that the speakers are just 10 inches, there are so many of them and the cabinet is so large that there is quite enough low end, especially now with the Hiwatt. There's not toooo much high end when the presence and treble are dialed down, but it's certainly there if you want it. And then there's so much rich and crispy midrange that you just don't know what to do. God, it's nice. And I think I'm sold on 10 inch speakers. They're just so quick and detailed. They're bristly in a finer way than 12 inch speakers. I actually compared it with a few different choices on hand (10 and 12) when tracking the Verst album, and it won hands down for the kind of richness and detail I was going for.

Here's Lurch all mic'd up to track the Starship Crash album.

Whew. So yeah we're all caught up now .. at least enough to get into some serious cork sniffing in the posts to come. Thanks for reading.

ROCK!

#hiwatt #marshall #super lead #jazzmaster #telemaster #epiphone #casino #elitist #explorer #gibson #celestion #eminence #ramrod #8x10 #Mastery Bridge #DR103 #fred stuart #lollar

This Telemaster is killing me

DAS PARTSMEISTER

I just put this guitar together, and FINALLY, I have the perfect Jazzmaster - what I think of as the perfect one, anyway.

I've been playing Jazzmasters and thinking about them and taking them apart and putting them together and smashing them and losing them and just playing the hell out of them since 1992. In that time I've owned four - two made-in-Japan (MIJ) vintage reissues, an American vintage reissue (AVRI), and now this one. This one is technically not a Fender, I guess, since the body is not made by Fender. And it has a maple neck. So I guess it's a Partsmaster. I've never owned a real vintage Jazzmaster, because I waited too long to get into them and so they've always been way too expensive.

One neat thing about this new Jazzmaster, for me, aside from it having all my favorite bits and attributes, is that it also contains parts from every single Jazzmaster I've owned. I also cannibalized the black Eric Johnson strat for a couple things. Anyone want a distressed and inexpertly routed Eric Johnson strat body?

Source : Part MIJ 1 Jazzmaster (Pie guitar) : pickup covers MIJ 2 Jazzmaster (Creamsicle) : whammy tailpiece, bridge pickup AVRI Jazzmaster : neck pickup Eric Johnson strat : vintage hot rod maple neck & tuners, volume & tone knobs

Here I am testing candidate pickups to put in the guitar. I ended up using OEM AVRI neck pup (8.1 K Ohms) and ye olde Seymour Duncan hot bridge (15 K Ohms).

The inspiration for this one was kind of obviously the Loveless Jazzmaster - the red one(s) that Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher of My Bloody Valentine played. I look at it and hear woozy roaring sounds (which I enjoy). I just love candy apple red, too. The metallic flake dark bloody red reminds me of 70s speedboats and super loud engines about to explode.

I got the body from MJT, the same excellent guys from Missouri - Mark & Matt - who sold me the Telemaster body. They buy offset bodies in alder or swamp ash from Wildwood, then finish them in Fender custom colors. They're really into relic finishes and apparently do a great job of that. But I don't like that relic shit. So I ordered both my guitars "closet classic." It took a while to get this Jazzmaster body from them, but the wait was totally worth it. I had them get me a really lightweight (< 4 lbs empty) swamp ash body and finish it in candy apple red nitro lacquer. They did a beautiful job and it's the lightest, most resonant and plucky Jazzmaster I've ever played. Swamp ash is great because it's very balanced in terms of light/dark sound but the notes really jump out and have tons of character. Much more so than alder, which sounds dull by comparison.

You know what else helps the sound of this thing immeasurably is the Mastery bridge. I had bought it a couple months ago and installed it on the Creamsicle. Man, it was a radical improvement. All of a sudden I realized that the old Mustang and JM bridges had been missing transmitting most of the sound generated by the strings, even when modded. The Mastery bridge also intonates perfectly, sets string height perfectly, and keeps strings firmly in place. It's way louder and sustains better. As a bonus, the string length past behind the bridge is more prevalent and reverby, so there's more JM character thrown in to boot. The Jazzmaster's achilles heel is gone at last. Thank the Lord for Mastery.

Yeah, so that's about it. I literally just put it together, so I don't have any recordings to share yet. Nor do I have any better pics than these crummy iPhone 3 snaps. I'll add more stuff to this post later when I've got it.

Stoked!

#fender #jazzmaster #seymour duncan #avri #mij #mastery bridge #mastery #MJT #Mark Jenny #swamp ash #telemaster

I Only Need Two Amps

People have asked me to write about amps. The thing is, there's not a whole lot that I can say in a macro survey-of-amps kind of way. I've had the same two amps for a longggg time. One is Bessie, a Fender Pro Reverb I bought in probably 1982. The other is Mars, a 1969 Marshall Super Lead 100 watt that I got in 1991. I have a couple other amps in the house right now, but the big two are really all I need.

Know that the Marshall is really THE ONE. There's something magical about a Jazzmaster through a 60s Marshall. You can't beat that sound. I do use the Fender Pro when I'm recording if I want a Fendery clean sound, some genuine reverb or trem, or if I just need something contrasty.

That's pretty much it - Fender & Marshall, end of story. So in order to have something to say, maybe I'll just walk through the amps I've used, try to tell their stories and get across some of their qualities.

1980 Fender Champ

Thanks to my awesome parents, my very first amp was a tube amp. I got a brand-new Champ for my 12th birthday, along with the Sears Les Paul copy for which I'd been lusting for the better part of a year. The amp was a total surprise. It had simple controls - volume, treble and bass - and a nice clean Fender tone. Though I discovered quickly that I needed a distortion box in order to get the sounds that were on the records I liked. My first distortion box is another story for another post.

The Champ was not loud enough to be used with a full band. But I kept my Champ and used it for years and years. It became my test bed for lots of unholy experimentation. The best mod was when I cut the negative feedback loop. This made the Champ into a little firebreather. I recorded a bunch of feedback through it in that state for a song called Motorcycle Girl. That's the only known recording I have of that amp, actually. Poor Champ! It was in an unusable state when it was stolen in probably 1995, along with a bunch of other spare parts and things.

Holy shit - look at my hair. And look at my Ukranian bandura! From left to right, the amps are: Fender Pro Reverb cabinet, Marshall super lead 100watt, topped by Fender Pro Reverb in absurd white cabinet topped by Ibanez DM1100 delay, boss SE-50 multi-effects unit and a custom Hal Pecher power soak, and I'm sitting on the Champ. That aqua thing was a space heater.This was the Motorcycle Girl era in Somerville, Massachusetts.

The Family Stereo

Because the Champ wasn't loud enough, I would carry my parents' Marantz receiver into my room. I would stack their four stereo loudspeakers on top of my two stereo loudspeakers (driven separately by a harmon kardon receiver). I would plug my guitar through a Y cord into the mic inputs of a cassette tape deck, put a tape in there, press record-play and pause, crank the record input level to 10 and dime the receivers. It was loud as hell and made a great super bristly in your face trebly, chunky distortion. I wrote a song called "Turn It Up Louder" through that rig, jumping around in my room.

Marantz 2270, motherfuckers!

Harmony Solid-State, model unknown

I bought this off my neighbors(?) for next to nothing. It was a total piece o' shit, but it came with a big 2x12 cabinet and got a pretty good bristly, thumpy distortion when I turned it all the way up.

I still have this faint, fleeting visual memory of the inside of this amp. I think that's because I took it apart, did something horrible to it, and it never worked again. Pretty sure I scavenged parts out of it for various projects.

"Bessie" - 1974 Fender Silverface Pro Reverb

The Fender Pro was my first big boy amp. I have a very clear memory of going to Guitar Center in Santa Ana with my dad to look through the used Fenders to find the one on which to spend my $300. This must have been 1982 or 1983. There were Super Reverbs, Twin Reverbs and even Quad Reverbs lined up near the door. Everything I remember seeing was silverface, but there must have been some blackface amps too. I zeroed in on the Pro Reverb because it was cheaper than the Twins but seemed similar, and it was plenty loud. I didn't know the difference between a two- or four-power tube amp back then. I didn't know jackshit about tube vs. solid state rectification. All I knew was that I wanted a Fender 2x12" tube combo with reverb.. because Will Sergeant of Echo & The Bunnymen used Fender amps and that was the sound I wanted. I was already an amp snob at 15 years old! I had played through Peaveys, which I thought were dark and shitty. Marshalls seemed like they were just for hair bands - because, frankly, the JCM800 was. I thought stacks were gouache.

Anyway, I was totally stoked when I got the Pro. It sounded fantastic. I played it blissfully through high school and college. Also in Road Parrot and in the early Pie days. Even though it was only 45 watts, somehow it always seemed to be the loudest amp in the room. This was the era of the Roland JC-120, and other new solid-state amps from most manufacturers. I think I just got lucky that I chose the Pro Reverb, but it kept coming home to me every time I played with someone using a solid state amp that my tube amp was just better than theirs - better tone, louder and cooler.

Posting this pic again of me turning Bessie up to 11, circa 1987

I pretty much favored clean tones through high school and half of college. When I started to get into fusion, though, I started to want a more sustaining, violin kind of tone for leads. And it was then when I started to read interviews of guitarists and reviews of amps in gear magazines. Wanting to get a nice distorted tone from my amp, I took it to an amp tech in Montclair named Smokey Stover (a.k.a. Amp Man). He taught me about the kinds and qualities of capacitors, tubes, rectifiers, speakers, etc., and we tried a few different things on my amp, including setting up one of the 12AX7s for pre-amp distortion. In those experiments I learned that I don't like pre-amp distortion by itself - I don't like the classic Mesa Boogie approach of creating an overdriven pre-amp stage. For sound & feel, I vastly prefer power tube distortion and non-master volume amps.

The coolest mod I ever did with the Pro was when I had Hal Pecher modify it to be able to use Marshall-style EL-34 output tubes. Hal now owns Guitronics in San Francisco, but at the time worked in the shop above Cambridge Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not all Fenders take this mod well, but apparently the voltages in my Pro happen to be hospitable to EL-34s. The amp still uses EL-34s now, but is otherwise blackface-stock. The EL-34s break up more early than 6L6s. And when they do break up, the distortion has a much finer, creamier grain to it, with more present harmonic overtones. Even the clean tones are a bit compressed. This makes my Pro somewhat of a hybrid between a Fender and a Marshall - like a Marshall but with reverb, trem, tube rectification and with tone controls that actually work.

The dumbest thing I ever did with that amp was to take it out of its original enclosure and to, eventually, sell the original enclosure so as not to have to move it back across the country. I made the shitty head-only cabinet myself, and it's still in there. Wood and I don't get along, so it's pretty lame. Someday I'll get one of those repro 2x12" combo cabs for it and put it back together.

"Mars" - 1969 Marshall Super Lead 100-watt

I was not looking for this amp. It was looking for me. And it found me in Hal Pecher's shop above Cambridge Music in 1991. Hal had been teaching me more and more about tube amps and I would just visit him for the hell of it, maybe once every couple weeks. We would talk about the amps he had in the shop. One day this amp was in there. He said it was his and that it was for sale, because it was just too fuckin loud. I entertained the idea of buying it because I had just read an interview with Thurston Moore in which he enthused about the late 60s Super Leads.. the glory of that combustible sound, the way they sound as they die. I knew I'd wanted a bigger sound than I was getting from my Pro. Not just more gainy, but LOUDER both clean and dirty, and I was already an EL-34 convert. So I gave it a try. As soon as I heard my guitar through that amp, I was done. I bought it from Hal for $500 - in all respects the best investment I've ever made.

I was so bonzo for the full-tilt sound of that amp that I drove my housemates insane. Most Pie songs at that time featured noise sections, owing to the Sonic Youth influence and my interest in things discursive in general.

One thing about Mars is that it is devastatingly, room-clearingly loud. Recognizing that, and lacking a proper cabinet for it anyway, for a while I ran a complicated hybrid setup where the Marshall was in a loop with a power soak. My first power soak was handmade by Hal. Later I used Groove Tubes and Marshall versions. I used a Boss LS-2 line selector, the momentary switch of which I had remoted to an electric piano sustain pedal, to bring the Marshall in and out, then I ran the signal through my Fender Pro. Even though this relegated the Marshall to being more or less a really expensive distortion box, it was a fabulous combination of the two amps and available at semi-humane volumes. Also cool was that I could use reverb on the Marshall sound. Here is a recording of a Pie song where I'm playing that setup, reverb and all - Debbie Days. Hear the reverb?

So I made those early recordings of the Marshall while playing my Steinberger guitar. It wasn't until I bought my first Jazzmaster and played it through the Marshall with the big 1960TV cabinet that my final sound came together. The TV cabinet must have come at the same time the guitar did. Jesus Christ, when I plugged the Jazzmaster straight into the Marshall through that TV cab, in that moment my sound came together FOR LIFE. The truth is that I really only need one amp and this is it. Without reverb, and with total brick wall rectification, Marshalls can sound a bit flat with some guitars. With its lovely single-coil pickups and bridge/tailpiece construction, the Jazzmaster introduces enough complexity to make the sound compelling.

Here is Mars with us during the glory days of Richard Bitch, doing what it does best - rocking the shit out of the place. That was my favorite setup, with the TV cab. Gotta get another.

But the amp is loud. Techs have measured the output at 130 watts. So I use two things to manage the amp's power at both ends - a volume pedal, and a THD Hot Plate power soak. I use a Boss volume pedal with an adjustable "zero." I turn the amp all the way up all the time. I adjust the volume pedal's zero to the point at which the amp is on the edge of breaking up. So when I want a clean sound I just stomp the pedal all the way down and I'm there. From zero to 10 is just a continuum of gain. I've tried this with other amps and it just doesn't work as well. I think you need to have a 100-watt amp for that continuum to be wide, useful and dynamic enough. The closer the hot plate is set to full volume, the better it all sounds and works.

For most of the time in Pie I did not bother to use a power soak. Luckily, we were playing in bigger rooms, but even when we were in a small place I played that amp at full volume through both the TV 4x12" AND the Pro Reverb 2x12" cabinets. It was so fucking loud! But the Marshall's strength is in the low end and midrange - it's that "brown sound" that you hear with your body as much as with your head. Even though it is insanely loud, I don't get many complaints. It's rarely as painful as a Fender Twin or the cymbals of a drum set.

Right now with Verst I'm playing the Marshall through a 16ohm hot plate and an Orange 2x12" cabinet, which is loaded with 75watt Eminence Governor Red Coat speakers. I traded the TV cab for the Orange 2x12" in a misguided attempt to have a more portable gigging setup. Truth is, the Orange is ridiculously heavy and deep. I can barely get it in my car. I really want that TV cab back! That's an expensive proposition, though, because I would have to replace the Greenback 25watt speakers with something tougher. The Marshall kills those things on sight. In fact, the first time I played the Marshall through the TV cabinet, the glory lasted only about 10 minutes before all four Greenbacks were smoked. It then took Marshall a frustrating six weeks to replace them. Luckily for me they did. I traded them for Celestion G12T-75s - the British ones, not Chinese.

At home I play the Marshall through a very sweet-sounding home-made cab. This was a Unicord 1x15" cabinet that I either fished out of the trash or maybe Ted Nesseth gave it to me? Anyway, I cut the baffle out and made my own plywood 2x10" baffle. On a tip from Chris Barnett, I put a pair of vintage Celestion G10 10" short-throw speakers in there. I covered the face with some grill cloth from a trashed Hammond organ. It's considerably quieter than the Orange, and so sweet. The amp breaks up earlier and it's less thumpy. There's some neato detail in the high end. I have to use the hot plate with it, or the Marshall will fry the speakers. That's the setup I've been recording everything with these days.

I can't finish about this amp without mentioning Chris Barnett, wizard amp tech to the stars. For years I struggled with some 60-cycle hum in my amp. And I know that's a common problem. Chris eliminated most of it without affecting the sound of the amp, by simply re-routing wires or using shielded wires or I don't know what-all. He also has made this amp sound even better, with stock components. He is a magician. He also told me that in researching the serial number of the amp he determined that my '69 is only two serial numbers apart from Jimi Hendrix's favorite recording amp. This makes sense to my ears!

I say that these aluminum faceplate Marshall Super Leads from the late 60s and early 70s, even at $2,500-3,000 now, are fabulous buys. I like them better than Plexis, because they're more bezerk - they have higher voltages, more gain and they're louder. At this point, they are only going to get more rare and more expensive. If I had money for an amp, I would just buy another of these. And someday, I will have a full stack through which to blast mine.

Besides Hendrix, there are way too many players of this amp for me to list accurately. But in terms of the ones who influenced me the most, the list includes Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Angus Young, Thurston Moore and Kevin Shields. I heard about J Mascis' fetish for them after I'd had mine a while.

Kevin Shields amongst the stacks

Eddie Van Halen's Super Lead amp that he used to record all the relevant Van Halen albums.

Vox AC-30 50th Anniversary Hand-Wired Head

For some reason, last year I got really interested in AC-30s. I was listening to Brian May and The Edge again and really loving that sound. I was also getting way into Telecasters, an obsession which eventually resulted in my building a Telemaster. In checking out Telecaster sounds I had heard a few country players sounding really good through AC-30s, or other cathode-bias EL-84-driven amps. There are a lot of boutique versions too.

To me, it seemed like an AC-30 would be like a Marshall, but quieter. That wasn't really how it worked out, and I ultimately sold the amp. But it was a worthwhile experiment.

There is a lot of blather about whether an AC-30 really is or isn't a Class A amp. I don't care. All that aside, it definitely achieves a smoother-sounding distortion than most amps - very creamy and fine-grained. I think that mostly has to do with the EL-84 output tubes it uses. I've liked a couple other amps with EL-84s .. like the Mesa Boogie Studio .22 and the little Fender Blues Jr. But with the AC-30 there's definitely something else going on as well. Maybe it's the tone section or the cathode bias, but it's always compressy and very harmonic. Even the clean sounds. It's sorta flutey. I love that.

I'd had trouble with AC-30s in the past, though, so they'd never really grabbed me. Like when Pie was recording Strictly Seance at Pete Weiss' Zippah Studio in 1995, I tried to use his vintage AC-30 Top Boost and it just didn't do it for me. It was too dark. I went straight back to my Fender Pro for Mellotron and for clean guitar sounds, and the Marshall for all the loud stuff. Obviously, you listen to players you know are playing AC-30s and there is some high end sparkle to be had. The Edge, obviously. Hmmm.. it was always a bit of a conundrum.

Here is an amp that everyone in the world has heard by now.

So anyway, I bought a 50th Anniversary AC-30 Hand-Wired Head off of ebay, and it was killer. Damn! I played it through my Orange cab with the Eminence Governors and it was plenty loud. In fact, most of the time at home I had to use the hot plate. Playing with the band, I did not have to. One thing I really liked about this amp was the EF-86 channel. That was a big surprise. I just didn't know anything about that tube. It has character in spades - I don't know why, but it has more touch-sensitivity and creates more and more interesting harmonic overtones than the 12AX7 channel. It's very addictive. So why don't more amps use EF-86s? I dug a bit and it's supposedly because they're unreliable and often microphonic. My neighbor, pro guitarist and tube amp collector Rick Wilson (much more about Rick someday, I promise) lent me an NOS Telefunken EF-86 to use in the amp, and that made it even more fabulous - more open & airy, more chimey. Wow. The grit of the breakup is a little more coarse than a 12AX7, but there's this second-order finer grit or crystalline thing that's happening on top and between. So nice.

Brian May is never without his wall of AC-30s.

But there were downsides. The tone section irritated the shit out of me. The amp lacks simple, proper tone controls. Bass, mid & treble controls would be nice. What it has instead of those are a couple drastic and useless switches - "bass shift" and "pentode/triode." It also has a "tone" control that basically just knocks off the high-end. Shitty. Most of the time, I could switch in a great sound. Here is a recording where the full volume sound worked pretty well - Throw Them To The Wind. But on a couple occasions I just could not get the balance I wanted. Usually there was too much low end or not enough. At one of those points I went back to the Marshall and realized there was no reason to use another amp. The Marshall did the sound better. And the whole thing was just BETTER. I couldn't really justify having the AC-30 after that. Bye Bye pretty AC-30.

What's Next, If Anything

Still, I fantasize that there is a boutique version of the AC-30 out there that does the cathode-bias and EL-84 thing in a lovable/liveable way. Does anyone know of one?

You know what's really killing me? The rare Marshall combo amps from the same era as my Super Lead. I don't mean the Bluesbreaker, which is not gainy enough. I mean the ones that are just all grill cloth on the front, with the little script logos. They're gorgeous and I have the feeling that they sound amazing. There was a 20watt one with EL-84s and I think there were 50watt ones with EL-34s and 4 10" speakers. I have a serious problem for these things right now. They're very expensive, though.

When I was a kid in SoCal there was this badass wild man who lived across the street and seemed to have it all - good looks, money, cars, women, cool kids, power boats, etc. One day I was hanging out with his stepson and we went into the dude's closet for something (a gun, probably), and we came across one of these Marshall combos. It was perfect. I didn't even know the guy played guitar. That image still haunts me. I want that amp!

Gahhh, unhhh

The Ones That Got Away, part II

I just found some old pictures today that I couldn't find when I did my original Ones That Got Away post.

Sears Les Paul Copy

Below is a picture of me with my first electric guitar ever, the Sears catalog Les Paul copy. This is the one that would eventually, once punk rock hit my crew, get mutilated beyond recognition, slathered with white boat paint and emblazoned with the word "destruction" in German. This pic was taken the day after my 13th birthday - must have been May 3, 1981, I think. I had had this guitar for a year on this day. The name of this band was The Headgivers. See, that's how young we were - we thought that the one who gave head was the one who actually got head. Cuz if you're a guy you give your.. well, nevermind. Good thing we never played out with that name!

See how tan I am? And I'm rocking a tasty Lightning Bolt shirt and OP shorts. My friend Lance and I wrote most of The Headgivers' songs together in the Marco Forrester Jr High School library during lunchtime.. such classics as "Mommy, I'm Dying," "The Guardian Of Hell," "The Rats Are Dead (and the stench is growing stronger)," "Turn It Up Louder" and "San Juan Town." I remember Queen's album The Game was all over the radio at that time.

Goya Strat Copy & Hondo P-Bass Copy

Below is a picture of me with my band Ozbone Banana - Christian, Ron and I. I was 16 and it was October, 1984. Check out the record on the top of my stack to the left there - that is Heaven Up Here by Echo & The Bunnymen. I was super into that. Joe Strummer is on the wall right above that. A Hondo P-Bass copy belonging to my friend John Frank is leaning up against the wall. We referred to that thing affectionately as The Battleship. It was indestructible and seismic. I learned to play slap bass on it.

Ibanez Artist

I'm pretty sure I put in more woodshed hours on this guitar than any other. I had it in college. It was the one I would noodle on for 8 and even 10 hours in a single sitting. I wouldn't even pee, all day. What a wacky guitar it was. I suppose it was an imitation of the kind of insane woodblock shit and pointlessly complex coil-tapping switchery that Jerry Garcia and Stanley Clarke were getting into toward the late 70s. It was heavy as hell, and that neck was a thing of beauty - just dead straight, long (24 frets) and topped with ebony. I ripped out the original active pickups and replaced them with Allan Holdsworth models by Seymour Duncan. This was the guitar that I learned to really shred on, and it was the one I was using when I got into improvisational and atonal music.

Here's a picture I found on the interweb of the same model..

Rickenbacker 620 - "Patricia"

I've never mentioned this guitar. I wish I had a Rickenbacker now. Not this one.. it was too small for me, and it wasn't a semi-hollow body, like the 330. But she was beautiful, eh? Wanna hear a terrible story about this guitar? I just wasn't in a pop mode at all when I got this thing. Rickenbackers are pretty much pop-only guitars, so I don't even know why I got it. Mainly what I was doing at this time (college) was playing like a total weirdo. For a while I MADE THAT RICKENBACKER 620 INTO A FUCKING FRETLESS GUITAR. I did it myself and I did a really shitty job. It was basically ruined. Ultimately I paid a guy to refret it and then I sold it. Now it can be told.

Steinberger GL2T

I got so into playing during college that I decided I would go to music school after college. I also decided that as a serious student of music I deserved to have a fancy, super portable guitar. The Steinberger also happened to be the same guitar used by the guitar player whose playing I was completely in love with at the time - Allan Holdsworth. He's the guy who can play like John Coltrane except on the guitar. Insane. I've already written about this guitar - whatever for it. I didn't really like the tightassedness of music school because I ended up forming Road Parrot with Walter Horn and Gary Kendig. Those guys were totally unique, incredible musicians and together we were just absolutely nuts, free and out. Road Parrot was the most fucked up, vicious, hilarious and insane band ever. The first thing we did was destroy all the rules. We would get together once a week at Walt's house and just make shit up. We tried to get sax players involved, like poor Patrice below, but none of them were fierce enough. The Steinberger was the perfect guitar at that time.. so easy to burn and burn weirdly on that thing. Anyway, here I am with my Steinberger, hanging out with Road Parrot, in a golden age of musical exploration and monkdom..

Ok, I think that's just about it for now. Ta!

That Hollow Feeling

Do you ever get that hollow feeling? The one like when you have to have a hollow body guitar RIGHT NOW?? Well, I got that feeling a few months ago. And the upshot of it was that I bought an Epiphone Casino. I got one of the Chinese ones.. the (relatively rare) 40th anniversary model. And it's pretty damned nice. The one I got is finished in a washed out sunburst finish called Royal Tan. Here’s what it looks like..

I can't remember what first got me started thinking I wanted a hollow-body guitar. It might have had something to do with seeing Johnny Marr's Gibson ES-355 in Pat Graham's excellent book Instrument. I looked at a bunch of pics of that guitar, read up on it, and I played a handful of 355s. It turned out that I didn't like them. They're just not hollow enough for me. The hollowness of that design is kind of a fake-out because there's actually a bloody great wood block that runs straight down the middle of it. That's all fine and good if partial hollow-ness is what you want, but I wanted real hollow-ness.

Most totally hollow electric guitars are jazz boxes. I played a couple Gibson ES-125s. Wow, are they beautiful! I love the look of the single cutaway. And it brings up all those fun Ted Nugent and Steve Howe vibes. But I was sadly disappointed by how thick the tops were. They’re so damned thick that the guitar is surprisingly dead. Why? For durability, I guess. And I suppose it feeds back a lot less than you'd think. Bummer, though.

So I went around tapping my finger on the tops of jazzbo guitars to find one with a nice responsive hollow knock. And I found these beautiful guitars made in Quebec by Godin. They have a nice thin, very alive and thrummy top. And they have P-90s, instead of the dull, overwound humbuckers that are on most boxes. In general I'm not a humbucker guy. The Godin model I really liked was the 5th Avenue Kingpin. I played one at Tall Toad Music in Petaluma. Very nice shop, btw. Even though I really enjoyed it, I realized that a jazz box really isn't for me. The first thing I noticed was the bridge. I know that I would need a bridge with adjustable saddles, because I use heavy strings and I don't use standard tuning - two things that affect the intonation. Also, a wooden bridge just seems like it would lack clarity, articulation and probably sustain. Then there's the thing that I really don't like about Gibsons and most traditional guitars.. the violently angled neck. That angled neck means that the strings sit way high off the guitar and the bridge is stuck way up in the air. I don't like that feeling. Feels precarious and tedious. I like my right hand a lot closer to the body. Also, it means the neck is a lot more prone to breaking. AND I can't lay it flat on the floor in good conscience.

As soon as I figured that shit out, my choices got a lot narrower. I looked at Gretsches. God, they look good. I could look at them all day. And they sound cool. But they have the bridge way the hell up in the air over the body. Like I’m some fuckin Orangutan and this is my monkey bar set? Also, some of them have fake f-holes painted on! Yick. That’s the kind of blingy “Cadillac” tack-on fakeness that degrades the impression of American design worldwide. I’m sure Gretsches are wonderful and the best and all that. But even the nicest one would only be a curiosity for me.

So while I was in a music store one day I picked up an Epiphone Casino and BOOM there it was. It was exactly what I was looking for – fully hollow, with single coil pickups, and a nice responsive, lightweight top. They look cool and they sound great. I decided to get a 40th anniversary because I couldn't afford an Elitist Casino (made in Japan), and because I like the smaller headstock and placement of the bridge further back on the body. Now that I'm so into Casinos, I think ES-335s look weird with the neck joining the body so far up. I think that's another reason why they sound dead to me.. because the bridge isn't in the middle of the guitar, where it belongs.

Compared to the solid body Fenders I'm used to, this Casino is a bit of a tussle to play. I can't really play above the 15th fret. I really have to watch the amp volume or it starts to howl. But that howl is very cool! It's so nice to be able to get feedback with an essentially clean tone if I want to, and it's also really good fun to just wail with it at full volume. The sound is very different than I'm used to. The biggest factor in the amplified sound is the pickups, the P-90s. Comparing them to Fender pickups is kind of like comparing a Trans Am to a Lotus. P-90s are epically crude, brusque and primal. There's no delicacy in them. But they have their own complexity, in spite of the bruteness.

I almost forgot to mention the Casino's heritage. How could I forget that? The Casino is most famous for being the guitar that the Beatles played from Revolver onward. Paul McCartney bought their first one in '64, I think. George and John bought theirs a year later. Epiphone has a John Lennon model with a natural finish. Who else plays a Casino? Lots of players seem to dabble in it. Like The Edge. Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth used one to play Shadow Of A Doubt for a while. I think Paul Weller has played one. It's one of those guitars that people use to sorta name drop but never really play as their main thing, it seems.

Also, it's not right to mention the Casino without a nod to its up-market cousin the Gibson ES-330. Yow, THAT is a nice guitar. They still make them, and you can still find vintage ones. Either way, you're looking at spending a shitload of money, though. I made the mistake of playing an ES-330 recently. It was just fantastic. The wood and the build quality were just way beyond my Casino. Not that there's anything wrong with my Casino, but it's just that everything was just so right about the Gibson. I think the sunburst finish is nicer on the Gibson too - darker, more Gibson-ish. Elliott Smith played one.

So yeah, that’s my Casino thing, and the hollow feeling has been mostly taken care of. Mostly. You know what I’m onto now? I’m now dying to play a Rickenbacker 330. I know they’re only semis, and I’ll probably struggle with the neck. But they sound and look amazing, totally unique. There’s always a frontier.

#epiphone #casino #hollow-body #gibson #rickenbacker #gretsch #pete townshend #neil young #godin #tall toad music #es-335

The Ones That Got Away

You know the one that got away? Well, here are some of mine. Owww..

Steinberger

When in 1992 I had a dream about a yellow Jazzmaster, I was actually playing a Steinberger GL2T. Yes, I was. That Steinberger had been a very expensive guitar. Maybe still the most expensive instrument I've ever bought. I took it to music school (Berklee) in 1990 and played the shit out of it. It was the guitar I played in Road Parrot, and it was the guitar I played in the first days of Pie - the Soft Broth days. Whatever for that thing. It was completely Spock, but it was not cool.

My First Jazzmaster

But then I had my dream about the Jazzmaster.. a pale yellow one with a dark tortoise shell pickguard. I'd never played or even thought about one before, but I knew when I woke up in the morning that I must have it. Well, no music store in town had a pale yellow one. And the stores didn't have any vintage ones that I could afford. But Central Sales Music on Mass Ave in Cambridge did have a sunburst MIJ reissue with a red tortoise shell pickguard. So I bought that. That guitar, Seymour Duncan "Hot for Jazzmaster" pickups and the 1969 Marshall Super Lead 100 that I'd bought from Hal Pecher in 1991 became MY SOUND and I've never looked back. Not successfully, anyway. Nothing else compared or compares.

Dickey, Boston University, February 17, 1996

just like the dream guitar

I didn't mean to break that beloved guitar. But I did. It was the night when Pie played Boston University. My friend Dan set up the show, which in itself was pretty amusing. Dan took a few great pics during that show. One is above. And I know he got another of the moment just after I'd snapped the neck, when I was slamming the thing into the ground. Maybe he gave me that other pic and I lost it.. anyway I don't have it. At the end of our set I was manhandling my guitar a bit, like I often did. I'd thrown it onto the ground many times, but this time the neck caught at just the wrong angle and it snapped in half. Feeling like an ass, not to mention angry, I completed the job by slamming it around. Parts went flying and kids grabbed them. I don't know why I didn't save the body. I guess I didn't see it and someone made off with it. Or maybe it was split too. All I got were the pickups and the Mustang bridge.

I'm so bummed I broke that guitar. It was perfect and I loved it. It was the sound of Pie.. just all over all the recordings. RIP Jazzmaster.

MIJ Jaguar

We had more shows scheduled right after that BU one, so I had to have another guitar. I didn't have a backup of any kind at that time. At that moment, none of the shops in Boston had a Jazzmaster that I could afford. Central Sales did have a metallic red Jaguar, which I bought on impulse. I thought it would be the same, and it totally wasn't. I guess I didn't realize that Jaguars have a short-scale neck until I'd been playing it for a while wondering WTF was wrong. It weren't no kind of guitar for a man! Also it was pointlessly heavy. There was unnecessary metal shit all over the top of the body. And the pickups were just atrocious - ice-picky, shrill, gutless, ear-stabbing. I got rid of it in short order. I think I must have traded it directly for the white MIJ reissue Jazzmaster that ultimately became The Creamsicle, because that white guitar was the one I had when I left the Least Coast in 1997.

BTW, I just traded the neck from that second Jazzmaster to Pete Weiss of Zippah/Verdant/Weisstronauts fame. So Pete, when you see the Central Sales Music sticker on the back of the headstock, now you know why.

To this day, I do not understand the Fender Jaguar. Why the fuck would you have a Jaguar when you could have a Jazzmaster? Seriously!

Yellow Mosrite 12-String

This guitar was the first in a string of nonsensical, searchy purchases. And my treatment of it may comprise the zenith of my adult life guitar abuse.

One day in what must have been 1994 I walked into Cambridge Music Center in Porter Square, Cambridge. I used to go in there a lot, because I lived nearby. They often had cool, rare guitars, and for reasonable prices. Hal Pecher the amp guy had his shop just upstairs. Anyway, this one day they had a vintage yellow Mosrite. It was a 12-string with Mosrite's own version of a Bigsby whammy bar on it. Weird and impossible! I had to try it. It sounded cool, and played pretty well.

I was sitting there noodling around on this thing, just making stuff up in a very Dickey way, when this dodgy young guy came in. He watched me play for a while, which made me feel uncomfortable. I looked up at him and he said, "That sounds good. That sounds sorta like this tape I've been listening to. But that's weird because it's just a cassette demo by this band called Pie that I pulled out of the trash at ______ (insert shitty old Cambridge rock club name)." I couldn't believe someone had recognized my playing because I hadn't even been playing a song. I just let his comment hang in the air for a bit before I said, "Well, I play in Pie." That guy called himself Dave King, and right then & there he became a good friend of mine. He was an extremely talented guitarist, singer & songwriter in his own right, but with an unfortunate shy streak. He ended up recording the Pie album "upside the d-lux bee chamber" on the 4track 1/4-inch reel to reel in his basement, and we hung out until I left Boston. Because I knew right then that it was such a momentous moment, I bought the guitar with my poor little credit card.

For most of my life I haven't given a shit about vintage correctness or veneration. I still have no idea when that pale yellow Mosrite was made or how rare it might have been. I've never seen another, so it must have been rare indeed. And I balk now at researching that, mainly because of what I ended up doing to the guitar. It became my backup guitar, because with the addition of it, I then had two guitars. We were making lots of first-take live 4track recordings, and playing lots of shows. I had no use for a second guitar that could not double for the Jazzmaster when a string broke. The Mosrite looked unbelievably cool but had screechy microphonic pickups, and, well, it was a 12-string with a whammy bar - it didn't stay in tune much. So I pulled the Mosrite pickups out and butchered in a couple Seymour Duncan Jazzmaster pickups. The 12-string headstock felt heavy and unbalanced, so I CUT PART OF THE HEADSTOCK OFF and strung the thing as a 6 string. Hmm, yes. I used it live on a certain songs, and whenever I broke a string on the Jazzmaster. I gave the guitar to Dave King when I left Boston. I don't know what happened to it or to him. I haven't heard of either since.

Before I fucked up that guitar, I did manage to make one recording with it in its original state. There is a 12-string part at the end of the Pie tune The Lost Expedition from Strictly Seance. The Mosrite comes in at 3:29. I think it's also all over the Simp tape "World Wheat Hands," which is lost.

Here's the only picture I can find of the (then already formerly 12-string) yellow Mosrite, in the hands of Vinnie Scorziello. Notice the modified headstock. Oww.

Aqua Mosrite

This was one of the most valuable guitars I have ever owned. And I didn't own it for long. It was a perfect vintage Ventures model, just gorgeous. The finish was something to behold. The paint was so deep and dimensional, it felt like you were looking down into the ocean. God, it was a beautiful guitar. It was another impulse credit card buy from Cambridge Music, and I really couldn't afford it. It cost me $1,200. Nevermind that they're worth well over $5K now.. I probably couldn't afford $200 at the time, so I gave it back to the store after a couple months.

And apparently, the same day I dropped it back off, Peter Svensson of The Cardigans came in and offered good money for it, so I didn't end up owing the shop anything. He's a great player, so that's doubly awesome. I hope he still has it.

I didn't record anything with it, but I did take one picture that I still have. Here is the Aqua Mosrite with two others that got away, the Mustang and the Jaguar..

It's funny that I owned a couple Mosrites... well, not if you think of it from the surf guitar angle, because they are associated with the Jazzmaster via surf music. But I don't think they actually sound very good. And they don't play or hang on you as nicely as a Fender does. They're wonky and weird. But they do have this high-quality, over-engineered aura to them, and by God they look fabulous.

Mustang

This guitar is the only vintage Fender guitar I've ever owned. It was from the 60s, with metallic red paint and double yellow racing stripes. I'm sad to say that I did not come by it entirely honestly, and that the moment it entered my realm, it began to exact a heavy karmic toll. It was a cool guitar, though, with a really great grindy Fendery sound. Too bad Mustangs are short-scale guitars and generally so small.. otherwise this one might have become my main guitar.

I have one recording of it - Failure Of My Imagination. And then there's a funny phone message left by our record guy Chris deStefano, the second in a heated exchange of voicemails concerning this guitar. I think I'd traded it to him for Pie T-shirts or something. I added that track to our homespun final album Pie @ The Electric Spa, as if it were a song called Outta Control. That was a trendy thing to do then.

Vintage Kawai Winston Hollow-Body Teardrop

I don't think I ever took my own picture of this guitar. So here's a pic I found on the interweb..

It looks 60s to me, and it's the only natural finish hollow-bodied teardrop I've ever seen. I got it cheaply, for maybe $150, from either Cambridge Music or Mr. Music. I only owned it for a couple months before I put my foot through it while in a rage over dumb personal shit. What a waste. It was really cool, if not particularly versatile. It had a clanky, microphonic, hollow sound. I actually recorded a few tracks with it - most of the tracks on Pie's The Dustbowl EP. Here's an example - Ocasek. That's my dog Puck barking because he didn't like the guiro.

Silvertone Electric

I bought this guitar because it was cheap and cool and owned it for a little while. I don't remember where I got it, but it must have been in Boston somewhere, because I had it during the Pie days. I used it to record Plastic Vistas. It definitely would have looked cool on stage, but it was way too microphonic to play through my Marshall that was always on 11. I have no recollection of how we parted company. I probably hocked it when I was broke, just before I left Boston.

Silvertone Acoustic

This was my first guitar. It belonged to my mom, and probably came from Sears. Somewhere there's a picture of her in her college dorm room with it hanging on the wall behind her. I'll post that pic here if I ever find it.

My mom didn't play guitar. Neither did my dad. I must have started playing at age 6 or 7. But I didn't take a lesson until I was 19 or 20, so I'm 90% self-taught. I didn't even know how to tune the guitar until I was 12. I learned on this Silvertone. It started out with 6 strings, undoubtedly. I remember a long period when it only had 3 strings, then 2. When it got down to 1 string, I bought another acoustic guitar from a neighbor for $5.

I have a wonderful memory of discovering harmonics on the old Silvertone and incorporating them into a song. I remember thinking maybe when I touch the twelfth fret here, this could be the way that Tom Scholz and Buck Dharma change notes into endless 8va sustaining feedback (I didn't know the full scope & uses of The Giant Amp at that time). That nano-focus that a young musician gets into - just you and the instrument for hours and days and weeks and EONS, in the Summer with nothing else to do or think about. Lots of people never know the dreamy, meditative intimacy of that kind of experience. It's a treasure for me. I can just look at this guitar now and instantly go there.

I don't still own that first Silvertone, but I did find another at Thin Man Music Company (a great shop!) in Alameda a few years ago. Here it is..

So where did the original Silvertone end up? Maybe now you'd guess that I smashed it. And sadly, yes I did. See, I was making a tape recording with my best friend Chris Mays. I was playing the Silvertone guitar while he was supposed to be making feedback with walkie-talkies, but he couldn't figure out how to hold the buttons correctly. The tape was rolling when I got pissed off and hit him over the head with a huge phone book. I wish I still had this tape! But I do remember it well. You could hear the big book come down on his poor little 10 year old pate - boomph! As part of that sound you could even hear his teeth clack together from the impact. I then laugh a taunting laugh. Then the fucker starts whipping me with the long metal walkie talkie antennas! You could hear this whrr whrr whzz whrr whap whap thing happening, with some swearing. I remember he split my thumbnail open and blood flew all around. I raised the stakes by smashing the guitar over his leg with a couple huge swats, thereby ending its useful life. It was loud too. You could hear my mom yell from downstairs at that point, "What's going on up there?!" Chris and I said, Oh shit! And we made up instantly. Man, I wish I still had that tape!

Goya Strat

I have no recollection of buying or selling this thing, but I had it at the end of high school and part way through college. It was a hardtail strat copy and I loved it. Somehow it escaped modification. Look at that cool maple neck!

Turning ye olde pro reverb up to 11

Telemaster

This is a post about The Best Guitar In The World - my Telemaster.

My Telemaster in a rare state of rest.

My Telecaster Jones

For years I jonesed for a Telecaster. I still do, actually. Guitars are so expensive that normally, when I get a new jones for a certain guitar, I make myself wait and wait and wait in a protracted state of excruciating anticipation before actually buying the thing. This could last for months or years, during which I torture myself by thinking & dreaming about the object of my desire, and I even write songs with it in my head before I even have it. The worst is looking at Ebay auctions, where I just dangle myself over the precipice of buying the thing. It's times like these when I often think to myself, "If only I were rich, I could just get this fuckin thing RIGHT NOW!"

But there are a couple benefits to the wait. First of all, when I finally do execute, I have that awesome feeling of hard-earned entitlement. Yeah, it was expensive and yeah it's probably a frivolous thing, but dammit I earned it! And there's another benefit - circumspection does actually help one to make better decisions sometimes. Imagine that! Well, that was how it worked in this case. Because yes I do wish that I owned a Telecaster. But my Telemaster is even better than a Telecaster, I say, and it took a couple years of fiending to discover that the thing even existed.

Anyway, yeah I was jonesing real bad for an ur-vintage style Telecaster. The purity and simplicity of that design, the killer gritty sound. The guitar is so ubiquitous that it's absurd to name-drop Tele players, but I do have my own faves. Enjoy some neck-bendin' goodness from Will Seargent on Echo & The Bunnymen's All That Jazz, and the completely bezerk tone that Jimmy Page gets on this old version of Communication Breakdown. And I couldn't leave out pal Ted Nesseth, or how cool Keith Richards, Joe Strummer and Bruce Springstein look wearing theirs. At a certain point, these guitarists and Tele-ness in general just started driving me wild. I even grafted a Tele pickup and deluxe-style Tele bridge onto my Univox strat to try to at least get somewhere Tele-ish without spending much money. See my "Guitars Come Apart" post about that guitar.

MJT Built My Hot Rod

I'm pretty sure that I first saw a picture of a Telemaster in a google search, one of the images on the Telecaster Forum. So I saw that image and immediately I knew, this is the guitar for me. I love the Jazzmaster/Jaguar body shape, of course. After years of Jazzmastery, it just feels like home to me. I think it also looks killer, and of course it's bigger than a Tele or Strat - there's more wood there and you can even be a little fat and still play one. ha ha!

When I started looking for a Telemaster to buy, I couldn't find any whole guitars, or anything that was actually a real Fender. Now I know that they're out there, but there aren't very many and they don't come up for sale very often. Apparently, the Fender custom shop did make a few of these, or was at least rumored to have made them. Some ex-Ibanez people called Malden have built the Malden Mozak, which to my eye looks fruity, skewed & wrong. Someone out there also says that Fender was at one time gearing up to produce the Telemaster as an official limited-run model. None of that helped me actually get a guitar, though.

Whoah, it turns out this store in Chicago will make them for you!

I did learn that what you can get all the time are pieces of the guitar - bodies, necks, electronics and hardware that you can put together. So I bought my guitar on Ebay, in pieces, from MJT Aged Finishes. I completed a buy now sale and they contacted me with a checklist of my desired details. MJT specialize in relic finishes, which I'm not interested in myself. So I had them do a "closet classic" treatment for mine. It took quite a while but the timeframe was at the outside edge of what they'd said it was going to be, so that's fine. My guitar has a light swamp ash body. Now that I have an ash guitar, I can't believe that I've ever mucked around with other woods. Where have you been all of my life, Swamp Ash?? Holy shit, it sounds good - very rich, complex, sparkly and springy.

As part of the MJT deal, I was able to choose my own neck from the allparts catalog. For someone accustomed to the high-end Fender "vintage hot rod" necks, that was a big mistake. The allparts build & finish quality were really terrible. The neck was also extremely fat - like, surreal fat - and ruined the tone of the guitar, making it overly bright & harsh. So I bit the bullet and bought a vintage hot rod tele neck from my favorite Ebay seller The Stratosphere. That's a big bullet to bite, as these things go for around $700 just for a new parted-out neck! But I can't say enough good things about them. The soft-V strat necks on my Creamsicle Jazzmaster and EJ Strat are sheer buttery glory and really make those guitars rad. The Tele neck is C-shaped and right in line with the quality of the strat necks. Adding that neck rounded out the tone and made for extremely fabulous playability. Anyone wanna buy a big, fat, shitty allparts neck? I still have it.

MJT did a wonderful job finishing the guitar and pulling it together. I love all the options they gave me - little things like did I want a matte or gloss finish? I chose matte. Did I want a checking effect on the nitro finish or not? I chose yes. And they aged the hardware nicely too. Definitely very cool guys with very cool stuff.

My Telemaster, begging to be played again.

I just wanna say something about 1-piece maple necks - they're the best. As I've said before, following a series of disappointments, I have resolved to NEVER put a rosewood neck on a Fender again. I know it's a bit extreme, but when I see Fender guitars with rosewood necks, they look bastardized and corrupted to me. Like a bit of Gibson crossover. Extreme, I know. But still.

Electronics by Spock

If you think the foregoing describes an obsessive, geeked-out tedious fucking mindset, then you ain't seen nothin yet. Because I did go Spock on the electronics. First, I wanted to make sure that I got excellent vintage style pickups. Know now that I am not at all interested in putting any pickups besides Tele pickups in a Tele-style guitar. I know they have their limitations, but to me those pickups are 90% of the guitar's sonic character right there.

For years I've played Seymour Duncan pickups, which are consistently great. But I've had a Seymour Five-Two bridge pickup in the Univox Strat and I think it's just ok. It definitely sounds Tele-ish, but it doesn't have Godhead Factor. It's a bit opaque and sterile, if that makes sense. It's as if the sound is obscured by a thin layer of vagueness. There are other premium pickup makes and a number of boutique makers out there. For some reason, the moss-covered dwarvery of Lollar bums me out. Fralin is too strat-steeped. I'm sure these guys make nice pickups, but.. meh.

So I read around in the Telecaster Forum and saw nothing but raves about the Fred Stuart pickups. I think Fred used to make Tele pickups for Fender? He's in Orange County and hand-winds the occasional batch of "black guard" Tele pickups. I found him here on Virtual Vintage Guitars and ordered a set, with reverse-wind on the neck pickup. They are not wax-potted. I had to wait a while, but I was waiting for the guitar anyway. They are amazing, just wonderful. They're really open-sounding, super complex and multi-dimensional. And the output is just right. I've been playing the guitar mainly though a VOX-AC30 50th anniversary head. Here is a recorded example - See-Thru Kowboy. There's some Fender Twin in there too, pretty obvious from the harder, reverby sound. And the metal part at the end was played through my crummy little transistor Vox practice amp.

I was worried that the unwaxed Fred Stuart pickups would be too microphonic, but I actually dig the incidental sounds I get from them. Just like hearing fingers sliding on the strings of an acoustic guitar, hearing a heavy pick click & clack over pickup covers, pickguard and bridge gives the listener a really cool impression of tactility and humanity. Neither pickup ever squeals, and both get totally bitchin harmonic overtones and cooperative, sustaining feedback. Especially through the AC30. Here's another track where I alternate between neck & bridge pickups a bit - Throw Them To The Wind.

Telemasters all over the place.

Because I was creating the guitar from scratch, and because I had the time, I researched and thought through all the components. I ended up buying an NOS Carling 3-way pickup selector switch. For the rest, I ended up emailing with a guy named Dirk in Germany (his website is singlecoil.com) who seemed to have some good stuff and some hyper-informed opinions about tone capacitors. I bought silver teflon wire, some military grade pots and a couple different tone capacitors from him. I still have his recommended tone cap in the guitar, though the value isn't high enough for me and I'm going to change it. It's a special ceramic cap that he found, and it does sound mighty good. I think it contributes a subtle flutey thing. Dirk describes it as being slightly leaky, in a way that favors some musical harmonics. I agree! I also have a Sprague orange drop from him that's probably worth trying. But overall, I need a higher value in order to get the occasional darker tone.

You can get really insane about tone caps, it turns out. They really do affect the sound of the guitar, even when your tone pot is turned all the way up. Check out this psycho's videos to see what I'm talking about. I've used Angela paper in oil caps on my other guitars, with pretty high values. I'm re-thinking all of that nowadays. It's a nichey little frontier.

Ain't No Jazzmaster Replacement

So yeah, that's the deal with my kickass Telemaster. It's the best guitar I've ever owned and I love it. By now, the finish has pretty much stopped out-gassing and I'm doing my best to break it in - playing obsessively, every spare minute. The body has a few nicks and that's just fine, but I'll baby the neck as much as I can. Besides putting strings on it and trying another tone cap or two, I don't plan to do anything to it.

I do like it better than my Creamsicle Jazzmaster. The overall quality is just better, and it's made of swamp ash as opposed to alder or basswood or whatever the Creamsicle is. The black & tortoise shell Jazzmaster I used to have - an American vintage '62 - was almost as nice as the Telemaster. But of course that guitar is gone. I do realize that, as great as the Telemaster is, it can never replace a Jazzmaster. That's because the Jazzmaster has a certain very unique sound and because it has the whammy bar. Maybe my next jones will be for a custom ash Jazzmaster. Hmmmm, yes... but I have no emotional space for that right now. I'm in love.

****

Ahh, one more thing is that, by happy accident, this guitar actually looks from certain angles a bit like Captain Sensible's old Gibson Firebird. That Firebird was one of my aborted joneses. I loved this particular photo (below), totally pictured myself playing one, could obviously hear how good it sounded in Captain's hands, loved how it was different from the Firebird II, all that. But when I tried a real one, man was I disappointed. Gibson had it all wrong. The thing looked cool, but it played like hell. It was totally anti-ergonomic. Worse, for a new replica they wanted $2,500. And the thing had obvious manufacturing flaws. Fuck that. Anyway, now I feel like I've captured a bit of the Firebird feeling, for way better playability, sounds, etc...

#fender #telecaster #telemaster #guitar #DIY #tone caps #fred stuart #MJT #single coil #jazzmaster #will seargent #jimmy page #ted nesseth #allparts

Coffee Talk

This is not the update about the new hyper-cool Fender mutant. But I can’t have a guitar blog without mentioning the odd man out, the weirdo, the fifth child (droppin’ a sick Doris Lessing ref there if you wanna know), the black sheep in the bunch - a guitar I affectionately call THE COFFEE TABLE.

I did not ever set out to want to like one of these things. I did not see one in a magazine or on TV or in a dream and think, “Man, I have to be seen wearing one of those.” I guess I do sort of care that The Edge played one. That is pretty nifty, because it was an odd choice for him. I mean, he was all post-punk and reserved, whereas the last famous dudes to play them before he did were definitely deep 70s hairslingers like .. well, I don’t really know. Except I think the not-as-good-as-the-good-guy from the original Heart lineup played one. And you cannot sesh with Molly Hatchet without having your ass whupped real bad by one of these things. I’m talking about the Gibson Explorer, people..

You look at it and I bet the first thing you think is, “That’s one of those ridiculous heavy metal guitars from the 80s.” I bet most of y’all think it was designed by metalheads for metalheads too, right? Well, guess what - you’re fuckin wrong. Gibson designed this thing in 1958! This is Don Draper shit, not Dimebag Darrell shit. The design is totally mid-century modern, maybe even googie. Look at it again now. See that reachy angular shit? If this thing were a house, Jackie Treehorn would live in it.

But so as I was saying, I did not want one of these. A few years ago I was in another music store phase. That’s the kind of phase in which, for whatever reason, once a week or so I go into retail music stores and fondle the gear, chat the creatures up, things like that. I didn’t even have any kind of aim to buy anything at that time. But one day at Music Unlimited in San Leandro, I looked up at the wall and saw this natural finish Explorer and thought “ha ha metal guitar - I have to play it.” Like it was going to be funny. Well, I wasn’t laughing when my fingers touched the thing and four new songs came flying out! It sounded fantastic. It felt fantastic. And it wasn’t even a Gibson - it was an Epiphone (Gibson’s made-somewhere-un-American downmarket brand). I’m not a Gibson guy, so with Gibson-like guitars I’m not susceptible to the same kind of snobismo I have about Fender-like guitars. Still, I don’t ever just buy a guitar on a whim, because all guitars are expensive. So I kept coming back and playing the thing, looking at it online, watching the video of “11 o’clock tick tock.” Until a couple months had gone by and I’d satisfied myself that it wasn’t just a whim, went down there and slapped the money down.

Even though I don’t play it a ton, I have not regretted buying this guitar at all. I didn’t really like the pickups it came with, which are some kind of really dark-sounding retro Gibson PAFs. This all-Korina guitar is actually pretty bright, and those pickups weren’t doing it justice at all. So I put a Seymour Duncan pearly gates in the bridge and a Jazz Model SH-2 in the neck. I had to get gold pickup covers and fit them to keep the look the same. I fucked up the hole that the volume pot sticks through by overdrilling it. Oh well. Anyway, here is an example of The Coffee Table in action with the original pickups - in the luxuriously / self-indulgently long second solo (starts at 2:24) in The Bruises Of Unknown Origin’s runaway hit Charles Glympse.

XOXO

~Chuck G

#11 o'clock tick tock #bruises of unknown origin #charles glympse #epiphone #explorer #gibson #hugh dickey #john dickey #molly hatchet #pie #the edge #u2 #richard bitch

Creamsicles Are For Licking

I've neglected my blog, but now I'm back. Lots has changed for me, in many ways. Even in the guitar ways. Well, especially in the guitar ways! Guitar change is just a function of time for me, and it has been a while, right? But man, I've got something taking shape right now that's gonna kick your balls off! (Venom reference, if you missed that) What I have in the works is a semi-official mutant and, uncharacteristically for one of mine, it's actually being done beautifully. All the deets are coming soon.

In the meantime, I thought I'd warm this space up with a quick update on The Creamsicle. This is my beloved Jazzmaster mutant. See the previous post for details on this guitar's genesis. Last time we saw this one, it was in dire need of a neck, its second MIJ neck having warped. Well, you know what I decided? I decided that rosewood necks suck and I don't like em. And I'm never gonna put another rosewood neck on a Fender guitar again!

That's the negative way of looking at things. On the positive side, I just adore the "hot rod vintage" neck that I put on the EJ Strat. Experiencing a braineurysm one day, I took it off the Strat and put it on the Creamsicle. It fit. Oh, it fit really nicely. So I got another one of those hot rod vintage necks for the Strat and now here we are with the gorgeous maple-necked Creamsicle that I think is better than any Jazzmaster I've ever played..

It even matches the Orange cabinet. The black pickup covers and knobs were my 5-year-old boy's idea. Can't argue with that - it looks very cool, I think. It plays extremely well too, the 9.5" radius and medium jumbo frets being a big improvement over the vintage style 7.25" and thin frets, in my book.

The EJ Strat with the same neck demonstrates that playability improvements could still be made - the Strat has better action & sustain because it has a better bridge. But I think this Creamsicle is really in the sweet spot of playability vs. character, and I don't want to change a thing about it. I find myself playing & recording with it more often than with the smoother Strat, especially for the main track of a tune, where I think it's important to have a unique sound.

With their two-piece bridge and tailpiece thing, Jazzmasters have something that most solid body guitars don't - that reverby, resonant length of string behind the bridge that adds so much character, uniqueness, and unpredictability. The vintage Jazzmaster hardware and dimensions are problematic because the tailpiece is so far back that the angle of attack of the string on the bridge is really low. With the resulting low tension over the bridge saddles, this makes for some sustain limitations and causes the strings to buzz sometimes and to jump out of the saddles with really hard playing, especially when you still have the original Jazzmaster-style grooved bridge. Over the years I've learned to solve those problems, mostly, either by filing deeper grooves into the Jazzmaster bridge, or, as in the case with the Creamsicle, by using a vintage Mustang bridge which is the same as the Jazzmaster bridge except for the saddles. I also wrap the posts of the bridge with electrical tape so it doesn't float so much in its postholes.

Fender makes some new versions of the Jazzmaster, called "Player's Jazzmaster" that take some of the pain out of the arrangement by moving the tailpiece up toward the bridge. They also use Gibson tune-o-matic bridges. I've played a couple of these and I get it, but I like mine better. I think you lose some of the character and a lot of the sympathetic reverb when you shorten that length of string. And my modded Mustang bridge is just as good for me as a tune-o-matic.

Some people do what Robert Smith of The Cure did with his Jazzmaster when he played one. He added a brass buzz-stop thingy which sat in between the bridge and tailpiece and forced the strings down hard against the bridge in order to kill the reverb and to increase the angle of attack. No question, his guitar sounded cool. But I still think one loses something in taming this beast.

Anyway, I love my Creamsicle and that's that. Stay tuned for more on the next project, which I think is even cooler!

XO Dickey

#Robert Smith #The Cure #Venom #fender #jazzmaster #jazzmaster bridge #john hugh dickey #richard bitch #strat #stratocaster #DIY #pie

Guitars Come Apart

I discovered at an early age that electric guitars can be taken apart. Over its short and brutal life, my first electric guitar, a sunburst Les Paul copy from the Sears catalog, suffered all manner of disassembly, reassembly, experimentation, and ultimately, destruction. In fact, in its final configuration that poor guitar consisted solely of a neck joined to a splintered, hewn-down scrap of wood slathered in white boat paint. I had also nailed a DiMarzio Super Distortion II pickup to the wood and had emblazoned "Zerstörung!" (that's German for destruction) in red model paint where the pickguard should have been.

Ever since that time, I have owned very few guitars that I've left alone - only my beloved Goya strat copy, a vintage Mosrite Ventures model, and a vintage Fender Mustang have I left stock. It's worth noting, I suppose, that I only owned the latter two for a couple months. I've tweaked almost all my guitars, mostly inexpertly. But they do what they need to do and it's all sorts of fun. Since I've been doing a lot of guitar tweaking lately, I thought it would be fun to write about the current stable of mutants.

Creamsicle Jazzmaster

One night in 1993 I had a dream of a gorgeous vintage pale yellow Fender Jazzmaster that gave me "that sound," and with which, in the dream, I regaled thousands of screaming fans. After that dream I became obsessed with Jazzmasters. Fast forward to 2010 and by now I've owned 3 of them. The first was a sunburst Made In Japan (MIJ) Fender '62 reissue which I ended up destroying at a Pie show at Boston University in 1996. The destruction was an accident, at first - I loved that guitar. I ended up replacing that one with another MIJ reissue, this one curiously light & snappy. It would become The Creamsicle Jazzmaster.

The Creamsicle Jazzmaster began life with a white finish and red tortoiseshell pickguard. Not my first choice, but it played so well I had to have it. As far as I know, Fender has never made a Jazzmaster exactly like the one in my dream - pale yellow with a dark brown tortoise-shell pickguard. And I'm not careful & patient enough to have duplicated such a finish myself. When I saw The Flaming Lips play The Rat in Boston in 1996, Wayne played an orange Jazzmaster. Remembering that show, I decided to sand off the white finish and, with orange spray paint, to approximate the radness of Wayne's guitar. I got hold of a white pickguard to complete the look.

And thus The Creamsicle Jazzmaster was born. Somehow, the goopy, toxic spray paint has not ruined the sound of this guitar. The body is made of either a really light alder or maybe basswood. It's the best-feeling guitar I've ever worn - the balance of it. And being light, it has a great snappy sound and instant jang-jang keening response. I put Seymour Duncan "Hot For Jazzmaster" pickups in it, like I always do with Jazzmasters. That's MY pickup, so I can't help it.

The only crummy thing about this guitar is the neck. The first one warped badly, which is why I played a black US-made reissue as my main guitar for quite a while. I replaced that neck with another MIJ neck a couple years ago and guess what.. it just warped again. I can't believe it. Anyway, this lovely guitar is currently taken apart, because its neck is messed up. And the pickups have been donated to my Custom Strat.

From L to R: Squiremaster, Creamsicle Jazzmaster, Custom Eric Johnson Strat (phase 2).

Custom Eric Johnson Strat This is my main guitar, my best guitar at the moment. I made it for myself after my US-made Jazzmaster was stolen. It's an Eric Johnson alder body with THE BEST GUITAR NECK EVER MADE - a Fender hot rod soft-v vintage strat neck. I bought the body and neck from the Stratosphere on Ebay, then put it together with a custom pickguard from Pickguardian, and various Seymour Duncan pups in a couple different configurations:

Phase 1: Seymour Duncan surf pickups neck regular, no middle, bridge angled.

Phase 2: With the same Seymours, but both angled, as pictured. That was the prettiest look for this guitar. Like a Fender Lead II or Mustang.

Phase 3: Now the Seymour Duncan "hot for Jazzmaster" pickups from the Creamsicle are in the Strat. Well, the bridge pickup is. Seems that in the process of trying to add the SD hot pup to the neck position, I fried it. Oh well. Instead I added the US reissue stock neck pup, and it sounds great - a little brighter and bouncier than the hot one.

Here is the Custom Eric Johnson strat today, with Jazzmaster pickups crammed into a mutilated pickguard.

Squiremaster Right after my black US-made Jazzmaster got ripped off, while I was quite contrite over the circumstances thereof, and just before I'd resolved to put together a really nice guitar, I decided to do what I could with a real cheapo guitar I had that I actually really liked. Just to see if a cheapo guitar could become my main squeeze. Well, the experiment ultimately failed. It's not my main guitar. But it is fun and interesting. After much violent routing and such, I fitted a Jazzmaster bridge and tailpiece/vibrato into a Squier strat. No mean feat. No graceful one either, but if you squint at it, it looks pretty cool. See the first pic above, first on the left.

Because the Squiremaster is so light and because it has a Jazzmaster bridge & tailpiece, it has a really great & unique sound. Here is a Bruises Of Unknown Origin track recorded with this guitar, back when it had a Seymour Duncan twang banger Tele imitation bridge pickup for a strat. Now it has a JB Jr. Anyway, check out screw me to hear it go. Univox Strat When he retired, my excellent neighbor John moved to Costa Rica and left me a bunch of guitars. The Squire that became the Squiremaster was one of them, and also a Cameo Mosrite copy bass. But the best was this Univox Strat. It had been seriously modified and damaged before I laid paws on it. The wood was so fried that there was no way to resurrect it with a whammy bar.

Still, it's always been super fun to play and has lots of songs in it. The very first time I plugged it in, the Richard Bitch song Sit In The Sun came flying out of it (that recording features the black US Jazzmaster, though).

I messed with a few different pickups on this one, and it sat around for a couple years taken apart. A couple months ago I started lusting after a Tele, and having a Tele pickup and bridge around, I decided to graft them onto the Univox. So I chopped into a strat pickguard and added some other SD pickups I had, and here we go..

The Univox Strat with tele bridge pickup. Sounds fab.

Cameo Mosrite Copy Bass Well, here it is. It has a US reissue Jazzmaster bridge guitar pickup in it. With total frankenstein hardware on this thing, I can't quite get the intonation right, but it's really light and fun to play. It's very clean & bright with the Jazm pickup, but still has enough output to make amps bristle. A caveman job for sure, but super fun. Listen to this track by The Bronson to hear it in action: Eskimoes

Yep, so that's the mutilated stable at the moment. I'm sure in a year from now most of them will have different pickups and the Creamsicle will be back in action. Maybe it will even have become my dream guitar by then.

Out, Jxxxx

#pie #guitar #richard bitch #john dickey #fender #seymour duncan #jazzmaster #stratocaster #DIY

Feedback is Holy

Feedback is holy and I can't wait to join others in worship. After a year of not playing live, I have a couple shows coming up. And I'm stoked.

My band Richard Bitch is resurrected with some new and returning members to play the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on Thursday, March 18. The next month we'll play Hotel Utah in San Francisco.

What's in store? Well, loud guitar. And, of course, feedback. I just had the idea yesterday to start writing about guitars, amps and playing. It's easy to get into the gearhead stuff, and I certainly will. My more abstract ideas and feelings surrounding playing are more difficult for me to express. I thought I'd start with the toughest and most preposterous of all - my ideas about feedback.

Feedback feels like ghosts to me. I get a very spooky feeling when I grab some gain and begin the process of calling the spirits - usually putting the volume right on the cusp of feeding back, then coaxing out the oscillation by slowly moving the whammy bar and letting the strings begin to vibrate. Initiating that crosstalk between the amp, the guitar pickups and some delay is like conjuring a wind that begins to compound. Teasing in and out of that layering by standing at different angles to the amp or bringing volume down then back up is just one of my favorite things to do. I feel like I'm channeling ghosts of notes, melodies and feelings. Feedback is spooked-out holy shit!!

#guitar #music #psychedelia #psychedelic #richard bitch #feedback

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