Loud, Bad Guitar

The Endorsement Game

2012-01-12T17:16:00.000-08:00

Just saw a note on Opeth's Facebook page that Mikael Åkerfeldt had a new endorsement deal with Marshall Amps and his new 'amp of choice' is the Marshall Vintage Modern. He had previously been endorsed by Laney Amps. Åkerfeldt has all sorts of good things to say about the Vintage Modern and, no doubt the majority of them are true. Marshall knows how to make a good amp that covers the ground between vintage tube sound and modern high-gain sounds.

I still find myself rolling my eyes a bit, though. Because in most interviews the guys from Opeth and their guitar tech mention that when they are on the road they run all the amps on clean and use their effects and modeling boards to approximate their recorded sounds. The amps on stage all say Marshall or Blackstar, but the color is more likely to come from a Roland multi-effect unit preset than from the Marshall.

Likewise, Opeth are endorsed by PRS Guitars and use them on tour. They are really good guitars that the guys sometimes use for live recording, but they also use older Gibsons and Jacksons and, recently, a vintage Strat or two as well. There's no telling what guitar the guys used to get a particular sound on record unless you read it in an interview and they tell you straight out.

It's a weird game, really, with bands using all sorts of stuff -- whatever they can get their hands on -- to get 'the sound' they are looking for or re-recording dry tracks run through layers of different equipment for a more dense sound or changing mics and mic placement, etc in order to get the sound that young guitar players fall in love with and want to emulate. When they hear the sound on record they look in the guitar magazine and see that their hero uses StoneTone Amps and figure that's where the sound comes from. And when they see their heroes perform live they see that guitar and that amp again and hear that tone again.

But the guitar is playing clean and the amp is being used more like a stage monitor PA between the digital effects and the house PA. And they still sound great, but it's not the sound of that guitar and that amp. It's the sound of those hands playing a guitar that's sending a signal through an amp sim to a house PA with maybe a Dunlop Crybaby and a vintage delay in the chain for some analog magic that sounds something like whatever alchemy they cooked up in the studio without the fragility and risk associated with bringing a bunch of cranky old equipment on the road.

The artists really have three sounds. There's the one they have when they are playing by themselves and writing the music -- their private sound. Then there's the one that ends up on record after all the engineering is done which may be close to that private sound or may be only a distant cousin. And then there's the live sound, which is as close to the recorded sound as one can get with a minimum of risk and a maximum of consistent repeatability.

The music can still be magic, but that magic is rarely in the equipment being endorsed. You will have to find your own magic in those instruments.

Precious Little Help

2011-12-21T17:02:00.000-08:00

One thing I've noticed as I crawled my way from being a horrible guitarist to being an unremarkable one is how little actual supporting material there is for players whose tastes run to music outside of the commercial mainstream in America -- in my case this means progressive folk, death, doom and black metal. Any aspiring guitarist can find plenty of Metallica, GnR, heck...even Children of Bodom tabs and videos and Dave Mustaine has his own app to help teach you Megadeth songs. But the rule seems to be that you have to be attached to one of the big Guitar companies to make it into a guitar mag with any consistency. In the case of the guys mentioned above that means tabs and vids brought to you by ESP, Gibson and Dean. The closest you are going to get to anything underground is probably Opeth, and even there you have Akerfeldt and Akesson endorsed by PRS. Slip down the endorsements list too far and you might as well not exist. Which is too bad, because there are so many awesome bands whose music I'd love to have some decent help learning.Sure, there are some GPro tabs on the usual sites for bands like Enslaved or Paradise Lost, but I lost faith in those pretty soon after downloading a bunch and finding that the people who tabbed them out may be better guitarists than I am, but they all seem to have crappy ears that are unable to distinguish anything other than major, minor, and power chords. Diminished? Fuhgedaboudit. You will not find any nuance in an amateur GPro tab, and if you do, it's probably wrong.Go a bit farther into the underground -- Amorphis or Agalloch, for example -- and you won't even find crappy amateur tabs. Which is too bad, mind, because they both have complex and beautiful music to learn and play. It seems, however, that the people who have deciphered the songs are all too busy playing them to write any of it down for us slow kids.It's not just tabs, though. I love to wank around with Garage Band loops running through my Line 6 Guitar Port so that I have drum and bass to play over. Which is fine so long as you are looking for either funky and danceable or worldbeat and you want it in 4/4. Some of the loops are labeled as classic rock, but we aren't talking Zep or even the Who. The closest they come to straight up rock are the 'edgy modern' loops that have a sort of Incubus feel to them. And there is nothing even remotely metal to be found in the standard library that ships with the basic version included in iLife. If you want metal you will need to either pay for a dedicated software library of metal grooves or download one of the free samples that contains mostly flashy, real instrument loops rather than a basic double bass pattern with crash cymbal for the kick done on the software instrument so that you can tweak it or add to it to make it your own.It's one of the ironies of the digital age. Technology does give ordinary people the tools to make their own music sound professional, but the only music you can make easily sounds like the same commercial stuff that you can already hear anywhere else. Making something outside that safe range takes just as much work as it ever did.

No BS Buying Advice For New Rock Guitarists

2011-08-21T15:57:00.000-07:00

Things the store won't tell you:

Do not buy a guitar with your eyes. You have to buy a guitar with your hands and your ears. Hands and ears are the things that matter for playing music. The guitar will need to feel good in your hands and will have to sound good to your ear. You can do all that with your eyes closed.

So what goes away when you close your eyes? Looks and brand are the two biggest things. I'm not saying that those things should not matter at all, just that they are way overrated in the scheme of things. The body and headstock shape will have more effect on how you play from the way they feel than they will from how they look. Pointy guitars may look mean, but they also can be really uncomfortable to play. Particular brands may be known for quality but every guitar is a little different in material and feel and how the parts go together. If every guitar is different, then every guitar could be great or could suck. You won't know until you pick it up and play it.

When you are playing it, pay attention to how it sounds and feels, but even more than this make sure that you get a tuner and tune the guitar as well as you can and then play notes all over the neck and see how well those notes stay in tune. Check especially to see how close the tuning at the 12th fret is to the tuning on the open string. If they are off you need to find out if the place you are buying the guitar does free setup with every purchase and if they will set it up before you buy it. If the guitar goes out of tune as you move around the neck then there is either a problem with the setup or there was a mistake made when the neck or bridge were put on. Any of these things can be a problem. Buy the guitar within your budget that plays best. You will care less about the looks over time and fall in love with how it plays.

More of your sound comes from your fingers and your amp than comes from the pickups. You want decent pickups, but a guitar with adequate pickups will still sound good if you have a decent amp or, better yet, a good computer setup that gives you a wide number of virtual amps and effects to play with while you learn and figure out what sounds inspire you. You can worry about the perfect pickups once you have figured out what sort of player you are and get a second guitar that fits your personal style.

Non-electronic hardware is easy to replace, but it is also way more important than most salespeople will let on. Try to figure out how well the tuning keys stay in tune and look for guitars with better quality parts. Prioritize these over style. Staying in tune and sounding good is much cooler than looking good and sounding like crap.

Truth be told, the most important thing you can learn with your first guitar is how to make friends with the strings and fretboard. This is everything for a player. If you are comfortable playing and can make sounds that inspire you without cringing at how out of tune your guitar is you can really learn a lot with that first guitar and once you outgrow it you will know what things matter most to you as a player.

Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero: And the Winner Is...?

2011-04-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

C. - None of the Above

And it's not because the games sucked, either. Well, okay, Guitar Hero 5 got some mediocre reviews because of the usual reviewer foibles -- not enough new about it, some songs were boring, arenas were meh, etc. -- but what do you expect from so simple a concept this late in a franchise? And Rock Band 3 got really good reviews and added a ton of new stuff, so what gives?

The video game industry fell out of love with the games and pulled its support, that's what...along with a lot of fans, the music industry, and so forth.

Harmonix has pledged to soldier on in support of its game and its partners, but the sale and fade pulled by MTV Games means that all the media licensing for new content becomes much more difficult. In essence the music industry -- make that entertainment media as a whole -- has decided the games are not profitable enough to maintain their bloated egos, expectations, and overhead.

I figured this would happen sooner or later because, as I mused last time I wrote about the games, these games have never been about the music, they are about the fantasy of being a rock star. They are basically action RPGs for people who dream about platform boots, facepaint and pyro more than about swords and sorcery. It's a different fantasy about a different sort of magic axe. So trying to develop the games as a new form of content delivery for the entertainment industry Misses the Fucking Point. It was never about the songs.

The games themselves might linger on for a while longer and eke out a living. And even if they don't some group of enterprising geeks will package the whole dream -- hardware and software -- into a controller that plugs into whatever passes for a television in 10 -15 years and there will be a hip retro renaissance for the genre.

But for the immediate future it seems that these games have maxed out, overreached and blown up.

ReValver III.5 Demo Out

2011-02-23T19:05:00.000-08:00

Haven't seen much about this anywhere yet.

I've given Peavey a lot of stick on this blog for their poor support of their software. (To be fair it looks like a lot of that has to do with how much involvement the development partner takes in the product that Peavey is distributing). Nevertheless, I do want to take a moment to acknowledge that ReValver III.5 finally came out on their website at Winter NAMM and that you can download a demo of it for evaluation while you are waiting to see if the old stock ever sells and the new version starts appearing on the shelves.

If you go back and check my three-part comparison review of the Revalver III demo you'll see that I disliked the interface for the speaker/mic combos and the overall dryness of the sounds. Since that review I got a little better at using the reverb and delay on ReValver and my overall assessment of the software went up accordingly. It still never usurped the place of Guitar Rig in my estimation or the combination of value and fun delivered by Pod Farm.

I haven't been playing guitar a lot in the last month, but I have played around with the ReValver III.5 update demo enough to say that it is much easier to navigate the cab/mic choices this time around and the amp sims seem to have fewer digital artifacts swimming in the mix. They've added a few new amps to the mix as well, but those additions are far less of a game changer than the changes made to look and feel. This is finally beginning to feel a little more user-friendly and a little less like trying to find a decent studio sound in a rathole studio full of old equipment -- but without the vibe and atmosphere of the real thing.

Hopefully they will take a more active role with this release because with decent support and marketing they could well do some damage to the competition both in the studio and as a direct-in option live. Still not sure I would take it over Guitar Rig, but the choice has gotten a lot harder.

Everybody, Point and Laugh

2010-11-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

What the hell were you thinking, Gibson?

The all-new, 'revolutionary' Firebird X.

It's a non-reverse Firebird with robot tuners and built in effects run by toggles and sliders all over the body of the guitar. It's chambered, unbound ash and it must be close to hollow because the whole damn thing weighs in at under 2.5 pounds.

Gibson Guitar Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz introduced the new Firebird X at a packed press conference today held at the Hard Rock Time Square. During the press conference Juszkiewicz talked about the leaders of innovation and the history of technology, all leading up to the unveiling of the Firebird X, a guitar which will change the music industry forever. Stunned press looked on when Juszkiewicz smashed a guitar into pieces in front of the crowd ushering in a new era of guitar technology.

The Firebird X Guitar takes the guitar instrument to new heights of functionality and usability for the professional player and the aspiring enthusiast. Using technologies that did not exist even a few years ago, Gibson has enhanced an already outstanding instrument to unbelievable performance and creative heights. The enhancements touch every aspect of the instrument from using improved manufacturing technologies to the latest electronics.

Gibson’s design goal is to bring more creative options to the player while he or she is playing. Thus the user interface has become richer and simpler. Fundamental musical effects are now available with a minimum of motion and disruption from playing the music. At the same time, the player is able to see what is happening with the guitar very easily, again without disrupting his making music.

Juszkiewicz introduced luthier Frank Johns, who took to the stage to demonstrate the Firebird X guitar and then answered a round of media questions. The guitar will be produced in a very limited quantity worldwide and available on December 11, 2010. They will not be reproduced after the initial offering.

Pure theater. Pure bullshit.

How do we know that this is not a revolutionary product that will usher in a new era? They will be produced in limited quantity and will not be reproduced. If Gibson believed for a second that this guitar would do any of the things that their marketing department claimed for this product they would be tooling up to produce them the way that they do the Les Paul.

I'd love to have a Gibson, but I'd buy a vintage one. No sense in buying anything new from them when the last new idea they had was in 1958.

Fender is more forward thinking. They at least have the foresight to take advantage of new trends and offer something like the Rock Band 3 Squier Strat. Putting music in the hands of a new crop of players and giving them a fun way to learn to play for $280 could be pretty revolutionary if any of those players decide to break out of the pop cover mold.

But a $5000 guitar that combines a bunch of existing features into one piece of complicated hardware?

Not that I'm claiming that using the Firebird X is complicated. I don't know. Nor do I care. My point about complicated is that the guitar is set up to run on Windows or OS X. It has a bunch of IC chips built in. When one of those fails -- when Gibson decides to quit offering tech support for the software once MS and Apple come out with new OS -- this guitar goes back to being a regular guitar. Assuming, that is, it still works and can bypass all of the extra circuits in the first place.

Wah pedal. Revolutionary. Added new sounds and new possibilities for guitar players. Plug your guitar into it, plug it into any amp and it works. If it breaks you fix it or buy a new one. It's modular.

Firebird X? No new nothing. Just a lot of existing stuff crammed into a guitar where it's harder to get to if it breaks.

No thanks.

Meanwhile, if you want actual innovation and a revolutionary design, check out Teufel Guitars. Not going to sell a ton of these either, but at least they are genuinely new and innovative.

Rock Band 3 vs. Guitar Hero 5 (and Some Thoughts On Hero Maker)

2010-09-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

Three important facts:

1 - I play guitar.

2 - I play video games. In fact, I'm a professional new media scholar.

3 - Despite 1 and 2, I have never played either Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

This is the point at which I slam the games based on some expectation about music and games or anything like that. Simple fact is that as someone who plays video games for professional research and who robs writing time to play guitar (and to blog) I really can't afford to dedicate the sort of time I know would come of trying to learn to play a guitar based DDR-type game. DO NOT DRINK, Alice (Cooper?, In Chains?). That way lies the death both of guitar playing and of progress on my writing.

Still I can't resist the siren call of blogging about this as it overlaps on the Venn diagram of life with so many other things that I hold dear and about which I have blogged.

It's fascinating to me the way that each of these has differentiated itself from the other. As a big fan of the 'Loud' part in "Loud, Bad Guitar' I have to say that I've always preferred the Spinal Tap-esque grandeur of Guitar Hero to the alt-pop bent of Rock Band. Let's face it. GH started as a nod to the arena headlining fantasy buried at the heart of air guitar in the first place where RB has always seemed a little more of a Garage Rock experience. Now GH seems to have decided to channel it's Brutal Legend side for all it's worth and RB seems to have re-visioned itself as training wheels for the garage.

I'll admit -- as far as my own tastes are concerned I'd lean towards GH5 over RB3 because I already have a guitar and I'd rather noodle with it on my own than learn a song note for note. And I'm not interested in having to pick up another guitar just so I can hook it up to my game system and play songs from their Karaoke menu. Call me when they include Opeth or Amorphis or Enslaved, but I'm not interested in learning to play most of the stuff they feature. I'd rather pretend to be Kiss. They are ridiculous. The game is ridiculous. Dreaming of being a gargantuan rock star at 40 is ridiculous. It all fits.

That said, the Rock Band pro mode with the Squier guitar looks to work just fine according to this video. Okay, so the tuning is off. That just shows that it really was the guitar you were hearing.

Of course the Rock Band 3 deal with Fender/Squier reminds me of my earlier post about how Gibson lacks vision when it comes to the power of games like these to open up new markets. Looks like its Fender 1 - Gibson 0.

And I don't mean to bash on Peavey again, but it looks like Rock Band 3 will steal all the thunder from the Peavey/Xivix Hero Maker/Jam Party deal. It's going to take a lot to break into the market with well established competition. Unless Xivix comes up with a viable niche market that makes their product cool with a group of players underrepresented in the Rock Band playlists (country, blues, extreme metal) or incentivizes artists to partner with them I think they are screwed.

Too bad, because Peavey makes good hardware.

Thoughts About AmpKit LINK

2010-09-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

Looks like AmpKit and AmpKit LINK are out now and people have begun reviewing them. Here's a couple vids to get you started, followed by my own reactions and comments.

TechfastLunch&Dinner gives us a video unboxing of the AmpKit LINK followed by a demo review of the free version of AmpKit. This one lets you hear the app live and watch the player on an embedded screen, which is nice. It's also good to be able to see what the free version of the app can do before being tempted to drop the cash for the full version.

BigGeekReviews gives us a two part review of the software that includes a very thorough demo of what it's like using and tweaking the (looks like) full version of AmpKit and a very useful, if brief, comparison to the iRig hardware. He goes through some backing tracks so you can hear how changes in the settings affect the tone and he includes a recording and some live playing so that you get an idea of the software's capabilities. He also confirms in comments that the hardware works with third party virtual guutar amp apps for the iPhone.

This last bit is very good news as it means that you can choose your hardware based entirely on its performance and not the performance of your software. It also means that once you choose your hardware you can comparison shop your software independently, as I explained in my previous post on the subject. As long as the hardware sends a clean signal and has no latency you can pick it up with no fear that the app software is going to become outdated if the company drops it or loses the market to another app. You can switch to the newer or better app later. If BigGeekReviews is correct, this means that the LINK is the best hardware to date for the iPhone market.

Also, given what I said earlier about Peavey's lack of visible support for ReValver, I am reassured that AgilePartners (the actual developer) seems to be much more web savvy and responsive than Peavey and they need this product more. As a result I'd trust them more than I would Peavey to keep their product on a front burner.

In short: it's looking good for the AmpKit LINK right now.

Product Delays?

2010-08-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

I have a habit of going to the different virtual guitar amp sites in order to see when they update and put out another demo version of their software. I like playing around with the different suites and seeing what they can do. I did an extensive comparison review a while back in case you are interested (along with a later revisit I did when I got new model packs and an updated demo of Guitar Rig). One of the things these constant visits to the various virtual amp software makers has convinced me of is that Peavey, despite its decent software, is still essentially a brick-and-mortar company with no web savvy.

Case in point. I went there this week to see if they had any new info on the iPhone amp rig they are developing with Agile Partners, (not to be confused with Agile Guitars, marketed by Rondo Music). Nothing new, despite the fact that they have to play catch-up with the iRig. They really need to pay attention to how the video game franchises do it and feed the tech nerds a constant diet of updates.

While I was poking around Peavey's terrible corporate website I navved over to the press page and saw some press releases from Winter NAMM talking about the upcoming ReValver Mk. III.V release set for, (according to Peavey in January), Q2 2010 -- *last* quarter. No news since then. No mention of the coming update on the webpage for ReValver itself. No reviews of the current software since 2008.

C'mon, Peavey. I know you are un-hip, but this is no way to build your software side. You have to let people know that you have new and better stuff on the way and convince us that we should buy your current version now (at an attractive discount) so that you can get us used to using it. Then when the new version comes out you can sell us the upgrade for a little more (rather than having to convince people to shell out $250 all over again). It's not an amp, it's a software franchise.

I will confess. I like ReValver a lot. It's grown on me. I still mess with the demo long after having deleted GTR3 and AmpliTube (which was good, but did not give me enough time to evaluate it fully before they spiked the demo with enough white noise to make me not want to finish evaluating it). I mess with it more than with Guitar Rig 4. The difference is that, despite my liking ReValver and having fun messing with it, I don't trust Peavey to support it. I know that Line 6 and Native Instruments are always working on their software because they tell me what they are doing. That commitment means a lot. With Peavey it always seems like the software is a novelty that could become an orphan at any moment.

Not a good impression to make when you are trying to get people to spend a couple Benjamins.

iPhone Guitar - Hardware Matters

2010-06-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about my last entry and the iRig, and one of the things I've realized since I last posted is that the iPhone/iPod market will be a lot like the desktop virtual amp market in that you should probably consider your hardware and software solutions separately, to an extent, and weigh your hardware choices more carefully than your software choices. Here's why.

I do not for a second regret the $49 I spent on my Toneport GX when it was on clearance. It has limited input options, (a single standard TRS input), and the enclosed Gear Box software, (since upgraded for free by Line6 to Pod Farm), is not the best sounding or most versatile on the market. Still, just getting the USB interface allowed me to try out and play with most of the other software on the market for an absurdly low entry cost given what I got for it. And the GX gives me a low-latency, line level input device.

Input level and latency are going to be huge for portable applications. Every complaint I have heard about the PRS Jam Amp/Guitarbud seems to be related to one of these -- either that there is too much latency in the signal or that the signal craps out and becomes unusable as soon as the level gets too high, (and woe to all who have high output or active pickups in their guitars). No matter what the software is like, if the signal from the instrument isn't useable then there's nothing that the software can do to fix it. This is doubly true of portable applications because the memory and processing speeds are much more limited than they are for desktop applications. And, unlike desktop applications, you aren't likely going to want to carry around any additional gear with your iPhone/iPod rig to get it to sound better. It defeats the purpose of all that portability.

My guess is that a signal input that works with one set of iPhone guitar amp software will likely work with any other as well. It has to work with the internals of the phone itself and that is going to limit proprietary approaches substantially. This means that whatever hardware you get now will likely work for the near term no matter what new and amazing software is developed.

Short answer conclusion: If you decide to make the jump into iPhone guitar stuff, get the best hardware you can and keep your software options open because those are going to change a lot faster than the input options.

iPhone/iPod Virtual Amp Race

2010-06-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

Look's like it's on. IK Multimedia just announced their Amplitube iRig for the iPhone/iPod.

Back in March PRS started sending out press releases for their Jam Amp/Guitarbud combo which gives you a virtual amp, play-along capability, recording and a tuner. It looks simple enough -- there's a 1/4" input for your instrument cable, a minijack input for your headphones and a minijack plug for your iPhone or iPod Touch that allows it to process your signal and send it back to you.

I thought it was a good idea when I first heard about it. I had always looked wistfully at the Waves iGTR and thought about picking one up for its convenient form factor, but I never really liked the sound of it or the way the controls were laid out. I have a Vox DA5 for a practice amp and already feel cramped by it on the effects front despite it having a lot of useful effect combinations and three tweakable parameters for each. The iGTR limited you to three each from amps, filters and time effects and gave you only one parameter for each. The results being that everything sounded overprocessed and artificial to my ear. PRS took things a step farther than the iGTR by just using the iPhone/iPod hardward, adding an input for your instrument and letting you purchase the amp software in the app store.

Great idea, but the app/hardware got fairly mixed reviews. I took these with a grain of salt because I know that a lot of users don't have the patience to troubleshoot and tweak things in order to make it work and the bad reviews could just mean that a good product had a steeper learning curve than your average iPod. What made me pass on it, however, was that I was looking for a little more tonal flexibility than a single virtual amp with no effects could deliver.

The iRig, meanwhile, gives you the option of a free model with one amp and three effects, a low cost lite version with one amp, five effects and the option of plugging in more a la carte, or the full version which has eleven effects and five amps and looks to be very tweakable:

I'm going to be replacing my cell soon with an iPhone, which means my old iPod Touch will be free. I'll wait for the first reviews to come in (or the first big sale) before getting it, but this looks really promising. I'm hoping that this is just the first wave of a bunch of new virtual amp options for smartphones and mp3 players.

Guitar Scale Length Basics Pt. 2 -- Fret Spacing, Intonation, and Drop Tuning

2010-05-10T11:11:00.001-07:00

Last post I explained a bit about what scale length was and how it worked and why shorter scale lengths weren't automatically easier to play or snappier sounding. (Short version: because [on an electric, anyway] you can easily increase the string gauge to increase string tension, making the shorter scale guitar feel more like a longer scale guitar). This time I want to move on to the bigger differences that a guitar's scale length make. But first a quick review if you have not read the earlier post:

A guitar's scale length is the length of the string from where it leaves the nut towards the fingerboard to the place where the string crosses the bridge saddle. This distance is (more or less) the same as the "speaking length" of the string -- the part that vibrates when the string is plucked.

One thing you should notice here is that scale length only refers to the length of the open string, and that the basic way that a guitar works is by pushing down on strings in order to change the speaking length of the string by pressing it against a fret. Shorter speaking length = higher pitch.

The second thing to notice from this is that a capo works by making your guitar into a shorter scale instrument. Tune down a half-step and put a capo on a 25.5" scale guitar and you essentially have a 24" scale guitar (with screwed up position markers). And since the notes of the musical scale are proportional to the length of the string you will notice that the 12th (octave) fret on the guitar changes from being 12.75" away from the nut to 12" away from the capo. In other words, as the scale length gets shorter, so does the distance between successive frets. If the frets are closer together it makes spread-out chords easier to play, but tighter chords become a little more tight as well. It feels like you're playing farther up the neck on a shorter scale guitar because (as the capo proves) you really are doing just that.

Next point, and one that is a little more involved. If you are trying to adjust your bridge saddles to intonate your guitar yourself you will have to adjust the longer scale bridge saddle just that much farther forwards or backwards to change it than you will the shorter scale guitar. It's the proportion thing again. Looking at the frets on each tells you that you have to move farther on a longer scale neck to change the pitch the same amount. So if an adjustable bridge has 0.25" of adjustment you will be able to adjust the shorter scale guitar more in that 0.25" than you can the longer scale guitar.

These are all reasons that I like shorter scale guitars. I have smaller hands and bad wrists, so the shorter neck and reduced tension makes things easier on me. So why would I consider a longer scale guitar?

Well, for one thing, as heavy music keeps going down in pitch the standard guitar tuning drops as well to give the music that bottom-end "chunk." For decades the guitar was built with standard E tuning in mind and string sets were engineered for that as well. If you decide to tune down to C or go all Sybreed and drop it all the way to Drop A#, standard strings get really floppy and you have to increase the string gauge by a lot to make up for this (which has its own set of issues). A longer scale means being able to use standard gauge strings and standard gauged strings are much easier to find.

Plus, going back to the comment about intonation, no guitar is perfectly intonated for every note on the neck in every key. It's all a big compromise. But since we know that smaller differences in length mean bigger differences in pitch for a short scale guitar we also know that a longer scale drop-tuned guitar is going to have less noticeable intonation problems than a shorter scale guitar would. This becomes even more apparent when lower string tensions make it more likely for you to make the string go sharp just from finger pressure. So the combination of higher tension with standard gauge strings and more forgiving intonation carries the day.

Scale Length Basics -- A Simple Explanation

2010-05-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

Of all the things on my blog the one that seems to have brought the most people here is my discussion of scale length and pickup placement on the guitar. It seems that a lot of people have questions about scale length that are in need of some simple answers. Think I can manage that.

First off, a guitar's scale length is the length of the string from where it leaves the nut towards the fingerboard to the place where the string crosses the bridge saddle. This distance is (more or less) the same as the "speaking length" of the string -- the part that vibrates when the string is plucked. The strings speaking length and gauge form the basis for all the math that goes into acoustics that I'm mostly going to ignore here because we don't need all that math to get a basic understanding. Just wrap your head around this one thing:

If two guitars have different scale lengths but are using the same gauge of string, the one with the longer scale length will need more tension on the string to reach the same pitch as the one with the shorter scale length.

Put another way, comparing the same string on two guitars:

Longer string - same gauge - same tension = lower pitch

Same length string - heavier gauge (thicker string) - same tension = lower pitch

Same length string - same gauge - lower tension = lower pitch

Therefore: longer string - heavier gauge - same tension = even lower pitch

As you can see the pitch is determined by all three things (length, gauge, tension) and not by any one of the three alone.

The first myth, or truism about guitars that lots of people throw around but nobody seems to explain:

-- Guitars with longer scale lengths sound snappier or punchier than guitars with shorter scale lengths. Or, closely related, guitarist with shorter scale lengths are easier to play than guitars with longer scale lengths because the strings are looser.

This is sort of true, but only if both guitars have the same gauge strings. A longer scale guitar with extra light strings may have less tension on the strings than a shorter scale guitar strung with heavy strings. It depends on the ratio. That's why D'Addario publishes a spring tension guide -- so that you can keep string tension relatively the same between two guitars with different scale lengths by choosing the appropriate string gauges. Players who play both a Stratocaster (with a 25.5 inch scale length) and a Les Paul (with a 24.75 inch scale length) often times string the Stratocaster with .009s and the Les Paul with .010s for this very reason.

So if the reasoning behind saying that a Strat is more punchy than a Les Paul is because of scale length it's really only true if you have one set of strings to choose from.

Next time -- more about scale length and why players who play drop tunings often choose guitars with longer scale lengths.

Brands with no Vision: Gibson Edition

2010-03-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

Last year I taught a writing class organized around the theme of Intellectual Property. In the course of discussion we got on to the topic of counterfeiting and of counterfeit guitars in particular.

Okay, I admit it, they were talking about counterfeit designer purses and I shifted the topic onto guitars. My bad.

Anyway, they got me googling the topic and poking through Chinese knockoffs on dodgy auction sites. But one of the other things that popped up out of that was Gibson's lawsuit against Activision claiming that Activision had infringed upon Gibson's patent for 'simulated musical performance using an instrument'. This is the same Gibson that made a bit of coin off the licensing for the SG, Les Paul, and Explorer shaped controllers that shipped with Guitar Hero games and that gets a shitload of free advertising with all the damn characters using so many Gibson designs on screen.

Any responsible and sane company would look at this as a good thing. Twenty years ago -- no money coming in from video game licensing. Today -- money coming in without the company having to hire a single factory worker or even design a new guitar. All the work was done years back by Les Paul and Ted McCarty. Oh, and Angus and Slash and James Hetfield and Michael Schenker. Gibson corporate didn't have to do a damn thing except hold their hands out for the bags of free money and thank their lucky stars that they have been able to live off of their laurels for the last 30 years while people like Ken Parker and Ned Steinberger were bothering to think about what might be next.

If I were a small guitar company looking to break through I'd seriously be on the phone with Activision begging them to use my guitars likenesses and labels on every damn product they could push for free so long as I could do the same and use the games to market the hell out of my guitars rather than being a greedy, ungrateful wretch like Gibson and grasping for more. This is doubly true when the company hasn't had a successful new idea since before punk. That type of stupid should be criminalized.

Thank the gods they lost the lawsuit.

Eco Guitar Ponderings

2010-03-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I realized that I had no spare strings on hand for my Hag in case I broke one while playing. This led me to a number of searches on-line as I started my typical, neurotic grad student pondering about changing strings.

It started with thinking about gauges. I have consistently been upping the gauge on my strings since getting the guitar in order to deal with the effects of down-tuning to D and looking to get a bit more sustain and a little less oscillation on the strings so that I could lower the action. My last set of strings were D'Addario Medium Top Heavy Bottoms (11-52), which felt and sounded decent, but gave me some issues with the strings binding in the nut. I could take the guitar in to have the nut slots filed, but I thought I'd give light strings another shot first, figuring that this would also be a lot more convenient for getting strings locally and not having to pay shipping and wait.

Meanwhile, related thoughts. I've been using D'Addarios because they are the most forthcoming on their website about their green practices and their ongoing efforts to reduce the amount of waste they produce both in packaging and in production. I saw that Ernie Ball and GHS were both touting their new foil packaging as being eco-friendly, but then other places I saw that they were still packaging strings in envelopes inside the foil packs, so it seems like only a partial solution and more of a cost-cutting move that could be spun as green rather than a corporate commitment to reducing waste. I ended up choosing EXL 110s again.

(Short digression: Having put on the new strings I noticed an increase in fret buzz near the middle of the neck. Looks like I'll have to loosen the truss rod a bit to give the neck a bit of relief now that the strings don't pull as hard. I'm hoping that I don't have to raise the bridge any to kill the last of the clatter. Intonation has improved a tad as well with the smaller gauges, but is still a few cents sharp going up the neck. I'll move the saddles back a bit more where I can to fix this.)

Coupled with my recent thoughts on buying guitars I've been thinking that were I to break down again and get another guitar I'd probably buy used rather than new. The guitar industry is tearing down trees and stringing new guitars at an alarming rate from an environmental standpoint and I think that the best answer to the problem lies not in finding more ecologically sound tonewoods (or recycled alternatives to traditional tonewoods), but rather in recycling the guitars themselves wherever possible. Most of the ecological costs for a used guitar have already been paid and resurrecting an old guitar keeps that much more material out of a landfill somewhere.

Now if only I can find more information on guitar amps and power consumption so that I can have some fair basis for comparing the ecological impact of tubes vs solid state vs modeling and of amp and cab size, etc.

On the Passing of GAS

2010-02-28T16:21:00.000-08:00

Gear Acquisition Syndrome seems to be the bane of many guitarists. Go to any guitar forum and the majority of the attention seems to be focused upon what gear people own and, more often, what gear those people wish they owned to go with what they already have -- what they would buy or replace if they had the money to do so and whatnot.

Five months ago I was listening to a lot of Jeff Beck and Dada and got the jonez for a strat -- or at least for something with a trem and a chunkier neck than my Hag. Two months later I was playing acoustic and looking at OMs with envy. Had I given into my urges I would probably have picked up one of each. Neither one would have made me a better player, though.

Not sure why, but even though I never stop looking at new guitars, I'm really not all that interested in actually getting one right now. I've got my Hag and my Fender acoustic, my Toneport GX and my Vox DA5 and I really don't care if I get anything more in the near future. I've decided to stick with what I have and see what I can do with it, which, in these days of modeling technology, is actually a whole lot. I've got more sounds at my disposal than Pink Floyd had in its heyday. Seriously. Getting another guitar would not add much in the way of variety. It would not transform what I was playing into something wholly new. Only I can do that by becoming a different sort of player, and the biggest changes in my playing come as a response to playing with filters and delays and other effects that change the characteristics of the waveforms that my guitar generates. Throw a couple really wacked out filter effects on and play the same notes you already know from something and try to work with the time and feel constraints and before you know it you are playing something that sounds entirely new and different.

I'm not chasing a sound in my head. I'm discovering the music that's in the sounds I already have. And I don't need anything new to discover those at the moment.

Re-Revisiting: Head-to-Head

2010-02-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

Not trusting my impressions of GR4 compared to Pod Farm I went back today and pulled up a fairly basic go-to tone on my Pod Farm that I call 'A Bit Beckish' that has a chain of noise reduction into a Tube Screamer clone dialed just behind 5 with the tone rolled back into a JCM 800 clone with the gain at 6 and bass 4 mid 6 treble 7 running through a matched 4X12 miked dead on using a SM 57 with a bit of air and with the signal going through a reverb set to model a medium room. Pretty much any sim software you buy is going to have these units modeled.

I dialed in identical settings on the Pod Farm, the Guitar Rig 4 and the ReValver Mk II. Not that I was expecting them to sound the same with identical settings. Even real amps and stomp boxes sound different from each other with the same settings. Nor does the comparison imply that I could not get each piece of software to create nearly the same sounds by tweaking each a bit and comparing the range of tweakability present in each model. Mostly I just wanted to compare my impressions of all three as a baseline for what characteristics they present.

I played the Pod Farm first, then dialed in the Guitar Rig and played it, went back to the Pod Farm, turned on the ReValver and dialed it in and played it, then went back to the Pod Farm.

Impressions...the Pod Farm is the buzziest of the three both in terms of hum from gain and in general tone. Compared to the other two it sounds like the Pod Farm has a fuzz unit in the mix as well. I know that the Pod can do nice, sparkly cleans so it's either the Screamer or the JCM model that kicks up the fuzz factor. I found myself looking for a bit more articulation and midrange roundness to give the guitar some character. The ReValver, meanwhile, was very round, but also flatter and less cutting than the other two. It sounded like a cab going into a single mic with little or no air and the reverb never really felt like it added much depth, just a little wetness to the mix. It picked up the least variation in string response as well. The Guitar Rig was very present and deep and articulate with very little background noise or fuzz. The guitar sounded very alive and I could hear the difference in response based on my picking, which, if I were trying to dial something in rather than just comparing would mean a lot less tweaking and a lot more playing.

I'm really impressed with Native Instruments modeling. It's just such a solid overall package. If you have the money and plan on using it for recording or playing out it would definitely be worth the extra. I'm sure that a tech could get them all to sound great in a mix, but the GR4 sounds great even without a tech in sight.

****ETA 10Jun2010****

One thing I discovered a couple months back that I hadn't noticed before is that the ReValver gives you the option of outputting through your computer's soundcard rather than resending it to the USB interface output. This lets you play through your computer speakers like it's an amp. In Pod Farm you have to run it all through Garage Band or another DAW which is doable, but adds another layer of latency issues and memory suck into the equation.

Being able to output to your speakers is handy for sharing ideas or just playing for a friend/spouse.

Revisiting Virtual Amps

2010-02-13T12:59:00.001-08:00

Since last time I reviewed a bunch of virtual amps and virutal amp demos (back in Oct/Nov 2009) I've purchased add-ons for my Line 6 Pod Farm and have downloaded the demo for Guitar Rig 4 to compare to the GR3 demo I already have. I picked up the Metal Shop, Collector Classics, and FX Junkie Model packs in mid-December sometime and just downloaded the new Guitar Rig demo this week, so my opinion of the model packs is much more developed than my impression of the new Guitar Rig.

The Model packs are a complete blast. The Metal Shop and Collector Classics add a bunch of new amp models into your virtual studio that add all manner of options and nuance to your sound. Between them there aren't many sounds I couldn't go for within the limits of what one can pull out of a stop tail, dual humbucker guitar. As far as bread-and-butter additions go, though, I most appreciated the addition of the Killer Z distortion box into the mix. The Cat stompbox in the original software was good, but it was a little bright and thin for a modern metal sound. The Killer Z is more modern sounding -- thicker and warmer with some contour control to shape your mids for the right amount of cut. The FX Junkie pack adds in a lot of fun effects that range from classic and subtle to outrageous. They would be awesome for any time one wanted to step away from your guitar god pose and do some postrock experimentation or write some soundtrack stuff for a video game. It extends your tonality into decidedly unguitarlike places and gets you playing things you normally would not. I don't know that I would pay full price for these packs unless I needed them for some project and could not do it with the standard set of sounds that comes with the Pod Farm setup, but they were well worth the package special price that put them all in the same price range as a budget stompbox.

Switching from the Pod Farm to the Guitar Rig 4 demo, the first thing I noticed was how clean and spatial the sound was. The Line 6 sims are good, but they always sound just a little less articulate and more compressed than the Native Instruments sims. This does not imply that the Line 6 sounds aren't as good or as accurate. I'm always surprised when I plug into a normal amp to hear how muddy they sound and how much more string noise they pick up from the guitar, and I'm always a little disappointed that I can't tweak the size of the room in which I am playing it without dropping a lot of money on a good quality reverb unit. The Line 6 may actually be more accurate than the Native Instruments in this regard (much as the ReValver was more like an RL amp in its output than the rest), I just really appreciate the way that the NI software sounds when almost everything I play is just my guitar through headphones. It gives my playing added musicality and dimension and really pulls out the expressiveness of fingers on strings while cutting all the odd, non-musical artifacts down to a minimum.

There's no buyer's remorse here. I saw that the online retailers have been clearancing out the GR3 hardware and while I was tempted to pick it up I really can't justify the cost when I'm not doing anything with my music other than entertaining myself and annoying the cats. I will say, however, that if I had no sunk cost in the Line 6 hardware and were looking at either a full price Line 6 Pod Studio vs. a clearance GR3 package with the direct box hardware and had a chance to play with both ahead of time I would definitely go with the NI over the Line 6. At full price, however, I still think the Line 6 is still the best value of all the virtual guitar studio packages and good enough for most applications.

Acoustic Info and Websites

2010-01-25T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm sidling up on the end of a dissertation chapter and trying to decide between rewarding myself with a new tattoo and a new acoustic. The tattoo would be easier, since I already know the design (Viking spirals and a snake somewhat like the one from Marebro, Sweden) and the artist (Adam Kilss). Acoustic...not so easy.

I know that whatever acoustic I get I'm more interested in fingerpicking than in heavy strumming or bluegrass and country flatpicking. Ideally I'd be playing acoustic stuff a la Opeth or Mick Mills' Antimatter material -- some Zep, maybe. Stuff like that. Price wise I'm looking under $500. Sound wise I want something that is less boomy than a Martin dreadnought but still has decent bass response when played softly.

Other concerns -- my wrists and fingers aren't what they used to be before all that typing from academia (and years of IT work before that) tried to cripple me. Plus I've got strong, square hands, but relatively short (and slow and clumsy) fingers. I love my Hagstrom, but ain't no way I want to try to fingerpick on it. The neck is to slim and fast and too tight at the nut even at 1.68". I want something a little more supportive and hand-filling for chords and a tad more space between the strings. Oh, and that lower bout on a dreadnought is an arm killer, too, but I'm not sure I want to go to a 000 despite my earlier post because I don't want to lose too much bass if I tune down a little. I'd say OM or GC, except that those usually up the scale length and my wrists and fingers keep telling me to stick to a shorter scale if possible.

So far this all sounds like it makes me a candidate for a Seagull guitar. They mostly have shorter scales and slightly wider necks and they have a great rep. And they are made in Canada, eh? I'm down with that.

Anyway, what I'm getting to here is that finding and evaluating all this info has made me wish that online music stores did a better job of organizing their stock and informing their buyers of the crucial things. Guitar marketing is straight up stupid most of the time. I love abalone purfling and quilted backs and sides as much as the next guy, but body size, scale length, nut width and string spacing at the bridge are much more important to whether or not I'm going to like playing the damn thing. And if I'm not going to be able to play the thing myself, I'd like to at least see a picture of someone else holding it seated so I can see where that lower bout sits relative to another body size. I know that a mini-jumbo is bigger than a dreadnought, but with a tighter waist does that put the upper bout in the same place, lower, or higher where it hits the arm? It would be nice to know this. For that matter it would be nice to search for guitars by body size rather than by brand and for acoustics and acoustic electrics together with a check box to filter on electronics if that were a deal breaker rather than having to run separate searches and try to aggregate the results.

It shouldn't take much to build a website right for this. If Elderly or Sweetwater were to put a little design time into it they could really put the other companies on their asses. I'd be there.

Cheap, Good Guitar

2010-01-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

Tuned the old Fender Gemini II down to C# standard today to noodle after learning a bit of Den Standiga Resan. I picked up some of the intro, but got distracted by some meandering improv. Somehow tuning down three steps made the guitar sound better in addition to making it easier to play with the reduced string tension. I'd always thought the Gemini was a nice guitar for the money I payed way back when (and was the only acoustic under $250 I found that had good intonation and action with no setup), but, like most dreads, I thought it was a bit boomy on the bottom end for my tastes. Tuning down balanced it out a lot more and made the treble sound richer and louder.

I'm honestly surprised by how well the laminate top on the guitar has aged over 20 years. It's responsive and woody, but has never had any of the problems with humidity that a lot of solid tops develop. This was especially nice when I was in Colorado, where the humidity dropped alarmingly in the winters. In fact, other than one little issue with one fret fairly far up the neck (and on one string only...need to tap or file that sucker down), it's been entirely maintenance free for the whole time.

Good little Korean made guitars, those Gemini.

Quiet, Bad Guitar

2010-01-05T19:06:00.000-08:00

It's been over a week since I last played my Swede.

It started one of the days of our hectic holiday interim. We were going somewhere and it was unclear at what moment we would be leaving. I hadn't played guitar for a couple days and I was feeling the jones, (and fearing for my callouses). So I dug beneath the Swede's case to the battered chipboard shell that sheathes my battered old Fender dreadnought and dug it out to save having to plug in and boot up my Pod Farm and fiddle with settings only to have to shut down and unplug once our friends showed up and we took off. What could be simpler than an acoustic? You just take it out, tune up, and play.

The holidays are over and I haven't put it back yet.

Somewhere during the time that I picked up the acoustic I also pulled out Opeth's Damnation and listened through it. Then I pulled out Antimatter's Planetary Confinement and listened to it. Then I pulled out Green Carnation's The Acoustic Verses. Before I knew it I was dusting off how to play ELP's From the Beginning and trying to learn a bit more fingerpicking than just being able to stumble through Travis picking Dust in the Wind.

All the playing on the electric has payed off in one respect. I'm starting to get a feel for the fretboard and where notes are in relation to what I'm playing and beginning to be able to play what I'm hearing in my head (as long as what I'm hearing is slow). All the melancholy acoustic stuff gives me a chance to play along, but also to play counterpoint and improv a bit.

It's killed my GAS for a solid body with a trem, (for the time being, anyway), but now i'm GASsing for a mid-sized acoustic with a little wider string spacing at the bridge and some nice mellow strings. Maybe an OM or a 000 with a cedar top or the like.

It's still buzzy, muffled notes, but it's quiet and honest buzzy and muffled notes.

Except that as far as my wife and neighbors are concerned, outside the headphones, the quiet, bad guitar has just gotten louder.

Folk Metal Heroes

2009-12-31T20:22:00.001-08:00

Last on my list of guitar heroes who play metal (but far from last in my estimation) are Esa Holopainen and Tomi Koivusaari from Amorphis. They are a mythic folk metal band from Finland and they have been around for 20 years and been a huge influence on the european metal scene but are still relatively unknown in the US which is a shame, but that's the US metal scene for ya.

Tomi K. (not to be mistaken for Tomi J., their singer) plays mostly rhythm and all the intricate treble, picked stuff from their early music. He also used to do their growling in the early, death metal days, but is mostly happy now to keep out of the spotlight. He also plays a mean mandolin and writes part of the music for the band. Esa plays mostly lead in that he plays most of the solos and a lot of single note parts, but a lot of the time he's playing melodies or counterpoint to the keys over the top of another melody. Amorphis is one of those ensemble bands where everyone is doing something different and making it all work together. Esa does the finnish folk melody parts on guitar and Tomi supplies the metal heaviness.

Go to the Nuclear Blast website and you can find their video for Silent Waters or Silver Bride to get an idea what I'm talking about. Their music is very epic and there's a lot going on there. Fortunately enough for a crappy guitar player like myself, a lot of what they do is not so difficult from a technical standpoint that I can't at least approximate it for playing along. The rhythms are pretty straightforward and the folk melodies are off-kilter little modal things that move around, but repeat a lot of patterns, so they are manageable as well.

Tomi's rhythm work is interesting because he spends a lot of time chunking out the barre chords, but he can also do the old school death metal single note treble rhythms and slide into more acoustic arpeggios as well. He's an understated player, not really showing off, but doing some pretty intricate and delicate stuff. Esa's lead work is soaring and emotional and makes really lovely use of his Vox wah to give it a vocal quality. I can't touch his feel or his phrasing. It's deceptively good.

They also do some lovely acoustic work.

They are supposed to be swinging over to this side of the pond again sometime soon. I'll be there.

Metal Heroes Part Deux

2009-12-27T16:47:00.000-08:00

Opeth aren't the easiest band for a guitarist of somewhat-less-than-moderate talent to emulate. I love them, and I do my best with what little tab exists, (not that much of it is any good since they seldom use straightforward chords and most tabbers have ears of tin), but when I play much on my own I find myself barre chord riffing and experimenting with slower, simpler melodic lines. No surprise, then, that I love the music of both Swallow the Sun and Daylight Dies. Both of them make some of the most melodic, simple, and massively heavy music out there.

I really don't know what to write about Juha Raivio and Markus Jamsen (of Swallow the Sun) or Barre Gambling and Charlie Shackelford (of Daylight Dies) or Greg Mackintosh and Aaron Aedy (of Paradise Lost) as players, except that they are exceptionally tasteful and understated players more interested in making beautiful music than in showing off their chops. Not that they have no chops, mind you. There are plenty of moments that show their technical abilities. Most often, however, they spend their time in service to the overall compositions and the atmosphere of the songs.

I think part of my love for these bands and their guitar work lies in the stately tone they get from their guitars and the way that their music shows that off. They all use a lovely, saturated, sustaining high-gain sound with a nice, full midrange rather than the scoop and chunk of most modern American metal. There's also some nice air and reverb in the mix without it going all cavernous and echoey like a lot of classic metal or early death metal bands.

Too many times it seems to me that guitar players get recognition mostly from having impressive chops that will sell a lot of equipment and magazines to new players who are impressed by speed. These guys remain under the radar, especially in the US music media, because they are more musicians than guitar celebrity spokesmodels. No one is going to buy a magazine chock full of their riffs because they aren't players who can be distilled into a page full of riffs, solos, and rhythm figures. They are more about chord progressions and melodies. Playing their music, which is not too difficult to pick out on your own, teaches you more about music theory and how to think outside of scales and keys and go for those little moments of transformation within the scope of the song.

I should also mention here that all of the guitar players I have mentioned so far have the good fortune to play with excellent, musical bass players who, in contrast to the norm, often play more complex lines than the guitars they are 'supporting.' Pretty much all of these guys are in ensemble bands where the whole is far greater than the individual star power of the parts.

Next up...a shift into the folkier side of metal.

ETA: I've been thinking about this post a bit and have concluded that Mackintosh and Aedy are much more riffy a unit than the other two bands, but the part of their music that sticks with me most is not the riffs, but rather the more lyrical parts. So I cheated a bit. I can live with that.

Metal Heroes

2009-12-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

Much as I love Steve Hackett's guitar playing, I listen to a lot more metal than prog. Granted, I like my metal on the proggy end of things, but I also like a heaping helping of darkness with it. And when I sit down to actually play guitar I don't end up playing much that sounds like Hackett's music either, other than my having learned a couple of his solos. As such, most of my practical guitar heroes are metal players.

My favorite metal guitarists are Mikael Ackerfeldt, Peter Lindgren, and Fredrik Akesson of Opeth. Again, it's not that they are amazing technical players. Fredrik has some serious shred and speed and I love what he has brought to the band, but what has always set Opeth apart for me is the sheer range of what they do and the tremendous contrasts that they put in their music. They manage to be both beautiful and brutal, intimate and epic. Early on in their catalogue they tended towards a lot of twin guitar riffs like on The Night and the Silent Waters -- not just harmonized lead lines a la classic Wishbone Ash but also contrapuntal classical lines and push-pull lead/chord twinned riffs like at the end of this song and all through Demon of the Fall. The lines and the rhythms tend to be complex and non-linear, always looking for something surprising.

As Opeth matured they began adding keys in the mix and giving their compositions more space and openness. As they did this they also began to incorporate more jazz, blues and old school prog elements in as well -- like the ebow and slide playing on The Drapery Falls or the simple, understated blues solos on A Fair Judgment. Yet through it all they have never gone soft or lost their instinct for the heavy and brutal. For sheer brutal bombast it's hard to beat the single chord outro riff for Deliverance or the angularity of the section of Hessian Peel from the solo at 6:15 through to the break at 7:24.

But, as always with them, the heart of their sound lies in those moments of contrast when they shift from sweet to sour. My favorite example of this is probably the section of Ghost of Perdition where the song shifts from the vocal harmonies of 'winding ever higher' with the lovely acoustic guitar playing into a stunningly beautiful and emotional bluesy guitar close that fades on a high, sustained note that resolves the section only to give way to a one-chord, syncopated riff that starts to build the tension right back up like the long slow climb of a rollercoaster towards that big drop. It's especially gratifying to see and hear live. You can watch the shift happen as the crowd goes from singing along with the delicate melody to a sort of rapture at the solo, only to watch the circle pits start to roil like a growing storm with the first notes of the pedal tone. It's like a brutal organism.

Next up, we'll shift from prog metal to doom.

Dream Guitar Musings

2009-12-16T10:09:00.000-08:00

Thinking about Steve Hackett's guitars got me dreaming about the ideal guitar, or at least the ideal counterpart to the Hagstrom Swede that I already own. The Swede is an LP type guitar with a stop-tail, twin Alnico V humbuckers, and a 24.75" scale length. I love the smooth, warm sound of its neck pup and the extra sizzle of the in-between setting, but I'd like to see what I could do with a trem equipped guitar as well.

So...in order to keep the important things constant we'll keep the scale length but start to mix things up from there.

Let's start by making it a 7-string to extend the lower end down to B without killing the tension on all the other strings to keep the intervals consistent with standard tuning. I know that I already struggle with one fewer strings, but I figure that if I'm already comfortable playing between the low E and the G strings and muting the low E when I'm playing barre chords with a root on the A that adding a low B will only really give me one more iteration of a pattern I already know. Having the extra string will allow me to cover songs from bands that tune down to D or C in addition to those that use standard tuning. The riffs will need some refiguring, but it should reduce the need for retuning.

Which is a good thing because, as I noted above, I'm wanting to have a trem on this guitar. That means either a Wilkinson or a locking trem if I want to keep anything like tuning stability, and since I want to be able to palm mute all those chunky low chords I'm getting with the extra low string I'm thinking that a Kahler is the way to go. I know that a Floyd is more popular for seven string shredders, but I think that a Kahler is better for extreme metal riffage, and I do love to chunk away.

Final bits of sonic versatility -- I love the way that Parker Flys are wired for both magnetic and piezo run together or to separate channels, so we'll say that the electronics are wired that way with piezo saddles on the Kahler running through a built in preamp to balance the signals. And, for the icing on the cake, let's make the neck pickup a Sustainiac so that we can get that awesome, singing sustain for as long as we want.

A guy can dream.

Guitar Heroes

2009-12-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

Not sure how much of an honor it is to be a hero to a crappy guitar player, but...

Yeah, yeah. We all know about Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. They are both amazing guitarists for very different reasons (jaw dropping live playing and amazing composition respectively), so I won't waste your time going over their achievements or the achievements of the dozens of other great guitarists who get a ton of coverage in the guitar mags whether by dint of talent or of marketability and endorsements. Instead I'll concentrate on some of the guitarists I love who get less attention than they merit and from whose playing I have learned a little.

Steve Hackett -- merits top of the list for his solo on Genesis' Firth of Fifth alone. Much as I like some of his solo work, I have to say that what I love most about his playing is the way that he works within a virtuoso ensemble like Genesis in its idiosyncratic prime between Nursery Cryme and Wind and Wuthering, with Steve's special brand of genius most prominently on display in Selling England by the Pound. And again, while I love his pioneering two-handed tapping on songs like The Musical Box and Dancing with the Moonlit Knight, what slays me again and again is the understated grandeur of his soaring solos and his melodic counterpoint to Peter Gabriel's vocal lines. It's not easy to find space between Tony Banks keys and Mike Rutherford's blend of acoustic/bass/bass pedal genius, but it seems that whenever Hackett emerges from the mix he does so with amazing beauty and grace and delivers a performance that is unmistakably his own.

In addition to two handed tapping, Hackett plays some amazing slide guitar in a non-blues setting that ranges from etherial to downright rude. Given his love of sustain and crescendo, I thought for many years that he was a big Ebow player, but it turns out that much of what I thought was a combination of slide and ebow was actually Hackett's use of a Fernandes sustainer and a Floyd Rose playing through a volume pedal. You can see his Floyded out Les Paul in action here:

His solo albums after Genesis started off a bit uneven, but he still usually manages to astound often enough to make each release worthwhile and his nylon string work is always stellar. And at least once per album he reminds the listener of all that Genesis lost when they parted ways with him to chart a more radio-friendly path. He's worked with Steve Howe of Yes in their co-project GTR, and former King Crimson and Asia alum John Wetton on several notable tours. He's even managed to hold down his part of the stage while touring with John Paul Jones, Nuno Bettencourt and Paul Gilbert as part of Guitar Wars.

But mostly he's remained my most constant hero on guitar no matter what other fixations I might have at the time.

[coming next...some metal heroes]

Virtual Guitar Amp Roundup (Pt. 3): What I Didn't Expect

2009-11-02T16:22:00.000-08:00

One of the things that surprised me most about the way I ended up ranking the software was how important mics and cabs had become to my overall impressions of the products and how much this varied from my first impressions. Nowhere was this more evident than in the split between Guitar Rig and ReValver.

Guitar Rig 3 was the second modeling suite that I downloaded after getting Pod Farm and I was really excited to play around with it and look at the different amps and stompboxes it modeled. I had it for all of a day before I went out and found the ReValver demo, and when I first heard the sounds coming out of the Peavey XXX sim I thought that it might be the best metal amp sim out there. The sounds were very dynamic and live. I didn't come back to Guitar Rig for a day or two. The ReValver just sounded more like a real amp.

When I did come back to a head-to-head comparison between the two and started playing around with more than just the amps and the stompboxes, I found myself less satisfied with the ReValver. Guitar Rig had more effects models included which, despite the broad versatility of the ReValver models, gave me more tonal options on top of the amp models. At this point Guitar Rig crept back up in my estimation, but there wasn't a lot of daylight between the two.

Then I started to play around with the cabs and mics.

Peavey's cab modeling may be state-of-the-art and very realistic, but they are hard to navigate -- more like searching a list of presets than experimenting with different mic placements and cabinet enclosures. You look through a long list of options broken up into collections organized around cabinet --> mic --> mic placement (i.e. Peavey Collection | 6505 4x12 | sm57(a) )with little description of those options within the software itself. Each cab had a set of knobs to adjust the sound of the speakers, but it was hard to get an idea of how the various changes to those virtual pots translated into sounds. (There was an option for building custom cabs as well, but that option always crashed my software whenever I tried to use it.) Given the sheer number of options to navigate and select from and the difficulty of doing so from a single drop-down menu I quickly found myself frustrated both by the mono boxiness of the default sounds and by my inability to change a single ingredient (cab, mic, placement) without going back to the list and searching for the combination that I wanted to try. And those choices seemed fairly limited in most cases with only two mic positions listed. Given Peavey's thoroughness with this product I am fairly sure that I'm missing or misunderstanding some of the options. I hope I am. But whether or not this is the case, the interface design for this particular part of the software suite is both non-intuitive and not much fun, which quickly turns into a recipe for accepting and criticizing the default settings, which tend towards flat, closely miked sounds with little air or reverb. Meh.

Guitar Rig, on the other hand, gives you two different paths to tweaking the sound and splits the options in easy to navigate and highly intuitive ways. Using the matched cabs function you automatically get the standard cab for whatever amp you choose (i.e. a closed back 4x12 for the Marshall sim) a slider to blend between the sound of a condenser and a dynamic mic, and a slider for the amount of air to put between the mic and the cab. Switching to the cabinet options you get to choose the type of cabinet you are working with, the mic that you are using to record the cab, and the placement of that mic between 4 or 5 different options (on-axis, off-axis, edge, far, and back for open backed cabs), and dials for many other options. It's easier to navigate because the options are broken up into more manageable lists and it's easier to experiment with because you can change one option at a time and hear the difference that makes while chasing the ambience you are looking for. It's less like duplicating a real guitar amp sound and more like looking for a sweet spot that combines all the interactions of amps, mics, cabs, and rooms.

For the record, both the AmpliTube and the Pod Farm lie somewhere between these two on the cab and mic tweaking front. They are more intuitive than the ReValver and more streamlined than either ReValver or Guitar Rig. Guitar Rig is the standout here in my evaluation.

Virtual Guitar Amp Roundup (Pt. 2): Last Things First

2009-10-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

Rather than making you read through a review of each piece of software before I give you my final impression and a comparative evaluation, I'll start with my informal ranking and impressions of which ones I've ended up using and enjoying most and what kept me from matching speeds with the others or wanting to use them more. Once again (in case you are viewing the post on its own rather than on the page with the rest of the posts) I'm comparing Line 6 Pod Farm (1.11) with Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3 demo version (3.2.1), Peavey's ReValver Mk. III_Live demo, IK Multimedia's AmpliTube 2 and AmpliTube Metal demos, and Waves GTR3 Solo (3.5).

First a disclaimer -- I'm not putting full weight on my evaluation of either the two AmpliTubes or the GTR3. IK Multimedia gives you a fully functioning version of their software, but puts a 10 day limit on their software demos, after which they inject white noise into the signal on a regular basis to keep you from using the software for recording. Peavey does the same thing with white noise, but with no 10 day grace period, but AmpliTube injects the noise far more frequently and obtrusively than does Peavey, so while I've continued to explore the Peavey software for an extended time, I only got about 8 hours of time to mess with each of the AmpliTubes, and that was a while back. As for the GTR3 Solo software, it's a one year demo but it includes fewer models than the full version 13 of 24 stomp boxes, 10 of 25 amps, 10 of 23 cabinets, and a limited set of mic options. This is a lot of variety compared to a small modeling amp, but not a fair comparison to the full demo versions of the other software or my full but unexpanded version of Pod Farm. It gives you enough to play around with different styles of music, but not enough to get much range within that style. And, unlike the other software companies, Waves withholds some of their more basic models (i.e. plexi and rectifier) and gives you exclusive custom amps instead -- probably in hopes of getting you to upgrade to the full version to try the staples. This does, however, make it hard to compare the tone of models head-to-head if one is so inclined.

After bouncing back and forth between the different software for a few weeks (less the AmpliTubes) and trying to give each piece of software its due, I find that I'm coming back to Pod Farm and Guitar Rig 3 more often than the others. With ReValver getting the nod next and GTR3 just not inspiring me. I enjoyed the AmpliTube 2 demo a great deal while I had it and would probably rank it somewhere around the ReValver based on first impressions. The AmpliTube Metal sounded good, but only included 5 amp models and was by far the most limited in its versatility. Even as a metal head I found myself wanting a bit more range. It could handle classic, thrash, and metalcore/groove just fine, but was too limited to cover anything like the range of Opeth or more progressive sounds.

GTR 3 is a very polished sounding modeling suite. I see that a lot of producers like it, and I'm pretty sure this is because if you look at guitars as something to be added into a mix it gives you very finished sounding tracks. As a player, however, I always thought that the sounds were very processed and didn't have as much range as the others. It's hard to find anything that sounds ugly and dirty. I think I like my guitar with a few less manners. I also didn't like its interface as much. Again, this one seemed like it was built to look familiar to someone who uses DAWs all day rather than for a guitarist that also wants to be able to record or run a virtual rig into an amp miked into a PA.

The AmpliTubes sound great. It's a very detailed and dimensional sound and the way that they set up the cabinets and mics in the interface really helped me to get a better handle on how those things might work in real life. Changing these parameters really changes the sound and gives you a lot of variety even when working with one amp and one cab. The interface is easy to use and intuitive for someone who is used to working with real amps and stompboxes or for someone who has a basic grasp of signal chains. The effects also sound quite good. Like I said above, I thought the AmpliTube 2 was a really strong and versatile product and with more time it might have displaced one of the others.

ReValver strikes me as being a virtual amp modeler aimed at tube snobs that hate modeling amps. It has the dirtiest amp models of the batch, in a low tech, analog dirt sort of way. I've found clips of these models A/B'ed with their real world counterparts and doubt I could tell the difference in any meaningful way. They do sound different, but not in any way that makes the ReValver stand out as a digital simulation. If my biggest goal was to own something that sounded and responded as similar to a real amp as possible I'd get this software. And when the tweakability factor of being able to swap tubes and adjust components and speakers and cabs gets thrown into the mix I'd be all over this if I wanted to build or mod my own tube amps and wanted to narrow in on a sound ahead of time. What I don't like about it, however, is the way that it implements its mic sims and the way that everything ends up sounding like...well...a miked amp. ReValver makes complex and convincing sounds, but they seem less dimensional than the sounds that come out of Pod Farm, Guitar Rig, or the AmpliTube models. The sounds are great, but it would be just as much work to get a good recording sound out of ReValver as it would to get one from a real amp. I also never got the custom cabinet modeler to work without crashing the software.

What sold me on Pod Farm and Guitar Rig in the end was the way that each managed the compromises between being a modeler and being a piece of audio software. The models sound good and get the right feel for a wide range of music. The effects are great, moreso on Guitar Rig than Pod Farm, but then Guitar Rig is also a bit more expensive and Pod Farm can be expanded for not a lot of extra investment. Each gave up a little in realism to the ReValver and the AmpliTube, but they are also easier to use and give you a little more to play with in terms of exploring sounds. Guitar Rig also gives you some impressive options for adjusting virtual mic placement. Pod Farm, on the other hand, gives you a cheap and easy way into the USB world and still sounds great and packs in more versatility than any of the less expensive modeling amps. Trying out all the rest has convinced me that my $50 Line 6 investment got me an awful lot.

If I were going back now to make the investment (USB box and software) all over again I think I would end up choosing between a Line 6 Pod Studio UX1 and the Native Instruments Guitar Rig Kontrol Edition depending on my budget and plans. If I just wanted to play at home and record tracks without the need of channel switching or expression pedals I'd go with Line 6 at half the price of Guitar Rig. If I wanted to use the rig live or needed to switch sounds on the fly I'd definitely opt up for Guitar Rig.

Hope this helps.

Virtual Guitar Amp Roundup (Pt. 1): How I Learned To Love The USB.

2009-10-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

When I first purchased my Hagstrom Swede a little over a year ago I had no amp to go with it. I'd been playing off and on for years on a sweet little Fender acoustic I had picked up in the late '80s, but I had not ever taken the plunge and bought an electric, so I was coming at this decision as a complete beginner. I read everything I could find online about amps. There are some, but not many, reliable buyers guides that give you more than a lukewarm sales pitch, but most guides are either linked to a big seller (who is understandably reluctant to say anything negative about the products that they hope to sell you) or is a collection of amp facts combined with bong hit pseudo-science about why tube amps are louder than solid state amps and romantic mythology about what makes all those vintage amps out there so great. [I don't have space or time right now to talk about what makes one amp louder than another, and as for why so many vintage instruments and amps are so great, a big chunk of that is simply that most of the lemons have ended up in a junkyard somewhere. The ones that have been kept and taken care of are either awesome, collectors items, or forgotten attic treasures that may or may not be lemons.]

As I noted in the previous post, a lot of what I was looking for in an amp was variety. I know now what sorts of sounds I like as a player, but I didn't know that at the time, so I was looking for something with a lot of potential for sounds ranging from acoustic to extreme metal. I was also looking for something both inexpensive (< $300) and practical for a small apartment with lots of neighbors and lots of open windows.

The first thing to drop off my list was a small tube amp like the Fender SCXD. I love the sound of tubes as much as the next guitarist, but tubes are expensive and they wear out -- two things that most buyers guides fail to mention. It was also large enough that it would always need to be taken out and put away each time I wanted to break out the guitar. I wanted something smaller, more versatile, and lower maintenance. That left me pretty much a choice between a small modeling amp like a Line 6, Peavey, or Vox, or a direct box virtual setup.

I ended up opting for a Line 6 Toneport GX, which was going for $49 at the time and came with Gear Box software that promised to emulate a whole lot of classic amps, cabinets, stomp boxes and the like and also give me the option to mess with digital recording if I so desired. The only drawbacks to this plan were that I had to play near a computer and could not play live for or jam with friends.

Of course given how I sounded at the time this was probably a feature rather than a bug.

In the last year I have gotten very familiar with the Toneport and discovered that it could be used as a digital interface for any of the other major virtual amp sims. Wondering how Gear Box stacked up with the others I downloaded a free copy of Pod Farm from Line 6 and then went on to get demo copies of Native Instrument's Guitar Rig 3, Peavey's ReValver MkIII Live, IK Multimedia's AmpliTube 2 and AmpliTube Metal, and Waves GTR3 Solo. I've played around with each of these enough to get an idea of how they feel and sound and can give you my impressions of each.

Which I'll do, starting with the next post.

Prelude to a Review

2009-10-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

I'd like to share my thoughts about the virtual amp software that I've been trying out over the last month or so, but before doing that I think it might be useful to establish where I'm coming from in these reviews with a bit more solidity than the first couple posts might give you.

I hear a lot of people sneer at modeling software and the like with the underlying assumption that there is something artificial about digital simulations and that tubes are somehow more real or more honest.

I'm not even sure what either of these things mean.

I get that it's hard to sound good with fewer additions to the signal chain and that it takes a lot of talent, practice and technique to make an acoustic sound good. I also get that effects and processing and sequencing and the like can mask and augment a performance that sounds mediocre at best without all these enhancements (see pitch corrected vocals in pop/electronica). I'm sympathetic to these arguments in the sense that I'd readily agree that Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler are better guitar players than Edge, but that argument really sells Edge short as a musician because so much of what he gives to U2 has nothing to do with his skill as a player.

Bringing this back to the subject at hand...I don't really care whether or not modeling amps or virtual amps are "real" or even if they do a particularly good job of simulating the equipment that the software engineers claim to have emulated in designing their product. I've never used even a fraction of the equipment that these things emulate, and I don't think that really matters. What matters to me is whether the sounds that my guitar produces when I'm using one of these software packages inspires me to play better or differently in a way that reminds me why I love music in the first place. If using it and playing with it puts a smile on my face and keeps me coming back then I'm interested. If I find myself spending a lot of time tweaking it or stuck in a rut with no smile on my face, well...that's not so good.

If I were a gigging musician I'd be a lot more concerned with simplicity and live switching and reliability. If I were a recording musician I'd be a lot more concerned with how these things sound when they are buried in a mix with a lot of other elements. If I were one of those guys that argues about which players or what guitars or amps are better than the others I'd be spending all my time arguing about a bunch of old equipment I had never played in an effort to sound like an authority. And I'd probably own a cheap tube amp and talk about that old Fender/Marshall/Mesa/Vox that I wish I'd never sold.

That's not me.

I'm the guy that plays mostly badly, mostly in his bedroom, mostly through headphones. And I'm the guy that, every once in a while, changes the settings on my modeling software to something new and different and looks up an hour later and find that he's been chasing the sounds that were in his own head and not sounding like a deficient imitation of his favorite guitar players.

My reviews are going to be biased towards those moments.

Just so you know.

Scale Length, Physics, and 22 vs. 24 Frets -- Why Ed Roman is Full of Crap

2009-10-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

A while back while I was looking for my Hagstrom guitar I ended up on the Ed Roman site and poked around a bit to see what he had to say. His site definitely has a high entertainment value compared to many other high traffic guitar sites on the web because unlike most other sites that simply reproduce the marketing copy of the big name guitar makers and avoid much controversy, Ed Roman (or Ed Roman's ghost writer, if he uses one) aims to attract an audience that is suspicious of these marketing claims.

The gist of Ed Roman's arguments can be summed up in two sentences: You're a sucker if you buy a big name guitar from a corporate music store. Smart guitar players buy hand built American guitars from Ed Roman. Ed puts forth this argument wherever he can, weaving it through his ad copy and linking in and out of his webpage to lead surfers from the popular brands on his site to one of the guitars -- an Abstract, Baker, Pearlcaster, or Quicksilver -- for which Ed Roman is the primary distributor.

Ed also weaves together his own rants with "tech articles" in order to further his claims that his own guitars are far superior to any of the big name guitars that he disparages on his site. I was especially intrigued by one of his "technical papers" that featured prominently on his site where he criticized Paul Reed Smith's design for his 22 fret guitars with a 25 inch scale length. This article, which Ed characterizes as "[maybe] one of the best technical articles on this website."

Go ahead. Click and read. His hit counter will love you for it. Just be sure to come back and finish reading this once you are through there.

The quick summary of his article (or of John Johnson's explanation) is simple -- 24 fret guitars are better than 22 fret guitars because the pickup on a 22 fret guitar is right were the 24th fret would be, and this is a "dead node of the third overtone." This is a fatal design flaw because you can't change the laws of physics.

Assuming for a moment that this were true, I have yet to figure out what law of physics prevents someone making a 22 fret guitar from moving the pickup back to where it would be if there were two more frets. Just leave a little more space between the fretboard and the pickup. The difference is only a little more than 0.75" on a 25.5" scale guitar. How hard is that?

But that assumes that the basic claim is both a. true and b. relevant in the first place. Is it?

I put together a table that lists the fret placement for a 25.5" scale neck (found at ProjectGuitar.com and taken from Melvyn Hiscock's well respected book Make Your Own Electric Guitar) and expanded it out for our purposes here:

Fret	Dist. from Nut	Dist. From Bridge	1st Harm.	2nd Harm.	3rd Harm.	4th Harm.
		(Speaking Length)
0	0.000	25.500	12.750	8.500	6.375	5.100
1	1.431	24.069	12.035	8.023	6.017	4.814
2	2.782	22.718	11.359	7.573	5.680	4.544
3	4.057	21.443	10.722	7.148	5.361	4.289
4	5.261	20.239	10.120	6.746	5.060	4.048
5	6.397	19.103	9.552	6.368	4.776	3.821
6	7.469	18.031	9.016	6.010	4.508	3.606
7	8.481	17.019	8.510	5.673	4.255	3.404
8	9.436	16.064	8.032	5.355	4.016	3.213
9	10.338	15.162	7.581	5.054	3.791	3.032
10	11.189	14.311	7.156	4.770	3.578	2.862
11	11.992	13.508	6.754	4.503	3.377	2.702
12	12.750	12.750	6.375	4.250	3.188	2.550
13	13.466	12.034	6.017	4.011	3.009	2.407
14	14.141	11.359	5.680	3.786	2.840	2.272
15	14.779	10.721	5.361	3.574	2.680	2.144
16	15.380	10.120	5.060	3.373	2.530	2.024
17	15.948	9.552	4.776	3.184	2.388	1.910
18	16.484	9.016	4.508	3.005	2.254	1.803
19	16.990	8.510	4.255	2.837	2.128	1.702
20	17.468	8.032	4.016	2.677	2.008	1.606
21	17.919	7.581	3.791	2.527	1.895	1.516
22	18.344	7.156	3.578	2.385	1.789	1.431
23	18.746	6.754	3.377	2.251	1.689	1.351
24	19.125	6.375	3.188	2.125	1.594	1.275

The first two columns are from Hiscock's calculations. The third just reverses these calculations to measure the distance from the bridge rather than from the nut (the scale length minus the distance from the nut) which is important because this gives us the speaking length of the string when fretted at each fret. The remaining columns calculate the location of the nodes for the first four harmonic overtones of the string (at 0.50, 0.33, 0.25, and 0.20 the length of the string, respectively). These harmonic overtones give us the values for the intervals incorporated into the Western musical scale, but that is outside of our concern here. What we are interested in here is the correspondence between column 3 and row 1. According to my calculations here the node of the third harmonic overtone does indeed coincide with the location of the 24th fret -- both are 6.375" from the bridge -- so the basic claim that Ed Roman (and John Johnson) makes is true, but that does not mean that the claim is relevant, or that the conclusions that they draw from this fact are warranted. If we understand the rest of the table and what it is saying we will understand why Ed's point is far less relevant than it pretends to be.

The scale length of the guitar is important for the feel of how it plays and the distance between the frets, but if we are making claims about where to put the neck pickup we need to understand that these relationships only tell us anything absolute about the notes we play on the open strings or at the octaves on those strings because fretting a note changes the speaking length of the string and this changes the mathematical relations between them. If we were playing a harp where the speaking length of the string is fixed, we could optimize the pickup placement the way that the tech article on Ed Roman's website implies, but playing a guitar involves changing the speaking length of the string with every different note. Just look at the way the location of the overtone nodes change as you move down the neck. As the string length shortens so does the distance of the node from the bridge (the only really fixed node on the guitar.

For example, if we are playing an open A string on a standard E tuned guitar then a pickup where the 24th fret would be is at the node for the third overtone of that A note (6.375" from the bridge), but is not at the node for the third overtone of the B note played at the second fret on the same string (5.68" from the bridge). In fact, the node for the third harmonic of the B is closer to where the pickup on a 24 fret guitar would be. So by Ed Roman's line of reasoning you should never buy one of his guitars if you ever plan to play a B note and have it sound good.

Screw E minor. Who needs it anyway.

And this is just comparing single notes on the same string. Think about trying to optimize pickup placement for a jazz chord like a Gadd9 or a Dmin7 with an open string and a three fret spread somewhere up the neck where three of the four strings being played have very different speaking lengths.

So the 'design flaw' that the Ed Roman article points out only really holds true for notes played on the open strings (or at the octaves). The moment you fret any other note the mathematical relations all change. That's the other immutable law of physics that neither Ed Roman nor his physicist engineer friend John Johnson mention in the article.

Guitars are built to be fretted, and the shifting relationship between speaking lengths is what makes chords played on different strings sound so different from each other even when they are composed of the same notes. The only reason Ed wants you to buy that this is a design flaw is so that he can sell you his own guitar rather than one you can buy almost anywhere.

Frankly, if I wanted a semi-custom, American made guitar I'd go with Carvin long before Ed Roman.

Nothing Much To Begin

2009-10-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

I'm making this blog in order to have a place to post my thoughts on all matters guitar. I've been playing on and off for years -- pretty basic stuff, mostly -- and I pretty much suck as a guitarist. There are pre-teens that have made more progress in a year of playing than I have in all my years. That's okay with me. I only do this because I like playing. I get to make sounds not entirely unlike music, some of which are pretty enough to keep my partner from leaving the room when I play and have fun doing it with absolutely no bad consequences when I screw up. Not a bad gig, all in all.

That said, I love guitar just as much as the next, better player. And I love *my* guitars just as much as the next gearhead. And I love finding new sounds to make with them. I live in an apartment, so my primary setup is running my Hagstrom Swede through a Line 6 USB audio interface into an iMac running any one of a half-dozen virtual hardware sims, demo or full, to satisfy my jones for tones. I use these to play loudly and badly for about an hour every day.

I might write up a review of some of these things in the near future or put together my thoughts on strings, or finally get my thoughts out on why 95% of what I read on the internet about scale lengths and pickup placement and whatnot is a complete load of crap. We'll see.

After all, I have lots of other writing that I'm paid to do, and a guitar that I could be thrashing instead of writing stuff like this.