Loud, Bad Guitar

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 ban...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 b...

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...

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, ...