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New Squier Vintage Modified '72 Telecaster Thinline

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A couple years back I bought a Squier Vintage Modified '72 Telecaster Thinline electric guitar from the good people at Sweetwater. It was the last they had on hand and I was lucky to jump on it because a few days after I purchased it, Fender announced that they were shutting down the Vintage Modified line because it had become too expensive to produce them in Indonesia, and that, additionally, they were discontinuing most of their ash bodied guitar models due to the scarcity of wood. I got in just under the wire to purchase Otis. Skip ahead if you don't care about my reasons for wanting one and what shaped my decision to purchase: Preamble - A Platform for Modification and an Education in Personal Preference At the time, I was looking for an electric guitar that I could use as a platform for modification; something that would let me try something that felt and sounded different from my Hagstrom Swede (Ember) to get a better idea of the qualities I like in a guitar, and help
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Buying - Or Building - An Electric Guitar: How Experience Matters

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If you are a beginning guitarist, then picking an electric guitar (or bass) to get started should be a pretty easy prospect. All you really have to do is pick something that comes close to fitting the type of style you will start off trying to play. Hopefully that's something of decent quality from an established brand so you don't end up spending playing time trying to get the instrument to work the way that it should. But even assuming it is not, and you spend a lot of time frustrated by quirks, flaws, and limitations, the most important thing about that first instrument is going to be playing it enough to get to where you know what you are doing and understand how you interact with the instrument. My Hagstrom Swede is a quality instrument, limited a bit by the quality of the original wiring and cheap pots that caused some hum issues and a nut that was cut in a way that made the G string bind a bit. Oh, and the bridge pickup had a coil demagnetize not too long after I got
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Resisting Common Wisdom - Electric Guitar Pickups

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I've recently come back to playing more electric guitar again after having mostly bounced back-and-forth between my Seagull acoustic and my Yamaha bass. I found a local luthier/guitar tech that was well recommended and had been in business forever to take a look at my Hagstrom Swede. I'd gotten it into my head to rewire it after the bridge pickup stopped working. I'd ripped out all the old wiring and bought new pots and caps, but then left the whole project untouched for a year for lack of workspace. The new wiring that The Guitar Doctor put in was flawless and completely knocked out the annoying ground hum that the crappy stock solder job had caused, but in the course of fixing it, Doc also discovered that one of the coils of the bridge pickup had demagnetized, which was the cause of the original problem. I love heavy metal (Enslaved, Opeth, Amorphis, etc.), so I had been spending a lot of time over the last couple years thinking about what pickup I might get if the non-
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Opeth - Sorceress Review

When it comes to legendary metal bands like Opeth, some fans don't so much become fans of the music, they fall in love with the band. And who could blame them? Back in 1999, Opeth was the stuff of dreams for any metalhead, walking around wearing a Morbid Angel shirt and growling so sultrily. But then between 2005 and 2008 Opeth started hanging out with more psychedelic friends and the relationship got strained. Opeth just wanted a bit more space to be its own thing rather than going to hang out at the latest Horrendous show and the relationship started to drift apart. And things got really strained in 2011 when Opeth started wearing brown corduroy bell bottoms around town. It was like Opeth had become another person, and seeing them around town just reminded everyone of how things used to be. It would be easier if Opeth were dead. At least then you could remember the old times without having to see them having fun and acting all weird and selfish. In 2016 it's time to buy tha
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Nut and Bridge Width: the Other Important Dimensions in Guitar Playing

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So a lot of people have appreciated my discussions of scale length and pickup placement. Lately, though, I've been thinking about the other dimension that affects playing -- width. There's not a lot of discussion of it where electric guitar players are concerned beyond the big hands = wide nut conversations, but there's more to it than that. I'll get into the details of it in a moment, but first a bit of context. A few months back, I bought a Cordoba Mini R guitar. It's a nylon string classical guitar with a 20" scale length, but close to a full width and string spacing classical nut (2") and bridge. (It's tuned up a fourth to keep the strings from getting floppy.) It's a very good little guitar and so much fun to play, and the extra width at the neck really helps to keep the guitar from feeling as cramped as it might if I were having to deal with the closeness of the frets from the shortened scale. (For comparison, put a capo at the fifth fret
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Warning Signs that a Music Review Is Going to Suck (Regardless of the Music Being Reviewed)

Okay, that tears it. I was reading reviews of Enslaved's latest release, some on the high traffic metal blogs, and I hit three reviews in a row that sucked. Not that said that the album sucked -- the actual reviews themselves sucked. I mean how fucking hard is it to write a decent review of a CD? And, no, I'm not complaining about the quality of the actual words and sentences. I fully expect that any metal review I read may have been written by an international metalhead for whom English is a less-than-primary language. Some of the best reviews I've read were written by people who have less than fluent English. Nope, I'm talking straight up bad reviewing -- the sort that you could have given a classic Black Sabbath album to review and s/he'd have spent the entire review finding a way to leave you with 0% useful information and left you with the impression that they had a) never listened to heavy metal b) never listened to Black Sabbath OR the Black Sabbath album th
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Bass Guitar Scale Length, String Gauge, and Tuning

Back in March I wrote about wanting to shift from guitar to bass. Since then I went ahead and made the jump, picking up a beautiful, used Yamaha bass at a ridiculously low price given the materials and workmanship. (For more on why I chose a used instrument, read my Eco Guitar Ponderings post from back in 2010). The choice of a used instrument was easy compared to the back-and-forth thinking that I did about whether to get a standard 34" scale bass or to opt instead for either a medium scale (32") or short scale (30") bass to give my aching wrists a break. I've written a few times before on this blog about guitar scale length and its relation to pickup placement and fret placement, tuning, and intonation . It's a topic that I'm pretty comfortable with in terms of the underlying physics and how they make the instrument sound and play. I've also gone through a couple of months in the past when I was unable to play much because of shoulder and wrist pa
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