Loud, Bad Guitar

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...

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 ...

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-...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Rush got a brief flurry of attention a couple weeks back when they announced that they would be going out on tour again in 2015. The news quickly went from their press release to Rolling Stone, who immediately threw together a readership poll asking for the ten best Rush albums -- no doubt to get a bunch of people to give their contact infoso that Rolling Stone could spam their Facebook pages with ads. The irony of RS showing enthusiasm for Rush is, I'm sure, not lost on Rush. I did not answer that poll, but a friend on Facebook asked the same question on his own Facebook page, sparking a small discussion in which no one mentioned any album later than Signals and most gravitated towards either Hemispheres or the first three albums. (Confession: my response was Moving Pictures , but even that fairly populist response felt risky in the context of so many responses that trended even earlier than Hemispheres . There's a weirdly reactionary, curmudgeonly impulse that has woven...

Otherwise known as bass... Yeah, it's been a long time since I had anything to say here. Professional life has gotten more involved and with the dissertation done there's less need for distraction and blowing off steam with awful riffs. As a result, the Hagstrom has been somewhat neglected. Still, we went to see Amon Amarth and Enslaved a few weeks ago and I found myself in the mood to play again. Except that when I thought about the concert, I kept coming back to how I spent the whole time this time mesmerized by watching Grutle Kjellson and Ted Lundström playing. This seemed strange to me because Ice Dale is the quintessential guitar action hero and Johan and Olavi are themselves amazing players. Then I got to thinking about other shows we had gone to see. Opeth: I love Fredrik's playing and Mikael is the most entertaining host in metal, but during the actual songs I end up, more often than not, watching Mendez and his side-to-side headbanging as he jams out on that Ja...

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 somet...

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, ...

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 ...

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 an...

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...