Gitbox Culture

Scans from a 1961 musical instrument catalogue

2012-01-21T16:11:00.000-08:00

I recently found this catalogue among a lot of music books at an antiques mall in Freelton, Ontario. It dates from 1961 and features the Harmony, Supro, Stella, Martin, Gretsch and Fender lines of guitar, as well as Hohner harmonicas, Martin brass instruments, several other kinds and brands of instruments, accessories, and sheet music. I thought it might be fun to scan a few pages to share - I've been poring over it for a few days and I know that some of you enjoy this sort of thing as I do. Sorry about the blurring at the spine - I would have to take the staples out to get the pages completely flat on the scanner. Check out the 1960 price list at the bottom of the post!

The banjo and guitar in transition, Part 1: The banjo and industrial-age anxiety.

2012-01-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

This is Part 1 of the written version of a talk that I gave at the Canadian Antique Phonograph Society on January 8, 2012. I was asked to put together an hour-long presentation to a group primarily composed of 78 and cylinder record collectors and aficionados and home repairers of wind-up record players from the Edison Home cylinder machine to the sumptuous Victor Victrola "Credenza" model. I have been a member of CAPS since January of last year, and whenever I can, I attend their meetings at the Centennial College campus. I decided that this group might enjoy something on the banjo and guitar, subjects on which I have some knowledge and some playing ability. I am certainly no expert on guitars, banjos, or the jazz and dance bands of the 1920s and 1930s. Nonetheless I titled my presentation "The banjo and guitar in transition: the 1920s and 30s." My aim in this essay is to explain the process by which the banjo largely disappeared from the musical mainstream (i.e. jazz and dance bands) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Why was the banjo relegated thereafter to dixieland and bluegrass, two of the most conservative musical styles ever to arise? Specifically, what were the cultural forces underlying this change of fashion?

In the last eighty or so years, the guitar has gone on to dominate the popular music scenes of both the West and the many global instantiations of "pop" and especially "rock" music. Within the world of jazz, arguably the most 'prestigious' music of today, supplanting classical music as the music of choice, the guitar is preeminent, and guitarists like Pat Metheny, George Benson, JohnScofield, Bill Frisell are some of the biggest jazz stars of today. The banjo has an image problem.

How did this happen? The transition wasnot overnight or even dramatic. Many dance band banjoists doubled on guitar in the twenties and thirties, and chose their instrument to suit thedesired sound increasingly. A good example is Duke Ellington's longtime banjoist Freddie Guy, who started playing banjo with the group in 1924, but began to incorporate guitar on recordings in 1931. But slowly, surely, the tide beganto turn. After 1933, Freddie Guy never played the banjo on record again. When Django Reinhardt began to record his historic Hot Club of France sides in the early 1930s and Charlie Christian brought his electric guitar to a 1939 audition for Benny Goodman, the banjo all but disappeared from commercial dance bands, and was a rare sight in the great big bands of Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, and their ilk.

Versions of banjos appear in musicalcultures all over the world. At its essence, the banjo is a cut calabash gourd or ring with ananimal skin stretched over it, fitted with a neck and possessing at least one tightened string, with the skin serving as a vibrating medium and the gourd or body providing resonance. Because of their physical properties, banjo-type instruments create musical sounds that have a characteristic percussive attack and short decay.

Among native Africans, the instrument was known as the banza, or banjar. It survived in American slave culture largely because it escaped the ban on drums that had decimated the instrument stock of West African musical culture in the New World.

This instrument, whose name was standardized to 'banjo' by the early 19th century, was most often arawhide covered gourd with a simple fretless neck and a short dronestring accompanied by one or more longer melody strings. Fourstrings were standard until 1830 or so, and then five thereafter. This five-string banjo was primarily played by black musiciansuntil the 1830s, when craze for blackface minstrel shows inurban centers brought the banjo to the leisure activities of the growing white middle class. Along with the bones, the banjo was the iconic musical instrument of the blackface minstrel show. Each touring show left a trail of enthusiastic amateurs who longed to master the familiar, yet somehow exotic instrument. The music they played were largely simple accompaniment patterns using the thumb and index fingernail of the strumming hand, in a style roughly equivalent to the "clawhammer" or "frailing" old-time banjo style known today.

This is the best minstrel banjo clip that I could find on YouTube. Many of the YouTube videos labelled as minstrel banjo are in fact "classical" banjo pieces, taken from 1855 and 1865 banjo tutors and played on fretless minstrel-type banjos.

Around the middle of the 19th century, banjos began to be professionallymanufactured. At first these makers were individual artisans and later, companies like A.C.Fairbanks and S.S. Stewart, who made banjos for Sears Roebuck.

The banjo was a most adaptable instrument for general use. It was loud, percussive fordancing, relatively easy to play, and portable. By the time banjo tournaments were reported in themid 1800s, the banjo was a genuine amateur musical phenomenon. The popularity of the minstrel show was a cultural moment not unlike the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan show; in both cases, a generation looked on and said "I can do that."

By the 1870s the banjo had acquired frets, like aguitar. This made the banjo even easier to play. The instrument was strung with gut strings throughout the 19th century, with steel strings coming into vogue around the turn of the 20th century.

Manufacturers like S.S. Stewart inPhiladelphia looked with envy at the guitar companies, who werebenefitting from a 'parlour guitar' craze among middle-class whiteladies. The shareholders in the fortunes of the banjo industry wanted to associate the banjo withupscale domestic life, not the minstrel stage or the saloon. The most efficient way to make that connection withthe public was by associating the banjo with classical music, themusic of the cultural elite.

The association of the banjo with classical repertoire, and the resulting fashion for banjo playing among upward-mobile ladies of genteel manners would drive up the demand forhigh-end banjos with sumptuous decoration, like this Majestic banjo.

The five Dobson brothers, banjoistsall, popularized the banjo among New York society women in the 1860s, and by the 1880s classical banjo was a popular culture phenomenon. Touring virtuosi gave concerts and salon performances, a formal banjo technique based on classical fingerstyle guitar was developed and expounded in tutor books like Frank Converse's A New And Complete Method For Banjo Without A Master (1865). Banjo clubs joined mandolin and guitar clubs as a preferred social activity among polite society.

Even as the banjo was gaining respectability much to the delight of the banjo manufacturing and music publishing industry, the instrument was still associated with a kindof anti-modernism. This nostalgic aspect resonated with the doubts thatmany people had about the overall good of progress. The late 19th and early 20th century was a time of mechanization, factories, steam power,and railroads. Little farming towns were turning into industrial cities, sometimes virtually overnight.
Formerly agrarian people were leaving the southern plantations in droves for northern factory work and prosperity. A longing for home, sweet home began to be felt in songs and stories of the era. Pastoral visions of pre-modern life - simple, uncomplicated and stable, soothed fears of progress and change. The banjo, with its acknowledged black origins, served as a useful symbol of musicalprimitivism and a vehicle for nostalgia. Even the stuffiest classical concert banjoist knew to encore with "Massa's In De Cold, Cold Ground."

Around the turn of the century, banjo went in twodirections, along with American music at large. Classical music continued to be played on the instrument, though the amateur enthusiasm for banjo had waned; otherwise, the banjo was employed in the service of "characteristic" music, a euphemism for "black" musical forms - cakewalks,minstrel music, ragtime and coon songs.

Two banjoists best represented the 'characteristic' banjo repertoire on early recordings: Vess L. Ossman and Fred Van Eps.

Vess L. Ossman was born Sylvester Louis Ossman in Hudson, New York in 1868. He played five-string banjo in classical (guitar)style, with gut strings. He made his first recordings for the Edison company on brown wax cylinder in 1893. Ossman was not the first banjoist to record. According to Allen Koenigsberg's Edison Cylinder discography, Will Lyle made 50 banjo records oninvitation on Sept 4, 1889. These cylinders are not known to exist.
Ossman was one of the most recorded musicians ofhis day until about 1910, when Fred Van Eps superseded him. He recorded cylinders for the North American Phonograph Company, nearly 70 discs for Berliner, cylinders for Bettini in 1898 and 1900, and 12 7-inch Zonophone discs at the turnof the century. Ossman began his long association with Victoron July 19, 1900. On that day he recorded several songs for EldridgeJohnson's Consolidated Talking Machine Company.
He was internationally famous by the early 1900s, undertaking two concert tours of England in 1900 and 1903. In later years, he moved beyond solo and accompanimentwork to include duets, trios, banjo orchestra. One of his most-recorded aggregation was the Ossman-Dudley Trio, featuring Audley Dudley onmandolin and a harp-guitar player. He died in 1923.

Fred Van Eps was born in Somerville, New Jersey. He taught himself to play by listeningrepeatedly to Vess Ossman on brown wax cylinders, and as such was among the first generation ofmusicians to learn from recordings rather than in-person from other players. As a teenager, he bought an Edison Type M cylinderphonograph for $100 but paid it off the next week by attaching 14 eartubes and charging 5 cents a song to friends. Van Eps also recorded his own cylinders on the Edison machine and usedthem as demos to get hired by Edison in 1897.
Van Eps' early recordings in the 1890s wereoften remakes of Ossman arrangements, but he enjoyed strong sales, eventually touring with the Eight Victor RecordMakers from 1917 to 1922. Capitalizing on his fame, he formed a company with studio singer Henry Burr tomarket the banjos that Van Eps designed. His son, George Van Eps, became awell-known jazz guitarist who played with Benny Goodman, Ray Noble,Red Norvo and others. Fred Van Eps died in 1960.

Around the turn of the century, astechnical improvements in banjo making allowed for the use of steelstrings, the sound of the banjo became even louder and brighter than before. Steel strings also allowed use of a plectrum, or pick. The four-string plectrum banjo was similar to a five string with the short drone string removed, while the tenor banjo, also with four strings, had a shorter neck, a higher overall pitch, and the tuning scheme of a mandolin or violin. This made is easy for mandolin players, of which there were many, to doubleon banjo. The tenor banjo, sometimes called the 'tango banjo' because of its use in the momentarilypopular tango bands, also began to be used in the increasingly 'hot' and ragtime-influenced dance bands of the 1910s and 20s.

With high acoustic volume and cutting power, the banjo became the standard chord/rhythm instrument of jazz bands, which in their early days were oriented towards dance music of a wilder sort. The banjo found good use in the hands of Bud Scott with KingOliver's Creole Jazz Band, Clarence Holiday with Fletcher Henderson and Mike Pingatore with Paul Whiteman's orchestra. The banjo had found a place in the mainstream of popular music by the early 1920s.

Gibson factories in Memphis and Nashville raided

2011-08-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.wmctv.com/story/15323207/authorities-raid-gibson-guitar-factory-in-downtown-memphis

Crazy - the proud Gibson company was raided today under suspicion of illegal importation of wood. Pretty sad if it's true.
Gibson responds: http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/News/gibson-0825-2011/

String bending and intonation

2011-07-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

A couple of hours later, my fingers are still burning after working on this exercise for about 20 minutes. While I've preached the importance of in-tune string bending and regular bending practice to students, I've always favoured jazz and classical-style playing in my own practice regimen, such as it is. At a recent rock/blues trio gig I was disappointed at my intonation while executing whole-step bends. Thus my renewed quest to improve this aspect of my playing.

The author of the exercise claims that out-of-tune bending is a dead giveaway that a player is inexperienced. I admit that I judge other guitarists on the intonation of their bends, along with vibrato control and control of the portamento rate. I'm lapsing into synth talk here - in another life I owned a Yamaha DX7 and actually made a serious effort to learn how to program it. I never really succeeded in being able to program the thing but I did learn a lot about sound in the process. For example, a sliding pitch that moves smoothly from one point to another is called portamento. This term is often confused with glissando, which a quick movement through a portion of the chromatic scale. It's the difference between bending a string and sliding along the frets from point to point. I'd like to find or create another bending exercise that trains in bending at different, controllable time durations. I'd like to be able to choose different rates for expressive purposes the way someone like Eric Clapton does and did. After a little bit of YouTube searching here's a video that touches on bend durations. He gets into it at around the 10:30 mark, but it's really just more of an encourage to be aware that you can use different durations for different effects. He doesn't provide any exercises or even any attempt at classification, as he does earlier in the video for bend types.

Here's a less demanding version of the exercise by Justin Sandercoe. The search results for "guitar string bending lesson" indicate that this is a popular topic. If you have a favourite video on this topic, please let me know and I'll post it.

Alternating thumb - a country/blues crossover.

2011-05-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Practicing with fingerpicks and a thumbpick today, going through some books of folk and blues songs. Lately I've been consumed with writing songs for the upcoming Fraser Daley CD, and delving into some old-time guitar styles for ideas. I was playing along with this earlier:

I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the harmonica imitation, but a great record nonetheless. I love when country musicians play blues, and vice versa. Sam McGee (1894-1975) was an old-time country musician from Franklin, Tennessee. His style has been (rather anachronistically) called "Travis picking" after Merle Travis. But it's clearly much older than Travis, and seems to have been adapted to folk purposes from 19th century parlor guitar styles.

Parlor guitar wasn't far from 'classical' banjo of the late 19th century.

And all of this is not too far from prototypical blues guitar.

"One question....why a Squier?"

2011-01-29T08:56:00.000-08:00

Dedicated GC readers may remember my tribulations a few months back regarding my substandard Fender Highway One Strat, bought in Strat-desperation for a Pink Floyd cover gig, with regret slowly creeping up thereafter.
It's gone.
I traded it down to a Squier Classic Vibe Strat, the 50s version. Looks like this and sells for $330 CDN plus tax at Canada's own version of Guitar Center, Long and McQuade.

It was a bit of a journey to get here, and for now I'm very happy with this guitar. It wasn't long ago that I wouldn't even deign to touch a Chinese-made guitar; there was no point. Dull, weak tone, out-of-tune and cheap-feeling necks and a generally plastic feel top the list of reasons 'why not.' Yet here I am, a cheap Chinese Strat my main rock guitar and me proudly testifying on its behalf when asked the question at the top of this post.
It started with seeing Kevin Breit (see my email interview with Kevin here) playing one at the Orbit Room in Toronto and him commenting on its surprising excellence. From there it was to the online forums and finally to my local big box guitar dealer, where only the 60s version was to be found. Coveting a maple board Strat, I special-ordered the 50s guitar, something I've never done before. When it arrived it was perfectly set up, with an expensive-feeling neck and a nice clear Strat-y tone. I've heard and played better, certainly, but there's something psychologically gratifying for me about my guitar being easily replaceable; there's also something cool about not paying $4000 for what was designed to be the Model T of electric guitars, a populist plank. There's something just wrong about the idea of the Custom Shop for me, and relicing? I just can't get with it. So I strike a blow for the common man, and for offshore CNC machines, with my Squier scepter boldly in hand.
Nice two-colour sunburst, too.

Earning my "Badge"

2011-01-19T07:53:00.000-08:00

Working today on some of Eric Clapton's music. I was only a casual Clapton fan up to about six months ago, when I bought the Complete Clapton set. I've been working out of the excellent transcriptions in the accompanying book Complete Clapton (Guitar Recorded Versions) from Hal Leonard. I've found Hal Leonard's guitar stuff to be of consistently high quality. Unfortunately some of the eighties songs are reprints of transcriptions done back then, and they're not as nice. I guess that comes with the territory when you're dealing with a career retrospective.
I remember seeing published note-for-note Clapton transcriptions quite early in that 'movement,' probably the book (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3) that matched the boxed set. Incidentally, that boxed set, released in 1990, was one of the first really successful CD boxed sets as I remember.
So work continues on "Badge." I'll keep you posted.

Experience Hendrix tour - Sony Centre, Toronto, Oct. 28, 2010 Part 3

2010-11-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

Better late than never, here's the final bit of my sort-of review of the Experience Hendrix show last week in Toronto. After Kenny Wayne Shepherd had kind of torn up the house with full-on blasting and swagger, the duo of David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas seemed to be something of a low-key letdown. But as I settled into their short set, I appreciated the burnished tones, effortless interplay and classy licks of these two Los Lobos veterans. After running through "Can You See Me" and "Little Wing" Hidalgo and Rosas were joined by the Slide Brothers and Robert Randolph. Rob Quail worried aloud that three steel guitars would sound like a swarm of mosquitos, and he was not far wrong, despite the obvious talent of the musicians. A total of five guitars jamming on "Them Changes"? Not for the weak of heart.

The steel players stayed on stage to be joined by Living Colour for "Purple Haze," and then Steve Vai took the stage for his mini-set, which I found quite enjoyable despite his shredder tone and quirky phrasing. His sense of humour came through strongly on "Midnight" (from War Heroes), "May This Be Love," "Love or Confusion" and "Foxy Lady." The final song featured Billy Cox on lead vocals; he announced "Red House" as Jimi's favourite song, and admirably finished the night with Brad Whitford and Mato Nanji. There was no encore.

I was pretty impressed with the concert overall; it was certainly a great value for the money - we paid just over $100 per ticket, and that was the top price. Not bad for no less than thirteen fine lead guitarists playing some of the greatest songs of Jimi Hendrix's career and paying tribute to his singular guitar style.

Experience Hendrix tour - Sony Centre, Toronto, Oct. 28, 2010 Part 2

2010-10-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

Next out was former teenage blues phenom Jonny Lang, now 27. His was one of only two Teles seen that night - almost all of the guitars played were Strats. No one sported a Flying V, and in fact Gibsons were completely absent from the show; no wonder, since the tour is sponsored in part by Fender. Lang has a high-intensity style both on the guitar and vocally - he evinced a grittiness in the latter that was reminiscent of a young Steve Winwood. His very musical solos were largely executed with his right-hand thumb, a la Wes Montgomery.

Joining Lang, and looking three times as old, was the Aerosmith rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford. Whitford has played second banana to Joe Perry for at least two dogs' ages and judging by his performance this night, he has been hiding a solid blues-rock virtuosity. I've always loved the playing of "old guys" the best, especially when it comes to root-based music like blues and country. Brad Whitford had the assured style and tone that only comes from a few thousand one-nighters.

Lang and Whitford traded off on "Fire" and "The Wind Cries Mary," then were joined by Mato Nanji of Indigenous for "Spanish Castle Magic". Indigenous is a Native blues-rock band of some renown I gather, although I have not heard of them. I mentioned Nanji's brutal stage volume in the last post, and his relative inexperience was showing alongside Whitford, especially.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd and singer Noah Hunt were next out, and KWS evinced all of the charisma that Eric Johnson lacked. His blues-rock guitar style lies at the edge of hard rock, and his frequent cock-rock posing harkened back to a better time for guitarists of that stripe. Noah Hunt was hilariously pretentious, with a stentorian vocal style and dramatic gestures that would be masterfully parodied by a Will Ferrell or even a Jimmy Fallon. Kenny and Noah performed "Come On," "Voodoo Child" and "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)". I'm not sure that I can even hear "Slight Return" anymore - it's been run into the ground by too many bar bands. But the slow, mysterious "Voodoo Child" was a highlight. Rob Quail noted with hilarity that I yawned during KWS's set, and I don't doubt it, though I must say that I respect his commitment to a somewhat discredited performing approach.

Part 3 soon to come.

Experience Hendrix tour - Sony Centre, Toronto, Oct. 28, 2010

2010-10-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

I don't go to a lot of concerts these days - I work most evenings and it's hard to justify taking one of my rare nights off to spend $100+ on a show. But when I saw this concert advertised I was so impressed by the lineup that I decided to round up a couple of guitar freak friends and check it out.
The Sony Centre, formerly the Hummingbird Centre, formerly the O'Keefe Centre, is an acoustically excellent concert hall in downtown Toronto. Janie Hendrix, Jimi's half-sister and the administrator of the Hendrix estate, started the evening with a short speech, which we missed because we were in line to get beers. I regaled my friends, Rob Quail and John Davis, with stories of Experience Hendrix merchandising gaffes of the past, such as the Jimi Hendrix golf balls and the Jimi Hendrix red wine (one of the substances that killed Jimi in 1970).
We settled into our seats in the centre of the orchestra section, midway between the soundboard and the stage in the middle of Ernie Isley's three-song set. He was backed by Billy Cox (Band of Gypsys, Jimi Hendrix Experience) and Chris Layton (Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble). Isley played some Hendrix-like guitar and told a quick story about Jimi staying at his house in the early sixties when he was an Isley Brothers sideman. Isley played "Stone Free" and "Message To Love" with a nice touch but a ratty tone to my ears.
I believe that Living Colour was next - their second lineup with Doug Wimbish on bass. They did very good versions of "Power of Soul" and "Crosstown Traffic" - some of the best-rehearsed music of the evening. It was nice to see black musicians well represented in this show; it could easily have gone the other way, but curator John McDermott should be commended for a well-balanced and interesting lineup. Living Colour was not much changed from their late-80s heyday, though Corey Glover has put on a few pounds and his plaid sweater and cap ensemble brought the "Rerun" character from the 70s series "What's Happening" to mind for me. Vernon Reid played his trademark flurries of fast notes in every solo; Rob Quail commented something to the effect that when it comes to phrasing, VR just doesn't. It's a love-or-hate thing. I happen to enjoy what he does - there's a modernism to his playing that appeals to me.
Eric Johnson, the Texas guitar god, performed "House Burning Down," "Drifting," "Burning of the Midnight Lamp," and "Are You Experienced?" very faithfully in terms of arrangement and tones. When he let loose on his trademark wide-interval solos, the crowd of mostly male, ponytailed and mulleted baby boomers shouted their approval, along with entreaties for him to "turn it up." Johnson's guitar was not as audible as it could be; the sound crew had a hard time balancing the various guitar rigs on stage at times. With some of the players, the amps were so loud on stage so as to obviate the need for the PA altogether, as was the case with Mato Nanji from Indigenous, a subpar player whose Marshall cabinet was hurting our ears right off the stage. In spite of his stiff image and hard-to-hear guitar, Eric Johnson made an excellent impression with his impeccable execution and musicianship. I especially appreciated his astounding reproduction of the backwards solo in "Are You Experienced?"

part 2 to come...

Walking in Toronto Part 2: More guitar iconography.

2010-09-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

Part of the window display for a condo.


College Street lamppost

Queen Video, College Street. Nice Rickenbacker 4001 bass.

Amp-themed coffee cup. Gift shop, College Street


Magazine store, College Street


Lamppost, College Street

There's a guitar in there, I swear! Soundscapes display window.


Another poster in the window of Soundscapes.

Soundscapes window.

Soundscapes ukelele-themed window display, advertising the documentary film The Mighty Uke.

Deconstructing Luther Perkins

2010-09-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

Learning some Luther Perkins licks today for a gig. Luther was Johnny Cash's guitarist from 1955 to Luther's death in 1968. He's a good example of a musician who noticeably develops and advances over the course of his career. One Johnny Counterfit writes on one of his webpages about Luther:

In conversations with Luther’s widow, Margie, I discover Luther had a never-ending desire to improve his guitar talents, including adding more intricate dimensions within his own creation.

His lead licks on early Cash sides like "Cry Cry Cry" (1956) were rudimentary but effective. By the time of the recording of At Folsom Prison in 1968, Luther was a fluid country player. He died tragically that year in a house fire at the age of 40.

Of particular interest for me at the moment are the lead guitar parts for "Cry Cry Cry" and "Get Rhythm". They're mostly boogie patterns, with occasional counter-intuitive moments. There's something stoic about Luther's early licks on these songs. That quality meshes well with Cash's doomy voice and stentorian songs.

Walking in Toronto: Guitar Iconography

2010-09-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I resolved to take a picture of every image of a guitar that I saw on my walk through downtown Toronto. I guess you could say that I was engaging in some casual fieldwork on guitar culture. The interesting thing for me is the variety of ways that images of guitars are used to represent different ideas.

From the Metro free paper - a Royal Bank ad for student loans - the guitar is a luxury item, as opposed to the more necessary schoolbooks

The window display at Remenyi Music, a store catering to Royal Conservatory of Music and University of Toronto music students. The electric bass is nestled among more traditionally 'legit' instruments.

From the same window, an ad for the upscale Lowden acoustic guitars.

Shredding for change at Bloor and Yonge.

Pointy guitars have become a retro rock and roll symbol, suitable for belt buckles.

Window display at the weird, dusty music store on Yonge.

Away for a month and still hunting for a small amp.

2010-09-14T22:39:00.000-07:00

It's been about a month since my last post and it's not really laziness that prompted this extended break from the bloggin'. In the time since I last posted, I played a whack of gigs, exchanged my new Marshall Class 5 (not enough volume to be useful in a lot of gigging situations) for a Traynor YCM-20 (which I'm about to return as well - the reverb feeds back on the lead channel and the amp is generally uninspiring), seen Mike Stern and Bill Frisell live in clubs and have generally had my hands full with a variety of time-consuming musical projects.
Mike Stern was especially inspiring. I had never seen him play before, but I have been aware of him since the 80s, when he played in one of Miles Davis' late bands. My impression is that he just plays what he wants and doesn't worry too much about putting a label on what he does, or fitting in to current fashions. He's really a classic fusion player, with a constant outpouring of ideas, beautiful phrasing, and a quite nice tone from a Yamaha Pacifica, a stereo solid-state amp setup including a Pearce amp (no longer available but I coveted one at the Guitar Clinic in Hamilton back in the day) and an old Yamaha amp that I can't identify, along with the 'doubling' effect on the old Yamaha SPX-90 digital effects unit (which comes out sounding a lot like chorus).
That Mike Stern was able to coax such lovely sounds out of solid-state gear has got me re-evaluating my fealty to tube amps. I just don't seem to be able to find a usable small tube amp in the price range that I'm working in. I'm looking at the ZT Club 12, which is a digital amp that weighs 22 pounds and puts out 200 watts. My good friend and musical partner Alec Fraser just switched to digital for his bass amp, and I have to say that he is achieving a convincing SVT tone with the tiniest of high-powered amp heads. I'll probably do the exchange tomorrow and report back.
Oh, and I still have my Strat. Long story involving Eric Clapton. Another time.

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" - unpacking a classic guitar solo

2010-08-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

If there is a piece of music that captivated me this week, it was Eric Clapton's solo in the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." I've been working on it again, and have found it difficult to master in its simplicity because of its unusual shifts and bends. It's only sixteen bars long, played over the verse chords and leading into a bridge in the parallel major key, A major. Here's a tab of it, transcribed by a man known only as Clark.

   (E)
e------------------------------------------|
B--------------------------13-b14--15-b17--|
G--(14)b17r14---12h14-b17------------------| 
D------------------------------------------| 
A------------------------------------------|

E------------------------------------------|

Clapton's opening gambit focuses on an unusual three fret bend from A to C, a sound already established in earlier fills. This kind of ambitious bending was not at all common in rock in

1968, though Buddy Guy and Albert King were known for wide bends, albeit less psychedelic.Clapton's secret weapon was light-gauge strings - Ernie Ball Super Slinkys I believe.

   (Am)            (Am7)                (D2)   (F)
e------------------------------------------------------------------------|
B--13--------------------------------------------------------------------|
G------14~~~--------12h14-b17-14b17~~~----------12h14-b17-14b17~~~-------|
D------------------------------------------------------------------------|
A------------------------------------------------------------------------|
E------------------------------------------------------------------------|


   (Am) (G)                          (D)                  (E)  
e-----------------------------------------15------------------>
B-------------------15-b17r15p13-15b17-------b17-r15--15--13-->
G--------12h14-b17-------------------------------------------->
D------------------------------------------------------------->
A------------------------------------------------------------->
E------------------------------------------------------------->
  
                                >--(15)b17--r---15b17--b17--|
                                >---------------------------|
                                >---------------------------|

                                >---------------------------|
                                >---------------------------|
                                >---------------------------|

Here Clapton breaks out of the A-C bend motif to gradually shift positions, climaxing

early on the high A, bent up from G.

   (Am)           (Am7)                 (D2)                         (F)
e----(15)b17r15----b17---------------15-------------------15--------------|
B-------------------------17--15b17------b17r15--13h15b17-----b17r15--13--|
G-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
D-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
A-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
E-------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Backpedaling from this peak, he works in the 13th position with a series of permutations between C and G, the third and seventh of the A minor tonality.


   (Am)                                     (G)
e------------------------------------------------------------------>
B------------------------------------------------------------------>
G--(14)b17r14p12h14-b17--14b17---------12-------------------------->
D--------------------------------12h14----14--12p10-12---10h12-10-->
A------------------------------------------------------------------>
E------------------------------------------------------------------>

After a brief return to the A-C 'overbend', a series of hammered and slid note pairs returns the

line to the highest pitch.


     (C)                         (E)
  >------------------------------10h12--12/15--15-b17--b17r15--b17--|
  >----------------10h13--13/15-------------------------------------|
  >---------12h14---------------------------------------------------|
  >--12h14----------------------------------------------------------|
  >-----------------------------------------------------------------|

I learned this solo seven years ago for a Beatles show, but needed some serious

rehabilitation when remembering it during my practice yesterday. The slides and hammers at

the end in particular eluded me for a while - they're not in the common blues-rock lead guitar

inventory.

In the meantime, at one memorable gig around 2006 at the old Healey's club on Bathurst, Jeff Healey, Rob Phillips and I all wailed this solo in unison. A great night.

Check out the new header!

2010-08-08T19:51:00.000-07:00

I have a sweet new header courtesy of cousin Stephen. I guess he couldn't stand to look at my plain-jane template for one minute longer.

Thanks Stephen!

Marshall Class 5: my new amp.

2010-08-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

I bought a new amp yesterday.

I've been using an early Fender Pro Junior for several years, lately with a Hughes and Kettner Red Box between the speaker and the amp so that I can run a signal out to a small powered PA speaker for more headroom on stage. This setup has worked quite well for me, since the Junior doesn't really have the cut with a drummer on stage. At the same time it's too loud for certain applications where I want a bit of breakup.

But all of that is in the past, because I stumbled on the Class 5 yesterday. The Pro Junior has been giving me a lot of trouble, necessitating expensive repairs every six months or so for the last two years. First the input jack broke (it was plastic), then the tube sockets separated from the circuit board, then the tube sockets stopped engaging the power tubes. I finally decided after the latest mysterious crackling noise to retire it and get a new one, thinking that it was my only option.

When I saw the Class 5 in a local used guitar store, I thought that it must be some sort of hybrid solid-state Marshall and I wasn't really interested. But the price was right and when I realized that it was a Class A all-tube amp, I gave it a run with my Tele, which I had brought with me. I couldn't believe how good the amp sounded. I can't recall playing through an amp that was so responsive to the volume knob on the guitar. It's sweet and nasty at the same time. I really love a clear, transparent overdriven tone (like an AC30) and the Class 5 has that, but it also has an aliveness that reminded me somewhat of Neil Young's tweed Princeton tone.

At another store later in the day, I did a side-by-side comparison with a Pro Junior and the Vox 4 watt amp. There was really no comparison in tone, though the Pro Junior is certainly louder. It was not a pleasant loud, but it was loud, and I wonder if the Class 5 will cut through drums enough for me to use it on stage without the Red Box and the PA speaker. I certainly hope so, but I'm prepared to beef it up if necessary. The Marshall's tone is just so musical and I can't wait to put it through its paces in a variety of live situations. I'm bringing it to a 50s rock and roll gig today - I'll report back.

This is my first Marshall - I've owned a succession of Fender amps - and I have to say that I am very impressed with the design, tone and build quality of this amp. It's also light as a feather and has badass white piping and silver grille cloth.

I am a solder monkey.

2010-08-02T06:40:00.000-07:00

We did it! Greg Wyard and I rewired my Strat the other day, returning to its original three single coil pickups. There was a surprising amount of unsoldering and soldering between the pickups, switch, pots and ground, but success was achieved. We shared the soldering duties. We even did a little modification, changing the circuit to a master volume and master tone, rather than the usual configuration which provides tone controls to the neck and middle pickups but not the bridge pickup. As I'm still unable to read a schematic, we relied on the very clear wiring diagrams on the Seymour Duncan site, which nonetheless omitted the ground wiring.

We did the job without understanding much about why a given wire went to a given terminal and so on, so I'm on a mission to clear away my ignorance by reading Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects for Musicians, which explains the theory behind basic electronics and provides directions for a number of projects, mostly of the stompbox variety. One item on the agenda for me is learning how to read schematics. Then, if all goes well, I'm gonna build something! I admit that I'm proud to have achieved this little rewiring project, and excited to build on this humble success.

RIP Ben Keith

2010-07-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

Ben Keith, a steel player known for his long association with Neil Young, has died of a heart attack at 73. Aside from his work on twelve Young albums and several tours, he was a Nashville fixture who played on innumerable sessions, including Patsy Cline's "I Fall To Pieces." Keith had a voice on steel that I would describe as minimalistic, almost lonely. I never detected a showboat approach in his playing, which probably appealed to Neil. I saw him play live in 2006 on the CSNY "Freedom Of Speech" tour. A great loss to be sure.

Fire up the soldering iron.

2010-07-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

Engaging in some good old-fashioned DIY this week. With a bee in my bonnet to sort out my black Strat, I decided that I'm sick of paying surly techs at music stores to change pickups and otherwise rewire my guitars, and that I, a fairly capable man, should be able to do this work myself.

In bygone days I tried to do a bit of soldering but really had no idea what I was doing. But now there is YouTube. With a bit of poking around I found some videos on basic soldering and pickup how-tos from Seymour Duncan and Jason Lollar. Readable wiring diagrams were a little hard to find but I finally found a clear diagram on Seymour's site. His site is in fact a valuable font of information, in contrast to the DiMarzio site, which had basically nothing but marketing.

I have a date with a soldering iron at Greg Wyard's place on Friday afternoon - I'm going to change back from the single-single-double Rio Grande set to the original single-single-single set. I never could get with the Rio Grandes, and I'm not sure why. Oh, and I'm going to do a little modification, disabling the second tone pot to just have master volume and master tone. I'll tell you all about it when the deed is done.

Blind Lemon Jefferson, guitar symphonist

2010-07-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

I've been working on Blind Lemon Jefferson's "One Dime Blues." It is a solo guitar/vocal performance recorded in Texas in 1927.

For quite a few years I've had a Stefan Grossman transcription book called Texas Blues, with tunes by Jefferson, Mance Lipscomb, Little Hat Jones and others. I learned out tune out of it when I was a teenager, "Bad Luck Blues" which has become transmogrified over the years.

Lately I've been focusing on Blind Lemon Jefferson's music a bit - he's one of my favorite blues performers. His voice is refined, his lyrics are droll, and his guitar playing is top-notch fingerstyle ragtime blues.

After working on the tune for a while, I took a look at versions on YouTube while my right-hand fingertips recovered. There is this excellent interpretation by "Freddie 12 String":

Damn close to note-for-note on the guitar. The vocal less so, unfortunately. But still nice to listen to and great for cribbing fingerings. Etta Baker's modern version, seemingly as famous as the original on the web, is a lovely gloss on the Blind Lemon arrangement, though it lacks the inventiveness of Lemon's performance - his weird little bass lines under the vocal, the use of an alternating root-seventh during the first solo. These little touches, and the almost orchestral use of a single downmarket acoustic guitar, really make Blind Lemon Jefferson's music worth checking out, in my opinion.

Rhythm guitar: the spackle of music?

2010-07-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

In situations where two guitarists are in a band or on a pickup gig, it is often the case that one player is the designated "lead guitarist" and the other is the "rhythm guitarist." Much of the time, the rhythm guitarist is relegated to chord strums out of necessity, not choice. This is sometimes due to the demands of singing. John Lennon played strict rhythm in the early days of the Beatles, only breaking out solos on later recordings like "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and "Get Back." His rare solos are not bad at all, but he clearly did much more singing than George Harrison, which would necessitate a clear division of lead guitar labor. Even Bryan Adams has been holding back all of these years, save for rare moments. But more often it's a lack of single-note fluidity that places a guitarist in the rhythm camp. In a way, it's a shame that rhythm guitar sometimes becomes an afterthought, the Spackle of musical texture.

I've always admired guitarists who cultivate rhythm guitar as an art in itself. The first time that I remember becoming aware of this was in a May 1982 Guitar World magazine article about Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. Weir advocated using a large triangular pick and practicing with a "polynome" - a metronome that did polyrhythms. In fact, Weir occasionally played solos in the Dead - one example that comes to mind is the first solo in "Friend of the Devil" on the Dead Set live album.

Some great rhythm players who rarely or never took solos? How about Freddie Green (Count Basie Orch.), Catfish Collins (James Brown, P-Funk), James Hetfield (Metallica), Scott Ian (Anthrax), David Knopfler (Dire Straits), Al McKay (Earth, Wind and Fire), Ed O'Brien (Radiohead) and Keith Richards (Rolling Stones). Who am I missing?

Tonequest - the musical, or, barking up the wrong swamp ash tree

2010-07-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

Playing my dead-sounding Highway One Strat at a theatre gig the last few days got me thinking about ways to try to resurrect this guitar, which I bought about two years ago for the rock shows I was doing at the time. I was trying to find a workable Strat for about a thousand bucks, and was enticed by the classic features of the Highway One, and the nitrocellulose finish, which is all the rage these days.

I've already changed out the pickups, dropping in a set of Rio Grandes in a SSH (single-coil, single-coil, humbucker) configuration and no dice. The guitar still sounds like ca-ca. I'm not sure why I didn't hear it earlier, but this guitar just lacks presence, sweetness, lows, highs, mids...at the theatre gig I eventually just started using my much-better-sounding Mexican Telecaster, which I've had for over ten years.

My friend Rob Phillips changed up his late-80s Strat by switching out the body altogether, using a new body from Guitar Mill. The body, with a custom sunburst, took months to show up but he's very happy with the guitar now. Could a new body be the cure for my Strat's near-terminal suckiness? I can't help thinking that the guitar somehow enters a new stage of existence with a new body - every other part is subject to change and it's still THAT guitar. But change the body and you change the guitar. I'm not sure why this notion persists in my mind, but it does. But Leo designed his guitars to have easily replaceable parts, like a Ford Model T. It makes repairs much simpler and has also led to a culture of user modifications stretching at least as far back as Hendrix's white Strat with a Tele neck.

And what of options? Say I go with a swamp ash body ($185), humbucker rout for the bridge pickup (+$20), string ferrule installation (+$35) and Olympic White nitro finish (+$225). Total is $510.00 plus shipping, duty, and currency exchange. And I still might hate the guitar.

Having played guitar now for almost 29 years, I've gotten extremely picky about my instruments, yet I find my tastes hard to articulate. My feelings about a guitar can take many months to settle, and I've bought and sold many, many electric guitars over the years trying to find the elusive tone and feel that I like. It's a bit of a sickness, and unfortunately for me modifications rarely do the trick. There's something about the gestalt of the total guitar that has to be right, or I'll never be happy, it seems. Or maybe it's just a matter of research.

No Sco, but O.

2010-07-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

I never did see the Scofield show. He wasn't going on until nine, and I had a gig. Typical.

I've been reading Jas Obrecht's Otis Rush interview with great pleasure. Otis is another upside-down lefty, which seems to be a recurring theme on this here blog. From the interview:

JO: You and Albert King both put your string sets on with the skinny ones nearest the ceiling. This must cause a different sound on bends, since you're moving the strings the opposite way from most players.

OR: A right-hand man try to push the little E up, where I ain't got nothin' to do but just pull it down. And it's more easier to pull something down than to push it up. Just like this building – you can tear it down in a second, but to put it up takes a few months.

John Scofield's New Orleans-gospel-jazz-rock-blues thing.

2010-07-02T08:16:00.000-07:00

Amongst my friends and students, I'm not known to be a great follower of newly recorded music. I find there to be so much to discover in old music that it keeps me busy enough. And there's something about the old ways of playing and singing that resonate with me so deeply.

It's always nice to find something that is current that I actually connect with. In these last couple of weeks I've taken some time off of the blog and used the extra time to check out some recent guitar-related releases. I mentioned the new Jeff Beck in an earlier post. In a related vein, I'm just been listening to John Scofield's Piety Street from '09. Not his latest, I know. From what I've read Scofield had been itching to record a straight blues album but found the field too overcrowded; he turned to black gospel music, played in a funky New Orleans style. The core band for Piety Street was Jon Cleary, a keyboardist/singer who plays very tasty and authentic piano and organ and contributes several vocals; on bass George Porter, Jr., who has a long list of credits including the 70's NOLA funk legends the Meters, and on drums Ricky Fataar, who was a member of both the Beach Boys (he played on "Sail On Sailor"!) and the Rutles as Stig O'Hara (George Harrison). Fataar plays in Bonnie Raitt's band, along with Cleary.

I'm no Scofield expert, but some of the qualities that I identify in his playing on this record are:

1. A deep knowledge of blues licks, many of them extended into odd little harmonic places. Scofield seems to really be at home playing earthy New Orleans style gospel. His phrasing and sensitivity are really outstanding on this record.

2. An interest in tone manipulation through articulation - pick angle, velocity - and tricks like playing close to the bridge for a trebly, bell-like attack.

3. The sound of heavy strings. I hear a bell-like "inharmonic" sound in some of Sco's notes, which suggest that he is using a plain G string that has been made so thick that it has taken on the harmonic properties of a metal bar - upper harmonics are out of tune, which gives the notes a slight chorusing sound. He does in fact use a set of strings that begin with a .013 high E and a plain third. I've experienced this myself by experimenting with heavy gauge strings. Rock and blues guitar after 1967 needs a plain third string - the wound G strings just don't bend right. The outcome of all of this is that Scofield has that rare thing among jazzers: an awesome tone.

The band sounds really quite great - Porter Jr., Fataar, Cleary and Scofield cook effortlessly, and the singers add a different kind of performing frame and, oh yes, the lyrics to these songs, which include "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" and "His Eye Is On The Sparrow." The singing is a bit faceless for me on first listens, but it's not distracting either. This album was recorded in New Orleans in 2008, just after Hurricane Gustav.

This record does not evince a traditional gospel approach, although there are many elements in common - the hard swinging, the use of combined piano and organ and tambourines (both used sparingly on Piety Street). Fataar's drumming has something of a West Coast coolness which keep things from getting bombastic. My overall impression is that Piety Street is that it must have been a blast to record, with some of the top musicians in the U.S. coming together to re-interpret an old repertoire of black gospel, drawn from the recorded output of singers like Mahalia Jackson.

This band (with Terence Higgins replacing Fataar) is in fact playing tonight at the Toronto Jazz Festival, and I'm heading down there to do a Talkback segment with JAZZ FM at six. I'll report back.

Clapton-era Yardbirds: the rough guide.

2010-06-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

Educating myself on Clapton-era Yardbirds today. Join me, won't you?

"Boom Boom" by the Yardbirds. A nice document of the band as a cohesive unit. Some of the live clips on YouTube are rather dire. The weak link, to me, is Keith Relf, the singer/harmonica player of the band. While his limitations as a singer are readily apparent in the live clips, his harmonica playing is somewhat better.

The British blues rock boom yielded, in my opinion, few truly great native English blues singers. Those few that come to mind for me are Van Morrison (though he's technically Irish) and Mick Jagger. And by blues I don't mean necessarily the blues form or the blues repertoire, but the mode of singing practiced by certain African-American musicians starting around 1900 that was derived from slave work songs, and Islamic prayer chanting before that, in the Muslim areas of West Africa that supplied the slave trade. We're talking about a significant degree of cultural difference from suburban England in the 1960s. As a blues singer, Relf is just passable, but as a more waiflike version of Brian Jones, he's got the look of English rock in the mid 60s.

The Yardbirds again, with "Louise" from 1963. Clapton is fleet with a variety of authentic blues licks, yet his performance is somewhat mannered - there is flash lick after flash lick, but little of his later restraint.

And the one that according to rumor served as the final straw to Clapton's dissatisfaction with the musical direction that the Yardbirds were taking. The main issue seems to have been that the tune was composed by pop hack Graham Gouldman, who also wrote for Herman's Hermits and the Hollies. The trendiest element of the record is the harpsichord, here represented by Jeff Beck's acoustic guitar with metal soundhole pickup. Other than that, it sounds structurally at least like blues-rock-pop of the London ilk, circa 1965. There's a good documentary clip here, featuring surviving Yardbirds Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty and Eric Clapton.

"All Your Love" from the Bluesbreakers' 1966 album, nicknamed "Beano". Clapton was featured in this band, and better represented than ever before. His cult in London had built up to this point, fed by his studied virtuosity and cool charisma. Clapton had by now traded his Tele and Vox AC30 for a 1960 Gibson Les Paul and Marshall combo.

Neil Young's Old Black: by request

2010-06-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

My cousin Stephen, who incidentally suggested that I write this blog in the first place, sent some requests for posts the other day. One of them caught my eye - for a piece on Neil Young's "Old Black" Les Paul, the one he's used more or less constantly since 1969.

Dave Hunter wrote a fine piece about the guitar in 2008 on the Gibson Lifestyle site. The article is from the series "Get That Tone" and while the article on Neil's heavily modified 1953 goldtop (apparently crudely painted with black matte paint) is informative to the extent that the guitar's provenance and modification history is known, the promised instructions for getting that tone are disappointing:

Short of modifying two pieces of prized vintage gear and building your own Whizzer, run a bright but powerful guitar into a simple, low-output tube amp and give it all the gusto and emotion you can muster. That, in the end, is what’s at the heart of the Neil Young guitar solo after all.

I think that a microphonic Firebird pickup and a Bigsby help a lot too, along with a handwired, hot-biased low-wattage tube amp.

From an interview with Neil Young roadie (or is it roadeye?) Larry Cragg:

Cradled in a stand in front of the amps is the fuse for the dynamite, Young's trademark ax Old Black, a '53 Gold Top Les Paul some knothead daubed with black paint eons ago. Old Black's features include a Bigsby wang bar, which pulls strings and bends notes, and a Firebird pickup so sensitive you can talk through it. It's a demonic instrument. "Old Black doesn't sound like any other guitar," said Cragg, shaking his head.

Link:
And here's Neil himself speaking at length about his gear, including the famous Whizzer.

Gibson has no doubt taken note of the sales potential of a Neil Young model Les Paul, perhaps an exact copy of Old Black, relic'ed. And no doubt that Neil won't let it happen in his lifetime.

Of course, one-offs by individual builders can fly under the radar, like this beautiful replica of Old Black built by Juha Mäntymaa of Finland.

Guitar Player magazine again.

2010-06-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading the interviews on rockcritics.com with various Guitar Player principals, including Jim Crockett, Tom Mulhern, Tom Wheeler, Joe Gore, Steven Rosen, James Rotondi and Michael Molenda, the current editor. I'd love to hear from Bud Eastman, the creator of the magazine back in 1967. But all of these men have something interesting to recount about their time working on the magazine. Each seems to have their own version of Guitar Player's so-called golden age, as is to be expected when reminiscences are on the menu.

I was surprised by the rancor shown in reader comments, if not a little from the commentators, towards Michael Molenda. Molenda defends himself by pointing to the increasing subscriptions and newsstand sales, and Guitar Player is navigating the choppy waters of the print magazine business admirably. But for some, something has been lost in Guitar Player's change of ownership to large corporations heavily focused on the bottom line and thus encouraging a low-risk editorial policy.

I still buy the magazine from time to time and I think that aside from some clearly commercial cover story choices (the Matthew Bellamy cover this month has inspired some criticism on GP's Facebook page) the content is still reasonably diversified and the writing and editing are still of high quality. To an extent, I don't really care who's on the cover - my favorite parts of the magazine are the fiddly bits in between the big articles - the lessons, the gear reviews, the spectacular (and sometimes spectacularly odd) advertisements. I can't imagine a time when I'll never pick up an issue.

Interview: Joe Gore.

2010-06-13T00:10:00.000-07:00

Joe Gore is that rare thing, a relentlessly creative and successful guitarist (including credits on seminal Tom Waits and PJ Harvey recordings, as well as work with Courtney Love, DJ Shadow, Aimee Mann, Tracy Chapman, Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches, the Eels, Les Claypool and John Cale) who also excels at a number of other pursuits. These include journalism - he was the senior editor of Guitar Player magazine for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s - and large scale creative projects, like the gargantuan Clubbo website, a fictional record company with a deep back catalogue, all fake. I've admired Joe Gore's guitar playing and writing for many years, and am grateful that he agreed to answer a few of my questions via email.

You have a new project coming out this week - can you tell us something about this?

Mental 99 is a new band with my pal, drummer Dawn Richardson. We'd been wanting to do something together for years, and we finally got around to it. It's an instrumental duo, exploring the question of how much racket two players can create.

There are a couple of things that I find exciting about the project, beyond the pleasure of playing with such a cool and creative drummer.

1. Phantom bass syndrome. For various reasons, many of the projects I've been involved with for the last decade have had no bass player, and I've gotten increasingly into the idea of playing the bass and guitar roles simultaneously. Not necessarily in the Ted Greene/Charlie Hunter sense of true multi-voice counterpoint, so much as creating parts that straddle those two roles. I've played bari-guitars, or just low-tuned regular guitars, for ages, especially on the records I did with Tom Waits and PJ Harvey. Along the way, I just started hearing less in terms of bass vs. guitar, and more in terms of low/dark vs. high/bright. (Having said that, Dawn and I got to play a show recently in a quartet with Tracy Chapman and Flea, and it was exhilarating to play with a bassist again, especially one that talented!)

2. Pure sound fixation. For the last few years I've been geeking out on guitar sound — pure sound — to an unhealthy degree. I've done consulting/development work for various audio companies, some of which involved scrutinizing classic guitar tones. To better understand how those things work in the digital realm, I started building analog stompboxes and amps, and that became a parallel obsession. But it got to the point where I felt like a painter who had learned to mix amazing pigments, but never got around to painting anything. So one motivation for Mental 99 was to actually use some of the tools I'd worked on.

3. Those who can't sing, don't. Playing instrumental music has always been a can of worms for me. I was a classical musician till my early 20s, and I still love classical music, though I don't play it. And while I dig jazz and have played it with some amazing artists, I've never really been a jazz musician. Plus, the jazz I'm drawn to tends to be highly arranged/composed stuff — I've always responded more to Ellington than to bop. (And I sincerely hate Real Book blowing sessions with round-robin soloing.) On the other hand, I love lots of kitschy instrumental music, like surf, easy listening, and Euro-cheese soundtracks. But my ear is too dissonant to play that stuff in a literal way. So I guess Mental 99 sounds at times like the Ventures playing Ellington, or Gang of Four playing the Ventures. Basically, people attempting music they have no business playing, sometimes with cool results.

Anyway, I play everything on one guitar, a standard-scale James Trussart tele tuned down to CGCFAD (like regular dropped-D, transposed down a whole-step), into a laptop running Apple's MainStage. There are no amps or stompboxes, though the signal runs through a hardware looper before it reaches the mixing board/PA. I've done a zillion digital guitar recordings, but this is the first time I've been dumb enough to try it live.

Here's a free song if anyone's curious. It was cut live in the studio with no overdubs — just drums and guitar/laptop going straight to disc. Though we did actually play a few minutes longer and edit out the boring bits. (Hey — Miles did it too!)

Could you talk about the Clubbo project from a guitar perspective? Specifically, how do you approach the faking of outdated guitar sounds?

Well, Clubbo was an over-ambitious project I co-created with Elise Malmberg, a great singer, composer, engineer, and audio geek. It alleges to be a web site documenting the half-century history of Clubbo records, complete with music, album art, biographical essays, and various "historical" debris. It's all fake, of course. (BTW, here's the secret page with the real credits.) The site is hundreds of pages deep — even many of the "external" links are faked, leading to other bogus websites we made.

Guitar-wise, it was fun, because it was an excuse to play everything I never would have been caught dead doing under my own name. Southern rock? Shred metal? Jam band noodling? No prob!

As for the recording techniques, 90% of it created in software — mimicking various historic recording chains via digital distortion, EQ, compression, and effects. One secret trick: heavy use of impulse-response reverbs made from quirky/crappy old gear.

You recorded seven albums with Tom Waits, a musician with a singular aesthetic - did he give you any directives about what he wanted from you?

The direction is continuous — he directs every part, sculpting your performance with his facial expressions, body language, and amazing turns of phrase. ("Make it sound more poor." "Not bluegrass banjo — death banjo!"). He never suggests particular notes or parts, but directs the proceedings so completely that it always comes out sounding like Tom Waits music. Example: I was thrilled to bits to track a couple of Tom's song with Stewart Copeland on drums. Tom had Stewart play one of his fucked-up old circus drums, and coached him on the performances. In the end, Stewart sounded pretty much like the drummer on any post-Swordfish Waits album — which is to say, fucking amazing! Almost all Waits recordings are first or second takes. He hates when it starts sounding too rehearsed, or like you've worked out the perfect part. Better to sound like you've never played it before, mistakes and all. And not using a tuner is a definite plus.

I've heard some of your looping with the Apple MainStage software - what are the advantages to working with software, rather than a standalone device like the JamMan or the Boss looper?

I did some work for Logic, GarageBand and MainStage. (For those who don't use the software, I'll explain: Logic is Apple's pro recording software, sort of competing cousin to Pro Tools and Live. GarageBand is a light version of Logic, based on the same audio engine, that comes installed on most Macs, though sometimes GarageBand innovations trickle upstream into Logic. And MainStage is a Logic spinoff optimized for live performance.)

The latest version of MainStage includes a powerful looping tool, but I haven't worked it into live performance yet — I use a hardware Boomerang III looper instead. The all-software looper is more powerful and open-ended, but I find it difficult to drive onstage, in large part because no one has made an ideal hardware controller for it. (Apogee's GIO is a great-sounding I/O that performs fantastically onstage, but it doesn't have enough footswitches to operate several loops simultaneously AND switch programs.) I prefer the Boomerang to all other options because of its great ergonomics — creator Mike Nelson put a lot of thought into creating a device you can truly pilot in real time. I also use a Kenton Killamix — basically, just a row of controller knobs and switches. Summary: I loop with the Boomerang, switch programs and toggle effects with the GIO, and tweak virtual knobs with the Killamix. It's all very awkward, and it's taken me six months to obtain the vaguest hope of making it through a song without screwing up.

I find it a bit ironic that I'm even talking about looping. Like many musicians I know, I've moved away from looping over the course of the last decade. Today's zeitgeist just seems to be more about imperfect, realtime playing. It's been years since I used a drum loop on anything (except maybe Clubbo tracks making fun of bad drum loop music).

Still, I find that looping presents huge challenges — both hugely exciting and hugely daunting. The biggest problem is that looping tends to lock you in a specific musical structure: Play a part. Add counterpoint. Get thicker and thicker, then go silent or fade out. You can compile stunning textures, but the process gets tiresome. It's harder to make stop-on-a-dime changes, alternate between contrasting sections, introduce variations, or deviate from the itinerary on the fly. Those are the things I work on these days. I haven't mastered any of them, but I'm slowly improving. Or so I tell myself.

Your tenure at Guitar Player magazine, from the late 80s to the mid 90s, represents some of the most interesting guitar journalism of the magazine's long history. Yet you told Steven Ward in 2008: “In retrospect, I was probably a bad fit for the gig. I hated the music industry. I hated guitar heroism. I hated guitar collectors. My passions were music and culture, where guitar occasionally plays a role. I love making music on guitars, but I have no sentiment about them. They’re hammers and nails to me." Are you proud of your work there? For you, what is missing from mainstream guitar journalism?

Well, I stand by those words. But at the same time, I loved working at the magazine and always felt extremely lucky to have been part of it. It was amazing to get paid to do so much stuff I probably would have done for free. I don't reread my work unless I have to, but I suspect that if I did, I'd be of two minds: I'd wince at how self-important I sounded, but I'd probably give myself a bit of credit for documenting some great music while it was being made.

What do I dislike about mainstream guitar journalism? The same thing every guitarist hates about it: It's doesn't always reflect my personal taste! But I feel the editors at the top mags are doing a stellar job in the face of the dual declines of the music industry and the print medium. Theirs is not an easy gig!

If I did anything valuable, it was being a conduit: exposing readers to something great they might not otherwise have encountered, be it a new player, a forgotten one, a great stompbox, or a cool tuning trick. Fortunately, players can now obtain all those things more easily than ever online. It's a trade-off — the "experts" usually can't make a living writing for consumer music mags these days, so we must rely on the amateur fanatics. The things we encounter online might not be especially well written or edited, but they're passionate and intense—and often shockingly good.

Here's a personal example from when I started building stompboxes a couple of years ago. I didn't know electronics, yet I fancied myself an expert. I'd reviewed hundreds of pedals. I had access to amazing collections of museum-quality gear. I knew the big-name manufacturers and got paid to scrutinize their latest creations. I owned a formidable collection myself, and had used them in great studios with great artists, engineers, and producers. So I ventured into the DIY community with the most condescending of attitudes. I thought it would be, "I built me my very own Tube Screamer, and it's durn-near good as a store-bought one!"

Needless to say, I was a fucking idiot.

I learned far more about stompboxes from the collective wisdom of the DIY community that I would have learned in 50 years at a guitar magazine. That's no swipe at the magazines — it's just that old-school print can't rival the depth of such a large and vibrant virtual community as the one at, say, freestompboxes.org. And I can't believe some of the amazing labor-of-love websites, like beavis audio and gaussmarkov! They're packed with great info, beautifully presented. So while it's bad time to make a living dispensing that information, it's a great time to consume it!

My thanks to Joe Gore for taking the time to answer my questions.

Guitar Player magazine.

2010-06-10T16:20:00.000-07:00

The first issue that I ever bought of Guitar Player was this one, from 1982. The cover story was on John Entwistle's vintage guitar collection, and I could not have asked for a more enticing entree into the world of guitar journalism. I had been playing about four months when I started to reach for more information about the instrument, and I've never stopped reading and thinking about it.
I'm currently enjoying this multipart oral history on the Guitar Player editors through the years and cutting a videotaped interview with boutique effects pedal manufacturer Andrew Kilpatrick that will appear in the next few days.

Fender Pro Junior: I'm lovin' it.

2010-06-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

I'm loving my Fender Pro Junior again. This amp, that I got in trade for my Blues Junior a few years ago, has been an up and down affair for me. On one hand, it's a great-sounding little amp, with a warm and organic overdrive that's hard to find on modern amps. On the other, it has given me quite a few problems, like excessive hum and hiss, a disintegrating input jack and melting tube sockets. These problems are well-documented on forums and I've had it repaired three times now.

I've used the Pro Junior primarily as a jazz amp - my former employer Jeff Healey used one as well in his Jazz Wizards and it works very well with archtop guitars. But since this last repair, I've found the rock and roll voice of the Pro Junior. There's something vocal and pretty about the EL84 overdrive, something that I've found rare on Fender amps of late. I'm even tempted to buy another one, as David Barrett does with his Rivera Super Champs, to chain together for bigger gigs.

Interview: David Love.

2010-06-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

David Love is a versatile and busy professional guitarist and singer based in Toronto. He has been a member of the Randy Bachman/Burton Cummings band (featuring the two principals from the legendary Canadian rock band the Guess Who) since 2005, and has played with Cummings since 1996. He has performed all over Canada and the United States, and earlier this year travelled to the Canadian Forces base in Kandahar, Afghanistan to perform with his band the Carpet Frogs. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email.

How important is authentic gear when trying to get vintage tones?

Well, it’s important to me to be inspired by the tones I’m getting. Having authentic gear – the same model of guitar and amp - gives me a sort of confidence in my performance. I think the audience enjoys it too – at least the guitar players in the audience do or so they’ve told me.

Could you describe your guitar rig?

With The Frogs, we do anything from Johnny Cash to Led Zeppelin so I have to have gear that allows me to dial in a wide variety of tones. With Burton, I have to try to replicate the tones of some pretty iconic records. Burton is quite insistent on trying to reproduce those sounds faithfully. Primarily, I use my Koch Multitone 100 watt three channel head and a Koch 2 X 12 cabinet. Some guys gasp at the prospect of somebody still using high powered heads but I like the clean headroom I can get from it. It will give super clean sparkly Fender tones as well as that dry Marshall bark.

I always take my Rickenbacker 360-12 string with me because we like to do a lot of British invasion stuff. It is strung with Pyramid Gold flatwounds like Harrison, McGuinn, and Townsend used on their Rickenbacker 12 strings.

My main six string guitar is a 2005 G & L ASAT Deluxe which is Leo Fender’s spin on his Telecaster design. Mine has Seymour Duncan pick ups that I can switch from single coil to humbucking which allows me to cover a lot of ground sonically.

My pedal board consists of an Ernie Ball VP Jr. volume pedal, a Peterson Strobostomp II, a Diamond Compressor, a Keeley compressor, a Keeler Push overdrive, a Diamond Memory Lane analog delay, and a Catalinbread Semaphore tremolo and is powered by a Voodoo Labs isolated power supply.

My acoustic rig is either my Gibson J-185 or my Gibson J-160E into a Peterson Strobostomp II, Fishman Spectrum DI, and a Radial JDI Direct Box.

I use Evidence Audio cables.

You've been working for some time with Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings. How did that come about?

The Carpet Frogs had a Thursday night residency at some joint in Toronto many years back. One night, a friend of ours, who happened to be Burton Cummings’ road manager, walked in the place with Burton in tow. Burton was in town doing one of his Up Close and Alone shows and our friend, Sam, said “Come and see this band with me – you’ll love them.” We invited Burton up with us to do some of his favourite cover tunes and 5 hours later, we were friends. Burton got an offer to do a show but the promoter requested that he have a full band with him. Burton remembered our jam that night and called us to ask if we’d like to do a gig or two with him. Of course, we jumped at the chance. That was 12 years ago. We’ve been his band ever since.

When talk of a reunited Randy Bachman/Burton Cummings project came up in 2005, Burton insisted that they use our band. It’s been a pretty cool ride playing with those guys – they are Canadian music royalty. Playing for Randy and Burton has taken me all over the U.S. and Canada.

How do you approach working out guitar arrangements for the Bachman/Cummings live shows?

We are told what songs to learn. I go to the original recordings, the internet, youtube.com, tablature sites, sheet music – whatever - to nail down the parts. We all show up at soundcheck – there are no rehearsals – and you had better know your parts. Usually, the other guitarist (Michael Zweig or Tim Bovaconti) and I will watch what Randy is doing and try to pick the alternate part on the record and stay out of Randy’s way.

The same thing goes when learning a Burton Cummings tune. We’ll assign each other the parts and play them for him to get his reaction. Usually, if he nods his head and just rocks out, we know we’re on the right track!

I’ve been pretty fortunate to be able to play in Bachman Cummings and The Burton Cummings Band with a couple of outstanding Toronto guitarists: Michael Zweig and Tim Bovaconti.

You've been in the music business for quite a while. Do any hard-learned lessons come to mind?

Yes – you ain’t all that and a bag of chips – even if you are. If one is serious about being a professional musician in Canada, one soon realizes that you’re not going to be on a tour bus playing stadiums every week. Being a player means working and gigging – period. You may play for 160,000 people one week and playing the local pub the next. It goes with the territory in this country. If you can scratch out a living doing what you love in the Canadian music business, you are a raging success in my book.

What is your philosophy of teaching guitar?

I work primarily with adult learners who come to me to fast-track the art of singing and playing the guitar. I am not a very learned musician or a technically gifted player – I don’t read notation very well so my emphasis is on blending performance skills with guitar ability. My expertise lies in singing and playing the guitar and entertaining. That’s something that a lot of people want to know how to do and I help them do it.

Any career highlights that you'd like to share?

I am a child of the 60s and I grew up on The Guess Who so the first time I played "These Eyes" and "No Sugar Tonight" with Randy and Burton on a big stage in front of tens of thousands of people, I had an out-of-body experience!

Highlights? Let’s see…. (in no particular order)

Playing Live 8 in 2005 and ending up on the DVD

Doing a CBC special with Randy and Burton

Recording with Randy and Burton

Opening for Bon Jovi

Flying in a private jet

Seeing Canada from a tour bus

Watching Deep Purple sidestage

Playing for 160,000 people in Tennessee

Playing on the same bill with Mark Farner of Grand Funk

Playing on the same bill as and meeting Sir Elton John

Playing on the same bill with The Moody Blues

Having my Mom and Dad watch me play at the Molson Amphitheatre

Playing the 2010 Olympics with Burton

Playing in Afghanistan for our troops

Being interviewed for Gitbox Culture!

Thanks very much to David Love for taking the time to answer my questions.

The life and times of the Fender Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic

2010-06-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

Stratoblogster has a good post about a Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic, a purported exact replica of Jeff Beck's battered Esquire, which he used in the sixties with the Yardbirds. The price? $7999.99.

As a working musician, a price like that on an electric guitar, especially one that is so baldly utilitarian as the Esquire, is, to me, laughable. I'm sure that I part company here with many pros, who point to the six-figure prices of some violins. But I just can't get past the cold fact that an Esquire like this, under the painstaking relic-ing, is really just a plank. A beautifully engineered, mass-produced plank. Am I missing something?

This is not to imply that I don't shamelessly slaver over the picture of the guitar that I've posted here. But that's just because I love Teles, and I love the look and feel of old, beaten-up guitars. I still remember, as a 14 year old, picking up a battered sixties Tele with a Bigsby at Burlington Music (later Lakeshore Music, later still co-opted by Long and McQuade). But they wanted $700, so I couldn't afford it!

Hitting the Google oracle, I see that this guitar listed for $15,000 when it was first offered in February 2006. Here's a blog post from August 2006, reporting the street price of the JB to be $10,000. By December, the street price had dropped to $8,000, according to this forum thread. It has hovered there ever since, as evidenced by the $7999.99 EBay price tag (at this price point, by the way, I find "99" prices tacky) and this listing on Elderly's website.

Fender's extremely expensive guitars, which tend to be relic'ed reproductions of classic Fender guitars used by celebrities, exist in a sort of netherworld to me; a netherworld populated by guitar-dabbling lawyers and doctors, some perhaps buying guitars as investments. Why did the Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic fail as an investment? Were qualms about its accuracy damaging to its reputation?

The trade in reproduced famous guitars can be understood as a particularly fetishized aspect of guitar culture. It depends upon a strain of gear lust that values highly two factors: rarity, and the perceived aura of a celebrity's guitar. The Jeff Beck Tribute Esquire Relic certainly has rarity on its side - only 150 were made. But it's possible that Beck lessened the impact of the Fender model by also allowing Gibson to use his name on their Custom Shop repro of a famous Beck guitar, in this case his "Oxblood" Les Paul.

But what about the aura? The 'Masterbuilt' line of Fender guitars is built by named craftsmen, in this case the late John English. So there is a connotation of the old-world artisan here, rather than the monolithic Fender brand, which has been somewhat cheapened these days by the company's major Chinese, Mexican and Korean operations, along with their Southern California base. The 2007 death of John English might have been expected to affect the price, though perhaps English's role in the manufacture of the guitar is not significant to the actual customers who would purchase these guitars.

And of course, we must take into account the formidable aura of Beck himself. There has been an assessment in some recent sources that Beck is one of the most highly regarded rock guitarists still working. It's entirely probable that the value of both guitars will increase when Beck dies, though the admittedly less rare Danny Gatton and Stevie Ray Vaughan models have not had a renaissance as of yet.

Bob Dylan, guitar hero

2010-06-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan has surely employed some wonderful lead guitarists over the course of his career, including Bruce Langhorne, Robbie Robertson, Mike Bloomfield, David Bromberg, Norman Blake, Billy Cross, Mick Ronson, Mark Knopfler, Danny Kortchmar, Fred Tackett, Mick Taylor, G.E. Smith, Daniel Lanois, Mike Campbell, Mason Ruffner, Jerry Garcia, John Jackson, Larry Campbell, Charlie Sexton, Cindy Cashdollar, Stu Kimball, Cesar Diaz and Denny Freeman. But what of Bob himself as a lead guitarist?

Don't laugh, Bob played a mess o' lead in the nineties. When I saw him in Philadelphia in 1994, after not seeing him live for eight years, I was surprised by how many solos Bob was taking, often at the same time as his lead player that night, John Jackson. His style, as I saw that night and heard on subsequent live recordings, tended to be a simple one, with a heavy reliance on repeated riffs. In that way it was reminiscent of his harmonica playing.

Even earlier in Dylan's career, some noteworthy guitar playing can be heard, if not really 'lead' in the classic sense. His first album, titled Bob Dylan (1961), is chock-a-block with guitar goodies, including the lipstick-holder slide on "Highway 51" and "In My Time of Dyin'". "Only A Pawn In Their Game," from The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964) features some very strange Carter picking (alternating single picked bass notes with strums) and "Don't Think Twice (It's All Right)" from 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is a model of Travis fingerpicking. "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" from Blonde on Blonde (1966) starts off with some Tele lead scratching from our man before Robbie Robertson takes over, yet Bob is credited with 'lead guitar' on the album cover.

Dylan seems to have curtailed a lot of his live lead playing recently. Mostly I hear about him playing keyboards on tour, and not really much guitar at all. There's not much out there that I know of on Bob's lead playing in recent years, but here's an article on Dylan's guitars,

Crazy Heart guitars.

2010-05-31T09:52:00.000-07:00

I just watched the 2008 film Crazy Heart, the one with Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake, a down-on-his-luck country singer-songwriter. There are quite a few interesting guitars in this movie, and they help to convey something about the story and the characters who use them.

Bad's stage electric is a relic'ed Gretsch G6122 1959 Chet Atkins Country Gentleman, the hardware of which he lovingly polishes in one scene. This guitar is associated with Chet Atkins, of course, and thus has an aura of the Country Gentleman, the southern man with impeccable manners and upward mobility. The Stratoblogster blog uses the term "rustic regal" to describe another guitar, and it fits this guitar as well. It is also associated with George Harrison, which has increased its vintage value. These connotations attached to the Gretsch are at odds with Bad's character early in the film, as he drunkenly stumbles through a disastrous performance. But when he finds redemption through love, the Gretsch confirms Bad's persona as a seasoned class act who has paid his dues.

His other guitar is a Gibson J-45 with batwing pickguard, probably from the fifties, with many dings and scratches. This guitar is less pampered than the Gretsch, as is shown in the scene when Maggie Gyllenhall's character goes to sit down in a chair where the Gibson has been left, and Bad carelessly tosses it onto a nearby cushion. This seems to indicate the centrality of music in Bad's life - it is propped in a chair like a person - and his willingness to give this attractive stranger (Gyllenhall) a similar place of privilege.

More neutrally, a Kyser capo and a tweed Fender Vibrolux amp are seen, along with a Strat, Guild acoustic and a strange Tele with a three-on-a-side headstock as played by Ryan Bingham in Bad's first backup band. A nice cream Tele, played by Buddy Miller, shows up later, in the soundcheck scene when Bad is about to open for Tommy, played by Colin Farrell. Tommy's guitar is a sunburst Gibson J-200, which is as collectible as Bad's J-45 but is far flashier, as befits Tommy's character.

After all of this American guitar goodness, it's a bit of a letdown that an Epiphone AJ-220E, signed by Jeff Bridges, Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett, was given away by CMT and other media companies as a promotional contest.

Jeff Beck, back in my life.

2010-05-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

I first heard Jeff Beck as a teenager on an old vinyl copy of Wired, his second hit jazz-rock fusion album from 1976. I loved fusion and was sad to see it go out of style in the eighties and even be the target of derision from critics (remember the "fuzak" epithet?). I think that Wired was one of the best products of seventies fusion. I think what made the difference was that Beck was a rock guitarist moving into jazz, rather than the other way around.

This was the highlight of the album for me at the time: "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", Charles Mingus' elegy to Lester Young, later beautifully set to lyrics by Joni Mitchell on the highlight of her Mingus album. Beck plays the langorous melody rather tartly, then the band comes in and he obliges with some low-register slyness. After launching a perfectly feedbacked high C at 1:45, he begins to explore the modernist blues changes of the song with a series of small melodic cells, brilliantly fit together. At 3:30 the guitar throws up. Jeff continues on unfazed and fires off even more ideas, with extreme dynamics, in the final statement of the melody, from 4:02 on.

For a primarily instrumental artist, Jeff Beck has had a long and successful career. From the Yardbirds through the Jeff Beck Group (various lineups), Beck Bogert & Appice and a long solo career both muso and commercial, Beck remains a vital artist. His well-reviewed new album attests to this, along with the popularity of his YouTube clips playing with (the "very teenage-looking" as Guitar Player put it) Tal Wilkenfeld on bass.

An early pop success after leaving the Yardbirds was "Hi Ho Silver Lining", a sunny Britpop song featuring Beck on unpolished but charming vocals. I get the impression that this has become something of a singalong anthem in the UK, especially for football spectators.

Lately I've been listening to Jeff's new album Emotion and Commotion, and it really is an excellent guitar album if somewhat overly smooth. Beck plays the guitar with loving attention to detail, and he's playing with beautifully recorded, tastefully arranged orchestra on some of the cuts. I'm not sure why, but I often find Beck abrasive when he is working with singers, and his cuts here with Joss Stone are no exception to my ears (though the Imelda May number is nice). But his soaring version of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" is a highlight and a good endorsement for the album in general.

Auto-wah and the dialectics of instant funk.

2010-05-28T07:34:00.000-07:00

There's a new face in my pedalboard - an old DOD FX-25 envelope filter given to me by an old friend and guitar colleague. To be honest, it had sat in my odds'n'ends drawer for a couple of months before I chained it in earlier tonight.

It's the most pedal fun I've had in a while, and I'm a serial Memory Man abuser. Why did it take so long to get it out of the drawer? I guess that I have a weird relationship with out-of-fashion pedals (see my flanger blog post) and the envelope filter, or T-Wah, is not exactly in vogue these days. They've been around for a while; the 1972 Mu-Tron (popularized by Stevie Wonder on recordings like "Superstition" and "Higher Ground") is probably the classic expression of seventies auto-wah technology but they all work on the same principle: an automatic wah effect that opens and closes a filter based on picking strength (unlike the still-cool wah pedal, which requires foot movement for the wah effect to happen).

Mu-Trons went out of production around 1979, after the company that made them, Musitronics, was bought out by the ill-fated ARP synthesizer company. In an earlier post I recounted how the ARP Avatar, an early guitar synthesizer, essentially put the company out of business, and it seems that the Mu-Tron was collateral damage. For purists seeking the original Mu-Tron III sound, Electro-Harmonix has taken up the mantle by hiring one of the original inventors of the Mu-Tron, Mike Beigel, and issuing an update of the Mu-Tron, the Q-Tron.

I set the DOD envelope filter up with a rhythmic delay on the Memory Man. Instant funk. Was the envelope filter ahead of its time? It seems right at home with contemporary loopy, analog filter effects. Sure enough, original Mu-Tron IIIs are sought after, though I suspect that the effect is more popular on bass than guitar. Bootsy Collins is no stranger to the envelope filter, and in fact has been known to use the very DOD FX-25 that is warming up my pedalboard's power supply as we speak.

I mention Jerry Garcia a lot in this blog, and one of his many roles in my life has been as the harbinger of auto-wah. "Shakedown Street" by the Grateful Dead represents the first time I heard the effect, though this was followed shortly by hearing it used by a few reggae lead players and in the guitar solo from Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians' "What I Am." I had possession of an Ibanez Auto Filter for a while when I was about 16 but I'm not sure how that came to me. I certainly never owned one before now. What have I been missing all my life? It's possible that I just got a little funkier.

Glenn Gould and shred guitar.

2010-05-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

While walking home from a gig on Sunday, I listened to Glenn Gould's 1982 recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Gould is by far my favorite classical pianist, and not just because I used to talk to his statue in front of the CBC building when I worked there. He was a musician who was capable of great lyricism in the slower, aria-like passages of the piece. He even sang along sometimes, something that is sometimes distracting when listening to his recordings; on the plus side, he had a fairly tuneful and pleasant voice, unlike his fellow singalong pianist Keith Jarrett.

But it is in Gould's trills and fast passages that I find the greatest thrill, and this is where this starts to be about the guitar. Gould's trills and fast bits - his shredding - are my favorite part of his music. I'd say that it's the evenness of his articulation at high speeds that I find exciting. This is particularly apparent in trills and other ornaments, which are such a big part of Bach's music. In those passages, I can hear the years of self-discipline and hard work that went into Gould's craft. That is, I'm listening to Gould's virtuosity, his life story, more than to Bach's music in those moments of speed and clarity. And because I'm a musician, I associate virtuosity with work.

How much time in a day to you devote to running scales and patterns? My onetime guitar teacher Geoff Young introduced me to the Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (BWV 1006) and I've been practicing them ever since, sometimes to the expense of technical exercises. Somehow I can get behind putting great music under my fingers more than running patterns. To shred, you must run the patterns.

Yet shred guitar per se has never really appealed to me. The metal shredding of the eighties, exemplified by Yngwie Malmsteen, Vinnie Moore and Paul Gilbert seemed kind of thin and pea-brained to me at the time. When it went out of style in the nineties, I was somewhat relieved. I embraced the slacker guitar attitude of grunge, which was more about tone, melody and effects like feedback. Neil Young became, finally, a guitar icon. Rock guitar became more melodic in the nineties and speed and facility came to be somewhat ignored. This was noticeable to me at the time, teaching guitar to teenagers. Compared to my peer group and I in the eighties, they had a noticeable lack of ambition and low motivation when it came to getting 'good'.

Now we are in the midst of a shred revival, abetted by YouTube, with the flames eagerly fanned by Guitar Player magazine. Rusty Cooley has emerged as a new shred man to watch, his practice regimen positively draconian. Orianthi, Michael Jackson's unused guitarist, seems to be blazing a trail for pop shred guitar, evidenced by her recent duet with Steve Vai. Robert Walser, in his 1993 book Running With The Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, deconstructed shred as the (male) pursuit of virtuosity; total mastery. And there's something to the heroic effort that goes into getting THAT fast and THAT clean. It can give meaning to one's life. I just don't know that it's my life. I suspect that I'll never be a shred demigod, but it's nice to hear some true, 10,000 hours virtuosity once in a while.

Interview: Paul Babiak of Paul's Boutique.

2010-05-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

Paul Babiak owns and runs Paul's Boutique, a cool little music store on Nassau Street in the Kensington Market area of Toronto. Paul is one of the friendliest music store proprietors in town and his store is always full of interesting guitars and amps. Paul's Boutique is also my favorite repair shop in town, especially for pedals and other hard-to-fix items. Even better, they're open 7 days a week, 12pm-7pm. Paul agreed to answer a few questions via e-mail.

How did you come to owning and running a music store in Kensington Market?

I worked for a guy in California for about five years who had vintage guitar shops in San Francisco and Los Angeles. When I decided to open a shop here in Toronto I looked around for a good location and found Kensington Market still had relatively cheap rent as well as a ton of musicians and artists close by. I took what I learned in California and tried to apply it here.

What's your take on the current vintage guitar market? Has it been affected by the 2008 financial collapse?

I always say that most of my clientele don't have much money to begin with so the 2008 financial crisis didn't really affect my regular business that much. We did see a lot of collectors unloading vintage gear but prices were still fairly high.

How have vintage prices changed in, say, the last five years? Are there any trends that you notice?

Over the past five years vintage guitar prices have continued to climb. A lot of old Fenders and Gibsons have gotten so expensive that most players can no longer afford them so now we're seeing guitars like old Harmonys, Kays, Stellas and pre-90s Japanese guitars start to go up. There are lots of good guitars coming out of China right now so the vintage market seems to have slowed down. The average player can own a great axe for $400-500. I still play my '69 P-Bass because it sounds incredible, but the for most young players these guitars are out of reach.

You also sell amps - can you explain the lunchbox amp craze?

I think the small amp craze is due to the fact that most people can now easily record from home and bigger amps are just too loud to turn up. Our amp tech Jeremy Douglas builds 5 watt class A amps that can be used as a guitar/bass head and also double as a tube mic pre. The circuits are very simple in these amps but they sound amazing! Fender, Orange and Epiphone have all built small tube amps and had great success with a combination of cheap labour and low prices.

What do you think are the best investments on the vintage guitar market these days?

In the $300-500 price range I think the best investments in vintage guitars right now would be 70s and 80s Japanese guitars. Style-wise they may be a little dated but the quality of the instruments is very high. Look for brands like Yamaha, Ibanez, Vantage, and Aria. There are also a lot of lesser known brands that were made in the same factories that had different names but are similar instruments. Moving up to the $400-1000 range I've seen a lot of American made Harmonys, Kays, Silvertones, Stellas, and Danelectros start to really climb. These are the last semi-affordable American-made vintage guitars. I also really like Fender Lead IIs and Lead IIIs as well as lesser known Gibsons like 'The Pauls' and 'Firebrands'. Above $1000 it's tough to say. Different guitars come in and out of fashion. Lately Teles and Jazz basses have been hot but prior to that Strats really shot up. Not too many people are buying Les Pauls right now so many can be had for a good deal.

What makes Paul's Boutique different from other guitar stores in Toronto like Steve's, Long and McQuade, Capsule Music, etc?

We're different because we have a little bit of everything at the shop. We have lots of vintage guitars and amps but we also carry some new instruments so you can come in and try a wide range of gear before deciding what you like best. We also sells keyboards, recording equipment, as well as all types of accessories. Our clientele ranges from collectors to young kids in bands but as the old saying goes, if we can provide good gear at reasonable prices with great service, people will come back.

What's the best deal in the store right now?

What's the best deal in the shop? That's a tough question because new gear comes in every day. As far as guitars I like the early 70s Ibanez Telecaster but that could change by tomorrow!

Thanks to Paul Babiak for taking the time to answer my questions, and if you're in the area, be sure to check out Paul's Boutique at 69½ Nassau St., Toronto.

Shame, the sequel: guitar synths.

2010-05-24T22:42:00.000-07:00

Confession time: for a couple of years in the early nineties, I owned and played a guitar synthesizer. Oh, the shame. How did this happen, and how did playing a guitar synthesizer become so shameful?

Let's start at the start. Guitar synthesizers had a fitful start with early-adopter experiments like the ARP Avatar, which listed at a withering $3000 when it was introduced in 1977. Using new pitch-to-voltage technology (the MIDI specification was not introduced until the early 1980s) the ARP Avatar converted the signal from a divided or 'hex' pickup into soothing ARP synth sounds. Only about 300 were made, and the Avatar was a commercial failure that basically sank the ARP company and forced them to sell out to CBS, as Fender had done in 1965.

1977 also saw the introduction of Roland's GR-500, which used a dedicated guitar (reputedly manufactured by Ibanez to Roland specs) and was rather more successful. The Les Paul-shaped guitar also had an on-board infinite sustain contraption and was used by Steve Hackett and Alex Lifeson. Roland's subsequent guitar synth, the GR-300, introduced in 1980, was my introduction to the wonderful world of guitars that don't sound like guitars. What could be cooler than when Pat Metheny came out on stage playing trumpet through his guitar, as I saw him do in the mid eighties? Robert Fripp and Andy Summers also got some cool sounds out of the GR-300, as on their 1982 duo album I Advance Masked.

No amount of techie explanation could assuage the hilarity which greeted Roland's next guitar synth controller, part of the GR-700 package. With its offset triangular shape and goofy body-neck outrigger handle thingy, the futuristic silver GR-700 guitar was not ready for 1985 or any other year. But the deal included MIDI for the first time, which allowed the forward-thinking guitarist to plug into any MIDI-equipped sound module.

At this point, I should take a moment to explain to our younger readers that there was a time when guitar synths seemed, well, cool. This coincided with a time in which synths were seen as cool by most people and guitars not so much. The eighties was basically the only time in history that this has ever happened, and I was one of the brainwashed masses. I even stopped playing guitar for a while when I got my Yamaha DX-7, and plunked around on that while marvelling at its perfect intonation, lacking of breaking or out-of-tune strings, and ability to conjure ANY sound imaginable. Guitar Player magazine should take some of the blame, with a seemingly constant stream of articles about 'electronic guitar' and how to get on board.

In 1991, I joined a band that had previously featured a guitar player who doubled on flute. With a new record deal under our belts, we managed to convince our manager to buy us some new equipment. I made out with a Marshall 4-12" speaker cabinet, a TubeWorks Mosvalve power amp (I already had a Roland GR-8 that I was using as a preamp/effects unit) and a Roland GR-1 guitar synth, which allowed me to reproduce the flute player's solos. This model worked with any guitar, so I attached the hex pickup to my Strat and went to town.

Around the time that band broke up, the eighties ended. Now, it was well into 1992, but sometimes these things take a while. I still remember hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on my Walkman radio on the bus home from college and feeling like something was shaking loose in the long plastic winter that was the 1980s. I sold all of my high-tech gear, bought an old 50-watt Traynor tube head, and got grungy.

Ever since then, the guitar synth has seemed to me an embarrassing memory of deluded youth. I've never even considered returning to the fold, even through what I'm sure are quantum leaps in note tracking and the sonic realism of synthesizer patches. Even my hero Jerry Garcia's adoption of guitar synth later in the nineties fell on my deaf ears. Allan Holdsworth, who embraced guitar synth wholeheartedly after its eighties heyday, just seems ill-placed on his weird-ass SynthAxe:

One more video should suffice to contextualize the full-on nerddom of the guitar synth. Step forward, Stepp guitar synthesizer.

So the question remains: with all manner of formerly embarrassing eighties culture (hair metal, leg warmers) suddenly hot again, is the guitar synth ready for a comeback?

Interview: Kevin Breit.

2010-05-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

Kevin Breit is an upsetting guitar player. He upsets traditional notions of what is possible on the guitar. He upsets the received wisdom of how the guitar should be played. And he just plain upsets other guitar players, who after witnessing a Kevin Breit performance, may be inspired to slide the guitar under the bed and find something else to do.

I first became aware of Kevin Breit because of this video for "Slow Train" by the Breit Brothers. It got a lot of play on MuchMusic (Canada's answer to MTV) in the eighties. You didn't hear resophonic guitar played with a slide too much in those days, so I made note of Kevin Breit. But for the last ten years Breit and his band the Sisters Euclid have held court at the Toronto muso venue the Orbit Room (part-owned by Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson) every Monday night. That residency ended a few months ago, but lately the Sisters are back on selected Monday nights.

Over those ten years, Breit worked with Norah Jones and Cassandra Wilson, recorded two albums with blues singer/guitarist Harry Manx, and pursued multiple recording projects at once, including the Sisters, the acoustic trio Folk Alarm and his own singer-songwriter work with his recent collection Simple Earnest Plea. Kevin kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email.

You're not a conventional jazz guitar player, but you've played with some artists that are considered to be on the jazz side of the music business, like Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones, and you've recorded versions of jazz standards like "Donna Lee" and "Giant Steps." How do you see yourself as a musician in regards to jazz musical culture?

I try to serve a song the best I can. I don't know how other musicians see themselves when they embark on playing over a well worn chestnut like "Donna Lee" or "Giant Steps." I'd like to think that i belong to some sort of tradition. I love jazz. I respect those who have come before me. Am I a 'jazz' musician? I don't know. I love making noise whenever/wherever i can.

Your latest recording project, Simple Earnest Plea, is more of a singer-songwriter effort than your previous work with the Sisters Euclid and Folk Alarm. How do you approach your guitar parts and the parameters of improvisation differently for a project of this type?

Simple Earnest Plea is my first, all-out singer songwriter recording. I tried to serve the songs the best I could without stepping on the singer's feet...I have big feet so I was careful.

Your solo tone on electric guitar, especially with the Sisters Euclid on tunes like "Perry Garcia", often has a stark, saxophone-like quality. Are you influenced by sax players or other instruments besides the guitar?

I love all those sustaining instruments. So expressive. Of course the person playing it has everything to do with inspiration and influence. Bandoneón makes me weak in the knees.

Is Jerry Garcia an influence on your playing? I hear a lot of his approach, refracted, in your playing. Which other guitar players do you hear in your own playing?

To tell you the truth, I don't own a single Grateful Dead record. It's really hip and would be hip for me to say I am a Dead Head but truth be known, I grew up not knowing a single thing about them or Jerry.A couple of years ago, I purchased Sirius radio for my car. There is a 24 hour Grateful Dead station. On my long trip between cities, I'd tune in and think that i missed out on something cool..very cool. I really liked Jerry's style. Very thoughtful and unique sound. There are so many guitarists I love, Chet, Django, Johnny Winter, Frank Zappa, Pat Martino, Cornell Dupree, B.B. King, Jeff Beck, Michael Bloomfield, Santana, Ry, Lowell George, Joe Pass, Tal Farlow, James Burton, Ray Gomez, Albert Lee, Hank Garland....more.

You have an unusual approach to slide, as we see in the YouTube video of "Tongue." You combine slide and fingered notes so seamlessly that your approach seems almost to be at a perfect middle ground between the two techniques. After seeing you play once, I went home and tried it for a while and it was very difficult to get going. Can you explain your hybrid slide/finger approach a bit?

I love playing the slide guitar. I play chords with the slide and fingers and mix the two up when i solo. I started doing this when i was young as way of staying in tune. I'd fret a note, hold it and play a harmony with the slide. This made me play in tune. It kind of stuck, fretting and sliding at the same time.

In that same performance, you build to a frenzy that reminds me of later Coltrane. What is going through your head when you are at a high level of playing intensity, as from 5:30 on in the video?

I am so unaware of things when I get all wound up. Usually I am most clever in the first couple of bars then I go off on tangents. The Sisters Euclid really dictate what I play on a solo. Gary (drummer) may 1/2 time or double up on the time. This has a huge effect on me. Ian (bassist) will suggest other root notes, which again will make me go down another road. All of this isn't premeditated, so it keeps me on my toes. It's easy for some players to play what they've rehearsed but I am pitiful at it. I have a hard time playing the same thing twice.

How do you conceive of your improvised ideas as they come to you - are they abstract musical constructs, or are they framed by the structure of the guitar itself?

I like being aware of the melody and harmony of the song i'm soloing over. I like stretching the harmony as much as I can. So the prerequisite is I have to know the chords of the tune. Saying that though, playing over songs and not knowing its inner workings, can be a lot of fun. It may not be good, but so what.

Thanks very much to Kevin Breit for taking the time to answer my questions. Kevin keeps a busy live schedule and you can follow him here.

GTR and shame.

2010-05-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

I just saw a Facebook ad for a Steve Hackett album that touts him as the guitarist in Genesis and GTR. I was a little surprised to see the GTR moniker being mentioned as a feather in Hackett's career cap, given the many jokes that followed J.D. Considine's infamous one-word review of their album in Musician magazine: "SHT". That pithy review is the most famous of Considine's long career as a music critic and was an echo of the gag in This Is Spinal Tap where Marty DiBergi recounts to the band the two-word review for their album Shark Sandwich: "Shit Sandwich."

That's hard to get over.

GTR, active from 1985 to 1987, was a supergroup that combined the talents of legendary seventies prog rock guitar heroes Steve Howe and Steve Hackett. According to the Wikipedia article, the goal was to have a guitar and guitar synthesizer-driven band with hooky stadium hit songs. When the band went on the road, though, the late 80s guitar synthesizer technology let them down with its slow, buggy tracking of actual guitar playing and they had to add a keyboard player. GTR is coming into the picture as a hapless one-album band.

But that one album on Arista was certified gold and reached #11 on the album charts. "When The Heart Rules The Mind" was a hit single (and an oft-played MTV staple on video) that stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks. The Yes fans and Genesis fans who were the base for the live concerts were generally disappointed, though, with Max Bacon's voice and the large amount of filler on the album. The base would also have been disappointed with the slick commerciality of the music and the lack of particularly interesting guitar parts. And not long into the commercial success of GTR, Hackett left the band. According to Wikipedia,

Subsequent to an abortive lineup change in 1987, Hackett left GTR, stating it had been "interesting for about five minutes". He once said of the group, "There are artistic limitations with any successful band and it was a successful band."

This Hackett fansite gives a more sanguine account, though the bio is ten years out of date. Steve Howe, seeing no point in going on without Hackett, abandoned sessions for GTR's never-completed second album, and that was that. Hackett went on as a solo artists and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 as a member of Genesis. He has lately revisited his Genesis-era material as is nowadays common among the baby boomers' favorite musicians. This is his official website, hackettsongs.com, rather than stevehackett.com, which is owned and run by Steve's former manager.

Pretty tuneless stuff, if you ask me. But show me a hit single today that begins with 42 seconds of instrumental intro.

Gear lust on a budget: the Vox AmPlug.

2010-05-20T05:33:00.000-07:00

I'm disproportionately excited about the introduction of the Vox AmPlug extension cabinet, retailing in the U.S. for $30. There's a post about them over at Guitar Noize and I'll probably seek out one of these in my next string-buying trip to Long and McQuade, my geographically closest music store.

I bought an AC30 AmPlug headphone amp when I was still on the road and needed a way to hear my solidbody electric guitar in hotel rooms. I use it quite a bit at home now, especially when I feel like rocking out. With a good set of headphones the AmPlug sounds very nice indeed for what it is. I don't hear a lot of Pod-like digital processing going on in the AmPlug; maybe that's part of why I like it so much. It turns out that the AmPlug is completely analog, an increasingly rare thing in the world of miniature electronics these days.

I stumbled on a trick to make the AmPlug sound more like an amp in the room - I put the headphones only half-on my ears so that I can hear the acoustic sound of the guitar. It seems to give the sound a wider field of placement, something that is necessary especially for the complex tone of an AC30, which this headphone amp imitates surprisingly well. My most memorable AC30 experience was in October 1992, when I was performing in England with Dave King's long-running jazz-funk-rock band, Rapid Transit. We rented backline and my amp was an AC30. It was my first experience playing through one and it was magical. It was unfortunately a little bit low on headroom to have a reasonably clean tone over Dave's thundering drum assault. A Twin would have done nicely there. But I never forgot the lush, clear sound of an overdriven AC30.

Maybe someday I'll own an AC30, but for now it's the AC30 AmPlug, for my ears only.

My string gauge see-saw: in search of 1,000 lb. tone.

2010-05-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

Back in 1994 I wrote my first grad school paper on the pioneering 1920s jazz guitarist Eddie Lang, and I really went to town on the research. I interviewed several record collectors and Lang enthusiasts in person, scoured the libraries for any material that I could find, and at one point even restrung my long-suffering Yamaha acoustic with Lang's favored gauges, .015, .018, .030, .036, .048 and .075. This was an extremely heavy set of strings, a far cry from my usual acoustic gauges, starting at .013. This set of strings used a wound second string (!) and a bass string for the low E. I've never forgotten the robust rumble that emanated from that plywood box for those few weeks, though. Lang used heavy strings to get more volume from his acoustic L-5, his only chance to be heard over the din of the dance bands that he regularly played with. It's reputed that Gibson supplied him with new guitars every couple of years because of the increased tension of those draconian strings, and I don't doubt it. But there was something in that tone for which I'll always pine.

Stevie Ray Vaughan certainly understood the value of a stout set of wires. .013, .015, .019 (unwound), .028, .038 and .058 were his usual poison, though he experimented with a .018 to .075 set at one point. He certainly had a huge tone, thanks in no small part to his giant strings and his penchant for tuning down a half step. I've strung up a few Strats with heavies in my time in short-lived attempts to get Stevie's Texas-sized tone, but always slunk back to my mainstay .010-.046 sets. To play strings of that tension and thickness on a regular basis required a commitment that I was not ready to make. I keep my Epiphone archtop strung with .013-.058 flatwounds, but let's face it, bending strings more than a half-step in jazz is basically illegal. Acoustic guitar - the same. But on the solidbody electrics, it's .010 all the way.

In the other direction, I used .009s and even .008s for a time when I was young and dumb. Even in the fog of adolescence I knew that my tone was mealy-mouthed, though. Thus the compromise of string gauges. Lighter gauges are easier to press down, bend and pick but heavier gauges have the sturdy tone that can't be simulated with electronics. As I love to say, physics doesn't lie. A thicker string sends a stronger signal to the pickups and thus begins a toneful journey through the signal chain, just as Lang's heavy gauges drove the arched top of his L-5 in the pre-electric days.

Counterfeit guitar buyers: duped or knowing?

2010-05-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

For a few years now, Gibson has been waging a legal and PR campaign against counterfeit guitars being manufactured and sold out of China. An article on the Gibson website in 2007 aroused much interest and commentary, and a followup on the arrest of counterfeiter Li Dan and her mother has similarly spawned a flurry of righteous indignation in the comments on the articles, many of them semi-literate and a few of them even racist. If you can get through the patriotic rhetoric and serial comma abuse, have a look through the comments on both articles. One commenter goes so far as to accuse Gibson of secretly manufacturing 90% of their "USA-made" guitars in China through a Gibson-China backroom agreement.

Gibson offers helpful suggestions on how to discern a real Gibson from a fake and suggests that prospective customers buy only from authorized Gibson dealers. They and others, like George Gruhn, offer that if an online guitar price seems too good to be true, it probably is.

In spite of these efforts, DHGate.com and TradeTang.com continue to operate, selling badly copied Les Pauls with Gibson logos for around $200-$300 USD. Ibanez, Fender and Gretsch guitars are also common targets. Ed Roman reports that Mosrites, especially the Ventures model, have been heavily counterfeited for years. Cheap Chinese labor and computer-assisting manufacturing make the mass counterfeiting of guitars possible, along with the widespread popularity of Ebay and the willingness of many to buy guitars through the mail.

My own experience with counterfeit guitars has taken place not in the Chinglish-laden precincts of fake-guitar cyberspace, but in local vintage guitar boutiques around Toronto. Nash Guitars makes strikingly accurate copies of vintage Fenders, even copying the now-popular 'relic' process of finish wear and hardware rust. The Strats and Teles that I saw at Capsule Music even had Fender decals on the headstocks. While these were not claimed as vintage Fenders in the store, they certainly could be claimed as such to fellow musicians, friends and curious onlookers once the guitar was purchased. About ten years ago I saw beautiful copies of sunburst Les Pauls, complete with inlaid Gibson logo, being manufactured and sold out of the now-defunct Guitar Clinic in Hamilton, Ontario. Again, these were not being sold explicitly as Gibsons (and they were not cheap, selling in the $1500-$2000 range) but the buyer for all appearances was the proud owner of a '59 Les Paul.

What seems to be missing from the discourse around fake guitars is the realization that many buyers KNOW that they are buying a counterfeit. For these buyers, a name brand represents bragging rights and credibility more than build quality or tone. If the prestige of a Gibson can be purchased for a fraction of the price of an authentic Gibson guitar, all the better. Women who buy knockoff Gucci bags on the streets of New York City know that they are knockoffs, but they won't necessarily correct their friends when they ooh and aah. The fact is that owning a prestigious guitar bestows a certain aura on the owner - to other musicians, it can give a guitarist a certain legitimacy. I have certainly experienced peer pressure to own 'cool gear'. So I understand the desire on the part of some buyers to take part in the aura of expensive instruments for a cheaper price, and that is why counterfeiting will never be completely eradicated by 'educating' the buyer.

Interview: Matt Beck of Matchbox 20, Rod Stewart and Lisa Loeb

2010-05-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

Matt Beck is one of the busiest sidemen around, backing up the likes of Matchbox 20, Lisa Loeb, Matchbox 20 singer Rob Thomas (for whom he also serves as musical director) and Rod Stewart. In addition to keyboards, mandolin, banjo, lap steel, dobro, bass, cavaquinho and vocals, Matt plays a mean guitar upside down and left-handed. Beach Boys guitarist Scott Totten (interviewed at Gitbox Culture here) hipped me to Matt's unusual approach after reading my recent blog post about the upside-down lefties Gurrumul, Albert King and Elizabeth Cotten. Matt generously answered my questions via email.

How is that you started to play upside-down? Were there other guitar players around when you first started? Do you remember the moment that you realized that you were playing in the 'wrong' way?

I started playing that way because I started playing piano at an early age and there happened to be a guitar in the house. I never thought anything about it much until I discovered I liked playing the guitar more than piano. By the time I realized I was playing it backwards (and upside-down), I thought about switching the strings to the normal way, but was already used to my style so I just stuck with it. I think someone who played guitar actually saw me playing once and said "you know you're doing it the wrong way". I didn't care because I was just having fun with it so it didn't matter to me if it was "right" or "wrong".

What are the advantages and disadvantages of playing this way?

The advantages are that everything sounds slightly unique. Whether it's a strumming thing or a finger-picking thing, it sounds different. I can play some chords that are really difficult or impossible for righties to play too. Also, bending is easier as I bend notes down toward the floor so the hand motion is easier because I'm like pulling my fingers into a fist as opposed to bending my finger tips away from my palm. It's an easier motion and I have more control doing that way. The disadvantages are that certain things are harder for me to play. It's harder for me to play really high on the guitar as I have to bring my hand all the way up and over the strings to reach those notes. I'm used to doing it but technically it's harder for me than doing it the normal way. Also, voicings and riffs that use the lower strings "open" or as drones can be harder too.

You mention in your bio that by the time you realized that you were playing upside-down you had already come up with some unique voicings. Can you elaborate on this for the guitarists out there?

Yes, after a while I learned to exploit my upside-down technique to do things that laid easier on the neck for me. I found some chords that only I could play. I found that if I work along the diagonal of the neck that goes from the highest note on the low E string to the lowest note on the high E string, that I could play some chords that are difficult (or impossible) to play with the strings the normal way. Here are a couple:

Bsus13 = 0
                2
                2
                6
                2
                x

Fdim = x
             3
             4
             6
             x
             1

There are a lot of others too that just lay easy for me so I gravitate towards them more than some normal voicings you might hear from a regular strung guitar.

Do you feel that you are part of a lefty guitarist community in any way? If so, how does this community manifest itself?

I feel a part of the community a little bit from time to time. I was contacted a few years back by an author by the name of John Engel. He was putting together a book about left-handed guitarists. He really did a thorough job of interviewing a ton of lefty guitarists. He even split everyone up into 3 sections (lefties who play normal, lefties who play righty-strung and lefties who play right-handed). A wonderful read if you're into lefty guitarists.

Has being a lefty presented any problems for finding guitars?

Ha! Well the good news is I can walk into any store and play any righty guitar. A lot of the guitars I own are actually rightys that I just flip over. Usually symmetrical body shapes like 335s and SGs and non-cutaway acoustics. When I DO desire a lefty body though, I'm in the same boat as lefties who play lefty-strung. I wind up paying on average 15% more and they're harder to come by. I also have to have the nut switched around to a righty nut and recompensate the bridge if its angled.

How did the Matchbox 20 and Lisa Loeb gigs come about?

I'd been gigging around NYC for a while and wound up doing a bunch of gigs with Lisa Loeb's bassist Joe Quigley. He thought I'd be a good fit for Lisa's upcoming tour at the time and he recommended me for the gig. After doing Lisa's gig for a while I wound up meeting a couple of the guys from Matchbox 20. Actually, the other guitar player in Lisa's band at the time was Dweezil Zappa and Dweezil's sister Moon Unit was married to Paul Doucette of Matchbox at the time so I wound up meeting the Matchbox guys that way and eventually was asked to join them for their upcoming tour at the time. That was 8 years ago and I'm still around with them to this day! It's a good fit.

Can you describe your role as music director for Rob Thomas? What are some of your duties and responsibilities?

Yes, my duties as Rob Thomas' musical director are basically to be responsible that the music being played every night is up to snuff. That basically entails making sure that everyone is playing the right parts with the right sounds. I'm also called upon to help with live arrangements and setlists and hiring of musicians too.

You played in the bands for Tommy and Rent. How did those jobs compare to your present work with Matchbox 20, Rob Thomas and Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories?

Well, those were basically Broadway show gigs and those are different than recording artist/band gigs. Broadway gigs have the main focus on the cast on stage. So the bands role is to support them in the best way possible. It's not just the music that has to get across, but the whole story line and plot. With bands, the focal point is the song. How can we get this song across in the best way possible in a live situation?

What kind of gear do you bring on the road?

Tough to give you an answer there as each tour is vastly unique from the next. Usually for band tours I will bring 1 (sometimes 2) amps, many guitars and usually a fairly big pedal board to achieve all the tones needed to recreate the songs.

What kind of music do you make on your own time?

I describe my music as powerpop/rock with singer/songwriter leanings :-) You can get my recording "Anything Which Gives You Pleasure" on iTunes or CDBaby.

Any career highlights that you'd like to report?

I spent all of 2007 in Rod Stewart's band. I don't think it get's much bigger than that. :-) He's a living icon! Right now I'm working with Bono and Edge on their forthcoming Spider Man show too. That's been quite a thrill as well. I definitely don't want to downplay my work with Matchbox 20 and Rob Thomas though as those two projects are the closest to my heart. It's just hard not to get a little gushy when you get to work with the idols you grew up on.

Thanks very much to Matt Beck for taking the time to answer my questions.

Interview: David Barrett

2010-05-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

David Barrett has played with such diverse acts as Platinum Blonde and Amanda Marshall and has carved out a niche on the web with a series of popular YouTube clips. As well as self-producing a series of solo guitar albums, including The Atomsmasher's Noisy Trade and Music For Acoustic Guitar, David holds the position of Director of Special Events with Fingerstyleguitar.ca, and is a faculty member of League Of Rock (a Toronto-based 'rock school' for amateur musicians). David has composed music for film, and was also commissioned to create music for The Tube, a US music television network. Currently, David is conducting guitar workshops and playing solo concerts in Canada. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email.

You have posted quite a few striking videos of your playing on YouTube and have generated some strong interest. How did you get into doing this, and how has the experience been for you?

At some point I think I had posted about 80 videos. Everything from older footage of rock stuff, to newer content I created just for YouTube, being either performance or educational material. I took about half of it down to try and manage some quality control, I didn’t want to just post anything.
Basically after playing rock guitar and recording and touring for 20 years I came to the realization that I had become a pop guitar player and was relying on singers as a foundation for my musical work, even though I had hours of recorded guitar music at home that no one had ever heard. I decided I was only going to play guitar music and YouTube was an easy and obvious choice to get my material out there and try some things that were initially way outside of my comfort zone. I wanted to get really specific and do things that I wasn’t seeing much of, like talk with Steve Howe for an hour and cover topics outside but not unrelated to guitar. Or I’d post a mini movie shot by photographer Edward Pond featuring an hours worth of soundscapes. Where else could I post this stuff and have an audience?!

What's your sense of the YouTube guitar community? Anything about it that surprised you at first?

Yes, what surprised me most was how many guitar players and fans there are out there that have interests outside the mainstream. Something like YouTube comes along and provides an outlet for content that a lot of music fans crave. In the last decade, if you’d see an interview on TV or in print it was usually reduced to a sound bite, and more recently popular music is being reduced to a ring tone. On YouTube you can post anything, so I tried to give really in-depth stuff, and people seem to respond. I can get feedback from YouTube every day, a lot of positive comments, as well as guitar questions. Out of every 100,000 views I might get only one or two really terrible comments, so it’s really cool.

What guitars and amps do you use most?

For electric guitar, I only play my 1968 Gibson ES175D; I’ve had it since 1982. I use my Gibson Console a lot in the studio too, it’s a twin neck 8 string from 1956. For acoustics which I use all the time, there’s my Takamine C134S classical, Gibson Hummingbird, Gibson B25 12 string, Alhambra 12 string laud, Trinity College mandolin, and a Regal resophonic guitar.
I’ve been using a pair of Fender Champs for years. They’re the Champ II models designed by Paul Rivera 30 years ago, I’ve got Celestions in both. I like my Pignose too. I’m a big fan of Line 6 and Roland for direct.

Effects?

Line 6 M13 and Boss ME 50, nothing else except an Ernie Ball volume pedal, all the vintage stuff is long gone!

You're involved with Fingerstyleguitar.ca - what kind of work do you do with them?

Initially I helped Randy Finney out a lot in the early days when he started it back in 2005. I ran open stages, created podcasts, and produced a compilation CD for the association that featured Toronto area guitar players. I was also able to consult on certain logistics of touring and technical support, and refer Randy to some friends that have backgrounds in design, photography, media and sound engineering. Fingerstyleguitar.ca has become a hub in Canada to promote mostly international guitarists. Randy is able to bring the biggest names in guitar to Canada for some very successful single concerts and tours. There is less emphasis on the local scene, but that’s fine with me, I prefer that it has grown - it’s up to someone else at this point to keep the local thing going.

Have you noticed any changes in guitar trends over the course of your career?

Yes, and it’s a big one. There isn’t really any guitar on the radio, not like there used to be. Guitar has become popular with Rock Band and Guitar Hero and there is still a huge interest in other areas of guitar. But, the demand for good guitar intros and solos in pop music just isn’t there, so there is less work. A lot of good recording engineers can play guitar well enough for what is required in some pop music, so I’d say why bother to call a guitar player for a session?

The goal for me is to create a brand or franchise for my own music. Playing the music of other people has never been very satisfying for me, but I appreciate others who do it well.

Any career highlights that you'd like to share?

Jamming "Xanadu" with Alex Lifeson in his basement!

Thanks to David Barrett for taking the time to answer my questions. Check out David's website for more information.

The upside-down lefty: lonely and listening.

2010-05-13T05:54:00.000-07:00

I just became aware this week of Gurrumul, a blind aboriginal singer from Australia who is touring the US in June and July.

Growing up on a remote island, isolated from the larger society, Gurrumul learned to play on a right-handed guitar without turning the strings around. While this way of playing is rare, it is not unheard of, though less frequently today, with the ready availability of guitars worldwide. Gurrumul's playing style is a gentle fingerpick, though with a less regimented pattern than American folk fingerpicking.

I can only think of two guitarists that I've seen that play 'upside-down' lefty - Elizabeth Cotten and Albert King. Albert King is best known as a sixties/seventies urban bluesman, playing highly expressive, bent-string-laden blues licks, but pulling down the thin strings, which are at the top of the neck:

There's a close up of King's hands at 1:07, and I have to say that it's strange to watch, as someone who's been intently watching people play guitar in the regular way for 28 years. Even odder to watch, for me, is Elizabeth Cotten, who played a version of Travis picking upside-down, with the thumb playing the melody and the fingers playing alternating bass notes.

I'm not sure why Albert King played the way he did, but Elizabeth Cotten learned to play on a guitar borrowed from her brother, and she was not allowed to rearrange the strings. I would guess that Gurrumul was borrowing the guitar from a family member, or perhaps the guitar was just around and nobody knew to 'correct' the strings. Cultural isolation cuts off this kind of information, which can sometimes fuel innovation. Jeff Healey, another blind guitarist who played in an unusual way, said that nobody corrected him when he began to play the guitar overhand on his lap as a child.

Was upside-down left-handed playing more prevalent in the past, when communities were more isolated and guitars were less common? I really don't know, though I'd like to. I can't say that I've personally known anyone who played that way. I, like Jeff, started playing guitar lap-style, because it was easier to see what I was doing. My first guitar lesson took care of that. Did guitar lessons kill this particular mutation of guitar culture?

I think that in the cases of Gurrumul, Elizabeth Cotten, and Jeff Healey, playing 'the wrong way' came mostly out of social isolation. For Gurrumul and Jeff, I would speculate that it was blindness that set them outside of the larger guitar community. So much of guitar knowledge is traded through the eyes - look at the YouTube guitar community. For Elizabeth Cotten, it was being a young African-American woman at the turn of the century - there were strictures on the behaviour of young black women at that time that would have limited Elizabeth's inclusion in the local musical discourse.

This is not to say that these musicians were isolated from oral and aural culture. Gurrumul's favorite band is Dire Straits. Albert King must have grown up with blues recordings to study, based on his sure knowledge of the conventions of blues improvisation and stage performance. I'm not sure how many recordings Elizabeth Cotten was exposed to growing up, but her playing style is very much a piece with southern musicians who recorded in the 1920s, including Mississippi John Hurt, Bayless Rose and Geeshie Wiley.

An unusual technique can put a fresh spin on traditional styles like blues, folk and Australian aboriginal. All of the musicians that I've mentioned here play in traditional styles but have something different - a strange turn of phrase, an oddly quick string bend - that give them a distinctive musical identity. I submit that their 'wrong' ways of playing, borne of social isolation, form a large part of what makes these musicians distinctive and intriguing in their own ways.

Article first published as Gurrumul: the Upside-down Lefty, Lonely, Listening. on Technorati.

Big Country, Jimi and "secret gadgets".

2010-05-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

Back in 1983 when "In A Big Country" by the Scottish band Big Country became a pop (and more importantly for me at the time, video) hit, I was in Grade 9. I had a little group of guitar-playing friends and we would exchange licks and knowledge about the world of guitars, amps and pedals. The scuttlebutt was that Big Country owned rare and coveted pedals (I remember a "Japanese distortion pedal" being mooted) that allowed them to achieve their trademark 'bagpipe' sound.

What was the source of the bagpipe tone? We're still speculating, it seems. According to this blog, they were using the MXR M-129 Pitch Transposer, a rackmounted device. It certainly is rare.
Another guitar gadget of legend was Jimi Hendrix's "secret switch", which I heard bandied about for a few years. It's now claimed that this switch really did exist, possibly installed by Dan Armstrong. A Hendrix guitar with the switch, has, in any case, never been found.

The velvet icepick: favorite Telecaster moments.

2010-05-11T06:51:00.000-07:00

I was watching this YouTube of Merle Haggard singing "Branded Man" when out of nowhere at 1:43 into the track, a burst of beautiful Telecaster licks appeared. I had forgotten they were there, so it was a nice surprise.

It got me thinking about some of my favorite Tele moments - the recordings that made me love the Tele. I've played a Tele for about twelve years now. I think that I've become a 'Tele player' in the process - I tend to play things on it that the guitar seems to want to do. I think that the Tele has a clear, human voice, and that is part of what makes it a less forgiving guitar than say a Strat or a Les Paul. Danny Gatton, Albert Collins and Roy Buchanan are three guitarists who have been strongly associated with the Telecaster. All three were masters of the trademark Tele tone - searing, trebly attack and gain, usually bathed in spring reverb. Danny Gatton especially mastered the various tricks that play on the architecture of the Tele - behind-the-nut bends and the like.

Mike Bloomfield was associated with the 1959 Les Paul guitar in his later work with Paul Butterfield and the Electric Flag, but on his New York sessions with Bob Dylan in 1965, it was a Telecaster all the way. Al Kooper recounts the story of his first meeting with Bloomfield at the "Like A Rolling Stone" session in '65, where Bloomfield apparently comes in to the studio carrying a Tele without a case, and knocking it against the wall to get the snow off. It's a great story, but since the "Like A Rolling Stone" sessions took place on June 15 and 16, 1965, I can't see how snowy it could have been. But no matter. The guitar breaks in "Tombstone Blues" are my favorite Bloomfield bits on Highway 61 Revisited.
Hear here.

Dylan's other lead player of the sixties, Robbie Robertson, is another guitarist who is not necessarily connected to the Tele in the public imagination because he didn't use one in The Last Waltz. But in early sessions with Dylan and on the road in 1966, Leo Fender's primordial plank was the go-to. Here's a YouTube of Robbie's Tele reverberating off the walls of some old English music hall in Eat The Document, D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of Dylan's '66 UK tour.

Some others are more obvious. Albert Collins? Even David Letterman calls him the "Master of the Telecaster":

This live video of Ricky Skaggs performing "Don't Get Above Your Raisin'" was on high rotation on the country music video channel when I was an idle youth. Ray Flacke's solo at 1:29 is astounding.

But the true "Master of the Telecaster" in my heart will always be Roy Buchanan, a guitarist's guitarist who not only is inextricably associated with the Tele, but with one specific Tele, a butterscotch beauty from 1952:

Rare Gibsons: Safe as houses?

2010-05-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

In an article on the Gibson website, Jeremy Singer notes the steadily increasing value of vintage and rare Gibsons.

“It’s official – guitars are better investments than homes,” says rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia expert Ted Owen. They’re also better investments than stocks and shares. A 1958 Gibson Explorer, bought for $247.50 in 1963, was sold in 2006 for $611,000. That’s almost a 20% year-on-year annual return versus an average of 12% for the typical house or the 9% typically produced investing in shares. Adam Newman, manager of Vintage & Rare Guitars says, “Late Fifties Gibson Les Paul Standards bought for a few hundred dollars could be worth well over $300,000. With rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia auctions taking place on a regular basis, it’s now easier to purchase a vintage or rare guitar that, in turn, is a solid investment.

Not long ago, I ruminated on the resale value of guitars listed in the classifieds of a 1980 newspaper issue. I guess "the one that got away" for me was a 1959 Strat, all original, that I found in Sault Ste. Marie for $1500. They also had a 1955 Tele, clean, $1500. I couldn't afford the guitar - couldn't even fathom it - but my bandmate had a friend back in Toronto with a job. We bought it for them and they threw in a 1962 Fender Musicmaster for me for free for testing the guitar and helping to broker the deal long distance. Crazy times. If I'd had the cash in the bank to buy that guitar in 1988, it would possibly be worth $38,856.00. Not a bad increase.

What surprised me most about the article was not its recommendation of vintage Gibson guitars as an investment, but the increases that it cited for recent Gibson products like the 2006 Jimmy Page Custom Authentic Les Paul, which saw increases of 300% and 400% in price soon after its initial sale to the public. Were those guitars, limited to only 25 guitars signed, and more importantly, played by Jimmy Page himself, an IPO? The stock is, in this case, a highly limited product that is dripping with semiotic connotations. To own a guitar that was played by a legend holds great weight for some people, and they will pay for it.

There's even an investment fund for vintage guitars now, offered by Anchorage Capital Partners. They promise a 31% annual return. Should everybody get on the bus now? Or has the market peaked?

The most valuable guitars in the world are associated with the musicians that emerged in the U.S. and especially England from about 1964-1968. This period is ground zero for classic rock, which suggests that guitars owned by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page are valuable because of the durability, at least so far, of that body of music over time. When that music, and those artists, cease to hold great affective force amongst large sections of the public, the value of those investments will fall precipitously. When Eric Clapton dies, will the Eric Clapton model Stratocaster become more valuable? Or less so, because Clapton's stock will fall when he is no longer touring? Death is a great career move, but more so when you are young and full of promise. It remains to be seen how this will play out, for the most part. I don't believe that the Fender Stevie Ray Vaughan Strat increased in value much after his death in 1990, but it is somewhat more coveted now because John Mayer used one for a while. And the baby boomers are largely into their sixties.

I'm not sure that I would recommend vintage guitars to, say, a relative as a long-term investment. It seems to me that the values of the rarest guitars have become ridiculously inflated and that they must fall as the affective power of the 1960s musicians amongst the general public subsides with age and death, both of the performers and of the audience. But the decline will at least be slow, so there is still money to be made on the vintage guitar market in the shorter term. But I won't be subscribing to Guitar Aficionado anytime soon either. I play 'em.

Interview: Scott Totten of the Beach Boys

2010-05-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

The man Hamer craftsman Jol Dantzig described as "a guitarist's guitarist" has been holding down the guitar chair in the Beach Boys since 2000, and has been the musical director since 2007. Scott Totten was born and raised in Orange County, California. After attending Berklee from 1983-86 (finally earning his degree in 2006) he became a first call guitarist for Broadway shows, and has contributed his talents to New York and touring productions of Rent, Les Miserables, and Tommy. Today Scott tours the world with "The Boys," overseeing the maintenance and rehearsal of the sometimes complex vocal and instrumental arrangements of the Beach Boys' legendary career. Recently, the band has undertaken a series of symphony shows in Australia, and Scott has overseen those arrangements as well.

I've seen the band perform twice near Toronto in the last couple of years and I can attest that the band is in very good shape indeed. Original member Mike Love is the most recognizable face, and Bruce Johnston, who wrote my first favorite song, "I Write The Songs," is a close second. Scott leads the band, which includes John Cowsill on drums and vocals, Randall Kirsch on bass and falsetto, Christian Love (Mike's son) on rhythm guitar and vocals, and Tim Bonhomme (from Sudbury, Ontario!) on keys and vocals. In concert, the Beach Boys expertly play and sing their many hits, including some of the gorgeous Pet Sounds-era material. As Andrew Hickey blogged after seeing a Manchester Beach Boys show in 2008, "this band actually sound far more like the Beach Boys' records than the real Beach Boys did in the last couple of decades of their career."

Scott and I became friends after he attended a Classic Albums Live Beatles album performance in Florida that I was a part of. We share a love of Beatles minutiae, classic rock and pop perfectionism. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email:

Scott, you wear many hats as the musical director and guitarist of the Beach Boys. How do the roles of bandleader, arranger and band member complement each other or clash?

Hmm, interesting question-I think the arranger part complements the other parts most easily, at least on the few orchestral arrangements I’ve worked on, because I try to come up with parts that either add to the recorded parts or supplement them. As bandleader vs. band member, sometimes the band member in me doesn’t want to go to soundcheck…

I know you to be an avid guitar collector. What are your most interesting guitars, amps or effects?

Well, you mentioned Jol Dantzig earlier - he took me to Black Market Music back when they were in the Bay area and he MADE me buy a plexi Marshall head. This was around '94-'95. He told me they were way rarer than any pre CBS Strat and were undervalued. He was right and I thank him for making me get one, it sounds killer! It’s a '68 100w SuperTrem. I’ve got an old Strat and Tele, a dot neck 335. A couple of years ago I was in Cowtown Guitars in Las Vegas and I saw a reissue Fender Jaguar hanging on the wall…only it wasn’t a reissue! It was a mint 64, and I bought it immediately. Most of my pedals are newer, but I do have a 1970-71 Fuzz Face!

What do you bring on the road?

I take either my Hamer Monaco III or a Strat and a Epiphone Riviera 12-string. Also a pedalboard with a Keeley Compressor and Keeley/Boss Blues Driver, a Maxon analog delay, Ernie Ball volume pedal, Boss Tremolo, Boss/Fender Reverb and a Boss tuner.

How do you deal with backline? Any problems with that?

Yes, we rent amps, keys and drums at every venue and the amp is such an integral part of the guitar sound, it’s tough having a different one every night.

You convincingly reproduce some vintage tones and effects onstage. What are some of your secrets?

Analog! Lots of reverb when appropriate. And using the outer 2 pickups on a 3 pickup guitar. I’ve had to have both 6-strings rewound to do that. It simulates the pickups on a Jaguar, which is what Carl played on many early Beach Boys records.

Who are your favorite guitarists at the moment?

I love all the usual suspects, Harrison/Hendrix/Page/Beck/Townshend but also Bert Jansch, Jonny Greenwood, Robbie McIntosh, Lindsay Buckingham, Larry Carlton, David Williams…I’ve been thinking a lot about Pat Metheny lately.

What do your duties as music director of the Beach Boys entail?

I transcribe all the vocal and instrumental parts and try to translate them for live performance by our band. Mike Love and I tailor the setlist to the specifics of the show each night. I review soundboard recordings most nights to make sure the mix and performance reflect what we’re intending to represent. And I try not to step on too many toes in the process.

How do you see your role in the Beach Boys' legacy and history?

Just as a footnote. The heavy lifting was done by Brian and the other guys in the studio years ago.

Obviously you take your  role as a custodian of the Boys' music seriously - it comes through in  your commitment to detail and accuracy, both as guitarist in the band and as musical director. Do you feel the weight of history in your work with the band?

I've heard my role described (independently by you and also Bruce Johnston) as "art restoration". If I can take that analogy a bit further (without sounding too pompous), then consider the restoration of a great art work, say DaVinci's "The Last Supper". Can anyone name the man who led the restoration from 1978-1999? The art was created by DaVinci. (Actually there is quite a controversy surrounding that restoration).I certainly take my responsibility very seriously, because I do consider the Beach Boys music to be art. And I have always been a big fan. But the bottom line is, Brian, Mike, Carl, Dennis, Al, Bruce and David created that art over the years. My job today is to RECREATE it for the audience. Plus, I believe it's the records that will define the band's legend, not the live shows of the early 2000's. I think most people coming to see a Beach Boys show remember the way the records sound, and want to hear those arrangements, rather than "our new interpretations of old classics". I'm sure that when Mr. Pinin Brambilla Barcilon spent 21 years restoring "The Last Supper" he felt the weight of history; but I doubt that he ever thought his name would be remembered alongside DaVinci's.

What has been your personal career highlight so far?

There’s been a lot of highlights since I’ve been in the band, it’s hard to pick one but recently we played at the Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Symphony…and they performed one of my arrangements. I liked that!

How have you seen guitar culture change over the course of your career?

Seems like the era of the gunslinger is over…songs rarely have improvised guitar solos anymore (other than the jam bands). Plus, I’m kind of removed from the culture; as a musical director I think less about guitar and more about vocals and arrangements.

What do you practice on your own time?

I’ve been playing a lot of classical when my nails are in decent shape, and I’ve been trying to improve my keyboard, ahem, skills for lack of a better word. But when I get the chance I pull out my Les Paul and put on a Zeppelin record…

Thanks to Scott for taking the time to answer my questions. Scott truly is a guitarist's guitarist, touring the world with a legendary band, but he is also, in a very real way, a thoughtful and serious curator of some classic rock and pop music. See his work this year with the Beach Boys, on tour.

The banjo dilettante.

2010-05-05T09:39:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of hours in the studio yesterday wrestling with a five string banjo for a track that I'm recording with Alec Fraser. It's Alec's banjo, left at his studio by some long-ago musician who never came back to pick it up. I play a bit of banjo - I was even getting hired for sessions a few years back - because the standard open G tuning resembles standard tuning on the guitar - it's D G B D low to high, with a high G on the short fifth string, compared to D G D G B D on the guitar. The only string that's really different is the first string, down a whole step. So I quickly figured way back whenever I first picked up a banjo that I just needed to mentally move every note on that string up two frets.

Since we were basing our recording on Dock Boggs' version of the old-time country standard "Sugar Baby" (also known as "Red Rocking Chair"), I started with what is reported to be Dock's tuning on that song - "sawmill". With a G on the short string, it's D G C D low to high. So I think of it as the first four strings of the guitar in open G, with the second string notes adjusted to be down one fret. If you play in D in that tuning, you get the flat seventh, the C, ringing out strongly, as well as the G, which is the fourth of the scale. The G sounds especially strange if it's brought into the picking pattern over a D minor chord - "Sugar Baby" is essentially over one chord - D minor. When the high G appears (courtesy of the short drone string) it creates a D minor eleventh chord. This rather spooky chord contributes to the air of strangeness in Boggs' original 1927 recording.

Alec and I ended up trying a million permutations of the tune, changing the banjo tuning to D G A D (plus D on the short string) which better resembles the folkie guitar tuning "dadgad", which strangely enough is D A D G A D low to high. I even switched to lap slide guitar, then standard guitar for a while, and ended up back at the banjo.

Though I enjoy playing the banjo (I like anything acoustic that loud, for starters) I realize that I am a guitar player playing a banjo, and that I have not seriously checked out the body of knowledge that is banjo culture. To be honest, I don't know that I'll ever be a "real" banjo player - I think that I pretty much have to play one or the other, and I'm not ready to give up guitar yet! To complicate matters, there are four-string and five-string versions of the banjo.

The banjo has an incredible history, with origins in west African folk instruments like the akonting and banjar. Enslaved Africans in North America fashioned their own instruments, and when the blackface minstrels imitated them in the 19th century, a banjo craze began. Any survey of early recorded folk music in the American South would find the five-string and four-string banjo to be ubiquitous in both black and white musical culture. In the early part of the 20th century, the banjo was a staple of the recording industry, with ragtime 4-string banjo cylinders by Vess Ossman and Harry Van Eps selling strongly. It was also a standard part of the rhythm sections of dance bands, again both black and white.

When Eddie Lang burst on the scene with the Mound City Blue Blowers in 1925, he began to popularize the guitar to such an extent that banjos were basically gone from dance and jazz bands by the 1930s. The development of the microphone helped, and once guitars were electrified in the middle of the 1930s, the banjo was well out of fashion.

But the banjo was not to be silent for long. It had always had a strong presence in country music, and the offshoot style of bluegrass was to sustain the banjo most strongly in American music. Bluegrass music is an oddly classical strain of country music, and the strong attack and short decay of the five-string banjo sound encourage high-speed complexities and cascading chromaticisms. The four-string banjo has survived, in a more frozen form, in the "Dixieland" traditional New Orleans jazz band.

Early songsters and bluesmen like Little Hat Jones and Moses Mason used six-string banjos, tuned like guitars, on their 1920s recordings. Hot Five and Hot Seven banjoist/guitarist Johnny St. Cyr used one on pioneering jazz recordings with Louis Armstrong (in a lower-rent version of the creepy trend of using dead people to advertise products, Johnny is pictured with [a non-Deering] six-string in a recent print ad for Deering's six-string banjos). The six-string banjo is making a comeback with banjo dilettante guitarists like myself. Here's a nice talk about and demonstration of a six-string.

I think I need one. But would playing a six-string banjo further damage my already rock-bottom banjo cred? The banjo life is an all-encompassing one. Respected Toronto jazz guitarist Tim Posgate knows a thing or two about making the leap from guitar to banjo. Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell both sound great on banjo, though not very much like conventional banjo players - I suspect, like me, they spend 99% of their time on the guitar.

The ones that got away: Carter-era guitar listings.

2010-05-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back guitarist Bernie LaBarge gave me a copy of the Toronto Star newspaper from December 9, 1980 - the day after John Lennon was murdered. We are both huge Beatles fans and he was returning the favor after I gave him a 1968 Guitar Player magazine with Jimi Hendrix on the cover.

I probably read this Toronto Star issue back then, along with the Sun and the Globe and Time and Newsweek, since John Lennon's murder sent me on a quest to obtain any printed matter whatsoever about the event, and then about him and the Beatles. My first research obsession - I was eleven.

Last night, thumbing through its yellowed pages, I found the 'Musical Instruments' column in the classified ads. The once-mighty Star classified have shrunk to a few pages in the present day, supplanted by Craigslist and Kijiji. But in 1980 if you wanted to sell a guitar, the Star classifieds was the place to go. Let's have a look.

GIBSON guitar, ES335, 1969, $850. and other equipment, 822-****.

Current market price of a 1969 Gibson ES-335? $4500 to $9000 US, according to vintage-guitars.blogspot.com. Reading these classifieds is a grim reminder of how ridiculous the market for certain American guitars has gotten. As late as 1988 I found a 1959 stock Strat in Sault Ste. Marie for $1500 (I couldn't buy it).

GUITAR - Gibson ES175, with P.A.F. Humbucking pickup, excellent condition, $725. 247-****.

Ouch. A guitar I've always coveted, ever since I saw Tim Posgate's 175 back in high school. The lister doesn't give a year of manufacture, making it hard to price the instrument today, but if the pickup is truly a PAF the guitar was probably made between 1957 and 1961, and the 2010 buyer is looking at a cool $5,100 according to this recent listing. Of course, you can always buy a nice counterfeit for around the 1980 price.

MARTIN D-18, beautifully aged tone, $650. 444-****.

Ouch again. I can almost hear the beautifully aged tone. Wait, let's listen (for the full effect please use headphones, not your crappy laptop speakers):

More Martin tone porn and great picking by a Greek flatpicker:

Again, it's hard to guess at the year of manufacture of the listed D-18, which is all-important to vintage value. A conservative estimate of the age of an "aged" guitar is ten years, I reckon. 1970 Martin D-18: $2000 at this listing, about the same as a new D-18.

Liberal estimate - how about 1942? Expect to pay $12000. And the final cut:

1965 Fender Jazzmaster, rarity, immac., plus brand new case, $650 call Andy, 232-****

I want to call up Andy and ask him if he ever thinks about the one that got away, that guitar that he sold for a song thirty years ago, that he could have sold in 2010 for the price of a nice car. If he regrets it, even just to still have the guitar as an example of the golden era of a great American guitar company. The fact that he devotes about a quarter of his text to the selling point of a "brand new case" is almost sad.

I've been thinking about the ones that got away - the guitars, I mean. There's the toneful 1958 Gibson J-45 acoustic that I used for a year then blew the chance to purchase. The oddball Tele Frankenstein with a seventies Strat neck, a Gibson humbucker, a 1968-dated Tele bridge pickup and a multi-wood double-cutaway body. Even the Japanese-made 1983 Squier Strat that I bought new at Burlington Music (now a branch of Long and McQuade, the Canadian music store behemoth). Anybody harboring regrets? Share your shame.

Going down, down, down to floppy "A" town.

2010-04-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

Listening today to Leroy Pullen's (not Roger Miller's, despite the YouTube title) "I'm A Nut," I noticed that the guitarist's low E string was tuned down to A for a floppy "baritone" effect.

I remember this effect being used on Dwight Yoakam's "Little Ways" (which is itself a Buck Owens throwback) in the late eighties:

So I set to work getting my sixth string down to a floppy A. A nice thing about this extreme downtuned effect is that barre chords are still very easy to grab if the rest of the guitar is in standard tuning - just play "A form" chords, extending the barre finger down to the sixth string, and everything is just all right. Like so:

oo|||o
||||||
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||||||

And then the fun begins. For consistency of effect in single-note runs, you have to play everything up and down the one string - jumping to one of the other strings is too jarring a timbral difference. The downtuned string has a deep, slowed-down tone and a slight pitch wobble, especially if picked hard. This is what distinguishes the "A" downtune from a baritone guitar, which is at at the same lower range, but sounds "tighter." I wonder if this tuning is in Mark Hanson's alternate tunings book? Martin Simpson's DVD?

It's my sense that this trick is not widely used these days. The alternate tunings wiki lists several tunings that go down that low, but what makes this tuning more interesting is the disparity in pitch between the rest of the strings that are tuned in standard and the one floppy low string. Am I incorrect about this? A Google search yielded nothing about this specific trick, but I'm not sure which keywords would do the job.

The flanger, forgotten pedal.

2010-04-28T15:25:00.000-07:00

I stopped by this morning at Capsule Music, my local higher-end used guitar store. In the 'bargain bin' I found a battered pink 80s iteration of the flanger, the forgotten pedal.

The flanger is by no means the only also-ran of the 1970s-80s effects pedal renaissance. Anyone plugged into an Aural Exciter lately? Even the once-mighty chorus pedal has largely fallen from grace, though I'm told that it is on the comeback trail, sales-wise.

Part of the problem for the flanger has been its similarity to both the chorus and phaser in its operation and sound. I've never owned a stand-alone flanger pedal myself. In fact, my only 'modulation' effects are an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Nano phaser and the dubious chorusing abilities of the EHX Memory Man Deluxe (one of the older models).

The exception to the flanger's general decline is the strong cachet of the A/DA flanger, which sells for at least $500 on the rare occasions that it shows up at a store like Capsule. As often as not, these esoteric pedals are snapped up by the roadies for mega rock stars like Neil Young and the Edge and stockpiled in case of failure.

The origin of flanging, first as a recording studio effect and later as a stand-alone effects pedal, is tied up with the recording history of the Beatles. It is popularly acknowledged (with some compelling alternative histories) that Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend was responsible for first harnessing the effects of pressing on the flanges of moving tape reels on multiple machines. As the story goes,

it was Lennon who actually gave the process the name "flanging." Lennon asked Beatles producer George Martin to explain how ADT worked, and Martin answered with the nonsense explanation, "Now listen, it's very simple. We take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange with double negative feedback."From that point on, whenever Lennon wanted a Beatles song double-tracked, he would ask for "Ken's flanger". According to Lewisohn, "The Beatles' influence was so vast that the term "flanging" is still in use today, more than 20 years on." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanger

Once used to help realize the groundbreaking production of "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1966, flanging (along with the Leslie rotating cabinet) was used almost obsessively by the Beatles to render wobbly, psychedelic guitars (or voices, or pianos).

One of the more interesting, and dated, uses of the flanger would have to be its employment with full band mixes, such as at :51 in the Small Faces' 1967 single, "Itchycoo Park":

Or after 2:48 for the coda of "Bold As Love" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience:

Or at 2:17 in the Doobie Brothers' 1972 "Listen To The Music":

Remember when ugly bands could still make it?

One of the last examples of non-ironic full-band flanging must be the bridge of the Eagles' "Life In The Fast Lane" (sorry, no YouTube video of the litigious Eagles' 1976 studio recording of this song).

I would theorize that full-band flanging was more popular when flanging was a studio-only effect. It was quite easy to flange an entire section of a mixdown - vocals, instruments, and reverb (flanged reverb is prominent in the Hendrix example). When improvements in integrated circuits allowed the flanging effect to be implemented in a small, battery-operated effects pedal, flanging shifted towards being a guitar-only effect.

The A/DA was the first commercial flanger pedal, introduced in June 1977. Eddie Van Halen was an early adopter of one of the first to follow, the MXR:

The Ibanez Jetlyzer was another popular flanger of the seventies. In the late 70s and early 80s, the flanger pedal was fairly ubiquitous on guitar tracks, especially clean chord strums and arpeggios. But the pedal slowly declined in popularity along with chorus. It might be argued that flanging was the innocent victim of the overexposure of chorused guitar in 1980s pop music.

Lenny Kravitz's 1993 "Are You Gonna Go My Way" is a prime example of ironic flanging - the entire mix is heavily flanged at one point, exaggerating the most subtle full-band flanging of the Small Faces and Beatles. The full-band flange section begins at 2:10 for the climactic instrumental section:

I think that the flanger did not survive its initial novelty appeal because it imposed too coherent a sonic text on the music that it was used for. Once you knew the sound of the flanger, it was easy to identify - it was an exposed and ubiquitous code that tended, over time, to overtake the songs. The prominent (and recognizable) flanging effect helped to turn "Itchycoo Park" into a relic. It subsequently became a go-to pedal for overtly nostalgic sixties effects, as in Lenny Kravitz' sonic museum. But it became a rarity on the pedalboards of the musical rank and file.

There may be a cult of the flanger still out there, but I'm not aware of it. Musicians and music store staff that I have asked about the flanger seem ambivalent - they're aware of it, it may even be in a multi-effect unit that they have, but it's not seen as a staple effect. The only way to have any certainly about these things is to get facts and figures, which as far as I know are not published. I'd like to know, for example, how many flangers did Boss sell last year compared to Metal Zone pedals?

Baritone guitars, liminal zones and the economy of pub gigs.

2010-04-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

I had a Danelectro baritone guitar, a reissue of a fifties model, for a few years in the late nineties. It was pretty cheap - around $400 - so I impulse-bought it at Lakeshore Music in Burlington. I used it for a guitar solo on my album Been Here And Gone in 2000 and not long after traded it for a used Camry, a trade that I actually regret. In between I found a use for it that was, as I thought at the time, undiscussed. Actually, I can't remember knowing very much at all about the uses of baritone guitars. I knew that they had been on spaghetti Western soundtracks and Nashville studios in the sixties, often doubling string bass (leading to the studio term "tic-tac bass"). The closest thing that I saw or played prior to the mid-nineties was the Fender Bass VI, which was originally produced from 1961 to 1975. But the Bass VI is really a six-string bass, a guitar an octave down. The Wikipedia article on baritone guitars does not make a distinction between the Fender Bass VI and baritone guitars, and seems to suggest that baritone guitars were used on Pet Sounds and "Hey Jude," which I think is misleading.

The baritone guitar is six stringed, tuned halfway between a guitar and a bass, B E A D F# B (low to high). That's a scary looking tuning (especially the F#!) but it's just standard guitar tuning down a perfect fourth. But it's the tuning, in a kind of liminal space between guitar and bass ranges, that defines the baritone. It's really the only way, short of adding two strings, to be able to passably represent guitar and bass at the same time on the fly. The "on the fly" part is important, because retaining the six-string design keeps things simple and keeps neck widths down. If I was on a pickup acoustic gig, I wanted to be able to move around the neck easily, since I was probably transposing the chords of the song in my head at the same time.

At the time, I was playing with the Kevin MacLean Band around Hamilton. Kevin was just starting to expand beyond performing as a single and booking small band dates. For cramped pubs we could play as a trio, with the drummer on stand-up cocktail kit and myself on baritone guitar. With Kevin's acoustic guitar filling in the harmony, I covered bass lines and could throw in credible sounding solos. It was a easy, low-tech way for a three-piece to sound like a four-piece.

I can see this idea working for acoustic pub bands, though I haven't seen, through the recent boomlet of baritone guitar interest, anyone playing one live. Maybe that's because I've ignored recent metal, where the "nu metal" downtuning of Korn and Deftones has led to a resurgence of black, pointy baritone guitars. It stands to reason that nothing assaults the colon like subsonic power chords. Another contemporary take on the baritone idea is the acoustic baritone guitar. Vicki Genfan and Al Petteway sound wonderful on it, which suggests to me that the acoustic baritone has all kinds of possibilities as a solo fingerstyle instrument.

All of the above was inspired by a post over at Guitarz on baritone Telecasters, an idea whose time has come. Now I see from my reading that Duane Eddy used a baritone guitar. When I was a really small child I loved my mother's record of Twangy Guitar and Silky Strings. Perhaps my baritone desires are deep-seated. Maybe it's time for a conversion.

Sol Ho'opi'i and my year of Hawai'ian steel guitar.

2010-04-23T11:05:00.000-07:00

About ten years ago, I traded in an old Boss Chorus Ensemble pedal for a National lap steel guitar at the Guitar Clinic in Hamilton. Resplendent in a mother-of-toilet-seat pearloid finish, this sturdy plank was to capture my imagination for the next year or so. Guitar Clinic staffer and mandolin god Randy Hill gave me a lead-filled Bakelite slide bar to get me started, and I was off. At the time, I was doing a lot of private guitar teaching at a music store in Burlington, doing long shifts with student no-shows or cancellations happening often. I started to bring my steel to work and practice on breaks.

I had fooled around with slide guitar since soon after I started playing, but I never really got the hang of it and feared open tunings. The lap steel, though it resembles a guitar in many ways, is a very different instrument. Here's Wikipedia's fine description:

The lap steel guitar is typically placed on the player's lap, or on a stool in front of the seated player.
Unlike a conventional guitar, the strings are not pressed to a fret when sounding a note; rather, the player holds a metal slide called steel (or tone bar) in the left hand, which is moved along the strings to change the instrument's pitch while the right hand plucks or picks the strings. This method of playing greatly restricts the number of chords available, so lap steel music often features melodies, a restricted set of harmonies (such as in blues), or another single part.

The steel guitar, when played in Hawaiian, Country, Bluegrass, or Western Swing styles, is almost always plucked using a plastic thumbpick affixed to the right hand's thumb, and metal or plastic "fingerpicks" fitted to the first 2, 3, or even all 4 fingers of the right hand. This allows the player greater control when picking sets of notes on non-adjacent strings. Some Blues players, especially those who use a round-neck resonator guitar played upright, conventional-guitar-style, with a bottleneck or hollow metal slide on one left-hand finger, forgo the fingerpicks and thumbpicks, and use their bare fingers and thumb instead.

I got started, as I have with many aspects of the guitar, with a book. This was Stacy Phillips' The Art of Hawai'ian Steel Guitar book. This book got me playing little Hawai'ian melodies like "Sweet Lei Lehua" and "Na Moku Eha". Through playing the examples in that book, I came to appreciate the simple beauty of Hawai'ian music and the hellish difficulty of playing the lap steel well. Stacy's book also acquainted me with the possibility of bar slants, which are tricky to execute (they involve a kind of one-handed juggle of the tone bar in the left hand) but are essential for getting around harmonic changes. This allows the possibility of doing harmonized fills, and by straightening a slanted bar mid-note, pedal-steel like oblique "bends". I found out years later that the tuning Stacy writes all of the book examples in, "high G open", is not a standard Hawai'ian tuning but IS a standard Dobro tuning. This made it easier for me to make the transition to playing in the country style later on.

The Hawai'ian lap steel legend Sol Ho'opi'i (pronounced Ho-Oh-Pe-Ee with glottal stops between the first and second halves of the "oh" and "ee" vowel sounds, not like "hoopie") was my favourite Hawai'ian player at the time. Born in 1902 in Honolulu, Sol came with his brothers to the mainland in 1924 to make his fortune. And in Los Angeles, he did. The U.S. was in the midst of a Hawai'ian fad, and his virtuosic steel playing was in demand.

Sol Ho'opi'i's was a cosmopolitan art. His authentic Hawai'ian style also incorporated jazz and blues ideas, which give his recordings a certain hipness and swing where other old Hawai'ian records sound, well, old.

Sol eventually gave up pop music to follow the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, a fascinating figure herself who came into scandal. He retired to Seattle and died of pneumonia there in 1953.
Here's a rare film of Sol after his religious conversion, playing hymns on the steel. "Bringing In The Sheaves" is my fave.

At one point in my year at Steel U., I got a lesson and further tips from Kim Deschamps, a Hamilton resident at that time who is now tearing up the Austin roots music scene. Kim, who played for many years in Blue Rodeo and the Cowboy Junkies, and whom Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy dubbed "the Duke Ellington of the pedal steel" played, like me, without plastic or metal fingerpicks. In our lesson I remember that he advocated a relentless right-hand damping scheme involving four fingers. Each finger would damp (or deaden) one string and remain in place unless the string was sounding a note at that moment. I've never mastered this technique - it requires right-hand finger independence that I'm not close to having at this point. But it's a big reason behind Kim's warm and organic yet clean and accurate sound on the steel guitar, be it lap or pedal.

The tuning issue is what eventually slowed my progress on the Hawai'ian style. I went to Mississauga for a lesson with a real old-time Hawai'ian steel player. I can't recall his name now. But we quickly learned that I was playing in a non-standard tuning, G B D G B D low to high. I like this tuning because three of the strings are the same as standard tuning, and because the same three note group is duplicated over two octaves, many shapes and licks can be adapted. But the standard Hawai'ian tuning, the tuning of record, was C6 tuning, which is also a standard pedal steel tuning (though with a lot more strings). This tuning, C E G A C E low to high, requires restringing of the instrument with the equivalent of a fifth string, fourth string, third string, another third string, a second and a first string. There's also very little visual commonality between C6 and standard tuning (which I guess I should start referring to as "Spanish tuning"). And let's not forget about the big ol' major second between two adjacent strings (G and A). I got a Mel Bay C6 steel guitar book but the thrill was gone.

Luckily I had a lot of nifty slanted bar licks that adapted well to country steel. Not long after I moved to Toronto in 2003 I got a call from Justin Rutledge, who was putting together a band for a Monday night residency at the Cameron House on Queen Street West in Toronto. I joined that band and we did a year of Mondays in the front room. Though I later played more electric guitar with the group, I was hired as a steel player. I continued to use the "high G open" tuning and began to incorporate echo and reverb into my nascent steel style. I didn't play steel for a few years after that gig ended, but have returned to it more and more lately. A recent highlight for me was playing the lap steel parts in "A Pillow Of Winds" and "One Of These Days" in a performance of Pink Floyd's album "Meddle" at the Phoenix in Toronto.

Who's got time to practice?

2010-04-22T15:47:00.000-07:00

Christine Bougie, one of my favourite Toronto musicians, wrote a blog entry last fall about practicing. Her insightful comments came to mind yesterday when I was emailing with an old friend and one-time guitar student about the difficulty sometimes of finding time and motivation to practice the guitar. My friend has a day job, a side job, and a wife and two young children. His guitar is, in his words, "gathering dust." I really felt for him because I've been in his situation, and have sometimes gone weeks without picking up a guitar. It's still hard sometime for me to find time, and I'm a professional musician. What Christine outlines is a plan for being intentional about what and how you practice.

I often tell people who say that they have no time to practice that 15 minutes a day makes a difference. If you don't have 15 minutes in a day to yourself, you're too busy. It helps a lot to try to practice at the same time, or at least at the same point in the day, every day. I suggested 'after breakfast' to my friend.

At first it's like daily exercise. Every excuse to avoid practicing will spring to mind in the first few days. But as you get in the groove, practicing gets more fun as your hands and fingers get more limber. Ms. Bougie suggests using a countdown timer when practicing. This can regulate the entire session or specific sections within it. Even using a metronome can help to structure time during the practice session. But it's equally important to know what you're practicing, and why.

Christine emphasizes the importance of having goals. I also sometimes use a practice notebook. I use it to keep track of what exercises I'm doing, metronome settings (for tempo), new practice ideas and so on. I often find little repeating patterns when I'm practicing that I will immediately forget if they're not written down. But a practice notebook also shows you your progress, your past goals and your successes or failures. This self-awareness is a big part of developing as a musician.

It's really important, I think, to be brutally honest with yourself about your trouble areas, and work on these more, and first, in the practice routine. We tend to want to practice the things that we do well. I'm currently targeting my left-hand pinky, which has had an easy ride for far too long. But I think there should be some time in every practice session for running well-worn routines one more time. Everyone needs an A-game toolkit in reserve, and that's what the things you do well are.

Big Bill dreams of an electric guitar.

2010-04-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

I did some recording today with my musical partner Alec Fraser - the video above is a montage of some of our blues and spiritual material. Today, we tracked an original tune of mine called "Blues All Around Me" and for the guitar breaks Alec suggested that I do something in the vein of Big Bill Broonzy's "How You Want It Done," a saucy 1932 blues.

Notice Bill's tone - he's picking very close to the bridge, giving his licks a nasal, cutting tone. The licks themselves are prototypical guitar boogie, of the sort that would later be promulgated by Arthur Smith and others:

And lest we forget the Virtues:

I could go on and on. The bass-string boogie figure is by now a venerable guitar riff. On electric guitars, it is usually played through the bridge pickup to bring out the snap and percussion of the low strings. On acoustic, the tendency is to move the pick close to the bridge. When I was first starting on guitar, I noticed the 'tinnier' sound I got by picking close to the bridge, and for a while I played there all the time. I was yearning for the electric guitar sound. Was Big Bill yearning too, for a sound that had not yet been invented?

In a thought-provoking letter to Guitar Player magazine a few years ago, Ry Cooder argued that Robert Johnson recorded facing the corner of the room to take advantage of an acoustical principle called 'corner-loading,' whereby the guitar sound reverberates against itself and accentuates midrange and increases sustain. The reason? Johnson wanted the sustain and whine of an electric guitar, something that was only beginning to see the light of day at the time of his death in 1938. Looking at Big Bill retrospectively, it's plausible that he was searching for an uncommon sound, one that would cut through a noisy club.

The technique is certainly not easy if you're unaccustomed to it. I opted for one of Alec's more stout picks, a Fender heavy, and it was well shredded after just a couple of takes. There was also the tendency for the pick to get hung up on the strings while playing rapid boogie-woogie lines - the strings have much less 'give' close to the bridge. I was forced to play both hard and accurately - two attributes that are usually mutually exclusive.

Most guitarists that I hear tend to use the pickup switch to get different tones. Acoustic guitarists in my experience find an optimal place to pick and stay there. I'm just as guilty of both of these approaches. But there are ways to get more tones out of our guitars - we just need to delve into the past for ideas sometimes.