Guitar Player Anarchy

[Happy]

The virus lockdown is doing my playing a lot of good. I've played more hours in the last two weeks than in the previous two months.

 

[DustyDreamer]

The virus lockdown is doing my playing a lot of good.

Good stuff! It is a wonderful way to decompress and be more positive, isn't it?

 

[Steam Flyer]

That Mark Knopfler video is great, thanks. There is some very good Tommy Emmanuel stuff on YouTube also.

I am huge fan of "That Pedal Show" although rarely have the time to watch a whole episode. They're not really so much teaching, officially at least, just fiddling around with really cool toys, but there is a lot to be learned especially when they show how different gear responds to differing techniques, and how you can dial up bad sound out of anything. I like the way Dan (who seems very conversant with electronic signal processing and physics) talks about how different gimmicks accomplish the sound they make.

But most of all, Samurai Guitarist.





He does have on-line lessons which I have not done, but I can't imagine they're not at least as good as his videos. This guy is awesome at everything. Shorter videos for just the right amount of time I have available. And he's funny. He's the guitarist version of "An Engineer's Guide To Cats" only with a lot more & better follow-up.

- DSK

 

[A guy in the Chesapeake]

For decent,playable inexpensive acoustics?   I like Ibanez and Yamaha.  I’ve got a Yamaha I bought new for $200 - it has survived numerous river trips, being left out overnight, hot boat decks, everything you’re NOT supposed to do.  It isn’t as nice as my Martin or my artist series Ibanez, but it still plays fine - low action, straight neck, stays in tune and for a ply guitar has excellent tone and sustain.  I see decent used acoustics like that offered for between $100 - 200. 
 

the most important things are NOT brand and price, it’s getting the guitar properly set up, and how the guitar feels to YOU.  The $60-75 you spend for a good setup is money very well spent, and can make the difference between a guitar that fights you, and one that invites you to play more.  

 

[Ed Lada]

Some of y'all might like this.

Clive is a great player and a great guy.

 

[Meat Wad]

Guys, thanks so much. Those vids are awesome.

 

[EquusAsinusDomesticus]

This guy is a goddamn beast on the guitar.  He's been livestreaming a bunch of cool stuff during this stay at home thing.

on right now with a 66 strat going wild...

 

[DustyDreamer]

The $60-75 you spend for a good setup is money very well spent, and can make the difference between a guitar that fights you, and one that invites you to play more.

This is incredibly true! Since I live in the boonies and own way too many guitars, I invested in some basic kit - mainly to do fretwork. Not only has this saved me tonnes of money but resurrected old guitars and made crappy ones very decent. I picked up a D'angelico "Premier Gramercy" grand auditorium for around $250 online that went from "holy shit send it back" to one of my main rides. The difference in sound and sustain swapping out the saddle was f'in amazing. 

 

[Steam Flyer]

The $60-75 you spend for a good setup is money very well spent, and can make the difference between a guitar that fights you, and one that invites you to play more.

This is incredibly true! Since I live in the boonies and own way too many guitars, I invested in some basic kit - mainly to do fretwork. Not only has this saved me tonnes of money but resurrected old guitars and made crappy ones very decent. I picked up a D'angelico "Premier Gramercy" grand auditorium for around $250 online that went from "holy shit send it back" to one of my main rides. The difference in sound and sustain swapping out the saddle was f'in amazing. 

I'm very lucky to have had a series of good guitars... better than I deserve as a player; although since settling down I have tried to take better care of them than I used to.

DD you could probably have saved this baby

View attachment 219440

which was an Alvarez copy of the Gibson J-200. My father bought it for me, when I was home on leave, and I dragged it around for years. It was a really good-playing, good-sounding guitar. Eventually the saddle (I did not know what it was, at the time) started coming unglued and it lost the nice bass & resonance but it still had nice action and tuned up nicely. I ended up giving to a Russian mechanic in upstate New York who did some very  needed work for me; since then I keep fantasizing about buying a real J-200.

Meanwhile back at the quarantine project.



.

I'm not 100% sure of the pedal choice, or order, although I've been playing with this combination of a dozen or so mini-pedals on my desk for a couple of months. I couldn't decide between the octaver (TC Electronix Mini Sub'n Up, great pedal) and the chorus (Joyo JF-316) so I put them both in. I have a Mooer tremolo, which I use a lot, and the lit-up blue pedal on the upper deck is a Valeton Moon digital delay with a dozen or so modes including a reverse. It's nothing like my beloved legacy Boss DD-5 but good enough to go with. I want a second mini digital delay for stacking delays, but this feeds into the black Joyo JF-317 reverb on the lower deck.

The final pedal, the little red one on the lower left, is a looper. THis is a fairly new pedal to me, and one I don't have as much playing time on. It's awesome though, it's basically a digital recorder you can click on/off with very precise timing. Play a chord progression, stomp the button on the upbeat of 1, play it through, then stomp it again on the upbeat of 1 for the next time thru.... it goes and goes, and never muffs a chord (unless you did) and never loses count.

Yes it's playing with yourself! So?

You can see that there's no power chord... rechargable power supply in the engine room, 8 isolated supply outs although it needs more amps... these digital pedal eat up power. But this thing can get played for at least 2 hours, because I've done that. I gotta get in enough playing time to be able to pull up the sounds I want without a lot of diddling around.

I was going to put a finish of paint and varnish on it, but I think I'm just going to leave it raw. I'm going to stomp on it, who gives a fuck what it looks like?

- DSK

 

[DustyDreamer]

I'm very lucky to have had a series of good guitars... better than I deserve as a player;

I like to say the better one gets the less guitar you need. And the fewer - you can get more tone out of each guitar rather than "needing"  a bunch of different instruments to cover all those bases. So of course I buy a couple of guitars a year  Would love a Gibson or two, (S)J-200 or Hummingbird or L-00. Alas, really out of my price range. 

Eventually the saddle (I did not know what it was, at the time) started coming unglued

A relatively easy fix! And Japanese-made Alvarez's (which I assume yours was) are might sweet and much sought after now. 

My own solution to the pedal situation was to admit defeat and get a Boss Katana, which has roughly a million pedals built in. I still have a few others of course, and use a looper a lot. Best practice aid ever. 

 

[Steam Flyer]

I like to say the better one gets the less guitar you need. And the fewer - you can get more tone out of each guitar rather than "needing"  a bunch of different instruments to cover all those bases. So of course I buy a couple of guitars a year  Would love a Gibson or two, (S)J-200 or Hummingbird or L-00. Alas, really out of my price range. 

A relatively easy fix! And Japanese-made Alvarez's (which I assume yours was) are might sweet and much sought after now. 

My own solution to the pedal situation was to admit defeat and get a Boss Katana, which has roughly a million pedals built in. I still have a few others of course, and use a looper a lot. Best practice aid ever. 

Well, it's certainly true about tone but no amount of skill will give you a country-ish sine wave tremolo just slightly slower than the beat, or a fast square-wave tremolo for pop-metal-ish sound. Or the difference between metalic distortion and 60s-funk fuzz. Or maybe if you're really REALLY good!

The Katana is an awesome amp

- DSK

 

[EquusAsinusDomesticus]

Well, it's certainly true about tone but no amount of skill will give you a country-ish sine wave tremolo just slightly slower than the beat, or a fast square-wave tremolo for pop-metal-ish sound. Or the difference between metalic distortion and 60s-funk fuzz. Or maybe if you're really REALLY good!

The Katana is an awesome amp

- DSK

The katana is spectacular for the price.  Just got the new MK 2 one or whatever it's called and the sound is great for a cheap solid state amp.

 

[DustyDreamer]

Well, it's certainly true about tone but no amount of skill will give you a country-ish sine wave tremolo just slightly slower than the beat, or a fast square-wave tremolo for pop-metal-ish sound.

Absolutely. I suppose I was speaking reflexively as primarily acoustic player. I'm having boatloads of fun with the Katana (a 100w Mk II) and it's opening a whole new world for me. It really is an amazing amp - I plan to build out an arduino-based foot pedal for it and have that hooked into OnSong on an iPad via bluetooth so I can change the amp presets for each song. In my copious free time...

 

[Steam Flyer]

Absolutely. I suppose I was speaking reflexively as primarily acoustic player. I'm having boatloads of fun with the Katana (a 100w Mk II) and it's opening a whole new world for me. It really is an amazing amp - I plan to build out an arduino-based foot pedal for it and have that hooked into OnSong on an iPad via bluetooth so I can change the amp presets for each song. In my copious free time...

I was very old-school until about 4 or 5 years ago. Then I wanted a better small-ish amp to tote around, and of course both good sound and loud enough to drown out complaints about my crappy playing was necessary. The digital sound processing has benefitted both from generations of engineers tweaking and faster, greater-bandwidth processors.

But I've also played with a couple of those all-in-one pedal boards. My main objection is that apparently the guys who build them either don't like fuzz or they have no concept of the difference between fuzz and distortion. They tend to muddy the flanger/phaser/chorus effects quite a bit too IMHO. A row of pedals is both easier to handle and sounds better, until you get up to the big fancy expensive ones.

The built-in sound effects for the Katana seem great, the ones I've tried. A pedal controller to dial them in, and switch between songs, would be awesome. Could you program it to recognize chord progressions, and pull up the sound you want for a certain song just by playing it?

- DSK

 

[DustyDreamer]

Could you program it to recognize chord progressions, and pull up the sound you want for a certain song just by playing it?

I suppose you could but you'd likely need something more like a Raspberry Pi to do the audio processing. There are pedals that will do backing bass and percussion that are like that. But I'm hoping I can use a set list in OnSong to trigger an amp preset change when I go to a song. So tap the "next song" button on the foot switch and OnSong pulls up the next song in the set (OnSong can be controlled with foot pedals that use midi over bluetooth) and tells the amp to go to a pre-assigned amp preset. But this is just a fun idea - I'd be happy just to have more extensive control over the amp than the Boss footswitch gives you. An example: https://github.com/SteveObert/KatanaUSB_Midi_controller 

 

[Happy]

If you had sufficient programming skills, serious computer power and a massive bank of samples, you could eliminate the guitar altogether. Avoid all that tedious practice and sore fingers, learning to lock in with other players, and that whole wood-string-magnet-mechanical old school stuff. Make guitar noises without having to play the damn thing.

 

[weightless]

^^^ Play Authentic [sic] or not?

 

[A guy in the Chesapeake]

If you had sufficient programming skills, serious computer power and a massive bank of samples, you could eliminate the guitar altogether. Avoid all that tedious practice and sore fingers, learning to lock in with other players, and that whole wood-string-magnet-mechanical old school stuff. Make guitar noises without having to play the damn thing.

Look up the Kemper profiling pre - amp. It's been done, and damn well done too. 

Well, ya still need someone with fingers on the guitar.

 

[Happy]

Well, ya still need someone with fingers on the guitar.

It's only a matter of time before they develop a program that replaces the fingers and the actual guitar............

I do a fair bit of recording for  a local guy who uses Logic Pro. The amp models vary from crappy to very good. I like a really simple model like a blackface or tweed Fender Champ or Deluxe, but with T-M-B tone controls and separate pre-amp gain, through a simulated 4x12. Depending on the music, sometimes I'll also run a fatter dirtier Dumble or Marshall model, and blend the two tracks.

For quieter tracks where I want an intimate close-up clean tone, I sometimes run a  big condensor mic picking up the acoustic sound of my Telecaster, and blend some of that in. (Obviously you need a quiet room, no jewellery, shoes off, don't tap your feet or sneeze!)

I would never use any of this type of stuff live, it's gtr> compressor ($80 Mooer Yellow Comp, very good)>tubescreamer>Boss Reverb> Boss Delay> old Roland Cube 60 or '84 Mesa Boogie SOB for loud rooms.

 

[A guy in the Chesapeake]

Happy, I think I'd enjoy an evening of libations and licks - my focus is live performances and reducing the amount of gear I have to jump out if a place at 02:00 to make that happen. 

I suspect you're close to a former bandmate and Berklee student in sound design/production.  

Good all around, and the appreciation of objective might make for some good stuff to go down.