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Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

I saw something very amusing in the WH Smiths at Paddington Station recently. Future Publications has just released a book and DVD in Newsagents called “Play Guitar Now – Metal” which despite its title is actually a very concise look at all the popular Rock guitar techniques of the 1980′s. Tapping, Sweep picking, Alternate picking, Legato Runs, Riffs, Solo’s, Modes and Scales are all included. It was clearly aimed at young guitarists, but featured the work of players who’s heyday was well before they were even born (Im talking the 1970′s and 80′s). Eddie Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen, Lynch, Vai, hell it even namechecked fusion god Al Di Meola….. I was so shocked at this I almost spat my Costa Coffee over a disgruntled commuter when I saw it.

Having bought the DVD I found it was a concise and very well presented selection of all the popular guitar techniques I aspired to learn as a nipper (and eventually did). But back then there was no internet and most tuition tapes and videos were pretty thin on the ground), I had to listen to my Vinyl over and over again and actually work this stuff out for myself, it took a long time to learn it and even longer to integrate it into my playing style. The idea that someone in 1986 when I was working this stuff out by ear would show all this to me….slowly and concisely would have been like a gift from the gods themselves.

The DVD is presented by Martin Goulding who is an exeptional player and teacher and makes a lot of information approachable and digestable. But I find it amazing there is a demand for this stuff at all. Perhaps we are being lied to.

If you were to only accept the narrow word of our Media Elite, you would think no one had any interest in such music, but clearly they have. As someone who’s playing style essentially fuses Classic Rock melodicism and fire with post punk’s icy texturalism and space I’ve always found myself something of an outsider compared to the players I saw in other bands at gigs both back in the 90′s and even now. I remember a guy coming up to me in a rehearsal room in Nottingham in 2005 and asking me about what guitarists had influenced me. I was really shocked, flattered and even bemused when this young 22 year old started feverishly writing down names like Alex Lifeson, Van Halen, John McGeoch, George Lynch, John Sykes and Neal Schon as I dictated notes and reccomended albums to him.

I blame the UK’s Media for this sorry state of affairs, successive UK Television, Radio and Magazine people have tried to pretend that Rock music with guitar solo’s and riffs does not exist…..no matter how many albums or concert tickets are sold. For example Journeys “Don’t Stop Believing” was on every best of AOR and American Rock complilation album released in the UK when I was a young lad. But according to the Guardian newspaper, no one in the UK knew the song existed until the TV series Glee. This is an out an out fucking lie.

I find this Stalinist-ist rewriting of history most sinister. Even Allan Yentobs BBC series on the history of the guitar also dismissed Hard Rock and Metal Music as some sort of curious American footnote, when its actually the driver and prime mover that influences the Guitar industry at every level. Something Yentob would have known if he’d actually bothered to look in a guitar shop and talked to some guitarists rather than pursuing his own agenda.

Meanwhile various careerist indie bands have chased the tail of whatever was credible from this month to the next and the result is the most lacklustre period in British Music ever. One only has to scan the musicians classifieds on Gumtree and Join My Band.com to see the same boring as fuck influences listed and repeated over and over again. Oasis/Kings of Leon/Coldplay yawn.

Outside of perhaps the Metal scene, the guitar has been reduced to the most uninspiring of voices, now lowered in the mix to such an extend in popular music one can harly hear it above the drums, no wonder the ukelele is popular again ( it is that “pick it up and can’t play but I have a cool haircut so I must be an artist” amateurism that has been a desease feeding on British Music since Punk).

I really hope lots of young guys and girls get into the techniques shown in this magazine, but I also hope they grow beyond them, mix them up with other things and in time find their own voices and that however those voices come out they are not drowned out by the Marxist scumbags of the UK Media who are killing off both art and aspiration in British Life.

With the recession firmly biting in the United Kingdom. The used market for guitar equipment has taken quite a pounding. If you’ve had a spare grand lying around recently, you’ve had your pic of some sweet secondhand private sale deals.

As commodities and fuel prices have risen. The price of new guitars however has leapt up to a point where I cannot see how some dealers will be able to continue.

A good example of this is Fenders new Mexican made Roadworn player series priced with an RRP of around a grand new (although most big dealers sell em for just shy of £800), but when a mid range instrument is selling for nearly £1K, you know the worlds in trouble.

Meanwhile as redundancy and casualisation looms and people try to control their household budgets, a plethora of high dollar guitars are hitting the used market at very very reasonable prices. So the near grand you’d spank on a brand new Mexican…ahem… “relic”… Fender would buy you a lot more used guitar for your money… Im talking American Deluxe Stratocasters, Yamaha SG1000′s, Gibson Les Paul Classics, PRS Standard 24′s etc etc. If you spend another £150 or so then your talking PRS McCartys ( A boxfresh Mk2 McCarty Std went for £1100 on Ebay recently) and even the odd Les Paul Standard as well.

Its a buyers market for sure. However thats not good. Most of us will want to upgrade and make changes to our equipment from time to time. So the idea that everything we own is devalued considerably is not great, especially if you have a larger collection of instruments.

A good alternative however is the Swap Meet. Lots of musicians are now advertising their equipment with not only a price, but the line “Will exchange for XXXXXXXXXXX” sometimes advertisers are even asking ” Will exchange for WHY – What Have You” as a way of seeing how far their unwanted item will take them.

I recently tried out this process. When I went to see Rush recently at Birmingham NEC. My brother started telling me he wanted to offload his rarely played Gibson Les Paul Standard and buy a PRS McCarty, he was thinking of swapping guitars rather than selling one and buying the other.

As I had bought a very nice used PRS McCarty some 4 months ago, I guess I was number one for his first refusal. As much as I liked my PRS, I was missing a Les Paul since I sold my LP Classic 1960 in 2007. Id bought the McCarty on a whim thinking it was a bargain, and much as I liked it. I was missing owning something with more low end prescence and grunt.

The following week we spent a day at his house trying out both guitars and seeing how we felt. My brother has a dislike for neck binding which means his Gibson Les Paul Studio is played far more than his Standard.

From my point of view, I knew the complete History of his LP Standard, my brother had bought it from new in 2001 it was the best of 4 we had tried that week and I knew he had played it minimally compared to his main guitars (a hideous flip flop teal LP Studio and his 62 Jap Strat-another guitar I’d once owned), so condition wise it was much cleaner than my already gigged and slightly dinged PRS McCarty. However my brother had fallen in love with the PRS’ playability and construction. He wanted it, more so than I to be honest.

For me the decision was harder. I loved both guitars, while I thought perhaps the Gibson had the edge on tone for hard rock, the PRS was far more articulate on cleaner tones and the coil taps actually worked. Something dawned on me…

As Gibsons Quality Control has always, and will always be….patchy (Charles Sharr Murrays recent column in Guitarist mag about his mates Gibson J 200′s faulty pickup system and Gibsons incompetent aftercare seems to bear this out). I suspect it’ll take me a while to find another Les Paul this well made. Meanwhile as PRS have the consistency of build other makers would kill for. I know that at some point I could always buy another used McCarty and not spend decades looking for one that was put together properly.

So as both instruments were of similar value we just swapped guitars. We put in a gentlemans agreement of 28 days that if one of us wanted to cancel the deal, they could do so without question. But in the end 1 month on both of us are happy.

So far this experience has been a positive one and Im wondering if I’ll be looking to swap rather than sell stuff in the future. I would suggest sometimes these things can be difficult. Most of us have fallen in love with an instrument only to fall out of love sometime later. Plus theres always fakes and charlatans around every corner of both Ebay and the classified ads.

However if you stick to relatives or just your Muso mates or their mates, this is probably a foolproof way of getting new kit without all the stresses of dealing with haggling and accurate descriptions.

I’d reccomend it.

After having not gigged for over 2 years now. Im now relocated, rejuvinated and feeling the itch to play live again. This has also been compounded by moving in with my girlfriend. So with domestic issues of space at the forefront of my mind Ive had a rethink about my gear recently.

I guess my main amps for the last decade have been Marshall JCM2000 TSL heads with a 4 x 12 (in both 60watt and 100 watt varieties). The plus side of the TSL has been its ability to give me both an impressive jangly clean and a choice of modern hard rockin crunch type sound. However nothing is ever ideal, while the 60watt version has a brilliant transparent and footswitchable FX loop, channel 2 is on the whole rather undergained.

The 100 watt version has seperate EQ’s and master volumes for each channel, also the 100 watt has an awful 2 loop FX design that sucks tone from the amp in a rather blatant way.

The good thing about the TSL 100 is that all 3 channels are very useable, the channel 2 is basically a JCM800 sound, while Channel 3 is a little fizzy, but as I never run my gain beyond 1 o’ clock, its a perfectly usable beast, the mid-boost control on the clean channel has always been impressive, especially with my telecasters vintage style neck single coil.

But in a modern new build apartment space is paramount, so the head and 4 x 12 cab idea is gone for now. Sold to a lovely bloke in a hard rock covers band.

With the cash burning a hole in my back pocket, I made a decision to return to the 2 x 12 combo format.

In some ways the 2 x 12 combo is actually much better for smaller gigs. While a 4 x 12 cab with its air sealed back is very directional in its output, plus you don’t really get the sweet spot tonally unless your about 15 feet from the rig. A 2 x 12 combo on the other hand with its exposed back gives a nice even spread of volume across a much wider area, the sweet spots probably only 8 or 9 feet away from the amp. Theres also a psychological advantage when dealing with sound engineers, with its global master volume a TSL60 must be about the most quietest head Marshall currently make, but the sight of such a huge rig always encouraged the majority of sound engineers to tell me to turn it down. Often before I’d even played a note. I’d say the TSL60 was very much a sheep in wolfs clothing

With the decision made on a combo, there was then the question of which one?

At one point i’d decided to go for a single channel amp and just use pedals to get my sound. This would make for less cables and less time on setting up and breaking down. I’d seen some video footage of the band Fiction Plane (featuring son of Sting Joe Sumner) playing live in a club in Holland, their guitarist Seton Daunt seemed to have a very versatile rig consiting of a Vox AC30 or Two Rock head & Cab being fed from a comprehensive pedalboard made up for various Pete Cornish,Pro Co, Sansamp, Eventide and Dunlop pedals. Stylistically he seemed to go between Edge like textures and Frusciante type clean sounds. With the odd heavy moment thrown in. I could see that his solution was useful. Less cable and less faffing around.

Ampwise I was wary of Vox AC30′s. I did play a gig with one once in 1992 and it sounded heavenly, but I’ve heard so many things over the years about “reliability” that I had my concerns. The AC30 Heroes of Switzerland borrowed to make our album was a 1960′s one that had been extensively rebuilt. So again even with the new chinese made AC30′s coming onto the market at very affordable prices I wasn’t sure.

My next thought was a single channel amp like a JCM800 combo or even a 900, 800′s are becoming stupidly priced and I was unsure about finding a decent one. So I even looked at the Vintage Modern series amps by Marshall. But after trying one out I was underwhelmed. I love the look of the Bluesbreaker combo’s but again I wasn’t sure it’d do what I asked of it.

I then got to try a Blackstar series One 45 watt combo, which I liked, although the control knobs felt a bit cheap, it did sound good, but new they are like a grand. My Budget was £600. no more

I went to see the Cult with a friend of mine last month and during our pre gig pint I reflected over my choices. My friend (who’s a bass player) basically thought I’d gotten a great sound out of Marshalls over the last 10 years so why change. He felt the only time I had a bad sound was when I went down the rackmounted route about 15 years ago, when I was “trying to have a rig that was all things to all men”.

With that in mind I returned to the idea of the Marshall TSL, but this time in combo format. The Marshall TSl 122 is essentially a TSL100 built into a 2 x 12 cab. Theres usually a fair amount of them in the classifieds and Ebay. Prices range from around £450-700 depending on age and condition. I bought a cleanish one on Ebay for £450.00

The big problem with this is basically putting such a huge amp chassis into such a small cab. They weigh around 30+ Kilo’s so its not an amp for the faint hearted. In terms of playing round the house even with the master volume on 1, this is screamingly loud dumping its 100 + watts of sheer power into 2 x 8 Ohm Celestions, also the lack of space for the tubes in such a cabinet means it gets very hot, much hotter than the equivalent head as I recall.

My first thoughts on this amp are that I need to go back to using an Overdrive pedal as it doesn’t seem to like the Pro Co RAT 2 I was using for solo’s before, so my immediate thoughts are towards a Boss SD-1 or similar, maybe a Keeley modified one?

I’d also like to add a compressor pedal to the rig and maybe a chorus/flanger of some description. But my immediate thoughts are towards a new pedalboard. My Electro Harmonix Gigbag style has been ok, but in reality offers little protection and the pedals simply do not bond to velcro pads easily.

I’ll update when Im gigging next.

Anyone who regulaly reads this blog will know I am a huge critic of the mighty Roland/Boss corporations pricing structure when it comes to established pedals. If a design is decades old why pay premium, especially as a basic Boss DD-3 Digital Delay pedal is still priced at most retailers even now for about £105.00 new. Ive always thought this to be shocking as the DD-3 is now a 28+ year old design and was only about £150 to buy new 20 years ago (Its predessor the Boss DD-2 was the first Boss compact Digital Delay pedal and had the chip out of the legendary SDE 3000 rack unit which were like nearly a grand, but back then it was really expensive cos of the chip price in 1982, so was your ZX81 for the same reason) But in 2010???? No this is taking the piss Roland corp.

This thought came to me again recently when I decide to have a “serious” look at my guitar rig. Although essentially in mothballs for the last 2 years, recently with my intentions to relocate looking likely, my thoughts have turned to perhaps playing again and enjoying the vocation of being a musician.

My rig has been pretty simple this last decade, however the TC Electronics Novadelay was far too fiddly to use live. So was sold on. My secondary delay need was really pretty simple, just a useable simple digital delay, no bells or whistles. Something I could synch up with my primary unit (The legendary Line6 DL-4 Delay modeller) for some rythmic echoey fun.

After toying with the idea of a Boss DD-3 and deciding it was (still) overpriced, I tried out a number of EH’s new compact pedals. Id originally set my sights on a “Memory Boy” based on the EH Memoryman+ analog delay. However, it just sounded too quirky for me, for some people it would be absolutely ideal, but I guess I just wanted something simple with the minimum of fuss. More buttons doesn’t always mean more useable tones.

The #1 Echo certainly is with only 3 controls for blend (fx level) Delay time and feedback. overally its a simple unit, the controls are perhaps not as accurate to set up as a DD-3, but at nearly half the retail price I didn’t mind spending more time on setting it up.

Using the shops test guitar a Yamaha Pacifica Mike Stern signature, I was able to get some lovely rythmic delays and built some pretty impressive lines out of a few simple parts. All those Dave Gilmour/Edge/Alex Lifeson/John McGeoch type delays are here, plus its warm and musical.

After 10 minutes of me grinning like an idiot, it dawned on me that this pedal had inspired me to play new things, which is always a good thing. So out came the plastic and the #1 was mine.

Overall Im pleased, its much warmer sounding than the cold delays of the 80′s….Im old enough to remember…

Twenty years ago I used to use a Yamaha DDS20M pedal as a secondary delay (borrowed off a singer who thought he was Jim Morrison crashing a Sinclair C5 into Simon leBon) with my much missed Boss BE-5 (probably one of the earliest multi FX units from 1988 with compression/overdrive/chorus/delay and a noise gate for £199), the BE-5s own delay was ironically the same basic circuit as the Boss DD-3 and was brilliant. The Yamaha DDS20M was awful, just spikey and harsh sounding. I only used it for a couple of points in the set and when I later upgraded to a Digitech RP-1 multi FX 2 years later (the first high end programmable rackmount quality unit built into a floor FX processor, the RP-1 used to run on AC Power and get incredibly hot on the left hand side live, so mine was built into a wooden board made from a tool drawer. Its reverse LED function made it light up like an Xmas tree, so In 1992 local musicians thought I had skylab on the floor and were quite jealous I recall ha ha!) the Yamaha was returned to its owner.

But back to the #1 Echo If Im being critical, the footswitch is ok but could be a bit tougher, but its true bypass and Ive had no noise issues using it either in an FX loop or direct into an amp. It comes in a sexy orange box and has a 9 volt -DC adaptor included. It was £67.99 and if I’d looked around online some places are doing them for £64.00. It says its made in NYC, which considering the strength of the dollar makes the Boss DD-3 look even more overpriced.

8/10

Ive been watching the TV series on BBC 2 “Im in a Rock and Roll band”.
It was entertaining fluff for a saturday night and I suppose if your
12 or an elderly person on the edge of death an insightful look at the
workings of a rock and roll band.

However as per the usual BBC/Guardian reading leftie peace and
vegetable rights left wing bias, the Guitarist episode was the kind of
cultural reworking chairman Mao would have been proud of.

From Hendrix to Blackmore to Lynrd Skynrd, the 70’s were lumped into
one big pot, no mention of fusion or the 70’s Jazz rock boom that
predated punk. No mention of Grunge either.

The entire school of Classic rock guitar post 1978 was referred to as
“American”. Of course guitar solo’s were seen as bad and male and
homoerotic in a wrong sinister kind of way by the BBC. Something male
and primal and… wrong…. but the best selling guitars of the 1980’s
world wide were Superstrat types beloved of guitarists who played
solo’s

Then theres the music, after punk lots of 80′s hit singles had guitar
solo’s on. Punk didn’t kill that as Mark Radcliffes salty voiceover seems to imply.

Michael Jacksons biggest records “Beat It” and “Dirty Diana” had
guitar work by Steve Lukather, Edward Van Halen, Steve Stevens etc. No
mention of the guitar solo’s popularity in 80’s music, long after punk
had died. Lionel Richies two biggest 80’s hits have guitar solo’s too.

The sole champion and arbiter of taste in all this anti guitar soloing
propoganda is yet again Johnny Marr!!!! No mention of other creative
guitarists of the time such as John McGeoch or Lu Edmonds or Jamie
West-Oram (who Johnny Marr rips of big style on the Modest Mouse
album), or even Billy Duffy, who started off as a post punk hero and
then went into the rock & roll cliche and enjoyed every minute of it.
How dare he, I imagine for the controller of the BBC it would be like
watching a gay man turn straight!

Perhaps the most sinister element of this programme is that you can
vote for your favourite musician as selected by the usual suspects. So
in effect, if you think your favourite guitar player is James from the
Manics, or favourite bass player is Bernard Edwards from Chic…..errr
Im sorry your not allowed to have a voice. Your allowed to vote for
Alex James from Blur (even though he stole his bass playing style from
John Taylor of Duran Duran who stole it from Bernard Edwards) and now
makes er cheese.

The biggest problem with British music and its lack of ambition in
recent years is the London centric cultural dominance of a few
journalists and DJ’s who have tightened the reign of what is
“acceptable” to be included in British music to such an extent, they
have strangled it. Thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Thats why
we ended up with the noughties genre of “landfill indie” and thats why
aside from heavy metal, the average british indie band guitarist plays
with the skill of a parapeliegic in a coma. These “industry experts”,
know nothing of passion, nothing of joy and the sooner this country
has a cultural purge of these individuals the better. I don’t need
Stuart Maconie or Mark Radcliffe to tell me about Rock guitar, the
fact that the BBC want them to tell me speaks volumes about its
agenda to close down debate on what is good, what is bad and what is
music. That for me is deeply sinister.