Jeztone.com

Happy 2009, this is my first post for a while…..(7 months) and see’s my playing and indeed my interest in the guitar going through somewhat of a transitional period. Having stopped gigging and left the band I was in. The idea of playing music live in front of people seems strangely alien right now.

I guess this happens to everyone now and again, you suddenly find yourself at a musical crossroads, unsure what to do next (if anything at all?).

I’m old enough to have been here before though, this feeling last happened to me in 1997 when…through a combination of circumstances and personal choice the guitar just took a back seat for a while.

I’d come out of a hard gigging band several years earlier and moved down South to study. One would assume such a time would mean endless oppertunities for musical alchemy and a greater choice of both musicians and possibilities.

How wrong I was.

As the musical sands shifted I suddenly found no real demand for a player like myself.

My crunchy power chords, textural influences and preference for lush delay lines seemed rather lost in the late 90′s. The very few bands I auditioned for seemed either lost in a post Oasis/post Britpop confection or stuck in a “US underground punk” haze of low fi incompetence.

It seemed rather odd meeting blokes from Camden putting on Mancunian accents and playing along to simplistic sub Gallager/Weller songs
(ever notice that whenever Noel G is on the cover of an English guitar magazine, they have a beginners special article inside….I mean why not go the whole hog & publish a special “underclass lads” edition with all the architypal “ladrock” favourites, articles on ripping off the Beatles Slade & Weller, using simple chords, gigging with an ASBO, organising rehearsals around a curfew order, a guide to shoplifting the best Les Paul copy from Cash Converters and styling your hair like Rick “remember him?” Witter).

On the other hand the “American Underground Punk” influenced crowd I knew seemed all to incompetent for my tastes. Anti Corporate dandys bashing out 3 chords in £100 trainers made by children in the third world?….Nah…it wasn’t really me!

This lack of musical oppertunity kept me away from the guitar for several years. When I eventually returned to the six string, It took me about 3 years to properly re-immerse myself into the instrument. It wasn’t easy, but I think that when I did re-emerge, I was a better musician and more tasteful player than before.

But what goes around comes around, I’ve spent much of the last 5 years of my life in bands and although brimming with musical ideas, my motiviation to do something beyond playing for my own pleasure is simply not there at this moment in time. This is actually more liberating than it sounds, however my biggest fear is reaching a point where I’ve lost ground in both ability and musicality. No one likes to go backwards when they stand still do they?

In light of both wanting to do something different and realising at the same time that I lack motivation to do in the first place. I think its a good strategy to keep myself involved in a more relaxed way. So a small recording project of a friends has allowed me to keep playing and be reasonably creative without the pressures of gigging, audiences, soundchecks, promoters, other bands and all the other annoyances of being a performing musician.

The other issue of this downtime is taking a closer look at my rig. Which in terms of amps & pedals has been largely unchanged since 2002.

I bought a Gibson SG earlier in the year and I have fallen back in love with the thick syrupy sound of humbuckers on a mahogany set neck guitar. In my friends recording project I’m running out of a Sansamp pedal into a Mac, its simple, quick and sounds ok for now.

If I were to gig again I don’t know what I’d use. The amp & pedalboard stand idly in a corner of the room. There are things I’d refine and things I’d change, but thats a set of decisions to be made another time.

Fender recently launched 2 US Custom Shop tribute edition Strats based on Dave Gilmours “legendary” Black Strat, the original guitar was a Stock 69 Strat bought from Manny’s in New York in 1970 and used on most of Pink Floyds classic albums. Atom Heart Mother/Dark Side of The Moon/ Wish You Were Here etc etc. Lots of people are excited about this, half of Future publishings editorial staff are wanking over a CD of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ even as I type. Gilmour has a new live album ‘Live in Gdansk’ to promote and sadly Rick Wright has passed away.

RIP rick.

It seems that the whole guitar fraternity are excited by this new arrival to Fenders range. I am a massive DG/Floyd fan, but somehow the hyperbole has vexed me. There are 2 models a New Old Stock guitar and a lovingly bashed up ‘Relic’ addition.

Personally I find the whole relic’ing guitars thing a bit pathetic, if you play live your guitar will get war wounds simply by gigging and being used. The dings and nicks are genuine and tell part of your guitars and therefore ultimately your story. The idea these scars are put on as part of a finishing process is as pathetic as it sounds and when guitarists disagree with me and say “oh but they feel played in” my reply is “BOLLOCKS you fucking girly dentist weekend warrior, get back to stealing my pension with your hedge fund!!!!”

Sorry…;) Rant almost over….

Basically if you strip away the marketing hype. This guitar is a US Custom shop 57 reissue with different pickups, a Callan shortened tremelo arm & block and a clever switch that gives you the neck and bridge positions together. Gilmours original is essentially now a bitsa thats had more surgery than the average Hollyoaks cast member. I had a peruse of (long time roadie) Phil Taylors book ‘The Black Strat’ in Waterstones the other day and the beast has had 3 different necks, several trems and more electronic things inserted into it than Jodie Marsh at an Ann Summers Party. It even had a Charvel neck and a Kahler trem at one point. Here it is hanging on the Hard Rock Cafe’s wall sometime in its history.

Somehow though the “legitimacy” of this model has kinda made people forget that they could easily doctor a black used 57 reissue (US or J-Craft) and simply shorten the trem arm themselves and buy some pickups to mount on their aftermarket black scratchplate. I’ve seen quite a few people already doing this and I for one think its great that with a few spares and imagination its possible to accurately replicate a guitar that a well heeled Floyd fan would pay a couple of grand for.

The irony of this signature model for me is that anyone who has seen DG live with Pink Floyd between 87 and 94 will know that his main guitar was not this (it was on loan rusting away in the hard rock cafe at the time), but a red secondhand early 80′s 57 reissue bought from Chandlers (the guitar was ex of Mick Ralph’s from Bad company I believe) and fitted with EMG pickups and a shortened trem arm. I saw Gilmour on the telly at Live Aid using this guitar with Brian Ferry, then on the telly again when Pink Floyd played Venice in the late 80′s and their ‘Earls Court’ residency in 1994.

Again this guitar has been widely copied by keen DG/Floyd enthusiasts for years. EMG actually make a Dave Gilmour DG20 signature pickup set complete on ready to mount scratchplate. I wonder how all those devotee’s with EMG powered 57 strat’s are feeling at the mo. Is it time for a respray and some pickups to be changed I wonder?

Don’t get me wrong, The Black guitar is of huge historical significance. But if your under 40 years old the guitar you most associate with Mr Gilmour is certainly not the black one. The fact that DG lent it to a Burger chain to hang on a wall for several years kinda makes me wonder if it was all that special anyway?

In typical cynical Jeztone style I wonder if this move towards a DG strat was not instigated by Dave Gilmour but by his Roadie Phil Taylor. Guitar techs to big name artists are increasingly powerful people who can act as a point man between artist and equipment manafacturer or Vintage guitar dealer. One of Metallica’s roadies has an Endorsement deal with Mesa Boogie…so I bet he welds some influence over the equipment choices of the bands he’s teching with for sure.

A DG signature based on the red one would have little in the way of difference to a stock Fender guitar, wheras the black instruments long running history of a test bed instrument for new hardware and pickups, makes it more of a Marketing mans dream. In addition it’s use on the classic Floyd albums of the 70′s also makes it sit nicely with the age group of the Doctors/Lawyers and other Baby Boomers with the money to spend £2k+ on a guitar they could replicate for less than half that amount.

In addition Dave Gilmour is the owner of a 1954 strat, serial number 0001. This guitar was used by Gilmour at the Stratpack 50th Anniversary a few years ago, while there is also claims this guitar is a bitsa, it is still the most iconic guitar in the Gilmour collection. Luckily Fender Japan make a very unofficial reproduction, basically a 57 reissue with Texas Specials and a gold adonized pickguard. A perusal of Ebay should get you one of these babies for around £550 quid, much cooler looking and far less common than a used red strat with EMG’s in ha ha!

While we are on the subject of Strats anyone who read my £500 strat challenge last year will probably be wondering if I ever did buy a guitar? Well the truth is…..after I went out and had a bit of an early 80′s nostalgia trip with my Ibanez Roadstar and Yamaha SG fetish. I’m back on the Strat trail and boy its a hard slog.

The reality is that finding a guitar to tick all my boxes is proving quite a challenge. The problem so far is that any guitar I buy will probably need some modifications in order to meet my needs as a player. Despite Fender making 150+ variations of the same guitar, nothing is quite hitting the mark yet.

Expect an update next month!

A few years ago I was in a band with 2 brothers, they were (and probably are) as dysfunctional as Liam & Noel Gallagher, but only in a thoroughly polite sensible introverted and repressed middle class way….no fights at airports or lines of Gak for these 2. You were more likely to get a discussion on Radio 4 or the literacy of Hong Kong action Cinema than a real punch on the nose.

The music wasn’t very british either instead their tastes were mainly the gothicy end of American Alt Rock. Their hero was Billy Corgan. The elder brother actually bought a Fender Strat because Billy played one. If you said the words “Smashing Pumpkins” they actually twitched almost as if….. aroused even…..scary. When I went to see A Perfect Circle at Nottingham’s Rock City a few years ago, it was with some amusement that I saw them corner James Iha in a pincer movement after the show and gave him some serious intense fan worship. Poor James Iha looked like he’d had the shit scared out of him (the younger brother is 6′ 5″ tall and dresses like Jason Bourne)

The bods at Fender have obviously worked out that theres a huge demand for a Billy Corgan Strat. They’ve also worked out that the average Pumpkins fan has not the high disposable income of Fenders usual poncey Custom Shop Artist guitar customers (ie:over 40, Household income of over £65k, 2 cars, 3 children; 2 privately educated etc etc) so for once this is actually an affordable American made guitar.

Fender have based the Corgan Strat on the entry level Highway one American series guitars. For your money you get a fixed bridge strat with a nitro finish body, modern C profile neck with 9.5″ radius board and 22 Jumbo Frets, which will really make playability excellent. The pickups in the neck and bridge are single coil sized blade humbuckers custom wound to Billy Corgan’s tastes, they seem based on the excellent Chopper series by Di Marzio, and the middle pickup is a stock Chopper humbucker. Having used a Di Marzio Chopper-T in my Fender Kotzen Telecaster for the last 4 years I can vouch for both their grunt and versatility.

The oversized 70′s style headstock completes the retro-modern vibe.

The biggest shock of this is the price, its cheaper than an American Standard strat,but has £210+ worth of high end pickups on it as stock. It comes with a tweed case ala a vintage reissue Strat. The rrp is £839, but on the street you could easily get one of these for £679.00 which is a lot of guitar for the money.

Mad Bad Billy has been using these guitars on tour and from what I can see has tried to make them affordable and also an instrument that would appeal to a broader church than the average Pumpkins fan. He may have succeded which is a testament to an artist actually getting involved in an instruments design. The Clapton Strat is another successful signature guitar, but idiosynchrasies such as the 50′s style 1 ply scratchplate and vintage style bridge have always put me off buying one.

If I’m gonna be critical….I dont like the fixed bridge. I would have liked a tremelo option and maybe the black/white colour scheme is a bit off putting for some but these are shockingly good value for money.

As regular Jeztone readers will know I’ve been looking to buy a Strat for some time and my £500 budget will go quite far for a used Strat on Ebay, but its still a secondhand guitar, so the chance to buy a new US strat with modern rock upgrades at this sort of price is very very tempting.

Downsides…if you want to play Robert Cray or Mark Knopfler tunes then this guitar is probably not for you, it will be a bit fatter sounding than an American Standard but if you play what the record store Fopp would describe as “Modern Alternative Rock”. and require a S-type guitar with more contemporary tones, great feel and classic looks, this guitar looks like a good place to start as any.

Buy the Tonebone Classic Distortion at Zzounds

Radial’s Tonebone range are all over the press at the moment with some pretty big user names (Vivian Campbell, Neal Schon, Steve Lukather, Kirk Hammett, the beardie guy who plays with Genesis etc etc).

I recently spent an evening with the award winning Tonebone Classic pedal, many cans of lager and 2 fellow guitarists (my brother Dom & our friend Nigel). We plugged a MIJ 62′ Strat reissue into the bone and then nto the clean channel of a Marshall JCM2000 head & 4 X 12. Heres whats happened.

The Classic is well made and has a basic level, Gain, treble, bass and a contour control, plus 3 mini switches controlling the EQ frequency curve and the level of gain. Its generally designed to give you that nice sweet Classic Rock Overdrive distortion. Y’know a JTM45/Hi-Watt kinda crunch

Passing the guitar around we got some quite nice sounds….I’ll repeat that again…..some quite nice sounds….. As this is the Classic pedal Nigel went off on a Diamond Head rifforama that made us all chuckle, I played the outro to ‘Who’s Crying Now’ by Journey. Meanwhile Dom gave it some Knopfleresque lead lines and……… it sounded ok nothing was earth shattering or award winning though. When playing staccato lines you could hear the preamp tube sag a little. It sounded organic yes and it was reasonably low noised given that we were playing a strat with stock pickups.

The problem here was that we were playing at sensible volume levels, so nothing the Tonebone did really cut the mustard. We got a nice creamy classic rock overdrive, but nothing better than a pro co RAT pedal, we got a nice lift to an already distorted amp, but nothing you couldnt get out of a Ibanez Tubescreamer or a Boss Super Overdrive.

Nigel was cynical of the 15Volt adaptor giving ther circuit enough juice in the first place. But it sounded okay…..not amazing…..or award winning…..but okay.

The problem is that this pedal costs £170 and I’ve just been comparing it to overdrive distortion pedals costing half as much.

I see what there trying to do, but if your spending this sort of money on organic valve tones with a traditional bite I’d personally go for the Coopersonic Twin overdrive this has had some good reviews and my experience of this was in the studio when I recorded some parts of the HoS album back in 2006, its far more convincing, sounds better, is better made and while lacking fancy endorsees. I think you’ll find it does what it says on the tin with far more aplomb.

The Classic’s manual was a triumph of marketing over common sense, it claimed that it was impossible to get a band sound out of it. Sorry Radial, Nigel found one very quickly and boy it sounded horrible as I played the intro to Journeys ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ if the knobs are turned the right way. Which begs the question, if you throw more money at Marketing and PR than on the actual design and technology, what gets you awards and endorsees????

I wouldn’t write Radial’s valve pedal concept off, the Plexitube and Hot British pedals look like they could be worthwhile. But I’m not sure who this pedal is aimed at. A studio would want something that sounds versatile & convincing at lower volume levels. A gigging guitarist may as well buy a cheaper overdrive unit. The price is Boutique, but I’m not convinced that the sounds are.

File under dissapointing

6/10

(my thanks to Nigel for the loan of the pedal)
Buy the Tonebone Classic Distortion at Zzounds

When I was a lad the 2 guitars that fascinated me the most were the Yamaha SG1000/2000 and the other was the Ibanez Roadstar. The Roadstar was Ibanez’s second attempt at an original design based loosely on the Fender Stratocaster. The earlier Blazer model was just a plain attempt, but with the Roadstar they really went to town.

By 1984 the design had evolved into a plethora of variations offering unlimited choices to the modern 1980’s player and boy people used them, a mainstay of the early 80’s working musician even some Pro’s like Steve Lukather had a signature model, Gary Moore,Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet, Allan Holdsworth. No wonder Fender were on there knees. In Back to the Future, Michael J Fox’s character Marty McFly owned an Ibanez RS440. for an all American boy to be playing a Japanese guitar in a Hollywood movie really showed how successful the Roadstar had become.

In the mid 80’s the guitar to beat was not even Fender anymore. Charvel and Kramers S-type designs were being used by both 1980’s metal types and top session guitarists. Ibanez realised that the key was too offer an S-type guitar with a Floyd type trem.
By 1986 they had managed to secure a license to make the floyd and rechristened it the Edge trem.

As 1987 became 1988 Ibanez had secured the endorsement of Steve Vai and a host of other up and coming widdlers such as Paul Gilbert and Vinnie Moore, The Jem 777 and legendary RG series exploded on the scene and became the must have rock guitar of the day.
However 1986’s Ibanez Catalog is perhaps the most interesting. Stuck between the traditional and the widdly era’s one can see some interesting guitars evolve. The Proline
managed to bring together the Roadstar body and RG series headstock design with some really odd mini button pickup switching options.

The final incarnation of the Roadstar actually had RG model prefix’s and the first year of production the RG/Sabre/S series were branded under the Roadstar series in America only.

I’ve spent the last 6 months trying endless Strat type guitars and have been dissapointed, when in January I tried a Roadstar RG440 (like the blue guitar at the top of the page) it was a black one and besides the Floyd type trem it had an oil finished neck that was quite substantial, yet easy to play. However good old Denmark Street had priced it at around £300 yet it had the shit kicked out of it.

However a good guitar is always easy to track down and I’ve just bought a Roadstar RG440 off Ebay and its possibly the cleanest 22 year old guitar I have ever played. The pickups are nothing exceptional however the neck is……probably one of the best necks I’ve played, fast, yet with enough mass to dig in. I’d say it was more like the excellent Ibanez Joe Satriani Guitars in terms of feel and the floyd licensed Edge tremelo system is like new.

A few days after I bought the guitar I was contacted by a chap called Nigel who missed bidding and wanted to buy the guitar off me, I was tempted for a black one, but relented.
Nigel is 41 and plays in a covers band, owns lots of guitars, Fenders/Gibsons/Yamaha etc. However his main axe of choice is a black Roadstar RG440, he’s pretty much sold on the the 1986 incarnation of the Roadstar as the ultimate gigging S-type. Well made, easy to play with a great tremelo and above all….cheap as chips. He compares it to an early 80’s Charvel. I’ve never played one, but I did play a Musicman Luke (Steve Lukather’s current signature guitar) last year. The quality and feel of this Ibanez reminded me of a Musicman.

These guitars are seriously undervalued right now. A good clean 22-25 year old Roadstar can be had for around £180-£300. Thats less than a used Mexican Strat and a much much better made all round instrument that I suspect will increase in value.
As usual beware of guitars with knackered tremelo systems and hacked up bodies, also an unfinished neck is much more susceptable to damage and dirt. The Edge tremelo is still in production,so spares are plentiful however beware the 1983 pro rocker tremelo, it doesnt work well, also the pre floyd locking system popular on RS430/440 models from 1984 is impossible to find parts for, unless one gets lucky on Ebay.

A weekly scan of Ebay reveals a good 6-8 Roadstars on the market at any one time, usually 2 or 3 1986 RG models. If one wants to do the high performance tremelo equipped Superstrat guitar on a budget and own a future collectable to boot, there really is no better place to start.