Hi There

What have I been learning?

Tue, 20 May 2008 22:37:34 +0100

This blog set out to chart the progress of someone with no time, and limited talent as he set about learning the guitar. Of late, all I have been posting is the usual ‘have you seen this cool shit’ stuff that infects so many blogs of all kinds. That is because I have no time and limited talent – it’s part of the original disease.

Anyway, I have fiddled around with some John Canapes’s blues lessons and am currently learning something he characterises as delta blues. I have also had another garage band practice with the Round Table crowd and also got together with my mate Mark to try some more ambitious stuff. Notably, we are digging into the tunage of local lad John Squire with covers of Waterfall (me on lead) and I Am The Resurrection (Mark on lead). We have also broken the back of covering White Wedding and Bigmouth Strikes Again.

Well stone me ...

Tue, 20 May 2008 22:32:43 +0100

Back in January I jumped on a bandwagon that was gathering some pace and said that the Ting Tings are quite good. Well, that said, I never expected them to go to number bloody one as they did on Sunday.

All I can say is ‘well done’ and I hope that now there is an album in the offing, that the non-formulaic style that characterises their music does not mean it will take another lifetime to get a second one out that’s just as good (alluding to the adage that one has one’s entire lifetime to write a first album but only a year to write the second).

Baby plays guitar

Sat, 10 May 2008 14:07:53 +0100

A short 30 second video of little Simon (9 months) playing my American Stratocaster. The video omits the two-hand tapping technique he has developed. By rights, he invented this on his own as he has never even seen Eddie Van Halen. He has also worked out that the pickup selector makes the guitar sound different. The boy is a genius.

Of course, now, when he is in his infant bouncer looking for something new to do, he looks over at the Strat longingly and only another thrash will satisfy his rawking needs. The is one small point of caution, however. He does like to violently thrust it off his lap when he has finished.

She’s a Hot Slag

Sat, 3 May 2008 22:30:51 +0100

Epiphone Les Pauls – say what you like about them but they cost £329 and the are way. way more guitar than one eighth of a Gibson Les Paul costing £2,000. In fact, some aficionados will tell you that there have been recent periods in history when Epis have been better finished than their counterpart Gibsons. That said, the one area where a Gibson scores over an Epiphone is in the pickups. A Gibson Les Paul has always and will always sound 200% nicer than an Epiphone copy.

Now I have a stock Epiphone Les Paul Standard and my regular guitar buddy has a Gibson with a pair of Bare Knuckle something-or-others in it. So, I have played both through proper boutique valve amps (Cornford) and I know that a sorted Gibbo is a wonderful thing, and that my Epi has shite pickups that lack articulation and hence sound a bit muddy. That is a Guitar Fact.

Now, I have another guitar buddy, a guy who posts here as ‘Axeman, who has a re-pickuped cherry sunburst Epiphone Les Paul (pictured). His upgrade involved Grover locking tuners, a solid steel bridge and a pair of Iron Gear Hot Slag pick-ups, all installed by our common friend Steve Robinson of Sale.

After some weeks of playing the Hot Slags, Axeman offered me the weekend loan of the guitar in exchange for mine – so we swapped. This morning I had a go at the Hot Slag Les Paul through the Orange Tiny Terror with the Celestion Vintage 30. You know what? I hate it. Aside from the fact that the guitar is set up a shade too low for me, the whole experience was really quite alarming. These pickups are seriously hot. If you want metal then they are your guys, but the problem for me is that I like semiclean blues rock where you play hard for your crunch and the guitar sounds soulful rather than being the acoustic equivalent of a Hiroshima bridge and a Nagasaki neck.

On the tone pot, things get really crazy. With the Hot Slags on board, the guitar can be rolled off to the bass settings and everything is mellow, but the gain soon kicks in beyond about 3 on the tone dial. By that experience, I can add that not only are the Hot Slags hot, but they are also a mite bit uncontrollable. Better for me might be the more bluesey pickups by the same manufacturer or actual, real Burstbucker IIs. Also worth checking out are Tonerider (http://www.dangleberrymusic.co.uk/Tonerider-m-163.html) who do Hot Slag-priced gear, but are potentially producing pick-ups that are a shade less lairy.

Wonderful Weekend

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:40:46 +0100

This weekend has been an odd one from the point of view of playing guitar. The parents arrived from Scotland, so we obviously devoted a lot of time to making them feel at home and I spent loads of time out walking with them and little Simon while Debs slept off the sleep debt that Simon owed her. Even so, within all that busy-ness, I managed to snatch enough time to learn Wonderful Land by The Shadows. It is a lovely tune to play as it is very, very easy, but has a lot of space in it to add your own feel and is not so effects laden as Apache, which I think was among the first ten or so tunes I learnt on the electric guitar. My efforts have left everyone in the house humming the tune while they do the dishes, wash clothes an scoop the cat shit .

The choice of tune was not accidental. If you are going to try to steal time away to play guitar, then you had better play something that your guests like and my mum is a huge Shadows fan, so explaining to her that I vanished for an hour to learn verses and then coming upstairs with the Stratocaster and working with her to learn the choruses was politically OK.

Moreover. there is something artificially wonderful about learning Shadows songs on a red Stratocaster ...

Also this weekend, my Fender Bullet 15 DSP is back in the house after a long-term loan to a friend. ‘Big deal’ you may think, but it actually is. The layout of our house means that the music room is on the lower floor and all the living space is one floor up, so when Simon is playing in the lounge, I can’t really piss off downstairs for extended periods before he goes to bed. The addition of the little Fender to the lounge means that I can caress a guitar in front of the TV while still keeping an eye to Simon and making sure that Debs does not bear the entire brunt of the burden of childcare while I struggle to amateurishly learn the guitar.

While we are on Fender, and Strats in particular, it’s worth noting that the whole of the one hour documentary Curves Contours and Body Horns’, which is a history of the Stratocaster punctuated by interviews with the people who play them, is on YouTube. Go here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dlKAkb8hWqQ for the first instalment of five videos.

The video lead me to idly click about and take the time to listen to some songs by Bonnie Raitt. I would say that Bonnie Raitt is not all that well known in the UK, but she is obviously huge in the US. The video featured below shows that she is not only a great singer, and a bit hot for 50+, but also a mean blues slide player.

Bonnie is notable in Stratocaster (sorry it is an obsession this week) circles for being the first woman to have a signature Strat made by Fender. The guitars have dropped off the production line now, so I am not sure what makes them special beyond the Desert Sunset colour and the pearly pickguard.

Funnily, this colour scheme is reminiscent of another guitar close to my passions, which is Nick Beatty’s custom build by arrowheadguitars.The guitar, with the development name Flaming Blue is a custom Stratocaster made from a pre finished body from the US with a neck from arrowheadguitars modelled of a Fender USA Stratocaster and with an Eric Clapton mid-boost circuit and a Trevor Wilkinson vibrato added to it. Nick has not blogged the guitar yet, but I am sure he will. In the meantime check out the pictures on Paul Creedy’s FlickR page. If you look closely at the big ‘A’ logo on the headstock you will see the unmistakable signature vector artwork style on none other than me.

A how-to for a neat project

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:49:59 +0100

Want to use a combo cabinet as a cab for a valve head? Fancy a powerful little ministack in your front room? Here’s how I went about combining a solid state Marshall and an Orange Tiny Terror.

How to do the modification