Previous threads linked to via this thread.
Okay – first completely inadequate pic here.
I finally got it – lordy what a long wait. But I am beginning to think it was worth it, in a very promising way.
Bottom line: very clear on first impression that this guitar has good bones – classic Tele simple playability with an easier Gibson feel and much tighter lows. From a geek standpoint, if you go back to, I think, the 2nd of these threads, I zero in on this basic combo of Fender and Gibson as my target – so from that standpoint, it feels like this guitar nails it. But it is still very early days with this thing – I don’t expect to have it dialed-in for a while and only after some parts-swapping and other adjustments.
And it needs a black pickguard.
Let’s catch up:
So I finally got the call from Bill – after much labor and the application of Fish-eye Flowout, the body was finally done. I went and got it – beautiful, perfect. You have to see it in person or I will get a beauty shot of it – the photo you see above is like trying on a bathing suit under fluorescent lights; it does this beauty no justice at all.
After thinking about it a lot, I ended up taking it to my guitar tech Steve to wire it up. I had been planning on taking the time to do it between Christmas and New Years’ when I had time off! I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. Anyway, 8 months later, I have no time and was about to leave on vacation – Steve could work on it while I was away. It had been far too long and I wanted to test drive the damn thing.
I just picked it up yesterday – first impression is that: a) it really captures the target look of a Tele in 50’s Gibson Les Paul Special clothing; and b) I need to get a black pickguard. The mottled tortoiseshell blends in too much – I want that contrast and black is also a legit Gibson LP Special color. Ordered.
It is very, very light – no more than 6.5 lbs. But not neck-heavy at all – I use a leather strap with a suede underside which I am sure is a factor but I never even noticed it.
I had some problems with sympathetic vibrations coming from the strings above the nut – the string tree we installed was too far up. I had to run to Guitar Center and grab a different kinda tree – the classic Fender T shape. Of course, while installing it, I chipped the finish of the peghead. Cool – first ding; I’m breaking it in already.
Okay, so I get it home and play it – unplugged for a while at first. It is a simple-feeling guitar: the heavy-gauged strings over the flat-radiused neck have the feel of a very playable cheese-slicer: taut and articulate. The sound is loud for a solidbody – more typical for a Fender vs. Gibson. The volume is not, in my experience, an indicator of amplified tone; it merely enables you to hear the guitar’s inherent tone better. In this case, the volume allows me to hear that it is a musical-sounding guitar: the notes blend nicely, it feels very stable in its tuning and the fundamental chord harmonies sound like they want to work together. And there is a bit of bloom and sustain unplugged – the guitar resonates as a system nicely; in my experience that’s a good predictor for amplified tone.
The neck is wonderful – the Warmoth Fat carve is just how I like it: big without feeling big. Easy up and down the neck, and I don’t notice the Compound Carve (see an earlier thread) at all which I suppose is a good thing – just very playable. No impression of the Brazilian Rosewood fretboard – not focused on that right now.
So with that basic first impression, I am inclined to trust the guitar – I think I can get a good tone about it, so the question is how it will sound through the amp. I say “the” amp because I really only want to play through my Tweed Deluxe replica, a simple, very dynamic and articulate amp that I rev up with my Rat distortion pedal. With my first project Tele, it produces a perfect tone: equal parts Malcolm Young, Pete Townshend and Keith Richards.
I plug it in. A few power chords, Open G’s and various riffs later, I find it to be way too much Malcolm and not nearly enough Keith – too much compression in the mid range, not enough open space within the tone. A bit too nasal, if you can hear that. But the lows – the lows are perfect. I can bear down with palm-mute chunking and get a thunk like a great metal song; crisp and clear. And there is a lot of string separation – there are clearly separate strings, and you hear the blending – notes stack up into chords well, and isolated strings jump out when I spit out a lead or pluck some strings in counterpoint inside the main chords.
This goes on all day – I find myself wanting to play it, and liking how playing it feels, but finding it too harsh – if only I could blow out the nasal tone a bit. I keep fiddling with tone combinations – lots of different pickup options, but since I can’t find my fastball – my solid bridge pickup tone – I am lost. Very frustrating – never fun to not get a great tone right out of the gate – leads to dangerous second guessing – did I blow the pickups? I even lowered the bridge pickup a bit so they became a tad less responsive – this took some of the edge off which I found encouraging. But maybe the body really does suck and have a nasal tone I am not hearing unplugged? Nah – I don’t hear that and I trust my ear. Well, given what I have heard, I really blame the electronics – I have to go back and research the parts I got; I assume I dialed up pots or caps that are mis-matched to the pickups so I am filtering out some of the good stuff by mistake. I can hear the beginnings of a good tone with the Tone control down to about 1-2 or so, which just doesn’t feel right. And backing off the pickup height and taking edge off supports my thinking that the electronics aren’t mic’ing this plank correctly, but the plank itself is fine. I decide I really like how the guitar plays and how it sounds unplugged, but there must be something wrong with the circuitry because I don’t hear that coming through. I was talking myself through the basics: if I like how it played, I have to keep my changes focused and lop off a few basic branches of inquiry first – a mis-matched pot would be an easy culprit and an easy rule-out; I will check my notes when I next power up my work laptop.
Then, today, I played it through my main gigging amp.
Whoa – I found it. This amp is a two channel, master volume amp, albeit a very high end fancy boo-teek one. It is a very flexible amp – and very forgiving, with a nice thick tone. It is a humbucker to my Tweed’s single coil – humbucking pickups produce that Classic Rock big, thick chord, whereas single coils are individual and articulate and are more likely to expose shortcomings in your players, so the story goes.
Well, that’s the difference between my two amps: one is ornery for fun and the other is robust to get the gigging job done. I hadn’t even thought about starting with the robust one to get a feel for the guitar without sweating the tone, but I hit a few chords and the hindsight was obvious. I don’t know my way around this guitar at all, why try to master it through the more particular amp? In a few minutes I found my anchor tone, a solid bridge tone with equal parts Malcolm, Pete and Keef; okay, a bit more Malcolm still, but in a cool, sharp way. And I can switch to the clean channel and find a couple of very usable clean tones with the Tone control in the same basic setting as on the Crunchy channel. Excellent.
I guess the most important thing is that I hear a much more solid connection between the tone I am after and what is coming out – I gotta live with this thing for a while and make some decisions about the electronics – do my research about pot and cap values and what changing them might do, while getting more comfortable with my gig amp and finding how to work the guitar, then moving back over to the Tweed to see what I can pull out of it. I swear, it is like breaking in a new baseball mitt, or shaking down a new racing engine – you have to listen and feel what the thing’s natural tendencies are and then sit with them a while so you can work out your best theory – find the tweak that doesn’t throw the system out of true. Patient work; but I waited long enough for the damn thing, I might as well hang in and get it right. At least I know it has good bones.
I’ll keep you posted – I will swap in the black pickguard and figure out a way to get better picks; and when I have the tone dialed up a bit better, I will record a clip or two via my drummer and figure out how to post them so you can hear what I am trying to write about…and if you made it this far, thanks for reading.
