Rock Guitar: The Major Food Groups

Cafe Society
1

In E-Sabbath’s Great Ongoing Guitar thread(link), he says that he is thinking about other guitars and wants a survey of what’s out there. I am happy to get this started, but will depend on other Dopers chiming in:

A few starting points:

  • This is all YMMV - for every POV I state, there are likely a lot of exception that can be pointed out (“X is best as a lead guitar” - “well what about so-and-so who played it differently?”). I am trying to provide generalities that will no doubt collapse when confronted with specifics. Humor me.

  • This is not a ranking or a “which is best?” thing - each guitar mentioned has excellent examples. And different players are better matched with different guitars - there’s no “right” answer.

  • I am focused on broad, mainstream blues-based rock and pop - trying to venture into other categories of electric guitar styles will muddy the waters :wink: to the point of becoming meaningless. So while The Nuge played a hollow-body Byrdland guitar and Steve Howe rocks a hollow-body ES-175, they are the exceptions and those guitars are not normally a fit with big, dumb rock.

Okay - so I tend to put guitars into major Food Groups, typically based on the basic design - i.e., body type, set-neck vs. bolt-on, length of the fingerboard scale, woods used - and control layout - i.e., types of pickups and controls. I like the Food Group analogy because you need a balanced meal with servings of each group to live a healthy guitar life (groan - sorry).

Here goes:

  • Fender Telecaster
  • First commercially viable, popular solidbody electric
  • Nicknames: Tele, The Plank
  • Analogies that work:
    > The Hydrogen atom: the fundamental stuff; the atom that all the other atoms are built off of
    > Maryann to the Stratocaster’s Ginger (if you young 'uns don’t get the Gilligan’s Island reference, get off my lawn ;))
    > Heinz Ketchup - i.e., goes with everything, and according to Malcolm Gladwell, may be the perfect food, balanced across all major tastes
  • Telecasters are also sharks - the basic design was arrived at right out of the gate and has survived a lot of evolutionary upheaval in guitarland. Why? They are basically perfect - the bridge pickup (the one closest to your picking hand) can get very trebly and bright, but if you roll off the Volume and Tone controls (and / or switch to the combo of pickups or just the neck pickup), you can thicken up the sound - but it still sounds musical and good. That is a very big, subtle deal - it means that you can play bright, crisp country and pedal steel-type guitar licks, or stay clean and roll off the Tone and get a warm, jazzy sound, or play crunchy and roll off the T and V a bit and get a great thick rock sound. Or as **An Arky **summarized after one of my rants: “You can make a Fender sound like a Gibson a lot easier than you can make a Gibson sound like a Fender”…

…but you gotta *operate *a Tele - tweak the knobs and dial in your sound. It is the antithesis of an Eddie Van Halen guitar with no Tone control and the Volume left at 10 unless you are doing volume swell effects. And Teles define rugged and durable - you can use one to pound nails and then take it to your gig that night. The necks are designed with no peghead angle, so they can fall over and not be a victim of physics, snapping the headstock off like Gibsons are notorious for.

There is no style of rock music that the Tele doesn’t excel in and that doesn’t have famous, important stars of that genre using a Tele. But Tele’s are like the name “Michael” - so common that you hear it everywhere and if you aren’t paying attention it just blends into the background, but there are still some standout folks who have made it their own like Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson. (that analogy is really stupid, but I will leave it in so you can mock me…)

As a player, the line is that a Tele boosts your strengths and reveals your weaknesses. You can’t hide behind a Tele, but if you get good on one, you sound better on any guitar.

  • Fender Stratocaster
  • Biggest selling electric guitar
  • Nicknames: Strat
  • Analogies that work
    > Ginger to the Tele’s Maryann
  • Strats are the hot blonde that you have to take a shot at, but you realize that she has dated guys who put you to shame. So many players have not just played a Strat, they have made it central to their sound and “brand” that it almost feels like the spectrum has been covered and there’s no room to make a new statement. It’s easy to see why: it is a versatile, great sounding guitar and its design is the ultimate example of “form follows function” leading to a truly beautiful, sexy, object.
  • Where a Tele is versatile because of the wide responsiveness of the bridge pickup and onboard controls, the Strat is versatile because of the 3 pickup layout, which (after Hendrix popularized finding the “in between positions”) yields 5 different, very useful tones. The neck pickup can be Stevie Ray playing Pride and Joy, the in between positions can be Mark Knopfler articulate and thin, the middle pickup is a straight up rhythm sound and the bridge can be David Gilmour or Richie Blackmore playing thick rock leads. I know folks who claim to play with the Volume and Tone controls on a Strat, but I rarely see it happen - the versatility is about toggling between pickups, not dialing in a tone - again, YMMV
  • Strats have the whammy bar, which is a blessing and a curse - it is one of the best designs for this type of feature, but it makes it a bit harder to restring and keep in tune (if you break a string on a floating bridge, it changes the tension of the remaining strings, so you can have tuning issues).

The line on Strats is that they are great to get the sounds of all the players that you love, but it can be tough to sound like yourself. They can be a great starting guitar because you can get those tones you hear in the music you love. And for some reason, they are a destination - Clapton and Beck both gravitated towards Strats after establishing their reputations on Les Pauls (and in Beck’s case, a Tele - actually a 1-pickup Esquire). Clapton has said a few times that he needs to fight a Strat a bit more, which makes him work harder and sound better. They are an articulate guitar - I guess that is what he is referring to; they don’t carry you along the way a Les Paul can…

I have a few more Food Groups; I will try to get to them during the day. In the meantime - does this help? Do you have another POV about Tele’s or Strat’s? Bring 'em on!

2

I am reading and thinking. I don’t have much to say right now. But I do want to thank you for your effort.

3

Another thing that makes Teles and Strats fundamentally different from most other designs (certainly Les Pauls*****) is that they have a bleed capacitor that lets more treble through as you lower the volume. So where as you lower the volume on most guitars it also gets a bit muffled, on a Tele in particular you actually get more top (and a Tele is pretty bright to start with).

A slightly unusual example I like for the flat-out tone of the Tele lead pickup is the opening riff of Interstellar Overdrive.

I may come back with an essay on whammy bar or pickup types, but I ought to some work right now.

***** Les Paul himself used low impedance pickups and didn’t have the less volume = muffled tone problem.

4

E-Sabbath - Cool; no worries.

Okay - where was I?

**Gibson Les Paul **(and I would lump in any solidbody Gibson that comes with two humbucking pickups hooked up to two Volumes and two Tones, with a Tune-o-Matic bridge and stop tailpiece. Gibson has been trying to carve out the SG as its own category - and there is some merit to that - but it is really the same basic layout with different wood)

  • Nicknames: “The Stradivarius of solidbody electrics,” 'bursts (for the sunburst finish on Gibson Les Paul Standards), a lot of nicknames related to specific models (e.g., the Custom, or “R9” for a recently-made Custom Shop Reissue of a 1959 LP Standard - there are also R8’s, R7’s, etc…those are the pricey ones you see in your local Guitar Center)
  • Analogies that work: a Harley, because on one hand it has a long, storied history, is pivotal to the growth of the genre, etc. but the company is really marketing the lifestyle, so you see lawyers and doctors with money using them since they are priced out of reach for most working players. Another analogy would be a good kitchen knife - meaning you buy it for one specific thing - but it does that one thing better than anything else does. Les Pauls ARE rock and roll - a Les Paul through a Marshall stack doesn’t get any better. Tom Scholz of Boston who is also an MIT-trained engineer came up with the perfect classic rock sound - e.g., the tone of the electric guitar in More Than a Feeling or the last break in Longtime - and it was a Les Paul through a Marshall.
    Your stereotypical Les Paul has humbucking pickups - two-coil pickups vs. Fender’s single coils. Those coils are wired in order to “buck the hum” - i.e., eliminate trace radio frequency hum that single coils are notorious for - try playing a Tele close to a neon sign or fluorescent light and you will see what I mean. Because the pickup has two coils, it has a hotter, more powerful output - and because the strings’ vibrations are being picked up at two points (i.e., each coil is “sampling” the strings and those two signals are blended to create the pickup’s sound) the tone of Les Pauls is bigger and thicker vs. Fender. Couple that with a mahogany body (with a maple “cap” on top of it) and you get a big, beefy tone. That is the signature of a Les Paul - a big tight low end that you can playing chunky riffs and rhythms on, and that can be the basis of big, thick, tubey-sounding lead tones like Slash opening Sweet Child o’ Mine. Les Pauls are set-neck guitars - i.e., the neck is attached to the body with a glued-in dovetail joint. They have pegheads that angle back, so the strings break cleanly over the nut for intonation purposes - but as a result, peghead breaks are an all-too-common nightmare for Gibson owners. (Don’t leave your guitar plugged in and on a guitar stand - EVER!). The Tune-o-Matic bridge and stop tailpiece are super easy to use.

Les Pauls are super fun to play - I am a Les Paul + Tele guy. Actually, Les Pauls and Teles have more in common tone-wise than Strats - both have ballsy bridge pickups and tight lows. But buying a cheaper LP type - like an Epiphone Les Paul - requires patience and experience because you have to play a bunch to find a good one. And the Custom Shop R9’s list for, like $4,000 - oy. And Les Pauls are considered easier to sound good on vs. the Fenders - I think this reputation is due to the thick humbucker tones…the Les Pauls I favor have the pre-humbucker pickup called the “P-90” or “Soapbar” pickup (it looks kinda like a bar of hotel soap), which I find to be more fun and raw and articulate - but more on them later…

ETA: **Small Clanger **- you posted while I was composing this little geek-out - all good and I agree…

5

I’m a big fan of semis. Not hollowbodies so much, but the semi-acoustic AKA semi-hollow is a great design.

I’d definitely say the Gibson ES-335 (the first semi) and all the many variations on that theme are a guitar “food group” all to themselves.

“Jazz boxes” are fully hollow, thick bodied guitars like the ES-175, and while they can be used for rock, they’re usually used for jazz.

Thinline semis, on the other hand, are definitely rock guitars.

6

Ah - you read my mind: for the last of the “major” Food Groups, I give you:

The Gibson ES-335 and all the variants
Nicknames - none, really; it’s a humble guitar
Analogies that Work: a secret weapon
When Eddie Van Halen was just starting the band, he played a 335 and the guys teased him for playing a “grandpa guitar” - so he trashed the crap out of it trying to make it look hip (hint: you can’t refinish a craft-made guitar with Schwinn bicycle paint) and eventually pried the pickup out of it and installed it in his homemade Frankenstein guitar. As Shakester says, they are semi-hollow - a solid central part down through the body that the neck is attached to, with hollow wings on either side.
335’s are everything a Les Paul is not - super versatile and capable of being played across genres. In other words, more like a Telecaster - and also like a Telecaster, they blend in. But a Tele has that crisp, biting tone that you can roll the tone off of, whereas a 335 has a rich, even tone that just fits. You can play the bridge pickup and get a solid rock tone that crunches up great (ask Clapton who played the Crossroads solo on his '64 335), or play the middle (both pickup on) and you can go from Black Crowes and Rolling Stones to the jazzy rock fusion of Steeley Dan. The spectrum a 335 covers is really amazing and useful.
The biggest issue for me with a 335 is their size - they are simply bigger guitars vs. Strats, Tele and LP’s - and if you are used to a smaller guitar, it can throw you off. Please note that I am talking as a gigging player - it would likely be no big deal for the majority of folks, but when I am moving around and angling my hand to play certain songs in certain ways in a tight space in a bar, I notice that the geometry of the guitar is different. But playing a great 335 is a wonderful thing - you can back off the crunch a bit, and really hear the hollow parts of the guitar influencing the tone…

…as an affordable guitar, the Epiphone Dot-neck (so-called because it has dot inlays on the fingerboard, which is what the most desirable vintage 50’s 335’s had before moving to block inlays in the early 60’s) can be really great.

I have to run again - if I can I will get to the second-tier set of Food Groups - again, not that they are lesser guitars at all, just less commonly used…

7

Another big genre, Super Strats. Usually pointy strat shaped but with added stuff.

Typically 24 fat frets, wide flat neck, locking whammy & nut, pointy headstock. Various pickup configurations but the one thing they have in common is that they do not have the Strat config of three single coils. I have (or had) Super Strat-esque guitars with all these variations:

bridge -> middle -> neck

humbucker -> single coil -> single coil

humbucker -> nothing -> humbucker

humbucker -> single coil -> humbucker

humbucker/coil tap -> humbucker/coil tap -> nothing (well sort of I’ll see if I can find a picture)

Another thing they have in common is that they don’t (IMHO) play like a Strat, they have the same scale length***** as a Strat so they’re twangy-er than Gibsons, but floating/locking whammys have a curious effect on the dynamics of playing. If you really whack at the strings the whole unit moves and takes the edge off the attack. You can alleviate this by setting it up stiffer but then you make all the stunt guitar tricks a bit of a wresting match.

Back to work :slight_smile:

***** Uh oh, here we go…

8

Yeah - I would put Super Strats in the next tier of Guitar Food Groups. Big, but they really had their moment in the sun (i.e., the 80’s, hair metal, etc.) but now are a well-understood subgenre with specific applications. If you shred and play metal, these are your babies.

I really don’t recommend them for starting out - they are one of the worst choices, unless you are focused on that specific genre of music. Locking trems are the *worst *- a pain to restring, awful when it comes to string breaks (your guitar is guaranteed to go out of tune and you have to unlock the trem with a freakin’ allen wrench to change the strings - so you can’t bang on the strings when you play for fear of breaking one - and what’s the point if you can’t play hard???)

I would add the following in the Next Tier:

  • Super Strats
  • **Rickenbackers **- **An Arky **is the guy here, since he plays one quite well. Great guitar with a VERY dedicated following and a bunch of shining spots (The Beatles, The Byrds, Tom Petty, the Jam and early Who, etc…), but never the big dog. Rickenbacker is a small, quirky company that has few dealer relationships - it is hard to find them in stores…
  • **Gretsch **- charming guitars with great histories, but hit or miss quality-wise. As Brian Setzer says, they neck joints start disassembling themselves out of the box. Fender bought them and they are being built in Japan now and the general consensus is that the quality is excellent - best ever. I played an Elliott Easton signature model the other day and it was drool-city - great guitar. Lots of players have used them and they cover a lot of genres, especially rockabilly. And a Model 6120 Chet Atkins is an iconic guitar - they are what Setzer plays, Eddie Cochran played (with a Gibson P-90 pickup installed) and what Pete Townshend used for Who’s Next…
  • **P-90 guitars **- i.e., Les Paul Juniors, Les Paul Specials, early Les Pauls before humbucking pickups were intro’d in 1957, etc. Juniors and Specials were cheaper and in the 70’s you could get ones from the 50’s for $100 (I need a time machine, dammit). So punkers gravitated towards them and their raw, snarly tone was perfect. P-90 pickups sound huge - much more like a thick humbucker vs. other single coil pickups like Fenders. But you have to work with a P-90 and, like a Tele, dial in the pickup’s tone - they went out of vogue in the “all dials on 10” days, but are experiencing a big resurgence these days in guitar circles because of how responsive and big they sound. A favorite of mine.

There are plenty of others - true hollow bodies, other brands, etc., but this is a rough outline of the landscape…

9

I can kinda see what you’re going for, but I’m not sure I’d agree. I just can’t see Ginger going out with a skinny, geeky kid from northwest Texas, but Buddy Holly played a Strat.

And I play[sup]*[/sup] a Strat, but Mary Ann all the way.

  • For a sufficiently loose definition of the word ‘play’.
10

Both Buddy and Hank Marvin of the Shadows (another horned-rim-glasses-wearing, doofus-y looking dude - sorry, I love Buddy, but he is…) played Strats and did have some influence, but by 1967 they were looking to discontinue the model - these days, that is not much remembered and kinda hard to conceive of - stop making Stratocasters??. But that Jimi Hendrix guy came along and changed *everything *- to be clear: the ONLY reason Strats have become, well, Strats is because of Hendrix.

11

Would you then include all the Warmoths, BC Rich’s, Ibanez’s, Jackson’s, etc guitars in this grouping as well?

12

Ibanez JEM’s and Jackson’s certainly - they have locking bridges, typically have a two 'bucker or an HSH layout (humbucker, single coil and humbucker). If the BC Rich has a locking trem, then yeah, but I tend to think of those as Les Paul variants - they basically have a two-humbucker + Tune-o-Matic + Stop Tailpiece, i.e., a classic Gibson layout…

Warmoth’s are homebrew guitars and have whatever features the builder chooses…I used a lot of Warmoth parts on my two homebrews…

13

I used to have an Ibanez RG 550, and I would certainly place it in that category too. Pretty much a strat, except with a humbucker and a pointier-edged body and headstock…

14

Some guitars have 'em, some don’t, and I have no idea why. I do know that Dick Dale uses a strat, had his whammy bar break off, and doesn’t give a rat’s tail.

15

It’s simply a feature that some guitars have, or you can add to most guitars. Clapton blocks his tremolos because he doesn’t use them. And different ones are good for different things (I’ll let **Small Clanger **go into details) - but a Bigsby is great for subtle flourishes; a Strat’s whammy is good for more rigorous use like dive bombs and a Jazzmaster’s trem is good for My Bloody Valentine-type detuned sounds. And the Maestro side-to-side vibrato that was on the early SG’s is really good for…well, nothing- they suck! :wink: Actually, Elliott Easton came out with Gibson signature SG that has a Maestro on it - when asked on The Les Paul Forum about it, he said it was because it wasn’t meant to be used, just meant to be there because it looked cool and had a minor effect on the tone since the assembly had more mass vs. a normal bridge…but he agreed they suck.

16

He blocks them, but he still likes the sound they give, apparently.

17

He likes Strats - but doesn’t want the whammy to be usable, because if it is floating it can affect tuning. There are “hardtail” Strats available - the Robert Cray signature model is a hardtail - but they have a different tone and much harder to come by back in the day. When Clapton picked up the three Strats that were pieced together to make Blackie around 1970, he just took what was available (Strats with trems) and made it work for him…

18

I’m a Strat guy but I favor the less common hardtail version…no trem, strings go through the body like a Tele. Ergonomics is where the Strat really shines, contoured body for comfort, all tuner knobs on one side and all the controls right there where you want 'em.

Currently thinking about finding an LP Jr.

Eh,…I’m such a slow typer.

19

I’m An Arky - and I endorse WordMan’s message. :smiley:

I don’t have much to add, other than Rickenbackers really look cool and are American made. Craftsmanship is always good, and they’re actually a pretty good value.

20

I would love a 620 (link to Ric’s website) - I love that “cresting wave” body shape. But I rarely come across them. And when I do, well, Ricky’s are known for having a narrower neck - I want to say they are something like 1 5/8" at the nut or something, vs. 1 3/4" for Gibson, so the strings are just a bit closer together - and for a ham-handed guy like me, that is an issue. I played a John Lennon model - what is that, a 325? - that had a big handful of neck that felt great, but that was the exception so far.

You should find your way to the Chicago Music Exchange sometime - I was just there and they had 20 Ricky’s on their wall - most I have ever seen in one spot…