Until today I had never seen or heard of this guitar, but damn do I ever want one now
That is just wrong. If you can imaging a Fender Telecaster that is the opposite of that in every way that is what mine is:
Not new.
Not shiny.
Plain black finish (where not worn or beaten off).
Not Humbuckers! Proper Tele single coils.
Proper Tele ashtray bridge plate, with three (3) bridge saddles.
21 frets not 22!
One piece maple neck. A bound fingerboard on a Tele? IT’S MADNESS!!!
What is with that** toggle switch**? AND THE FRACKING KNOBS DON’T LINE UP!!!
That isn’t a Telecaster it’s an OUTRAGE AGAINST ALL THAT IS RIGHT!!!
::Breathes::
Anyhow thanks for the RO 
Anytime 
Actually, I’ve never liked Tele’s, but at the same time I love my Strat. So I see this, and it’s everything I want out of a Les Paul, but much cheaper. Can’t go wrong.
Now I just have to find a place that has one :smack:
Wow, Fender is branching out. How about this one? Tune-o-matic bridge + surface mount tailpiece, soapbars, four knobs, pickup switch on upper bout, and a set neck. Madness!
My huge breakthrough came when I learned my first strum pattern and started playing three-chord songs with G, C and D. That was the day that I knew my guitar and I would become good friends.
Even now, if I am having a bad day with my guitar - or just a bad day - I’ll just play Bob Dylan’s Billy over and over until my problems drift away and I remember why I fell in love with my guitar in the first place.
Once you get that far, you can play most of CCR’s catalog. Get a capo and you can play any bluegrass song you want!
And now for something completely different…
I saw Mark Knopfler at the Chicago Theatre last night. Awesome show, as always. A couple of things stood out to me in last night’s show:
[ul]
[li]I got a kick out of the fact that in a sixteen song set, there were at least three guitars that only made a single appearance (sorry - I don’t know enough to be able to tell you what they were).[/li][li]He’s got a new band member who is there mainly to play flute and whistle, but who also played guitar and mandolin. I am so insanely jealous of multi-instrumentalists like that.[/li][li]He’s got a new toy. One of his Strats had a little web cam attached to the end, pointed down the neck of the guitar. They put this up on the big screen during “Sultans of Swing” so you could watch the blur of finger-work during the solos.[/li][li]The intro to “Donegan’s Gone”, which on the recorded version starts right in on the basic groove that runs throughout the song, was a beautiful bit of slightly sleazy Delta-blues sounding slide guitar. I wish he’d indulge that side of him more often. It was really nice.[/li][/ul]And now a question. I understand the bare-bones basics of how a guitar works (I am not a guitarist myself), but I’m hoping one of you can explain something to me. Occasionally Knopfler employs a sound wherein you can’t hear the “attack” on the note (I hope this will make sense; like I said, I’m not a guitarist, or really a musician for that matter). Usually, each note has a sort of “chime” at the start, but sometimes the note sort of sneaks in there, and reminds me more of a violin than anything else; it almost sounds like he’s bowing the guitar.
Is it possible to explain to a non-guitarist how that’s done?
Argh!!! Why??? Someone’s gonna show me a Tele with a locking dive-bomb whammy bar next :eek:
Oh. Your. God!!! (Not found a locking whammy, yet…)
Now, now - calm down **Small Clanger **- it’ll be okay; quit hyperventilating and get a whiff of these smelling salts. ;)
I couldn’t agree more - I like my Tele’s the traditional way - but the design is the basic platform of so many variations that it is pointless to argue. Heck, I even build my Tele Special to be a hybrid between a Les Paul Special onto a Tele platform.
I guess there is a difference between someone who plays a Tele and someone who uses a Tele platform and ends up playing a different type of music…
On a separate note, I have thought about commenting on the prevalence of Hybrid Designs - e.g., the Telemaster(Tele guts on a Jazzmaster body), La Cabronita(Gretsch guts on a Tele body - lots of buzz on this design right now - the name loosely translates to The Little Slut or Bitch), the Tele Jr. (Les Paul Jr. components on a Tele body - sorta what I built my Tele Special to be like) - and lots of others; all conflating a couple of designs into a Hybrid. Fun, funky and kinda post-modern…
Took the Xaviere into the shop to have it set up. Got it back. Still fret buzzing on 3rd fret, D string. Sixty bucks and it’s still buzzing. Feh.
And now I want a MicroCube RX.
Drum machine!
I’d surely take it back to the tech and bitch. Not acceptable.
“The small bastard?”
Little playing and a little more force and it doesn’t buzz as much.
Little bitch, squee. Female. Anyone hear about the Micro Cube RX? It seems to solve the old problems. More expensive, though.
Status: I am currently sucking at Detroit Rock City. Picking single notes and strumming three note power chords.
Man, how do people strum chords fast? I watch them, and they do this sweep and only hit the strings they want to. Experience and practice, I suppose.
Is it good when your pinky starts bleeding?
I grab a handful of the neck. So if I am playing just the tonic (Do, a deer) note and the Dominant (So, a needle…you get the idea - the note up on string and two frets higher than the Do in standard tuning), I am putting my index finger on the Do and either my ring or pinky on the So depending on how low my guitar is and how far up the neck I am. Then I am basically using the rest of my hand to dampen all the other strings - just be touching them with my thumb over the top, the fat of my fingers and palm - whatever; although I allow my finger fretting the So note to go ahead and also fret the next highest string if it wants to, since that is an octave Do if I need it. I am not dampening by pressing down hard - my hand is reasonably relaxed, just brushing up against the strings in the right places so they can’t / don’t sound. You can strum, downstroke or whatever as hard as you want. After a while you get used to just focusing your strum on the few strings you want to be hitting, but it is always good to master dampening…
Just seeing this. You can create your own example: fret a note on the Low E at, oh, the 2nd fret. As soon as you fret it, lift up your finger - not off the string fully, but enough to kill the note. So that was, let’s say, a quarter note, okay? Just a nice “bomm” and then stop, right? Now - try to play a note of the same length on the open Low E. You hit the open string, but the only way to stop it ringing, so it is the same length as the first note, is by laying a finger or three onto the string to muffle it, right? That’s dampening the string.
So if you are playing Peter Gunn, that is pretty staccato - short, distinct notes. Playing the notes at frets 2, 3 and 5-4 is easy to make short and distinct because you can use the first method described above - fret the note and lift up right after picking it. But there are hits of the Open E between the fretted notes - how to keep them short and distinct ? Hence my recommendation that you practice bopping your fingers back down onto the Open E after hitting the note to dampen it and keep it short like the fretted notes.
It is a weird bit of coordination - a rubbing your tummy while patting your head kind of thing - to get used to fretting a note, then hitting the open string and damping it with a light touch of your finger pads and then fretting another note - but you get used to it and it becomes second nature…
I’ve got blisters on my fingers!
Play until all four fingers are bleeding.
I’ve been following this thread since the beginning and all I have to add is vanderbilly. Free guitar lessons. some are good, some are not, but it’s worth checking out.
Anyone know anything about the Vox DA5?
It looks good, it sounds good?
No idea, but here’s some reviews at Harmony Central.
I’ve got one of it’s big brothers - the 30 watt 1X12 version. Best modeling amp out there, IMO. Good for mindless, low volume noodling and making weird sounds with the onboard effects. The clean sounds are very good to my ears, while the distorted amp models are passable but nowhere near the creamy goodness of my marshall tube amp…
Where it excels is in the studio. I love it for getting scratch guitar tracks down without having to get out the SM57’s and/or waking the neighbors. I don’t think I’d ever use it for a jam session or a gig, though…