(Of course, the last two posts are both to show my ultimate respect, with a side of SMH, at those Dopers who can actually be trusted to maintain high-quality acoustic and hollow-body electric instruments. I cannot.)
Whoa.
The Christmas Guitar: a short photoessay by OneCentStamp
My youngest son Adam lives with his mom in Atlanta, and he and his siblings come out to visit my wife and me several times a year. Adam has been making noises for a little while about wanting to play the electric guitar, most recently over their visit this Thanksgiving. In the way of many teenagers, those noises finally coalesced into coherent speech a week or so ago, when he flat-out said he wanted a guitar for Christmas. Of course, this was two days after our holiday gift package, containing cash among other things, had been shipped out to him and his siblings. (Clearly, his innate sense of timing will be an asset to him as a budding musician.)
Adam is 14, the same age I was when I got my first electric guitar. Guitar was my first love and has been my truest and most constant companion for nearly three decades now. While I’ve never actively foisted my interests on my children (I’ve seen Shine), I was thrilled when my oldest daughter took up the violin, and always quietly thought it would be pretty cool if one of the kids wanted to play the guitar.
With all this in mind, I wanted to do everything I could to help him, without doing something grossly unfair like drop-shipping him a brand-new guitar on top of the gifts he and his siblings are opening today. (I pictured it arriving next week with a note: Happy Second Christmas, Adam! Tell the others that next year, they might want to consider asking for stuff Dad thinks is cool.) Obviously a no-go.
I spent a couple of days trying to contrive a solution, maybe one involving pooling the holiday cash my wife and I had sent him together with any other monetary gifts from other relatives. Then, out of nowhere, an electric guitar was offered to me, free. (I hadn’t been asking!) A beginner instrument, sure, but a damned sight nicer than my own first guitar, and in great condition minus a little TLC. (This was the second time in a week that I’ve been humbled by the kindness of…well, not strangers, exactly, but friends from unexpected quarters. My faith in the general goodness and decency of humanity has leveled up several times this December, which I frankly needed.) And just like that - poof! - problem solved. His mom quietly intercepted the cash from his package, and will put it towards an amp to give him at the same time as the guitar, so that it comes across as one gift.
I spent a while yesterday getting the guitar cleaned up, set up, and tuned up for Adam. As I did so, I found myself feeling unexpectedly reflective. Nostalgic for my own early days in this obsession. I also had a chance to marvel at how far entry-level, import electric guitars have come in the last 25 years.
I ended up taking some photos during the process, and having my wife take a few pics of the finished product for his mom in Atlanta to show him on Christmas morning. Some of those photos, along with my observations, follow:
So, the guitar itself is a Johnson, a brand I’d heard of and seen a few times in pawn shops. It looks to me like a typical inexpensive Strat clone, as was my own first electric, a Memphis Strat copy back in 1988. (However, the similarities end at body shape.) First order of business, get those corroded strings off and clean it up a little.
I do not know how exactly how long these O.G. strings were on there, but I feel pretty safe saying “Thank you for your years of service.”
The biggest quality jump among entry-level guitars since the last time I played one has to be the electronics, which used to be uniformly garbage. This one came with some Johnson-branded EMGs that sound like their HZ series to me. Even if they’re downscaled HZs, they’re noiseless, which is very nice. By comparison, the electronics in my old Memphis were awful at picking up vibrating strings, but great at picking up fluorescent lights and shortwave radio dispatches. Between songs, I used to yell into my pickups in Esperanto, just in case it worked both ways. OK, that last part isn’t true. But they really did suck.
Last thing to check: plug and play. Also known as “please god please don’t make me have to break out the soldering iron and multimeter this afternoon.” Luckily, the electronics are in perfect working order. Very low noise floor, and sounds great in all positions. (No, that amp is not going to be under the tree any time this decade. No sense spoiling the boy.)
All in all, I was impressed by this guitar. Does it feel like one of my pro-level guitars? Of course not; it feels like a $149 guitar. But it plays comfortably, feels solid, and maybe most importantly, sounds very good amplified. As I mentioned upthread, it’s ten times better than my own first guitar, and even that piece of shit wasn’t enough to dissuade me from becoming a lifer. Honestly, I think this is a perfect first guitar for him: nice enough that it will be rewarding to learn to play, but not so nice that he won’t properly appreciate the first really good guitar that he buys with his own money. (I’m big on making sure I don’t have entitled little shits for children.)
Wifey took some lovely pictures of the finished product so that Adam can see what’s on the way and hopefully get excited. Her photos, more than my own, evoke the feelings I had when I got my own first guitar. I remember just holding it, looking at it from all the angles pictured here (and then some), feeling completely fascinated by the power and beauty and endless possibility represented in a simple chunk of wood and metal and plastic. Nearly three decades later, I guess I still haven’t lost that fascination; it just takes someone else’s perspective to bring it back to mind.
Candy apple red. Can’t go wrong with that. 
How’s the frets? Sometimes they stick out a bit along the edge of the neck and can scratch your hands on budget guitars. Not a big problem unless you play a lot every day. My first electric in high school nicked me several times.
Great present for your son OneCentStamp. Especially since you got to invest some of your own time into it. Getting it just right for his Christmas present.
Be sure to point him to JustinGuitar.com free lessons and most people say some of the best beginner ones on the web. He’s got a beginners course and an intermediate. The beginners course starts with holding a pick, making chords, changing chords etc. Then he has well over 300 song lessons on youtube.
OneCentStamp what a wonderful story and that looks like a great guitar for Adam to start with.
My son was 14 when he started to take guitar seriously. I had shown him some basic chords when he asked as a kid, but he kept guitar at arm’s length.
Sharing it with him has been really special. I wish you the same.
Thanks for the kind words! There’s a slightly pointy end or two between positions 7 and 14, but they aren’t real bad and that’s typically no-man-land for the novice player anyway. If it bugs him, I’ll pull out the files next time he’s out here.
Thank you! I hope he loves it as much as I do.
That’s a particularly sweet looking strat copy there, OneCentStamp. Inexpensive guitars are great these days, and your son should be able to play it without actually needing to replace it for years. Good score! What are you thinking about getting him for an amp?
When I was asked what I wanted for Chirstmas, I answered “any effects pedal, any price. They all sound different, so don’t worry about what one.” Most people chickened out, and got me a gift card. My wife was brave and got me two delightful ones: A Wampler Faux Tape Echo, and a Catalinbread Antichton. The Wampler is pretty much what you’d think. It’s a digital delay that allows you to imitate the tape warble of an Echoplex. The dry signal is all analog. The repeats are digital, but tonally controllable. It’s controls also allow you to adjust the virtual movement and sway of the tape. So you can make it sound like a new one, or make it sound like the tape’s about to break, if you like. I’ve got several other delays, including vintage analog ones. This one competes with my Minifooger for the nicest sounds.
The Antichton is a seriously weird pedal. So strange that when I first plugged it in without consulting anything about it, I was sure it was broken. It had no manual, does not indicate what it might do on the box, and operates completely counter intuitively for a pedal. After reading a bit and watching the video above, it kind of makes sense. It’s a fuzz/tremolo…kind of. The intensity and speed of the tremolo is controlled partly by the input signal from the guitar. Turn the guitar down to 2 or 3, or on the decay of the note, you get a dirty tremolo. Turn the guitar up, or just pound away at it, and it’s a pretty damn good fuzz, but no tremolo. The tremolo slows down and gets fainter as the level gets lower. It has controls for both speed and intensity of the tremolo, but it’s still largely the plaything of the signal intensity.
One thing I didn’t see in the demonstration videos that I found out, is that the tremolo is even stranger when you have a two pickup guitar with a Gibson 4 knob setup. If you have one pickup around 2 or 3, and the other in fuzz territory (let’s say 10), you get some tremolo and fuzz no matter how hard or quiet you play. I don’t understand how that works. To be honest, this thing has a very strange circuit.
That’s pretty strange, and neat. But the “Gravity” control on anything besides 0 generates bizarre tones when you’re not playing. The higher it it set, the louder you have to play to override it. What tones it generates is also party controlled by the volume setting on the guitar, whether your playing or not.
It’s probably more of a studio toy than a live pedal (it is noisy and a little hard to control), but after understanding how it works, I think it’s pretty great. It’s certainly nothing like any other pedal I’ve owned.
Yeah, that’s why I tend not to use pedals. They are their own Thing to master, alongside the guitar, and learning how to “play the amp” esp if you go with tubes.
They both sound really cool as far as pedal experimentation goes. When you mess with your various delay units, do you have them all set up on a board and you zig between them on the fly? Or do you get ready to play and decide what you need or want based on songs and mood? I typically just had something like an MXR carbon copy stuck in my chain for access and didn’t swap out.
As for the other, I caught the video. Interesting. I have one “dynamic response” pedal, where it is really designed to be affected by dialing up or down the guitar’s volume AND by how hard I am playing. It’s a Blackstone Mosfet Overdrive - I really like that aspect of its performance - I am very much a touch player, so having an effect that can actually respond, like a tube amp does as well, is fun. And because it is an overdrive, I am using it a lot when I play - its on for over 50% of my songs for sure.
ETA: by the way, did you notice that the demo guy was playing fingerstyle, no pick? First, it was interesting to see that - I would typically expect a demo guy to have a pick for at least part of the demo, cranking out blues/rock variants. It does seem like a FS approach is more common vs. pick these days - I have gone that way and it is discussed a lot on guitar boards. But also, with regards to that dynamic box - if the guy is playing fingerstyle, he is maximizing the use of a touch-dynamic effect because he’s got his fingers going. Showcases that effect.
That one would be fun to play with - I’d avoid the bird sound stuff, but that’s me. Don’t know if it would stay in my chain, but the responsiveness may open a few doors when experimenting. Have fun with them.
I’m leaving the amp choice to his mom, but my thought was one of the smaller Line 6 amps. For an amp that’s really just going to have to carry him through learning to play, finding his sound, and a lot of bedroom jamming, it might be ideal. Headphone out means he can play anytime. Aux in means he can play with YouTube jam tracks or lessons.
Once he graduates to needing something that can keep up with a drummer, I’ll talk tubes with him.
Also, your wife has good taste.
Andy Martin has been ProGuitarShop’s main demo guy for years, and I can watch those videos all day. He’s awesome, a really unique player, and he gets a pretty sharp attack for not using a pick. (PGS has another guy they use for demos of really* *metal-approved merchandise.) I think Andy does just about everything right for a gear demo. For one, he starts out by playing a song, one that showcases the piece of gear being demoed, instead of by talking.
At home, I’ll just grab one that I fancy and throw it in the chain. Through this, I’ve usually I’ve got some idea of which delay I’m going to use before I go to practice, and I’ll try new things there. If they don’t work out, I’ll go back to the previous unit for shows. This process usually boils down to the more boring units, for years it usually ended up being a choice between a Memory Man (sloppy and gorgeous) and a Boss DD-3 (crisp and flexible), but it works.
This is touch sensitive, but in a really different way from an overdrive or an auto-wah. It changes what effect you get, how much of each, and the settings of the effects, due to the dynamics of your playing and the settings of the guitar. It’s a seriously weird way to control an effect.
Oh yeah, I play similarly, but I kind of backed into it by needing a thumb pick to keep from dropping the things when my hand would get tired. The thumb pick freed up the other fingers, and I started playing fingerstyle. Even when playing fingerstyle, I need to use the thumbpick because of a very fat thumb. The pick also allows me to play like a normal guitarist when I want to, without sacrificing my fingers.
Yeah, I’m generally with you on the bird noises, but I keep playing with them, because you can kind of control it. It’ll certainly be a neat plaything around the house, even if I can’t figure out how to control it’s three modes reliably.
Good choice, they’re reliable, flexible and cheap. Fender has some nice beginner amps these days, too.
Oh yes, she’s brave and has good taste, but worries she lacks both. So she’s constantly trying to improve at them. It’s hard to even keep up. 
Oooh! I don’t know what you’re budget is, but GC has the Fender 600 combo on sale for $149 this week. It’s not that much more than Line6’s offerings. I still have and treasure the first low-watt tube combo that I got. If it’s in your budget, it would be another nice treat.
Link to that thread for reference here: Guitarists: the earliest Gibson L-5. Swoon. - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
I picked up one yesterday. It was in stock at my local store. I like the simple controls. I’ve never been impressed with modeling amps that I’ve tried.
Is low humidity a problem for the neck on my strat? I have both the acoustics in the computer room with a humidifier running, but the strat sits in its stand next to the chair I practice in. Humidity is presently running about 27% with the cold weather and furnace running all the time. Should I move it?
I keep my guitars in cases, but if you have a standard maple necked Strat I doubt I’d worry about it. I rarely hear about neck warp issues with Bolt-ons.
Thanks; yeah, it’s an American made Fender, so I’m probably okay. Being a lazy git, if the guitar is cased, I tend not to pick it up. Mine hang on the wall, where I can get to them easily. Mine don’t have the dollar value that yours do, of course. Also, most all of the case humidifiers seem to get scathing reviews, either because they’re leaky crap or because of user malfunction. Mine aren’t valuable, but I don’t want water stains.
I don’t know what WordMan is playing but I have a MIM maple neck Tele that is indifferent to the weather. Also, my 1974 ES-335-TDC and PRS don’t seem to be much affected, not even my Hofner archtop. The only one that doesn’t like the winter is my Eastman AR910CE.
In short, if you don’t notice a difference in playability it’s probably OK.
I would agree with all that. My solidbodies are my homebrew Parts-o-Tele’s. Big honkin’ maple necks that are not going anywhere. With my flattops, I simply won’t take that risk - they are old, lightly built guitars. Plus, the anticipation and appreciation of being able to open a case and there’s an 85 year old guitar for me to play lowers that barrier ;). Playing one now, as a matter of fact! 
Mine is a 2-year old (or so) Taylor, so maybe it’s made of sterner stuff. My Brazilian acoustic cracked up the back (as mentioned much earlier in this thread) after traveling from Brazil to Portugal to West Africa to equatorial Africa to Alaska to Portland over a 20 year period, living in a cloth case. Who’d a thought?