Oh, while I won’t get to listen to this till later, I do like T-Rex. And Marilyn Manson. They’re both glam, right?
If anyone thinks it’s not possible to have too many effects, have a look at
Holy. Shit.
It’s scary how many of those I’ve owned, I still have the huge orange Carlsboro parametric (top left). I may have a sift through the list to remind me what I’ve let go 
Oh, and BUMP!
Good lord. Stompboxes are like Tribbles - before you know it, they’ve multiplied all over the place. I am avowed non-box user - only because it feels like a slippery slope I could never have time to stay ahead of - and yet I have at least 5 - 10 lying around my various gear hidey-holes…
Oh, and E-Sabs? T Rex = glam. Marilyn Manson - well, whatever he is, he is past the era when Glam was its own standalone category - that was back in the 70’s (TRex’s time)…I would say maybe glam-metal or something with glam in it…maybe, but he is more into shock than provocation…
These days, you need shock with your provocation. You know. In olden times a glimpse of stocking…
And I was just being cheeky. I do consider him a heir to Glam. Not sure where I place Gaga.
Er, yeah. That kind of was my point. Back in the bad old days, proper music education was a rather elitist concern. Neither my grandmother growing up in rural NSW during the depression, nor my mother who was coal-miner’s daughter ever had a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting into the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. It would never have occurred to them to even try. Their musical education would have been rather light on the theory with a pretty heavy emphasis on rote learning scales, chords, and standard notation. It’s not very conducive to actually understanding what you play.
Maybe it’s just a personal quirk, but I really need to understand something before I can do it. I’ve never been good at faking anything, or blindly memorizing long lists of instructions. If I’m going to play music, I have to be able to look at it and say, okay, there’s a chorus, and that’s a bridge, and this is my root note, so these ones are my dominant, sub-dominant, relative-minor, and so on. I’ve discovered that, for me at least, a lot of the most immediately useful theory is about how stuff relates to the key signature.
They were reading stuff off a page and mechanically reproducing it. They weren’t bad at doing that (I understand that my mother actually did pretty well), but they weren’t really very engaged with the music on any more than that purely mechanical level. My grandmother played hymns on the organ at her church. My mother went to the local Eisteddfod playing this (but on the piano accordion, rather than the violin). That would have been in the late 50s, or early 60s. I don’t think she’s actually played anything at all in the past thirty years.
The thing is, they both decided they had more important things to be doing with their time, and never pursued music any further. It didn’t click with them the same way as it did for me.
I don’t see a lot of electric guitarists playing works by those composers. I’ll leave the classical stuff to the classical guys. Around here, the likes of John Williams and Slava Grigoryan have that gig pretty well sewn up. And to be frank, I don’t think Slava’s making much bank.
Weren’t Chopin, Liszt and Mozart brilliant improvisers? Didn’t the jazz saxophone genius Sonny Rollins park himself out on a NY bridge in the middle of the night practicing for hours at a time because he knew he had more to learn and wasn’t willing to compromise?
My point is that this feels like a false dichotomy: learning how to read and to “mechanically translate” the notations on a page to music is an important craft-skill to have. Being able to improvise - which means you understand the underlying structures of the music enough to build on to it - is also an important craft-skill to have.
The fact that some musicians come at Music from one end of the spectrum or the other is just a that - a fact of life. I can’t read music and exist in the Improv end of the specturm - but I am not kidding myself that I would not be better off if I had a solid grounding in music theory and sight-reading.
Wow. That’s quite something.
Why would someone own six Big Muffs? Yeah, I know, there’s slight (and – to someone – really really important) differences between them. But still. Of course, I’m one to talk – I have I think 5 overdrive stomps, and can’t part with any of them. But I can’t even begin to count how many overdrive/fuzz boxes this guy has.
You too???
I am NOT a stomp box guy at all, and yet I have fuzz, wahwah, phaser, reverb, delay, equalizer, overdive, etc etc etc.
So I finally went acoustic guitar shopping. A little. Background info: I’ve played electric since I was a teenager, and I’m pushing 50 now, but I have never owned an acoustic and would like to. I think I’d like an acoustic-electric with a cutaway. I have no idea if I like spruce or cedar top, or probably a lot of other things.
Anyway, my boy (12) had bugged me that he needed strings and, much more importantly, really wanted a much cooler guitar strap than that skull-decorated strap he had, which is soooo last year 
, so we went to Guitar Center on the understanding that I could hole up with the acoustics for a bit while he shopped for whatever in the rest of the store.
The GC acoustic room is dimly lit so it’s darned hard (for me anyway) to find specific guitars, esp. way up three tiers high. Someone up thread had mentioned Seagull, others Takamine, as guitars in my $500-$700 range, so I figured I’d start there. Nope, couldn’t find either brand. Lotsa cheap Epiphone, Yamaha etc stuff (who buys a $129 acoustic anyway?) as you go in, then going around the room you get the Wall of Taylors (well, 1 1/2 tiers worth), the Wall of Martin, and the Wall Of Everything Else (a few banjos, ukes, and the token Dobro) etc.
I couldn’t get someone to help me, so I pulled a couple of Taylors off the wall and fiddled a bit and was pretty pleased with one, except for the $1000+ tag on it. I didn’t even try the Wall of Martins, as I had visions of myself falling in love and dropping two or so mortgage payments on some Guitar! I Had! To Have! GAS is a bitch. I did try the dobro (I’ve always thought these looked and sounded way cool) and it was quite fun, but not as nasal as I’d have expected, it sounded like really any other small acoustic to me.
Finally I pried loose a GC employee, who climbed way up into the rafters and wedged loose a Takamine acoustic/electric (and I should have jotted down the model, but it was probably a EG363SC or similar, looking at their website – an acoustic-electric with a cutaway) and… I was underwhelmed. Maybe the strings were put on when Clinton was in office, but it was really thuddy. I fiddled a bit, but wanted to try something else, but the GC employee who got it for me was gone and there was nowhere to park the guitar and I could hardly just set it on the floor, so I went out looking for someone to park it for me.
At that point SqueegeeJr just had to show me all the straps and guitars he’d fiddled with. Also the acoustic room had a couple of other shoppers making lotsa noise. So I cut the expedition short.
On the plus side, when I emerged from the Womb Of Acoustics, my boy was comfortably walking around GC trying out guitars, where previously he was far too bashful to just dig in and have fun trying new stuff, for fear he’d be Judged Unworthy in front of someone, even with me helping him, so it was cool to see him all relaxed and having fun there. Sadly, he was still impressed with Dean and BC Rich axes that looked dreadful, but what’s a parent to do?
SqueegeeJr went home with a leather guitar strap with playing card symbols on it (that I thought was dreadfully overpriced @ $38, but he spent his own money, shrug).
I’ll go shop at GC next time in the middle of the day when the Acoustic Womb is vacant and I can get some sales help finding guitars.
I had a lot of trouble finding an acoustic I liked. I’m mostly used to playing electrics with thin necks and low action, which suits my small hands. But a lot of acoustics are pretty much the opposite of that.
In the end I settled on an Ibanez EW20, because the neck was the most comfortable for me, and because I liked the sound of the built-in preamp.
Yeah - me, too. They are simply too cool and useful to ignore completely. Argh.
**squeegee **- don’t get me started about acoustics. I am taking a week off so am not online a lot this week, but yeah, acoustics are as geek-tastic as electrics. Today I was supposed to get down to a top-shelf acoustic dealer in the NY area, Mandolin Brothers, but I need to help my son with a science project…maybe a bit later.
At some point I can try to break down the major food groups of acoustics if that would be helpful…
It’s gonna need to include 'classical guitars played with a pick so long they got holes in ‘em’, I’m guessing.
Yeah, but they can be fun sometimes. I still like to break out the wah wah pedal and desecrate Hendrix’s Voodoo Child once in a while 
60 Years of the Fender Telecaster- offical Fender clip, about 6 minutes…
Oh - and an NPR piece I heard about but have yet to listen to fully:
Nice video, WordMan. Of course, I’m a huge Tele fan already, so I admit bias. But it was cool to see all those players talking and playing Tele.
The NPR piece sounds interesting, and I’ve banked it into my iPod for next time I have to drive somewhere for 53 or more minutes. I can’t listen to a podcast at home, I get too distracted. Driving is perfect for that sort of thing.
I listened to it all the way through - worth a listen, but not super great. The bit on charlie Patton simply doesn’t play enough of his music. A couple of the middle pieces sound like some non-players attempt to explain something he doesn’t understand - “it’s guitar, it’s an icon of cool” :rolleyes: there’s a bit on a Chinese guitar like instrument that sounds interesting and an extended piece on classical player Christopher Parkening, a disciple of Segovia, and the recording of a Master class he gives.
I heard Christopher Parkening play in Ann Arbor around 1980. He played a baroque lute (which is different than that bathtub most of us think of when we think of lute). I don’t know if it was original or a reproduction, but it was a fascinating concert.
A new thread on the General Questions board asking about toggle switches on electric guitars:
Having followed the discussion on Xaviere guitars, I took the plunge on an XV-820 telecaster copy. It was “blemished” so there was a 15% discount off an already low price… ended up $135 shipped.
Arrived today, intonation is spot-on, was hard pressed to find a blemish… only played it for a few minutes to test out the feel, and the action is really low, no fret buzz, and the the GFS pickups sound great… I was skeptical, but nearly all the online feedback/ratings are consistently high… I am really amazed that you can get such a quality guitar at such a low price.