Blogging » Guitars, blues, rock, jazz and the music biz
We read ‘em, so you don’t have to, that’s our monthly motto. It’s mid-April, again I’m buying May mags so here’s what happened in print publishing land this current month. Some interesting features for your reading pleasure.
Guitarist
Great cover story, “Son of a Burst.’ This feature compares a 1959 Gibson goldtop Les Paul original owned by rocker Bernie Marsden and worth $475,000 with the new Gibson Les Paul Classic Custom ($2,225, American-made) and the new PRS SE Bernie Marsden ($460, Korean-made). Check out the great A/B video above, showing Bernie playing the Beast and its Korean signature copy.
Peter Eggle Guitars - Berlin Evo '50
It’s fascinating in that it takes apart all three (to some degree), shows you the inside of the ’59, named the “Beast,” and gives you a rundown on the Classic Custom and the PRS SE BM. Hands down, no surprise, the original surpasses. And the Classic Custom is a nice guitar, tried one yesterday, very sweet appointments and tones. The review of the PRS SE in this article has it sounding more like the ’59 beast than the more expensive new Les Paul. That said the new Les Paul, at more than 5X the cost of the PRS, is likely the better overall guitar of the two new ones. But tone-wise, according to Bernie and the editors, nice job Paul Reed Smith and the PRS team. Glad they overturned that 2001 lawsuit Gibson filed in 2005.
Also on tap, review of Flying Colors release and interview with Steve Morse; review of the PRS Stripped 58, review of beautiful Patrick Eggle Guitars Berlin Evo Legend ’50, only $5,000! – a Brit luthier who came up with his own version of the PRS Custom 24 20 years ago. Boy, I crave a quilted and figured top like this one.
Premier Guitar
This mag is consistently thorough with long-form articles and eye-candy intermingled in a balanced manner. My fave U.S. guitar magazine I find. This month has a unique feature, part of their Studio Legends series on Iconic Engineers, on Alan Parsons and his recording of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. If you don’t know him from his hits in the ’70s from the Alan Parsons Project (Eye in the Sky, anybody?), his first work as a 19-year-old assistant engineer at Abbey Road was to track Let It Be and Abbey Road, the last two from The Beatles. Wow, that’s the way to learn the ropes.
Alan Parsons at Abbey Road Studios
He was promoted to full engineer and recorded the Pink Floyd magnum opus, Dark Side of the Moon. It took nearly a year of recording, hit the charts in March 1973, made the top of the charts within a week and grew to one of the best-selling albums of all time. Interesting series from PG, Insights from Iconic Engineers, and Parsons sure qualifies. Noteworthy tidbits from an engineer who has recorded the guitar tones of David Gilmour and George Harrison, to name just a few (ok, The Hollies, Rod Stewart, Paul McCartney, and on and on):
Vox AC4C1-BL
Strong issue with great roundup of NAMM 2012, including mention of over 100 new models promoted at the winter 2011-2012 show this year. Included mention of an amp I pre-ordered from Sweetwater.com. It’s called the Vox AC4C1-BL and it came and sings beautifully to my ears, especially for $299. It’s a new version of my current AC4 with gain and mains knobs, bass and treble EQ, without the wattage attenuation of the AC4. Great tones.
Richard Thompson & his Danelectro
This issue has a solid three-page piece on Richard Thompson and the release of a new live Blu-Ray recording. Nice photo of RT and a cool baby blue Danelectro! Inset box memorable for this quote:
I think there is a time that as a songwriter you say: things are so bad I’m going to write a song that names names. You don’t hold back…you just say: things are shit, it’s time for the revolution, let’s kick out the despots…There is a time for that kind of song./ I think otherwise you’re better served by writing under a few veils with political songs, so you write political allegory, you write a political song as a love song, or as a kind of satire, where it’s a little softer and not so in your face. I think if you do that the songs have a longer shelf life.”
Gibson Novoselic RD Bass
And because, I have neglected to cover any magazine’s work covering the world of electric basses, for an online friend of mine in Georgia, there’s a review of a sweet looking new Gibson bass in this issue. It’s a reissue of the maple RD Artists model that Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic used on Nevermind, called the Gibson Novaselic RD Bass. Here’s the build specs: “Maple body, set maple neck with 20 medium nickel frets on an obeche fingerboard, Grover shamrock tuners and Gibson three-point string-through bridge with chrome hardware; passive pickups with one Seymour Duncan Basslines STK-Jn and one STK-Jb pickup; comes in black ebony only and weighs about 12 pounds with a 34″ scale. According to reviewer, its 12.2 lbs make it “one of the heaviest four-strings we’ve ever played.”
To salve my G.A.S. affliction, here are some great-looking new guitars to salivate over.
Dennis Fano is a luthier who builds innovative retro AND modern guitars. His brand, Fano Guitars, is part of the Premier Builders Guild group of luthiers. I lust after the Fano Alt De Facto RB6.
Fano Guitars has also introduced a new retro modern electric guitar with a lucite body. Intriguing. Unveiled at NAMM 2012.
Fano Guitars Alt de Facto RB6
Fano Guitars Fanosphear
Ibanez George Benson
Ibanez has a new George Benson model hollowbody jazz guitar. Looks nice. Thanks to GuitarSite.com for the post, looks like a good blog site I discovered surfing today.
Suhr Guitars released this Guthrie Govan Antique Modern model late last year. The feature I love is the blower switch:
“… a push-button “Blower” switch which allows you to go to a full-on bridge humbucker sound with a simple push of the button from whatever volume, tone, 5-way setting you’re at.”
Have you heard of Knaggs Guitars? Knaggs was a master builder for PRS, started his own boutique show recently. This Chena model guitar comes with a hefty price tag, $9K! But sweet, and likely the build quality is superb. Thanks to Guitar Noize for the pic and post.
Knaggs Guitar
Monday, Monday… Here are some blogs that had interesting posts the past few days.
From Hypebot: Indie label launches new music subscription model. Interesting idea from Stones Throw Records, you pay $10 per month and get all their music, from all their signed artists. Details from the label here.
From GuitarNoize: Gibson unveils metal Les Paul Studio at NAMM 2012, even has a Floyd Rose Trem, sacrilegious!
From Jason Shadrick, associate editor of Premier Guitar magazine: His fave 2011 picks of the PG gear video rig rundowns, where artists and their techs show their gear and give a rundown of information.
From TrueFire: What’s Your Blues Nickname? Great idea, a nickname tool using your initials. I’m Brown Hips Rivers!
From the iHeartGuitarBlog: Blogger gets his own Taylor solid body using the solidbody configurator. Neat idea, like picking your own BMW car, you can configure all the mods on your Taylor solidbody and print out the specs and image. Here’s my purple one. LOL.
Two helpful posts from blogger @hishamdahoud on Hypebot, the first an overview of the 2011 State of Online Music from NextBigSound:
… the numbers are quite staggering: 64 billion new plays, 16 billion profile views, and 3.5 billion new fan connections. Metrics include data taken from SoundCloud, Twitter, Vevo, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia.
Dahoud points out Soundcloud having the largest growth; noted the indie artists ranking on Soundcloud versus the big pop artists on the other services; and pointed out each service had it’s own most active day of the week. All from the same infographic.
The other post from Dahoud is about an interesting new web tool for artists:
Artist Growth, a sophisticated set of cloud-based artist management tools that also utilizes specialized apps for mobile devices, has officially launched. Created by Nashville based musicians turned entrepreneurs Matt Urmy and Jonathan Sexton, Artist Growth’s proprietary technology integrates finances, calendars, inventory, contacts, social media and mentoring resources within a single cloud-interface.
This certainly sounds like a tool that indie artists will want to use. There’s a video demo at the bottom of the post here.
Eye candy from NAMM 2012 via GuitarNoize a great indie guitar blog. Link to GuitarNoize post.
This new G5-VG Stratocaster comes with built in COSM effects from Roland. Awesome! I use the Roland Micro BR-80 which is sweet and has the same built in guitar efx, very effextive. LOL. Seriously, at the flip of a rotary dial near the tone pots, you can get these sounds: strat, tele, humbucker, acoustic, 12-string, sitar, drop D tuning, and on and on. The demo is incredible, must see for guitar fans.
The fluid and tasteful Alex Hutchings demos the G5-VG here.
Love to try this one, see what the acoustic or 12-string sounds feel like coming out of the axe.