Blogging » Guitars, blues, rock, jazz and the music biz
Not long ago, this year, it was my 20th anniversary of marriage to my wonderful partner and wife. In celebration, and recognizing that we each know what we wanted best, we bought our own presents. She got a rock, I got a steampunk guitar!
I think I must have seen one in my surfing online, and got a Jones for it. Found the wonderfully talented Tony Cochran and his wacky art. He is a syndicated cartoonist and artist who came to love modifying electric guitars with a steampunk twist. Each guitar has a name and a short history. I bought The Aladdincaster!
The Aladdincaster
This electric guitar was modified in the early 60s by a young lady who inherited a spiral brass Spirit Cylinder from her Father. Spirit Cylinders are containers for “thoughts left behind” by souls who have departed and no longer need them. At least that’s what merchants told her Father in the Moroccan bazaar where he purchased it. He perished a short time later. The daughter was a struggling musician in Southern California and paid some electric guitar tech guru $100 to hook the Spirit Cylinder to her bridge pickup. She then pawned the guitar and ran away with an AWOL sailor to live with gypsies in Hungary. It’s not known if she ever had nerve enough to play the guitar after the modification. I won’t do it . . . perhaps you’d like to try.
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.”
Welcome to my small but growing collection of guitars (gallery here). My first guitar was an imitation Les Paul, no longer in my possession. But the first guitar I bought that was not a ‘copy’ was an Ovation solid body electric which was new to the guitar world back in 1976 or 1977, when I shopped and bought it on famed 48th St. (guitar store row).
Detail of inside cover of EWF's Gratitude album
When I saw that white guitar on the inside cover of the Earth Wind & Fire double album Gratitude, with its bizarre shape, it must have spoken to me, ’cause that’s what I bought.
And used for two decade, or thereabouts, before I put it in various basements as I got older. More recently, the Deacon and it’s sibling the Breadwinner have been rediscovered, and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello owns two Breadwinners that he uses on tour.
The so-called ‘guitar collection’ really started on my 50th birthday, late 2008. My friend encouraged me to pick up guitar again and in commemoration of my bday, I bought a 2008 PRS Custom 24 with a 10-top tiger-striped top, beautiful bird inlays, two humbuckers and a five way dial.
PRS Custom 24 - detail
Got it from Guitar Center, on 14th Street, huge shopping mall of a guitar store, not like days of old, or like the swankier, smaller boutique, Rudy’s Music. I had brought the Ovation Deacon up from the basement, got the techs to set it up with new strings and action fixed and played it, but it was bit unwieldy and not so playable compared to modern electrics.
But the PRS Custom 24 was beautiful, modern electrics, decent humbuckers, beautiful one-piece ’10′ top and highly playable, and for two plus years it was my go-to guitar.
Two years later, spending the summer at a lake in Connecticut led me to a small guitar store, Guitar Hangar. I fell in love with a PRS Hollowbody I that rocked but also had smooth, silky jazzy tones and a piezo pickup for acoustic tones. Cool, beautiful guitar. More playable than the Custom 24, and way more variety of tonal color with its piezo option and extra output jack so you can run it through two amps.
PRS Hollowbody I 2009
Done. Okay, that really fed my initial gear acquisition syndrome, I now had three guitars, two were new and way cool, and one was high-quality build and cost to match. I was thrilled to have two such well-built guitars. Both of them PRS, and that appealed to me. Paul Reed Smith was the luthier that brought boutique guitar design to mass production, and in the process shook up the guitar making world, becoming the third largest player after Fender and then Gibson.
Fast-forward a year, and I was not happy with the tones I was getting out of my solid body Custom 24, hankering for something to pair with my hollow body. Played a normal American Strat, about an $1800 guitar, and really, really liked the feel and the sound. But, somehow I knew a stock Strat would not satisfy.
Ebay is a cool place to look at guitar eye candy, drool over $10,000 guitars or even $4,000 custom shop strats! Somehow I plucked up the nerve to buy a guitar without playing it first. The reason for my courage lay in the fact that this was a Masterbuilt Strat from their custom shop. So, you have stock Fender guitars, some made in America, some in other countries. Then you have custom shop Fender guitars, that are made but their crack team of luthiers, and they are beautiful, hand-calibrated and lovingly built and costing several thousand each and more. Lastly, you have Masterbuilt Fender Custom Shop guitars, each of these are made by individual luthiers, master builders in the custom shop, and they create and shepherd the building of a one-of-a-kind Fender. Yes, that’s what I got.
Jason Smith Masterbuilt Fender
Jason Smith Masterbuilt Fender
This Strat actually had a pedigree of sorts, having been custom ordered by Long Island’s Music Zoo store owner in 2007. It’s story was online, which made me feel safe, as it was reviewed here. That purchase was exciting, the guitar plays like butter, is incredibly special, beautiful and I’ll never part with it, too valuable to me. Exposed me to single coil guitar slinging, too. I hear you never forget your first.
Two other purchases complete my collection. For now. Again, after playing a Taylor acoustic at my friend’s house last summer, I realized I wanted and NEEDED a good acoustic to add to the collection. Guitar Center had a sweet, pretty and great sounding Taylor 814CE that fit the bill.
2011 Taylor 814CE
Done and added to collection in 2011. Lastly, this month, as you can read here, bought an inexpensive cherry red Epiphone ES-339. Got that one modded and it plays great, now it sounds sweet as it looks.
My new un-modded Epiphone Es-339
For now, this story ends, but not for too long, I warrant. 20th Anniversary this coming week!
