Archive for the ‘Music and Guitar’ Category
Xaviere “Keef” Tele
Filed under: Music and Guitar | Tags: GFS Li'l Punchers, Telecaster
Leave a Comment For some reason I thought that when I started teaching full time I would have time to play guitar in my office, so I thought it would be cool to keep a guitar there. I thought an acoustic guitar would be too loud, so I was thinking about a cheapo electric that I could play through my laptop with headphones. This turned out to be a totally crazy idea. I rarely have a minute to even think when I am at school. However, I ordered the guitar.
I have ordered a Les Paul type guitar and a Beatle-style violin bass from Rondo, a company which specializes in cheap Asian-made instruments. Cheap guitars are much better than ever before because the parts are cut out by computerized machines, so that every neck and body comes out exactly the same, to very precise tolerances. I have ordered pickups and other parts from Guitar Fetish or GFS, a company that sources economy guitar parts mostly from Korea. If you buy a very cheap guitar from Rondo, usually you end up replacing tuners, pickups, electronics, and maybe even bridge parts, and the cheapest place to get better stuff is GFS.
GFS also sells guitars, under the Xaviere brand. Maybe it is better to buy the guitar from GFS, with GFS parts already on it? I decided to try.
I ordered an XV-825 “Keef” model, a Telecaster-type that is supposed to emulate Keith Richards’ “Micawber” tele. It was $248 with case.
This guitar actually has little in common with with Keith Richards’ tele. It does have an ash body with a transparent butterscotch finish and a maple fretboard. However, Keith has a full-sized humbucking pickup in the neck position, and the Xaviere has a mini-humbucker. Keith has a modern tele bridge with individual saddle adjustments, while the GFS has a traditional ash tray bridge plate with three barrel-type saddles. Also, Keith tunes his tele to open “G” and leaves off the low “E” string so he only has five strings. The Xaviere model is pretty much nothing like the tele owned and played by Keith Richards. Here’s a picture of the guitar before I modified it:
The guitar is being inspected by Boojie the cat.
When it came I had low expectations. The action was high, and it had a set of .09′s on it. Pretty skinny strings. The fretboard was very flat, and wide, almost like an acoustic guitar, like a Martin. Before I had had it an hour, I had changed the strings to D’Addario .10′s, and lowered the action quite a bit. The neck had a satin finish that took some getting used to. The guitar was also pretty heavy. Still, the mini-humbucker sounded very good. The bridge pickup was a standard single coil tele style, but it was very bright, and the tone control didn’t tame it. Overall, the guitar had a chimey, jangly sixties vibe that made it seem worthwhile working with. I decided to keep it.
The problem with the tone control was because the guitar had one humbucking pickup and one single coil. Humbuckers usually need at least a 500k tone pot or they are too muddy. Single coils usually need a 250k pot or they are too bright. On a Tele, both pickups go through the same tone pot, so if you mix pickup types, whatever the pot is, it will be wrong for one of them. I realized that I had a GFS L’l Puncher Tele bridge pickup that I had bought for another guitar and then taken out. It was a twin-blade humbucker made for the tele bridge slot, and it needed a 500k pot. I put it in. It worked beautifully. Problem solved.
However, the three position pickup switch was intermittent on the bridge position. Contact cleaner didn’t help. I complained to Jay at GFS, and he sent me another switch. However, these looked to be light duty switches, and I thought I might have the same problem, if not immediately, then down the road a bit. I was also unhappy about the intonation of the vintage-style three-barrel bridge. Each barrel can be adjusted to intonate two strings at once, but if you get one string dead on, the other one will be either sharp or flat. This means that strings are never in tune together as you play up the neck. It sounds sour. No good.
I found a set of compensated brass saddles for the vintage bridge at Stewart-MacDonald for $15. These are drilled at an angle so that the barrel is slanted just enough to compensate for the different strings. I also bought an old-fashioned pickup switch. It turned out not to be an actual Fender-style switch, but a similar design made in Japan. I installed these pieces this weekend. I am very happy with the results. The guitar is sweet, chimey, and quite versatile for country, pop, or jazz.
I have about $230 into the guitar right now, not counting the case, which I can use for my other Telecaster, or the Li’l Puncher, which I already had. It is a very good guitar for $230. Would it be better to buy a more expensive guitar and not have to swap out parts and pickups? Perhaps. But I enjoy working on guitars, and to tell the truth, even if you pay more, even a lot, you might end up swapping out parts. I changed the pickups in my $750 Roland-Ready Stratocaster, for example, because I wanted something that sounded like a 60′s Strat, not a 2007 Strat. But it is all great fun.
Update: Today I took the neck off and inserted a piece of cardboard from some video game packaging as a shim to adjust the neck angle. I wanted to lower the high “E” string just a tad, but I couldn’t because the barrel saddle piece bottomed out. The shim worked very well. The shim is a little shorter than the width of the neck pocket, and about 1/2 and inch wide. It is just a thin piece of cardboard. A little piece makes a big difference. I had to raise the bridge saddles about a full turn to get everything where I wanted it. Now it plays like a dream.
Installing a shim is no big deal. Lots of bolt-on neck guitars have them. I shimmed my 2007 Strat too. I once had a ’63 Fender Jaguar that had a big, thick factory-installed shim.
I really like this guitar now. It plays great, and the mini-humbucker and the Li’l Puncher give it a tone that is in-between Fender and Gibson. The bridge can twang, but the neck pickup is jazzy or bluesy, depending on how you play. Extremely versatile. Great for Beatlesque pop and lots of other things. It’s a keeper.
SampleTank 2
There is a group buy going on right now at IK Multimedia on SampleTank Expansion libraries. You buy one library for $49.95 and you get SampleTank 2 XT and one extra library for free. Then as more people buy into the deal, you get more libraries for free. Right now it is up to four for one. I have Cinematik (movie-oriented strings and effects), Symphony Strings 2, Vocal Collection, and World Instruments. When there are 612 more users, it will go to five for one, and I will get either Hip Hop Instruments (even though I don’t do hip hop, there is some interesting stuff there) or Piano Collection 2.
This is all stuff I can play with my Roland-Ready Stratocaster. Right now I have it set up with an electric bass on the two lowest strings, horns on the middle three, and a cello on the first. Playing like this completely breaks down all the ruts that you get into as a guitar player, and generates new ideas for music. If I decide to record something, of course it is best to record the parts separately and layer them, but for jamming, writing, and fooling around, different instruments on different strings is great fun!
I have Kontakt 4, which is a much more powerful sampler than SampleTank, but new libraries for Kontakt tend to be very pricey. The target market there is people who are doing film scores, advertising, and hit singles, so it is pro, pro, pro and $500 a pop. This SampleTank deal has a lot of usable stuff for cheap, and I am going to have a lot of fun with it.
Here is a link to a quick jam I made with it:
Superior Drummer 2.0
I bought my electronic drum kit to trigger samples on my computer. The sensors on the drum pads generate information about timing, velocity, and position every time the pads are hit. This information is encoded in a format called “midi.” The recording program stores the midi information and plays it back on command. Normally, the midi information is converted to sounds by a virtual instrument, which might be a synthesizer that generates sounds electronically with oscillators and filters, or it might be a sampler that plays back short recordings, or samples, of real instruments. Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 2 is a sample player.
Perhaps the first sample playing instrument was the Mellotron, which you can hear on “10,000 Light Years from Home” by the Rolling Stones, or on “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues, and countless other recordings from the ’60′s. The Mellotron had tape loops of orchestral instruments and choirs. Press a key and the loop of a cello or a whole string section starts playing that note. It is a whole orchestra in an instrument the size of a piano, although a bit lo-fi. However, hundreds of little tape cartridges stored in a rack is a maintenance nightmare. If the speed was even slightly off the note was out of tune. I read of one incident in which a Mellotron was tipped the wrong way at the airport and all of the tapes fell out.
Sampling has come along way since those days. However, the lo-fi warbley, Mellotron sound is still available, now in convenient digital format.
Superior Drummer was delivered in a box containing all Toontrack products on various CDs and DVDs. I was sent a code that unlocked only Superior 2, the product I paid for. The other DVDs are sitting there tempting me to pay to unlock them. I am sure that is by design. It is a clever marketing strategy.
Do it yourself music making is a big business these days, and selling sample packs is a big part of it. A lot of mystique and mystery is involved in the marketing. With sampling, it is possible to recreate the sound of vintage gear, or instruments owned by famous players. Superior 2, for example, comes with seven snare drums including a Ludwig Black Beauty from the 1920′s, a Slingerland from the 1970′s, and several expensive custom-made ones. They all sound different and they all sound good. If I purchased the “Custom and Vintage” expansion pack I would have, it looks like, three more DVDs full of choices. And then there is “The Metal Foundry.”
This is all very cool, but one has to remember that it used to be that a drummer would have one kit, and would just play that kit. This technology makes it possible to swap out all the cymbals and floor toms, and kick drums and snares with a huge variety of vintage and esoteric gear, but it is easy to get so involved in selecting the elements of the kit that music-making becomes secondary. There is such a thing as too many choices.
However, Superior 2 sounds good, is simple to use, and I am having a great deal of fun with it.
Here is a link to a track where I used Superior Drummer 2 and the Ludwig Black Beauty snare:
I am afraid readers will discover the limitations of my drumming, but so it goes. The guitars all go through Native Instruments Guitar Rig 4 and the sax section and the organ are from Native Instruments Kontakt.
Playing Edrums
I have had the Roland TD-4 kit for a couple of weeks now. I found an alternative setup on the Vdrums forum that moves the brain above the tom clamps and and flips the bracket over to move it back a couple of inches. I have also tweaked the positioning of the toms and the cymbals into a playable arrangement. Here’s what it looks like now:
On the Vdrums forum a lot of folks tell beginners to get the TD-9 kit, with all mesh heads, if they can afford it. I am sure that is good advice for many, especially if you are going to play live. I haven’t played it, but they say that the TD-9 brain has better sounds and more expansion capabilities. For my purposes, I am happy with the TD-4. The sounds are fine for practicing, and good enough to play out if you wanted to. However, mostly I will use it to send midi to the computer to trigger drum samples, so the built-in sounds don’t matter much. A real advantage of the TD-4 setup is that it is compact. It fits fine in the small bedroom where I play, and it would work for a coffeehouse gig too. I am pleased with it.
I am glad that it has a mesh snare. The rebound and feel are very similar to playing an acoustic snare. I don’t mind the rubber tom pads. They could be upgraded later, but I doubt that I will. A lot of people upgrade the highhat. An acoustic highhat has two small cymbals that move up and down and clamp together. You can get an open sound, a closed sound, or in between, depending on where the pedal is. The highhat on this kit is one rubber pad with an electronic pedal that emulates the mechanical movement. After while, it almost seems as if the pad is moving, but it is an acoustically induced illusion. It works.
To get the kit sending midi to the computer I loaded the demo for a VSTi called Addictive Drums, a popular drum plugin. I opened Reaper, my recording software, inserted a track, and set it to monitor midi channel 10, which is normal for percussion. I loaded the Addictive Drums plug into the track and hit the snare. It worked! Then I hit the highhat and got a crash sound, hit the crash and got a closed highhat. The rest of the sounds were all in the wrong places. This meant that I had to load a drum map that would line up the Roland Vdrums midi information with the AD plug. I spent some time on the Reaper forum asking questions, and finally got some answers, mostly from a guy in France. The internet is amazing.
The AD demo sounds great, but it only has a snare, a kick drum, a highhat, and a crash cymbal. The full version costs $299. You can actually do a lot with that minimal kit, however. I did a quick instrumental with two guitars, bass, and drums. I won’t post the results here because it is too sloppy. It sounds like a high school garage band trying to learn an old Steely Dan song. However, I was happy. I had actually played drums on a track!
When I ordered my new music computer from Jim Roseberry at Studiocat, I also got a set of drum samples called Jet City. I haven’t tried these yet because I need Native Instruments Kontakt 4 to play them, but that is what I plan to use with this drum set. Kontakt 4 is coming.
More on this particular mid-life crisis later.
Electronic Drums
A long time ago, I used to be in a band. When you are in a band, you have a part to play, a role to perform, a space to fill that is defined by the context of what other people are doing. On the other hand, when you create music by yourself, layering tracks in a multi-track digital audio workstation (DAW), you have to compose everything, play everything, mix everything, etc. That is both a wonder and a burden. I can play rhythm and lead guitar. I am a terrible keyboard player, but I solved that to some extent with my guitar synth, which can emulate or trigger almost any sound. I can play bass guitar. My main problem is drums.
When I first started doing computer music, I clicked in drum parts with a mouse. Actually, I clicked in almost all of the parts with a mouse. I was using FL Studio, formerly known as Fruityloops. It has a piano roll and a playlist. The piano roll is a display with a piano keyboard on the left, and a grid that scrolls to the right. You assign an instrument, typically a software synthesizer of some kind, and click in the notes, using the piano keyboard as a reference. The notes appear as a block in the grid. Short notes are little squares, while a longer note is elongated into a bar-like thing. You don’t have to know how to read music. You can assign a kick drum sample to one key, and a snare to another, a cymbal to another, until you have a whole kit. Then you can click in a drum part. Such a drum part will sound pretty robotic, however. In electronic drums, the search for “human feel” is a major concern.
Of course you can turn “robotic” into a virtue and run with it. Just look at the drum machines of the ’80′s and what happened to popular music during that time. Drum machine plus cheesy synthesizer equals the ’80′s. There were some good songs written during that time, but the records sound like they were produced by space aliens. (Sorry if those are the anthems of your childhood!)
For a time my solution was a program called Jamstix, which is a virtual drummer created in software through artificial intelligence. The programmer, Ralph Zeuner, provides an amazing product that will create drum parts in different styles, as played by different drummers. It can even monitor the dynamics of your playing, and create soft drum parts for quiet parts and loud drums when you are really digging in. Ralph provides jazz kits, rock kits, and even a kit that emulates John Bonham’s kit in Led Zepplin. It never sounds robotic. However, amazing as it is, I always had trouble getting Jamstix to do what I wanted it to do in a track. It is great fun for jamming, but I was never quite satisfied.
Many years ago, I possessed an acoustic drum kit for while. It was a cheap St. George kit made in Japan that I got from the drummer in our band when he moved on to better things, and it was pretty terrible. Drums have to be tuned and maintained, so the quality of the shells, heads and hardware is important. Even so, I practiced exercises, and I took it seriously for a while. To be a good drummer, you have to divide your consciousness into four parts, one for each limb. The two hands and two feet have to be capable of working independently, and the mind has to manage it. It is not easy. It is also very physical. You need stamina and strength.
The other problem is that drums are loud and people hate them. All drummers have this problem. The family and the neighbors are constantly unhappy. So I got rid of the drums.
However, now we have electronic drums, sometimes called “E” drums or “edrums” as opposed to acoustic or “A” drums. The heads are rubber or plastic mesh, and underneath them are electronic triggers. With headphones, practice can be almost silent. The sounds are stored in the brain of the drumkit, or are triggered on a computer through a MIDI connection. Now drummers can play a full kit without annoying the neighbors. In fact, some small venues now forbid bands to use acoustic drums because they are too loud and it is too difficult to get a good sound.
I decided that edrums were my next solution. However, computer technology allows considerable rethinking of how things are done. The traditional drum kit is big, cumbersome and fussy. The physical characteristics of the drums and cymbals and the spatial requirements of a four-limbed human wielding sticks dictate a certain design and layout. Some edrums, such as the Roland V-Drums and the Yamaha DTExtreme sets, mimic the layout of a traditional kit. However, because the drums are not actually producing the sound but only triggering it, and are not physically present, the edrummer doesn’t need to have the same layout as an acoustic kit. Thus there are drum pads such as the Roland SPD-20, which has eight square pads in a four by two array. The pads can be assigned to any sound, and are designed to be hit with sticks. The whole drum kit can fit into a large briefcase.
The third option is the finger controller, such as the Korg PadKontrol or the Akai MPD32. These have 12 small pads designed to be tapped by fingers. It’s a bit like playing drums on a numeric keypad. Some argue that people naturally tap out rhythms with their fingers, so this is a very natural human interface for drums. I think that most of the beats on hip hop records were done with this kind of controller.
Once can also play drums with a MIDI keyboard, but this is usually less than satisfactory. The keyboard was not designed with drums in mind.
I ended up going with a Roland TD-4S, a setup that mimics a traditional drum kit. I think this is because I have played acoustic drums before. If I hadn’t, I probably would have gone with one of the finger controllers. I think that it is interesting to re-imagine the human interface for musical instruments, the path from imagination to music, but in the end I didn’t want to re-learn absolutely everything. Thus I chose the new/old rather than the completely new. Of course, none of it is completely new anyway. The most avant garde piece still builds on human tradition, and performance always must take humanoid physiology into account.
I’ll write more when the edrums arrive.
Brazilian Jazz
Last night my daughter and I went to a benefit concert put on by my daughter’s high school friend, Carrah Flahive, to support the Pueri Cantores Children’s Choir. Carrah was trained to be an opera singer, but got into jazz. Six months ago she went to Brazil to study Brazilian music. She returned speaking Portuguese well enough to fool a Brazilian and singing bossa nova standards.
The concert was at the Sacred Heart Church in Covina, where the choir, directed by Carrah’s father, practices, so it was one of those events where everyone knows everyone else and one feels like one is in the middle of a huge extended family. The atmosphere was warm, friendly and comfortable. The acoustics were surprisingly good, probably because the hall had been built with choir practice in mind.
It was a pickup band, and Carrah had arranged a lot of the material herself, so beginnings and endings were sometimes a little ragged. Carrah was amazing, however. She sang in Portuguese and English with confidence and skill. She taught us about Brazilian music, and made us love it the way she does. It was hard to believe that she had only been thinking Brazilian for six months.
She sang both Brazilian standards and American jazz standards that she had arranged into a samba style, even an interesting version of “Over the Rainbow.”
The musicians, pickup band that they were, were clearly having a good time. I don’t think they expected Carrah to be so good. For me, part of the enjoyment was hearing them play familiar tunes in unfamiliar arrangements, making it work by attending closely to each other and following Carrah’s lead. In such circumstances, there are some narrow escapes, but also magical moments.
Unfortunately, Carrah doesn’t have any more gigs scheduled before she returns to Brazil. She did say she was working on a CD.
Stomp Boxes: Magical Tone or Magical Thinking?
A stomp box is a guitar signal processor of some kind, usually built into a small metal box with a footswitch on top. Stomp, and it’s on. Stomp, and it’s off. In the quest for a unique tone, most guitarists go through lots of guitars and amps. At some point, the quest will lead to stomp boxes.
Back when I started playing in the late ’60′s, the only stomp boxes around were fuzztones. Fuzz is created by overdriving a small transistor amplifier circuit into clipping. This creates a fuzzy, buzzy sound, thick and full of harmonic content. Perhaps one of the most glorious examples of early fuzztone use is Sam Andrews’ psychedelic guitar on Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, especially the opening track, “Combination of the Two,” and of course, “Summertime.” Andrews’ tone ranges from gnarly full on assault to chimey, flutey textures (some of the chimier moments are James Gurley, the other guitarist in the band). Big Brother was sometimes sloppy, and not always quite in tune, but their arrangements reflected an unusual blues/classical fusion with loud, loud, passages and quiet transitions. They were underrated, in my view, eclipsed by their very famous lead singer, Janis Joplin.
But why not play clean? Fender amplifiers in the 1950′s and early 60′s, the so called “tweed” and “brown” amps, tended to break up when pushed even a bit. The distortion was very musical and warm, with lots of even-order harmonics. This is a characteristic of tube amplifiers, and it is why tube amps are preferred by most guitar players today, even though they are heavier, less reliable, and more expensive than solid state amps. However, Leo Fender was more oriented toward country music, and he saw the distortion as a problem. The “blackface” amps of the ’60′s, Deluxe Reverbs, Super Reverbs, Twin Reverbs, Bandmasters and Dual Showman, were designed to be cleaner, to have more headroom before they begin to significantly distort. To get a thick, sweet, distorted tone one had to play really loud. The later Silverface models were even worse.
Still, why not play clean? I think guitar players have always been jealous of horn players. Before electric guitars were invented, orchestra guitarists had to play big arch top guitars with really heavy action. They were loud, bright, and hard to play, but the player still had to struggle to be heard. When electrics came in, the guitarist could play lead lines (T-Bone Walker is a pioneer), but the notes didn’t have much sustain. They went “plunk” and decayed. Horns can play long notes, and they are effortlessly loud. In fact, it is harder to play a horn soft.
Distortion and feedback make the guitar sing and sustain. Now the guitarist can play lines like a trumpet player. However, if you are using a clean Fender amp, like the Fender Twin Reverb that Sam Andrews was playing through, you need to turn it up really loud, and it still won’t break up that much. Thus the need for the fuzz. Apparently, like Jimi Hendrix a bit later, Andrews used a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, a discus shaped unit with two controls and a switch, arranged to look like a face.
The only fuzz I ever played through back then was a Jordan Boss Tone, which was not technically a stomp box because it plugged straight into a guitar jack. That meant it couldn’t fit into a Stratocaster, but it fit into the Gibson Melodymakers we tended to use at the time. The most famous use of a Boss Tone was probably by Randy California on the first two Spirit albums. It produces a smooth singing sustain, very different from the harmonic rasp of the Fuzz Face. Cool stuff! But Boss Tones didn’t tend to last too long. They got pulled out of the jack a lot, and the innards tended to stop working after a while.
Nowadays there are many different kinds of stomp boxes. Chorus pedals split the signal in half, delay one half slightly, detune it a bit, and give it a pulse, making a 12 string guitar sort of effect. Andy Summers’ guitar on “Message in a Bottle” is a well-known example. Tremolo and vibrato pedals create volume wavers and pitch wavers electronically. On David Gilmour’s latest solo album there is a cut where a guitar note drifts upward a whole octave, something not possible by bending the string or pulling up the tremelo bar. It turns out he is using a “whammy” pedal, a stomp box capable of such tricks. There are digital and analog delay pedals that produce echo effects. Compressor pedals smooth out the dynamics and increase sustain without distortion. The list is endless.
Of course there are new fuzz boxes too. And overdrive pedals, which make the guitar sound like the amp is on 10 when it is actually at a much lower volume. Very handy, and they can prevent hearing loss.
Pedal types and manufacturers have proliferated. And of course, as with guitars and amps, vintage mystique enters in here too. Early transistors were made of germanium, while today’s are made of silicon, so Jimi’s Fuzz Face had different components than the same unit today, unless it is made to vintage specs. The search for vintage mojo led to boutique builders who recreate vintage effects, or design new, better than vintage units. To buy a Zendrive, an overdrive unit favored by Robben Ford, one has to get on a waiting list and pay $199.
Companies with large-scale Chinese manufacturing capability, such as Danelectro, have allegedly begun to clone some of these boutique offerings and sell them very cheaply. One can also buy kits to build vintage effects, and there are groups that reverse engineer popular effects so that hobbyists can build their own. Some manufacturers put plastic goop on their circuit boards to hide the components and prevent reverse engineering. It’s a crazy business. Crazy, but big.
I recently bought an MXR Dyna Comp, the current version of a famous compressor pedal. It’s a modernized design, with upgraded features, but Dunlop (who bought MXR) has just come out with a reissue of the “script logo” 1976 version, which uses a chip that is no longer made. In the online forums that discuss such things, guitar players are gushing about the wonders of the reissue. They told me that my new pedal, just ordered and on the way, was junk, that it sounded bad. I asked, “What is it that you don’t like about the sound?” They just said it sounds like junk. Well, actually it does just what I wanted. It makes the sound clucky like country, and jangly like Roger McGuin’s Rickenbacker 12 string on “Mr. Tamborine Man.” To me it sounds great. I find that one should not believe a lot of the perceived wisdom on forums. As they say, Your Mileage May Vary.
Why are guitarists obsessed with stomp boxes? Well, imagine that you could step on a switch and change your sound, your personality, your talent, and your image. It is actually only the sound that changes, but it is easy to think that there is more. If I have the same type of Fuzz Face as Jimi Hendrix, or the same Tube Screamer that Stevie Ray Vaughn used, there is a bit of a connection. And I think we’d all like to step on a switch and transform ourselves into something more, louder, bigger, more complex. Step on a switch and . . .Wow!
Wow!
Virtual Amplifiers and Effects
Filed under: Music and Guitar | Tags: amp modeling, computer recording, Gearbox
Leave a Comment Recording real guitar amplifiers can be a big hassle. If you’ve got a studio and you are making an important record, I’m sure it is the way to go. Until fairly recently, it was the only thing you could do if you wanted to record electric guitar. Well, you could go directly into the mixing board like John Lennon did on “Revolution.” The only reason that track doesn’t sound sterile is because Lennon overdrove the board, turning it into one very big and expensive fuzztone box and freaking out the engineers.
For home recordists micing electric guitars is tough because you have to get the right mic in the right place, and you have to crank the amp up to get good tone. Cranking the amp up causes potential disharmony with wives, children, and neighbors. To get the track right the home recordist might have to do take after take, the backing tracks in the headphones, lost to the world, oblivious to the pounding on the door, the shouting in the front yard, the police sirens wailing. Yes, micing electric guitars is tough.
However, now we have virtual amplifiers, speaker cabinets and microphones that exist as 1′s and 0′s in the virtual space of computer memory. An engineer takes a classic amplifier like a Vox AC-30, a Fender Deluxe Reverb, or a Marshall Plexi, and creates a model of it by analyzing the difference between the signal going in and the signal going out under various control settings and playing conditions. The recordist no longer has to crank up the volume because it has already been cranked and turned into an algorithm. The blazing fury of a Marshall stack on 10 takes place in the mental space between the earcups of the headphones rather than devastating the household and neighborhood.
One of the first and best products of this kind is the SimulAnalog Guitar Suite, which is free. This collection includes various stomp box effects and two amplifiers–a 1969 Fender Twin Reverb and a Marshall JCM900. The models are inserted into the recording software as VSTs, a plugin standard developed by Steinberg, the maker of Cubase. Generally, the guitar signal is recorded direct, without effects or models, and the amplifier model is placed afterward into the effects chain. This means that it is possible to change amplifiers or other effects after the part has been recorded. Here’s a link:
The Simulanalog suite does not have a graphical user interface, which means that the recording software must supply generic controls, making the user experience rather scientific in feel. Some recordists feel that a proper user interface is essential to the recording experience, so commercial products generally have sophisticated graphics that mimic the look and feel of the actual equipment. Amplitube LE, a “light” version of the full product that came with my EMU 0404 audio interface, looks like an amplifier head. I was able to get a nice Santana-like slightly overdriven sound out of it, and some of the bass models were useful. Not bad at all.
However, I recently purchased a Line 6 Gearbox Silver Edition, which came with a Toneport DI, a USB audio interface with one guitar input and three outputs. Line 6 was blowing these out through a lot of online retailers because a new product, PodFarm, was coming out. This Silver Bundle came with a free upgrade to the “Gold” bundle, and a free upgrade to PodFarm when it came out, all for $99. This was a great deal. It is basically a software version of the Pod XT.
The Gold Bundle has 78 amp models, 24 cabinet models, and 80 effects models. Playing through Line 6 Gearbox is like having a whole music store at your command, with every piece of gear available at the click of a mouse. In addition to the guitar amps, it has models of famous vocal preamps and other esoteric gear. You can switch cabinets and microphones, and even move the microphone closer or nearer, on axis or off. It’s an artist’s palette of sounds for any style of music.
One of the banes of computer recording is latency. Even though electrons move at the speed of light, it takes time and computer cycles to process information. Amp models and effects take computer power, and can introduce several milliseconds of delay. This means that with lots of effect in the signal, the recorded guitar track might lag behind the backing tracks, making the guitarist sound really lame and incompetent. The general solution is to record dry, without effects, and then introduce the effects afterwords. If you do that, however, the sound you hear while playing will be sterile and uninspiring.
Line 6 has solved that problem by writing drivers for the Toneport DI that bypass most of the Microsoft Windows audio processing. The resulting “Tone Direct Monitoring” is amazing. I sound like a much better guitar player because my timing is now spot on.
The Gearbox interface is whimsical and cartoonish. It’s fun. The new PodFarm interface is more realistic and professional looking, but it leaves me cold. The preset browser is better, but the VST plugin version doesn’t work in Reaper, my recording software. I have been using PodFarm because of the easier access to presets, but I prefer Gearbox, and if I want to record dry and insert the processing as an effect, I have to use Gearbox. I think PodFarm was released prematurely.
This package allows me to find any guitar tone I hear in my head or hear on a record. I can play and record all night without waking up my wife or the neighbors. Does it sound good? For the most part, yes. Do the models sound like real amps and effects. For the most part, yes. Is it the same as playing a cranked tube amp? No. What you miss is the physical interaction between the sound waves and the guitar, and the sense that the sound is coming right out of your fingers. Playing live is great fun. However, for the singer/songwriter computer recordist/hobbyist musician with a day job, this thing is great.
In Particular Pursuit of Tone
Filed under: Music and Guitar | Tags: guitar pickups, Telecaster, Tonerider
Leave a Comment I have a 2005 Fender “Special Edition” Standard Telecaster. So far, in search of noise reduction I have replaced the stock pickups with Guitar Fetish GFS Li’l Punchers XL, and less than a year later in search of a more traditional Telecaster twang I put in a set of Tonerider Vintage Plus pickups, installed a copper foil shielding kit, reversed the control panel, and changed the white pickguard to black. Am I crazy?
Solid body electric guitars are easy to modify, especially Fenders and other guitars with bolt-on necks. Within minutes you can reduce it to a collection of parts, using nothing but a phillips-head screwdriver. You can’t easily take the neck off of a set-neck guitar like a Gibson (it’s glued in), but the bridge, the tailpiece, the tuners, the pickups, the pickguard, and the electronics are all just screwed on. Thus, for many guitar players, the temptation to modify is almost irresistible. However good it is, it could be better. And even if it is someone else’s idea of good, it might not fit your own style or taste, or make the sound that you hear in your head. When that happens, it’s time to get out the screwdriver. Look out guitar!
The fact of the matter is that any guitar sound, no matter how lo-fi, hi-fi, muddy, twangy, dull, bright, out of phase, or strange, could be used musically in a particular context. When a player defines good tone, he or she often has in mind somebody else’s signature sound, often Eric Clapton on Crossroads or Layla (completely different sounds), Jimi Hendrix, or David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Even if the player is not trying to duplicate the sound of a famous guitar hero, these are reference points. Seeking a particular sound can lead to purchasing guitar after guitar, numerous amplifiers, and a suitcase full of stomp box effects pedals. It is the leading contributor to the dreaded “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” otherwise known as G.A.S.
Although some players change out bridge components in search of more sustain, the most common components to swap are the pickups. That is my own particular affliction. Most of my guitars do not currently sport the pickups with which they came.
Guitar pickups are very simple devices. Thin copper wire is wound around a fiber or plastic bobbin, with magnetic pole pieces in the center, one for each string. The pole pieces are generally permanent magnets made of an alloy of aluminum, nickel and cobalt called “alnico,” although some pickups have steel pole pieces with ceramic bar magnets fastened to the bottom. The alloy used in the pole pieces, the size of the magnets, the material of the cover, the thickness of the copper wire, the number of winds around the bobbin, even the pattern of the winds, all influence the sound of the pickups. The pickup generates a magnetic field. A steel string vibrating in this field generates a small electric current, which is sent to the output jack, and from there to the amplifier where it is converted into sound. Sometimes a very loud sound.
Pickups with more windings than usual will often be louder, with more bass and mids and less top end. These are favored by players who want a thicker, more overdriven sound. Vintage-style pickups generally have fewer windings, less output, and offer a more complex top end. I favor the latter. Players describing the tone of pickups use words like “chime,” “sparkle,” “punch,” “sizzle,” “edge,” and even “ice pick.” Sometimes it sounds like they are talking about a fine wine.
When I put in the Li’l Punchers, they didn’t sound good to me at all. They had a shrill treble, and not much midrange, giving them an unpleasant hollow sound. I was ready to take them right out. However, pickup height can have a dramatic effect. I kept lowering them until the neck pickup was almost level with the pickguard. When I reached the magic point, they suddenly became musical. Here’s a clip from just before I finally did take them out:
It sounds jazzy because I am playing an A Dorian scale against mainly Am7 and D7. The pickups actually sound pretty good here. However, I took them out because I had the same experience with the guitar every time I picked it up. The pickups sounded good at first. I would hear it as a fusion Tele sound, in Robben Ford territory. As I continued to play, it bothered me, especially the bridge pickup. It sounded somewhat twangy, but dark, and not too snappy. Sometimes the solution is to play another guitar for a while, and come back to it, but I always ended up in the same place. I liked the guitar, so they had to come out.
I chose the Toneriders because they got good reviews and were relatively inexpensive ($80 for the set of two). The alternative was either Dimarzio Twang Kings for around $140, or one of several sets from GFS, which would have been cheaper than the Toneriders. I was a little leery of the GFS stuff after the Li’l Punchers, although I think that they are basically good pickups that don’t suit me. I have a set of GFS Vintage ’59′s (humbuckers) in another guitar and I like them a lot. But I also have a set of Tonerider Pure Vintage in my Stratocaster, and I love those pickups. I decided to go with the Toneriders.
First I disassembled the guitar and put in the shielding kit, following instructions on the Guitar Nuts site. I had gotten the kit, which included adhesive-backed copper foil tape, solder, and some hookup wire, from Carvin a long time ago, but I never put it in a guitar. You cut a piece of foil to fit the bottom of the routed cavity, then cut one or two pieces to go around the sides. You peel off the backing and stick it to the wood. In some cases you have to solder wires to the surface of the foil to connect the different cavities together because all the shielding has to be grounded. Here is a picture:
Disassembled Telecaster with Shielding Installed
(I am sorry that it is just a cell phone camera picture.) The shielding reduced the hum significantly. You don’t even notice it while you are playing, and I haven’t heard it on a recording either.
The pickup transplant was a success. They are bright, twangy and snappy. The neck pickup sounds a lot like Keith Richards in a lot of Rolling Stones stuff, which is interesting because I think his Telecaster has a mini-humbucker in it. The guitar is bright, but if you roll off the tone control you can get jazzy Steely Dan sorts of tones. The bridge pickup is plenty twangy. I am pleased.
As noted at the beginning, the other thing I did was reverse the control panel. Normally it is switch-volume-tone. I turned it around and swapped the volume and tone pots so that it is volume-tone-switch. This allows you to pick notes while moving the volume control with your little finger, creating a volume swell effect. You can eliminate the initial attack, then bring the volume up, which sounds like a cry. Here’s a picture of the completed project. You can see the reversed control panel:
Telecaster with Black Pickguard and Reversed Controls
How does it sound? Some people think that the Punchers sound better. I disagree. As I said before, tone is a personal thing. Tone is in the mind. Here is a clip of the guitar with the Toneriders, same backing track, but new pickups. You can hear some volume swells made possible by the control modification at the beginning of the track:
Was it all worth it? Yes, I love the guitar. I think these pickups have found a home. Maybe I have found a cure for this particular case of guitar modification syndrome, but the long term outlook is uncertain. The world is full of guitars.
Cheap Guitars and Vintage Mystique
Back in the ’60′s it was simple. If you if you were going to play electric guitar you had to have a Gibson, a Fender, or a Rickenbacker. If you played acoustic, you had to have a Gibson, a Martin, or a Guild. That was about it. There were Japanese and Italian-made electrics around, and we played some of them because they were cheap and we were poor, but they weren’t cool and for the most part, they weren’t much good.
American guitars from the 50′s and 60′s now cost tens of thousands of dollars. If we had known then what we know now, we would have put some of those guitars in storage. My friend John refinished his candy apple red Stratocaster, of unknown vintage but he bought it used in about 1967, into natural wood with a furniture stain, which pretty much totally ruined its vintage appeal today. I did the same thing to a ’63 Fender Jaguar that I bought used for $79. They were not popular at the time. It needed fretwork and I brought it to Walecki’s Music in Westwood, where they refused to work on it. They said “This is a turkey guitar and it will always be a turkey guitar.” Somewhat taken aback, I decided to refinish it, and in an attempt to create more sustain I disabled the tremolo and turned the tailpiece around backwards to shorten the string length before they went over the bridge. The original finish had been an ugly two-tone sunburst, and in my view, the guitar looked, played, and sounded better. But a vintage Fender buff would have been horrified. There’s one for sale right now at Jackson’s Rare Guitars for $7,500. Well, actually it’s sold.
These days there are reissues of all of the popular guitars of the 60′s and 70′s, but most of them cost over $1,000, and some are up in the $4,000 range. However, these guitars are popular because the guys who lusted after these instruments in high school, but couldn’t afford $250 or so to buy them, can now afford to have the guitar of their high school dreams, even at these prices. Or at least they could until the recent economic difficulties.
There are also lots of cheap Korean and Chinese copies, and some Japanese copies that are not so cheap. Some are fakes that say “Gibson” or “Fender” on the headstock, but aren’t. Some of these are so meticulously made that only an expert can tell the difference. Some are cheaper versions of American instruments authorized by the companies themselves. Gibson’s foreign-made brand is Epiphone. Fender’s is Squire, although Fender also has Fender-branded instruments that are made in Mexico. And then there are instruments that look very similar to American versions, but have a different headstock shape, or a slightly different body shape, and a different brand name. Copies of Gibson Les Pauls and Fender Stratocasters are the most common. The biggest Korean manufacturer is Samick. There are numerous Chinese manufacturers. Gibson recently moved the production of Epiphone guitars from Korea to China.
Asian-made guitars come in a whole host of brands. Johnson, Jay Turser, Agile, SX, Douglas, Rogue, Carlo Robelli, are only a few. Often the same guitar is sold in different stores under different brand names.
Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machines have revolutionized guitar making. All the wood shaping that used to be done by hand is now done by computer controlled machines, resulting in very consistent quality. The bodies, necks, and finish on Asian guitars are usually excellent. The hardware and electronics are sometimes cheap. But these things are easy to replace, if the rest of the instrument is well-made. Another result of the computerization of the process is that once Gibson teaches a company to make a Les Paul, it is hard to unteach them if they decide to move the manufacturing elsewhere. Any one of these companies is capable of making a very high quality instrument for a reasonable price.
Are the American-made versions better? Are the vintage ones truly magical? Not always.
Quality control was actually more inconsistent in the 60′s. I have taken apart lots of guitars, both then and now. A friend of mine had a 60′s Telecaster where the neck pocket was cut too wide. The neck shifted so that the low E string wasn’t even over the fretboard by about the 10th fret. The screws holding the neck on were bent. Back then there were great ones, good ones, and bad ones, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of buying a guitar without playing it. These days you can mail order a guitar and it is likely to be quite playable out of the box. You might get lucky too. It might be great.
I wouldn’t buy a fake guitar that pretended to be a Gibson, but I have an Korean-made Agile Les Paul type guitar that cost $199 and is better in my experience than authorized Epiphone Les Pauls at more than twice the price. I have a Chinese-made Douglas violin bass (similar to the Hofner that Paul McCartney plays) that is nearly identical to the Epiphone Viola bass, and was probably made in the same factory. The Douglas was $139 and the Epiphone usually sells for $329. Is the name on the headstock worth $190?
Today it is much easier to buy highly playable, even very good instruments for a reasonable price. Brand names seem to mean little, if anything. In my view it’s time to forget about vintage mystique and focus on playing music.
