Archive for the ‘Music and Guitar’ Category
Fender Super Champ XD
Filed under: Music and Guitar | Tags: Amplifier, Fender, Super Champ XD
Leave a Comment I have played through a lot of guitar amplifiers. When I first started playing in our high school rock band back in about 1968, I had a Gibson flatop acoustic with a DeArmond pickup in it. I played it through a Standell transistor amp that belonged to a friend. In those days, most of our amps were borrowed. Craig borrowed a Bandmaster, John borrowed a Twin, and I played through John’s Standell. The guys who had money for amps couldn’t play, and the guys who could play had no money. Later, I switched to bass because Bill the bass player left. I bought a Magnatone bass amp from Madman Louie, the owner of a big pawnshop in L.A. We walked out of the store three times before he offered a reasonable price. That amp sounded good, but was never loud enough to compete with a Twin Reverb in a gym. I wish I still had the Magnatone, and the Silvertone bass I was playing.
Then I bought a Martin D-18 and we went acoustic for a while. No need for amps. I still have the Martin. I wrote a lot of songs on that guitar, but I don’t remember most of them.
For a while I had a Blackface Fender Bassman head, but it needed work and I never had a proper speaker cabinet for it. I traded it to Craig for a Rock amp, a little thing with a lovely wooden cabinet. It sounded good clean, but it was a solid state amp so the distortion settings were nasty. That ended up being used as a tiny P.A. at poetry readings, and I ended up giving it away for that purpose.
Then I had a no name Japanese Les Paul copy with a 25 watt Gorilla amp. The Gorilla was also solid state, and it sounded pretty good for a little practice amp with an 8″ speaker. I gave that away to someone’s son. That was followed by a Carvin X-60A, a 60 watt tube amp with EL-34 power tubes. This thing sounds glorious if you crank it up, but the neighbors will complain. At reasonable volumes, it sounds pretty dull, so it never got played much. It sits in my study.
I had a Vox Cambridge 15, which is basically a Vox Pathfinder with a tube in the preamp. It had a nice tremolo. I traded it to Craig for something, maybe the Fernandes Strat. I have a Crate VC 508, another little tube amp with an 8″ speaker. Out of the box you couldn’t get any kind of clean sound. I replaced the 12AX7 in the preamp with a less aggressive tube, probably a 12AY7. This cleaned things up a bit. I have heard that there are other modifications that can be done to make this amp sweet, but they are beyond my expertise. I still have this amp, but I have never bonded with it.
When I was playing the Wechter at Starbucks, at first I was going straight into Craig’s Mackie P.A., which was powerful enough to play a venue 90 times bigger than the Starbucks. However, when the conga player was there, I couldn’t hear myself, so I bought an Ultrasound AG-50DS2 to use as a monitor. This is a really nice solid state amp for acoustic guitar, and I use it for guitar synth and as a practice bass amp. The newer ones are set up even nicer. This was a good purchase.
And finally, the Super Champ XD. I love this amp, even though it has one serious design flaw. The SCXD is a modeling amp with a tube power section. These days, everybody is looking for pure tube tone. All the classic memorable rock and blues records were made with tube amps, which have a warm sound, distort in a musical way, and respond to the player’s dynamics in a way that solid state amps don’t. A modeling amp takes the characteristics of a classic tube amp and digitalizes them, so that a signal passed through the computer chip takes on the characteristics of whatever tube amp the model was made from. Tube amp purists hate this. However, in the SCXD, it works, maybe because of the tube power section. I especially love the Fender tweed models on this amp, but I have used the Marshall and Vox models too. It just sounds good, and it makes you want to play. It also has a direct out, so you can connect it to your computer to record without a mic.
The design flaw? The speaker baffle rattles when you hit certain notes. I have heard that the new Fender Princeton Reissue has the same problem. The top of the speaker baffle meets up with the amp chassis, so there is no way to fasten it down to anything. I tried screwing a piece of angle aluminum to the baffle to stiffen it, and this helps quite a bit, but doesn’t eliminate the problem. My solution at the moment is to run it through a Carvin extension cabinet with a Carvin VL-30 in it. It sounds great this way.
The amp sounds so much better than any other amps I have owned that I don’t even care much about the rattle. Eventually, I will find a solution.
I guess nothing is ever perfect.
Update: I re-tubed the SCXD with JJs, re-biased it, took out the stock speaker and put in a Jensen C10Q. Now it sounds much more authoritative and grown up, and best of all, the speaker baffle rattle is gone! I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps the Jensen is stiffer.
Roland-Ready Stratocaster
Filed under: Music and Guitar | Tags: Fender, Roland, Stratocaster, Synth
Comments (7) Around December 2004, I started playing every Thursday night at a Starbucks at the Long Beach Towne Center mall with my old friend Craig Saxon. He had been playing there for about five years. We played for tips, which ranged from nothing to about $50. (On the nights there was nothing, I suspect that someone cleaned out the tip bucket while we weren’t looking.) Craig is sort of a one-man band. He knows hundreds of songs, takes requests, and arranges them on the fly. He’s got a harmonica holder, a looper, and he switches from straight guitar to slide. I was playing leads and fills on a blue Wechter acoustic-electric, but I wanted to add even more to the mix, so I bought a Roland GR-20 guitar synth. The synth came packaged with a GK-3 pickup which I installed on a red Fernandes Strat copy that actually belonged to Craig. The GK-3 pickup unit looks like something the Borg might have designed, but it worked just fine.
I went through the hundreds of installed patches, which ranged from glorious, to usable, to “What were they thinking?” I copied the ones that I thought would work with Craig’s music into the user bank so I could get to them easily. I created a cheat sheet of patch numbers so I could find them. Now I could put a brass section on “Domino,” a Hammond B3 on “One Headlight,” cheesy Farfisa organ on “Personal Jesus,” spacey strings on “The Great Beyond,” cello on “Blackbird,” and even banjo on “American Pie.” This was all great fun. Some people thought we had pre-recorded backing tracks. Others came up and said, “your guitar sounds funny.”
This weekly gig ended in late 2007. Craig ended up moving to Camarillo, but we were just getting tired anyway.
I started using the guitar synth on home recordings. I have a little M-Audio midi keyboard, but I am a terrible keyboard player. With the GR-20, I could input parts with the guitar. You can record the onboard sounds, or connect up midi cables and trigger computer-based softsynths. However, I really wanted a guitar with the synth pickup built-in so I didn’t have the whole GK-3 unit hanging off the guitar. I had tried to order a Rogue Violin bass from Musician’s Friend when they were closing out the Korean-made ones for $149, but Musician’s Friend was moving their warehouse and got everything all screwed up. To make amends, they sent me a 20% off coupon. I used it to order a white Roland-Ready Stratocaster. Here it is, just out of the box:
2008 Roland-Ready Stratocaster
Because the VG guitar is now the top of the line Fender synth guitar, the Roland Strats are now based on the Standard Stratocaster, which is made in Mexico. Fit and finish were quite good. It was very playable out of the box. I ended up making quite a few setup adjustments, but that was mostly because it came with .09′s on it and I like .10′s. I left the bridge floating because I had been listening to some of James Wilsey’s stuff. He’s the guy who played the lead on Chris Isaaks’ “Wicked Games.” Tuning stability is excellent. I don’t do dive bombs with the tremolo arm, just little wobbles, but it stays in tune.
The pickups were the ceramics that come with Standard Strats these days. They were nice for playing rhythm, but I wanted something brighter, sweeter and more vintage. I wanted something that sounded like my best friend’s candy apple red Strat in high school, back in 1968. After a lot of research, I put in a set of Tonerider Pure Vintage pickups. I cycle through the pickup positions from neck to bridge in this clip:
Tonerider Pure Vintage Strat Pickups
This set is bright, sweet, and complex. The in-between positions are nice and boinky. You can get tones like Mark Knopfler, David Gilmour, and Richard Thompson.
The GK-2A pickup system does everything that the GK-3 did, but the whole package is tucked away inside the guitar. The audience will never know. They will probably still say your guitar sounds funny.
It’s a keeper.
Sophistic Rhetoric and “Little Pink Houses”
Filed under: Music and Guitar, Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: McCain, Mellencamp, Reagan, sophist, Springsteen
Comments (1) I guess I should attempt to make a bridge between “guitar” and “sophist.”
In “Encomium of Helen” the sophist Gorgias defends Helen of Troy, widely considered to be the epitome of a bad woman. Gorgias argues that she is blameless because her actions were either due to the will of the gods, or she was “by force reduced or by words seduced or by love possessed.” Gorgias’ argument deprives Helen of all agency and thus all moral responsibility. However, what I am interested in here is not the argument, but the theory of rhetoric represented here by the seductive power of words. Gorgias argues
Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity. I shall show how this is the case, since it is necessary to offer proof to the opinion of my hearers: I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter. Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and in evil fortunes, through the agency of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own. But come, I shall turn from one argument to another. Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft.
Much of the effect of Gorgias’ speech derives from rhythmic, poetic language with odd turns of phrase and lots of repetition of words and sounds. The translator of the above passage has attempted to preserve a bit of this effect. This is the sophistic logos, a persuasion through hypnotizing words rather than logical argument, as in Aristotle. Note especially the last sentence above, where he talks about the particular power of words that are sung to beguile and persuade the soul.
I want to argue that rock n’ roll music is the inheritor of the Gorgianic strand of sophistic rhetoric. Let me see if I can make this case.
In 1984 (1984, yikes, how Orwellian!) Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign tried to use Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a campaign theme. The chorus sounds stirringly patriotic:
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
It is almost impossible to hear this chorus without singing along, even for people who were not born in the U.S.A. However, the words themselves are banal and repetitive. It’s the music, the rhythm, the chords, and the arrangement, that drives them into your skull. You can hear this song a hundred times and not hear any lyrics besides these. That is what fooled the Reagan campaign. If you listen more carefully you hear words like these:
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
The song is clearly a bitter message about the men who went to fight in Vietnam and the problems they had when they returned home. The Reagan campaign’s cluelessness about this is old news. People, including Springsteen, said that they needed to put in the time and effort to listen to the song. However, songs with a rousing chorus like this are not designed to be understood in one take. What is the rhetorical effect of living with a song for a period of time, liking it, hearing it as a celebration of patriotism and American values, taking it into your heart and consciousness, and then suddenly hearing it as a critique? Could it be that a message that would have been fended off by ideological filters actually gets a hearing?
The McCain campaign recently made a similar blunder with John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.” The chorus is equally patriotic and stirring, except that the last line contains a hint of possible irony:
Oh, but ain’t that America
For you and me
Ain’t that America
Something to see, baby
Ain’t that America
Home of the free, yeah
Little pink houses
For you and me
Oooh, little baby
For you and me
The verses are about ordinary people, their aspirations and disappointments. There’s a black man in a black neighborhood with an interstate running through his front yard who “thinks that he’s got it so good.” There’s a greasy young man in a t-shirt who already thinks he’s found his destination because his crazy dreams to be president, “just kind of came and went.” But the real problem for the McCain campaign might be this verse:
Well, there’s people and more people
What do they know, know, know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico
Ooh, yeah
And there’s winners and there’s losers
But they ain’t no big deal
‘Cause the simple man, baby
Pays for thrills
The bills the pills that kill
Each verse builds up the irony of the “Ain’t that America” of the chorus until the catch phrase signifies a sense of broken dreams and quiet desperation rather than celebratory pride.
Neither “Born in the U.S.A.” nor “Pink Houses” is anti-American. Both songs question American culture and politics in constructive and provocative ways. However, neither song is exactly what it appears to be on first listening. The music opens the way for the bewitchment that is to come. Gorgias would approve.
Single coil versus humbucking
Filed under: Music and Guitar | Tags: Fender, GFS Li'l Punchers, Telecaster
Leave a Comment Back in 1988 or so, I was reading an article in BAM, a local music magazine, and I noticed an announcement that G&L, Leo Fender’s new guitar company, was selling some demo guitars. Leo had sold Fender to CBS because he was in poor health, then got better, started Music Man, had a falling out with his partners, and then started G&L, which originally stood for “George and Leo” because his partner was George Fullerton. Anyway, G&L turned out to be located in the old Fender factory. I played several ASATs and other guitars, through Randall amps. I saw the prototype of the Commanche with its weird “Z” shaped pickups, and learned a lot about what they were doing from Dale Hyatt, who had been working with Leo Fender since the old days. I bonded with an ash-bodied natural finish ASAT signature model with the P-90-like “Magnetic Field Design” pickups. Mr. Hyatt didn’t really want to sell that particular one, but he saw that I was in love, and he gave me a good deal. I played the heck out of that guitar, and I still have it, but there was one thing that always frustrated me. ASATs with the big pickups look like Telecasters (Leo’s original solid body electric guitar, one of the first ever), but they don’t sound like Telecasters. I was always trying to make it sound like a Tele.
So, about a year and a half ago, I dropped into the Guitar Center in West Covina and played some Teles. There was a white one with an ash body that I liked (Made in Mexico, otherwise known as MiM), but I didn’t buy it. However, it got stuck in my mind (any guitar player will understand) and the following week I went back to try it again, and perhaps take it home. It turned out that it had been sold, but I found another MiM ash body Tele in natural finish, a used 2005 Guitar Center “Special Edition” that played really nice. I thought it sounded good too, but I was sitting next to a shredder kid playing a Les Paul at enormous volume, so I couldn’t really tell. Anyway, I bought it. I pointed out that the jackplate wasn’t stock, so they threw in a gig bag. I had one problem though. It was natural ash with a white pickguard, just like the 1988 ASAT. It was the same shape as the ASAT, although it had a maple fretboard instead of rosewood. To my family, they looked exactly the same! I had some unproductive conversations about this. Here’s the two guitars:
1988 G&L ASAT and 2005 Fender Telecaster
Anyway, now I had a Tele, and I could appreciate my ASAT for what it was. Ah, but guitar players are never satisfied. The pickups were a bit generic sounding, and they were noisy. Here is where we finally get to the actual topic of this post: single coil pickups versus humbucking or noise canceling pickups. It’s a conundrum. Single coils are bright, snappy, sparkling, and complex. Gibson-style humbuckers, which have two magnetic coils with opposite polarity side by side, are mellow, darker, and maybe even muddy. But single coils hum and buzz, especially around computer screens, fluorescent lights, light dimmers, and bad power. The buzz is annoying, and can ruin a recording. How much tone can you trade off to get reduced noise?
Of course, every pickup company has designs that are supposed to give you single-coil tone in a noise canceling package that fits into a single-coil space. The most common are stacked humbuckers with one coil on top of the other, and rail humbuckers with two really narrow coils side by side. There are also exotic models that use different magnet material in the different coils. The verdict in all of these cases ranges from “sounds like a humbucker” to “close but no cigar.” After a lot of research, I chose GFS “Cool Vintage” Li’l Punchers from Guitar Fetish. These are rail-type humbuckers that are supposed to give you “vintage Tele tone.” You can pay hundreds of dollars apiece for boutique pickups. GFS pickups are cheap, made in Korea. However, they are highly regarded, at least on guitar discussion boards.
I installed the pickups myself. The neck pickup was slightly too large to fit in the pickguard, and I got a little impatient when I enlarged the hole, so it was a little uneven. Impatience is never a virtue when doing guitar repairs and upgrades. The pickups turned out to be very sensitive to height adjustments, so it took a while to get them sounding good. They were quiet when your hand was on the strings, but surprisingly noisy when not being touched. In general, the pickup transplant worked. However, now I had a problem again. It didn’t really sound like a Tele. It sounded good, but like something in between a Tele and a Les Paul. I was back in Telelessness.
The Li’l Punchers have been in for about a year now, and I am about to take them out. I’ve got a set of Tonerider Vintage Plus pickups that are going in, plus a black pickguard and a shielding kit. Hopefully, the guitar will sound like a Tele, not look like the ASAT, and not buzz too much. I’ll post about this transplant operation soon.
Update: Here’s a link to a clip demoing the GFS Li’l Punchers. The rhythm guitar is the neck pickup, and the lead for the first go around is the neck, the second is the middle position with both pickups, and the third is the bridge. To me it sounds more like a psychedelic Gibson SG than a Tele. Not bad, but not Telecaster.
