TapperMike

Rich Severson is great for theory in practice. Developing chord melody constructs jazz substitutions and more. Frank Vignola is great for licks -

Wow dig that. Ebony is graded like any wood Some cheaper grades are stained to look darker and have a looser grain pattern. That being said my strat has a rosewood fretboard that's painted black. It's got more then a few nicks from casual playing. I like the Rich Severson Video more. He at least set up his amps eq properly. While I'm fine with 25.5 scale length necks on solid bodies. I'm not as fond with jazz guitars. Mostly it's about "stretch chords" Chords that span 5 frets. Rich Severson is one of the better jazz guitar teachers on youtube.

Hendrix would overdub and then find himself in the position of having to re arrange his parts for live situation. I too feel your frustrations especially in arrangement / performance It takes me an unreasonable amount of time to get to the mastery level I want to record. And then in the recording process I'm usually obsessing about things I can't control it distracts me from doing the thing I can control...my own playing. The longer it takes me to master something the more I'm prone to walk away from the project..

Nice Article Tom, well worth the read. Music is full of compromises. When I first got a ztar it was on the hopes of exploring tonal clusters (chords) not accessible via my guitar. And the hope for a less compromised "Soloist" musician experience. In those things it has served me well. It's also reminded me that simply having the tools at my disposal doesn't mean I get a free pass on mastery.

Way Cool

Best Christmas gift of the year. Jan, Feb are the worst months of the year for restaurants. Usually they are cutting down on staff's hours and one can pretty much forget about being hired during that time.

I've yet to get a job, On the other hand this is good news. Just as a recap. My pay at my internet job was slashed in half just prior to working for Ultimate. I've been told time and time again prior to the last cut and afterwards that the end was near. Nothing like the sensation of a boss constantly reminds you to go out and look for other work. I was of the belief that Christmas would be the cut off of my internet job. Which isn't enough to survive on but it does pay for some things. Usually we get the bad news just before Christmas. Today I find out that December is not the end and as long as the money is there to pay me I'll have work.

Got a kick out of seeing a young David McCallum.in Juke Box Jury. Americans may know him best as "Ducky" the coroner on NCIS He's 81

It's good that hasn't affected you. As much as I've tried I've become the old man resistant to change. I've never been a fan of hip hop to begin with but when I worked at Ultimate and got forcibly tuned into underground hip hop I was not amused. It took every bit of stamina to maintain my live and let live disposition. Growing up we always had to listen to music via headphones in the house. My Brothers sisters (four sisters, two brothers) and I had amassed quite a collection of vinyl. When I started working at my high school radio station we'd get all these "not for resale" albums from record labels. Because we were such a low watt station they were never the big name artists. The station would have to buy titles and we were only allowed a certain amount of money to do so. The labels via interns would always hand us two or three copies. With over 50,000 albums of all styles there was no room for duplicates. So we were allowed to take some of these no hit wonders home. Some were great. I've always thought about scarfing through resale shops and the like to collect records of no hit wonders for personal amusement.

So Tom your end goal was to educate your parents on what good music sounded like?

hmm, yeah/bo maybe. How much are you willing to sacrifice for sustain? Investing in a compressor maybe the short and long term solution as well as the economical one. A long time back brass nuts and bridges were all the rage. I had a guitar that was build for sustain like nobodies business. The falcon had more natural sustain due to the heavy woods a slightly thicker neck neck thru construction and brass bridge and saddles It had more sustain then any guitar I had at that time including my Les Pauls (both the deluxe and the custom) But it also was considerably harsher in tone. I used to gig with it regularly as it wasn't quite as heavy as the LP's (which throws bodyweight out the window to a degree) Brass saddles and nuts give of very harsh harmonics. Your first goal is to find a guitar where by you like the tone. Brass does help sustain but it's not a be all end all. Frets are made out of metal. If the nut isn't made out of metal the open notes wont have the same timber as the fretted ones. Is this something that you demand above all else? Because most common (tusq, graphite) nut materials will produce roughly the same amount of sustain for open notes and...That's about all it's good for. Maintaining character of tone between the open and fretted notes. Bolt on guitars can lose sustain if they aren't flush mounted correctly. This is especially true of Strats and Tele's with the neck angle adjustment on the back of the guitar. http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com/repair/electric-guitar/neck-angle.php The micro tilt design was simply a way to remedy a bad original fit neck. This loose shifting neck was a favored technique for adding slow vibrato for many artists. Brace the horn or upper bout with your hand/forearm and try to move the neck. Ebows and sustainacs are two different approaches to keep the sustain going. With ebow's you lose attack. If you abuse your settings for your compressor you can also lose attack and limit dynamic range. Dynamic range (quiet to loud) is actually less of an issue then people make it out to be. Because if the character of the softly played tone is preserved that's all the listener hears. It's character as well it helps the soft notes still stay prominent in the mix. When not using the ebow (because it focuses on one string) the more sustain you have the more uncontrolled feedback is likely to occur.It quickly becomes a full time job for your left hand muting technique. It was a neck thru with serious weight.

The thing about the Jimmie Vaughn Signature is that...It's not priced through the roof and it's like Jimmie Vaughan's no nonsense strat with only one slightly unique alterations. Unlike standard strats where the bridge pickup isn't linked to a tone control but the neck and middle are ...In the JV version the middle pickup is wide open and not hooked up to a tone control. I've thought about swapping my loaded pickguard with a Jimmie Vaughan pickguard to get the tone without buying another strat. About the only thing stopping me is I really like the tones I'm getting out of my current strat.

When we'd work hamtramck many a bar would have less then ideal floor plans. Monitors were absolutes with us as was sending the line outs from the guitar amps into the PA. We used to work these long narrow rooms where the stage would be set in the center of the room length wise.

Wow, that Big Jim Sullivan is amazing. Beautiful grain.That Kent Armstrong floating pickup is to die for.

That's why I never hit record/ I'll just sit with my guitar work out a chord progression and try to sing my way through it. I've thought about just releasing my work as.... Backing tracks or an instrumental without any reference to the lyrics. But never have.

Think about this for a minute,,,, Friday as (ahem) sung by Rebecca Black was a lot of work for a a relatively small amount of money (the 4k) In the age of youtube it did what song poems of the past couldn't. Reach millions of listeners. You can hate it to high heaven but it wasn't a small time production. In the long run the producers made out "Okay, not great". I wouldn't mind a producers life like that at all. And to a certain extent that was part of the goal of my failed studio. Make money producing others whether I thought they were good or not. I'm stopping myself from telling or retelling my life story right now. When I came to songstuff, I came for the lyrics as I'm not a lyricist. Put a interesting lyrics in front of me and I'll break out a guitar and write music for it.(good, bad, indifferent) Since they aren't my lyrics that's about where it ends. I try to sing/play the song and move on to the next or other things.

They were entertaining. I think that documentary was edited down I can recall it being much longer before but the main gist remains. I joined songstuff because...I'm not a lyricist and never will be. However I do enjoy reading lyrics and trying to write music for them. Not that I share my efforts with anyone as the lyrics aren't mine for sharing.

Ha, I'm the opposite. Trying to move up to a standard "C" neck from a slim C was a challenge for me. Standard C's are not that thick. Ibby archtops aside from the George Benson model don't do anything for me. They just don't have the right magic warmth. Oddly same with most Gibson archtops jazz guitars. Completely off topic It's funny how critical I've become of jazz legends I used to admire. I still admire them but less now then when I used to. Take Tal Farlow He's got great fills, knows how to play chord/melody like no ones business and yet...not really that musical when trying to play by himself. There isn't that light bouncy feel the song deserves. It's more like he's going through the motions and doesn't lock in a groove. Johnny Smith on the other hand is quite lyrical, singing Granted he has a pianist behind him. Still JS takes a lot of liberty with the melody, sometimes his embellishments go a little to far. Barney Kessel sounds great....When he's not playing his own signature guitar. When Kessel is playing one of his signature models (Kay, Aria) I cringe. His frets are uneven and the intonation is way off. The tone is also undesirable. If Ted Greene had only cleaned up the tone a little (too much fuzz) This would have been near perfect But the whole face head and body movement when he plays live is ..a little freaky distracting.

Back in the 80's I did work as a recording engineer at a studio which specialized in "song-poems" and local advertising. Tire stores, pawn shops, you name it. If someone wanted a cheap and corny production they'd come to us. I too used a pseudonym "Clarence Michaels" and I tried my damndest to hide it from the outside world.

If you haven't yet I encourage you to watch this. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x25472p_off-the-charts-the-song-poem-story-2003_creation?start=12

Aja - Steely Dan

Cant you just mail order from someone in the UK like these guys http://guitarvillage.uk.com/products/2/Archtop-Semi.aspx

Wow quite a collection you have there. Welcome to the forums btw.

It's strange coming here to Songstuff after visiting gearslutz

Honestly it depends on the guitar itself. Though I wrote a long reply about this but apparently I never clicked post. Of all the stratocasters on the market today only the Jimmie Vaughan interests me and it is a MIM Short scale guitars are marketed to kids (or rather parents for kids) Kids want something that stands out. Like Hello Kitty or butterfly guitars or some other flashy stuff. Sadly the quality of these instruments can be rather poor. Parents may not care or notice what to look for same as kids.