p90jr

... One... I dunno, it was Guitar Center, and I'm sure they have their share of scams... hell, people grab guitars and just run out of their stores some places. --Two. While I agree with you, generally (I've bought a lot of guitars online, most of the ones I have, really...) that doesn't seem to be the emerging mindset, and I think that's because you and I are players who buy guitars to play, and increasingly the average guitar customer is someone buying an object they think will appreciate rapidly and they don't really play that well or gig. I want used or "open box/demo" guitars that are pre-dented and discounted, so I don't get pissed when I do it... I'm fine with B-stock stuff... it's going to get played and gigged and as careful as I try to be some wear will happen. I get great laughs from guitar groups on facebook (as much as from vinyl record groups on facebook) because people are increasingly a bit nutty and unknowledgeable. The guys returning Fenders because of that inevitable hairline fracture in the finish that almost all of them get in that lip where the neck is bolted on (if you have a Strat, you have to know what I'm talking about)... the fact that they ignore the instruction to not open the box and let the guitar acclimate to the new environment/temperature for 48 hours then return the guitar 3 days later when "this crack happened in the finish!!!" is funny/sad. Guys will dent a guitar and ask how much it costs to have it refinished... we're talking about MIM Telecasters, not expensive vintage guitars. People will post a guitar that they've changed something on and people start yelling at them about "ruining the resale value!" Like, for a late 70s Fender Brinco or something. One guy trolled a group by posting tons of pics of Late-50s Les Pauls and early 60s Les Pauls/SGs that had been heavily modified and letting them all go insane... and I recognized that these were Les Paul's personal guitars that were being auctioned off... they sold for way more than if they were perfect because they were LES PAUL'S PERSONAL GUITARS!!!! mostly prototypes he was experimenting on, and all were given to him for free... "It doesn't matter. He was a jerk to do that to vintage guitars, man!!!" The "pros" I know can't afford $3,000 guitars because they're playing for a living and don't make that kind of money... unless they do make that kind of money in which case they're big enough to be given a lot of stuff by companies and they buy rare vintage stuff as tax write-offs. EVen some kids I know in a stoner metal band got to the point where Gibson gave them guitars on permanent loan, which came in handy because they were trying to figure out how to afford guitars after grinding the affordable stuff they had down with constant touring. This actually just rolled around on my youtube channel while I was assembling something for my wife. I like this guy... he usually has some good insights as a former store owner... 1:37:22 below he talks about GC I believe acoustic guitars are overwhelmingly sold online these days...

I popped into a buddy's music store up the street late one Saturday afternoon before heading out of town to a 2 hour gig, then having a 4 hour weekly acoustic gig (with lots of strumming, since me on guitar and a drummer were the entirety of the band) the next night... I somehow had run out of picks, which I buy in bulk (that somehow being my bandmates, who refused to go in with me on orders because "that's not what I use" grabbing handfuls of them out of my bag every gig to use)... and he had no Fender Medium 351 picks... the only pick I have ever liked and used... he had some other Fender picks in the 351 shape out of a different material and done in different thicknesses, so I tried to find the one that seemed closest in rigidity and bought a package of them and used them for those two gigs... Monday morning I woke up and my right shoulder was killing me and I could hardly move my right arm. Since I draw and use a computer mouse to do design for a living, that wasn't good... I managed to get in to see my Doctor that afternoon and he asked if I used a different tennis racket or something like that recently... all I could think of was the different guitar picks, and he said "well, your body is used to a certain thing, you have muscle memory built around a certain thing and movement and applying pressure in certain ways, and when you change something even small, like how rigid a guitar pick is, it throws off your entire system and you subconsciously try to make up for what you're used to feeling... maybe you tensed up too much when you weren't getting the feedback or resistance your hand was used to, picked and strummed too hard. That's an athletic activity at the level and duration you do it. You have to think like an athlete about having all of those variables as close to normalized as you can get them." So I hide my picks from my bandmates, now. I keep the broken or dull ones and when they beg for them tell them "that's all I have..." though they steal them off of my pickholder on the mic stand when I'm not looking.

There was not really very much - comparatively to now - in the way of gear back then... or in recording technology, really. Gibson SG with humbuckers into cranked Marshall... Maybe a Les Paul with a treble booster... it looks as if as some guitar channel personality on youtube recently noted: "we're chasing these tones we grew up hearing... we're buying the amps, the guitars, the pedals, the period correct coiled cables, the same brand and gauge strings, the same picks... but we're not totally getting them... and that's because we're forgetting we're not sitting a room listening to that guy play... we're hearing his gear in a room, though a priceless collection of microphones into mic pres into a vintage recording console and vintage outboard gear like compressors and limiters and then onto vintage tape recording decks and then mixed down through more outboard gear onto more tape and then mastered through more priceless gear and then put through a process to get it onto vinyl or CD and then through whatever our personal listening system is regarding amps and speakers... after all of that, we're not even necessarily all hearing the same thing, anyway. But we sure as hell are not hearing the pure original tones, which is why when they remaster things it can sound completely different from what we remember, sometimes." The secret of AC/DC's recorded lead guitar sound on the Mutt Lange-produced records ("Highway To Hell," "Back in Black," "For Those About To Rock...") was Angus Young's Solo Dallas wireless transmitter system. Lange had seen them live and when they got into the studio he said "what's missing? Your guitar isn't hitting me the same way it does when you're onstage..." and Angus and his techs said "we use a wireless system onstage but we're using leads (cables) here..." and Lange made them hook up the wireless system, and they discovered part of the circuitry was a limiter necessary for making it function that compressed and focused things in a great way. That circuitry has now been put into effects units and pedals by Solo Dallas... I have the most stripped-down pedal version, which I bought for $100 on Reverb. It's very cool. There's an AC/DC-ish pre-set on my HX Stomp that I have fun with sometimes. The only live footage I can find from that era of Iris is this, which has a markedly different guitar sound/approach (more in line with the post-Van Halen SuperStrat shredders than the Angus Young sound on the first song posted)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVwKO-CsaCs I'm also intrigued by the band: I didn't think things like rock music were generally allowed behind the Iron Curtain during the Communist era... I have a record by a Polish New Wave band called Lady Pank from around 1980 that got some attention and I can't remember how I got it (it might've been a prank gift), and then there was Gorky Park from Russia in the late 80s... I want to look and see if there's documentaries or books about these music scenes. A friend/bandmate of mine (a former Marine who served in Afghanistan in 2001-2003, who also just got back from volunteering in the Ukrainian Army around Bakhmut for a year) was just sent one of those bootleg rock albums from the Soviet-era pressed onto used medial X-rays as a gift from one of the people he got to know in Ukraine.

(I'm "gifting" this article so you can read it without a New York Times subscription) Sam Ash Music Stores to Close After 100 Years in Business The chain, which started with a single shop in Brooklyn in 1924, said it would close all 42 of its locations by the end of July, citing competition from online retailers. Some of you should remember that I've been watching for the death of Guitar Center and posting updates on that here for... I think close to 15 years, now... (wow, time flies)... and somehow it has beaten the odds, and actually shot into the black during the great guitar-buying frenzy during the COVID shutdown, which of course was not going to last (though apparently the suits in the instrument business believed it would...). I don't know if someone shared this here already but... “We forgot who our core customer was”: Guitar Center CEO says premium guitars key to firm’s future and promises “playground” experience for serious musicians Gabe Dalporto, the new CEO of the US-based gear giant, outlined his vision for the firm, and a retail experience that lets players get hands-on with more pro-quality gear some counter opinions: Tom Morello Hits Back at Guitar Center CEO's Controversial Comments About Affordable Instruments "He doesn’t want to sell guitars to serious musicians, he wants to sell expensive guitars to lawyers/doctors/etc." - X (Twitter) user comment Here's my opinion(s): Sweetwater were genuises in setting up their entire online operation. It improved on Musician's Friend and made it more focused and personal. The Chicago Music Exchange were genuises when they set up Reverb. It improved on eBay and made it more focused and personal for gear. It's a simple rule of economics and business that you make more money selling a lot of something that is inexpensive than a few of something that is expensive. You will not have someone come in and buy a $1,500+ guitar every single day, but you will have someone come in and buy a pack of strings and picks and a patch cable every hour if you're in the right location, and that is what pays the bills steadily. You sell a lot of Squier and Epi starter packs around Christmas... that is the market to let GC grow into a behemoth (along with Bain Capital...). "Pros" are also pros at the hunt of finding great guitars and gear for a bargain, and vintage gear has long been fashionable to everybody except maybe the metal segment. I don't see the "pro" segment going into Guitar Center anymore... it turned itself into the WalMart of music gear, just as others more shrewdly built online things aimed at Pros. The used gear section of GC's website is abysmal. Brick and Mortar music stores can't sell expensive gear that's new, because most guitar buyers these days suffer from "Trogly's disease": they expect a guitar to be perfect and never before handled by human hands... unopened in a box, flawless... so a physical store would have to have a floor demo model and then boxed models in the back, which most can't afford to stock that way. A guy ranted in a guitar group on facebook that he went to GC and asked for a guitar and told them he wanted an unopened one from the back, so they got one, put it on the counter and started opening the box... he lost his temper and they looked at him like he was nuts. "Didn't I say I wanted an unopened one! Why are you opening it!" "Hey, man... I have to see what I'm selling you so you don't come back and say it was a Squier in the wrong box or something, you can be the only one who touches it!" "Forget it, you're idiots!!!" Storms off... he didn't appreciate people telling him he was unreasonable and nuts. So that shifts sales to online. Local guitar shops can do well if they're good at finding used instruments and selling them online. As for new guitars, besides the big sellers the guitar companies themselves are cutting out the middle man and selling direct online, now... so if you can afford to stock every model of guitar in every color and variation and not open them for display you can have happy customers. People now expect it to work like Target where you look at the display model and buy an unopened example... a change from the "I would never buy a guitar unless I'd played it for an hour to make sure I liked it" mindset. So... GC will create a lot of dented and scratched new guitars that they have to sell as used to move if they put the $500 and up guitars within arms reach on the wall. I can't see this as a winning business strategy. Maybe with their volume they can afford to have a demo model designated of higher-end guitars on the floor at each store that they "sacrifice." My personal advice to them would be to have employees set up, stretch out and tune all of the Squiers and Epiphones on the low level of the wall, because they're uniformly awful and seem to go right out of the box onto the wall with no care... and I've watched kids come in with their parents and grab one and plug it in and have an awful experience, which makes them think the guitar is defective because it's almost impossible to tune, the intonation isn't set, the action sticks and frets buzz and strings ground out and electronics don't work properly. And I say that as a guy who had the same experience as a 13-year-old who was excited to find tons of vintage Jazzmasters and Jaguars in pawn shops for $50-150 that were all wrecks and scared me off. But also, I think we're headed into the great post-COVID Guitar comedown... there's a glut of slightly used guitars on the market, which in turn should be creating a glut of new guitars on the market... which could be what killed Sam Ash.

not new (except to me) but certainly cool IMO... I finally picked up a Zoom Multistomp (MS-70CDR) which is stompbox-sized thing full of chorus, delay, reverb and modulation patches... and it's pretty great for $129 (and is tough, which I can attest to because I just knocked it off the top of an amp and it took at 4 foot fall onto a ceramic tile floor that has obliterated iPads and dishes and suffered no damage)... You can set up a chain of 4 pedals... I'm having fun... can throw it and my little ZT Lunchbox Jr. in a backpack and have a small battery-operated go rig

Making music (art) is not a competition... being inspired to be more ambitious by healthy artistic competition is not a race or a business battle. If that were the case at this moment this forum would be shut down and DJ&RapperForum would take its place with thousands of members posting daily

John Lennon changed the world with a 3/4-sized Rickenbacker (that looks too small on him and funny to me)... Susannah Hoffs from The Bangles uses that same model and it looks like a normal-sized guitar on her. They make smaller guitars and smaller scale-lengths. Dean Ween (from the band Ween) plays Fender Musicmasters, which are also 3/4-scale guitars... I tried to play one of those once at someone's house and felt like I was playing a ukelele... I am 6' tall (and let's not get into the footage I keep adding horizontally)... in high school at about 15 I shot from being 5 feet tall to about 5'10", and string-bean thin.... I had just saved up and bought a perfect-for-me Yamaha guitar (SC-400... a set-neck, Gibson-scale guitar with 3 Strat-like pickups, that looks like a Samurai Mosrite or something) and it instantly looked a little small on me... I also got my hands on a real Rickenbacker guitar at the time and was Heartbroken to find that my deluxe-sized meathooks were too big to play those weird tiny necks, really... and Les Pauls and SGs looked small on me, much different than on Peter Frampton, Angus Young, Jimmy Page, Marc Bolan, Randy Rhoads, Mick Jones from The Clash... I said something about that in a guitar store, looking in a mirror, and the salesman said "all of those dudes are tiny, man. I don't think one of them is taller than 5'5"! " That famous Telecaster looked huge on one of my heroes, Andy Summers from The Police... and watching him play, he rolls and slides his small hands around the fingerboard a lot to do things my fingers can just reach and does a much better job than I. So between instrument choices (and guitars made for taller/larger people are a relatively recent development because people have generally gotten taller and bigger compared to the past) and technique, I'd say there is not disadvantage to having smaller hands.

Some single note lines, classic Punk power chords, some full chords... I hate writing TAB, let me see... Em - Em - Bb- A is the intro thing... Verse - Em Bb A | Em Bb A | D F G | D F G | Em Bb A | Em Bb A | D F G | D F G Chorus - Em G A | A Eb D | D F G | Em G A | Em G A (Bass Lick - G Eb E) | E F# G | (Fuzz single notes - G Eb E) | E F# G Verse - Em Bb A | Em Bb A | D F G | D F G | Em Bb A | Em Bb A | D F G | D F G Chorus - Em G A | A Eb D | D F G | Em G A | Em G A Bridge - Em | B | C | A | D F | G | Em G | A | Em | B | C | A | D F | G | Em G | A Breakdown (same as Chorus) - Em G A | A Eb D | D F G | Em G A | Em G A Bridge - Em | B | C | A | D F | G | Em G | A | Em | B | C | A | D F | G | Em G | A (Bass Lick - G Eb E) | E F# G | (Fuzz single notes - G Eb E) | E F# G Verse - Em Bb A | Em Bb A | D F G | D F G | Em Bb A | Em Bb A | D F G | D F G (Fuzz single notes - G Eb E) | E F# G

I started a thread about this list a few months ago... and yeah, it has little to do with anything other than generational hipness positioning by Rolling Stone, Inc. It reminds me of another thing that happened with "music journalism." First, The Village Voice fired Robert Christgau as its chief music writer because he refused to write "listicles," articles in the form of short and easy-to-breeze-through lists, which "research has determined increases web traffic and sharing and 'interaction (arguments)' on social media"... then right after that the "record of the year" on their annual Pazz and Jop Critic's Poll was a record by a band called tUnE-yArDs, and someone bemoaning the end of their relevance and music criticism in general said "in 2 years people will ask 'tUnE-wHo?' Not taking into account the possible merits and quality of that record... it is not a record that has captured the broader listening public's ears and imagination, just the insular world of music writers and bloggers... and it has no relevance to this year in history. So while we all love the Velvet Underground's records, and Big Star and Nick Drake and The Modern Lovers' first record and Television, they were not broad successes... they excited a small group of people who were musicians and writers and over time their reverence and popularity and influence blossomed and grew organically. The problem is in thinking you can determine that and force it, and claim credit for it... and you can't. Mark my words: 'tUnE-wHo?'" I know it annoys younger people that younger guitarists who aren't massively popular don't end up on these lists, but music is not as popular as it was from the early 60s to the earl;y 00s in general, and the guitar is not as popular in music as it was during that time frame... so... Best just to not have lists that rank people like it's a competition, because the only metrics we actually have - record sales and concert ticket sales figures and guitar magazine newsstand sales - will always put the same people on top. If you let the public vote it will reflect those same things... as a kid reading Guitar Player before I even played guitar, I remember Bill Wyman always winning the bassist category in the reader's poll, and letters to the magazine and people I knew complaining that Geddy Lee or Chris Squire or somebody was better... but I realized more readers of the magazine just probably were Stones fans... a public poll is always just a popularity contest.

I am "budget-minded" too, and it's funny that a lot of people look at my set ups at gigs and say "whoa... someone is a cork-sniffer gearhead!" Even the prestige stuff goes on sale at some point... and this world is full of people who have to have every new thing that comes out, then sell it in a month or two because they've already ordered the next new thing... I buy that stuff at a discount from those people. And it is currently a buyer's market for music gear. If I just look at something on Reverb, not even add it to a watch list but just open the listing and view it, I start getting discounted offers from that store and other stores on that item.

A guy I play with a bit at the moment... he has a couple of Teles with maple necks... he sprays the strings with WD40 before he plays... the first time I saw him do that I must've had a horrific look on my face because he laughed and said "works for me... what do you use?" and I showed him I was wiping my strings with Ernie Ball string wipes to clean and lubricate them right before we play. But also in about a year and a ha;f of playing gigs with him he asked how often I've changed strings... and the answer is "0," except for breaking a couple of high E strings and a B on the B-bender Tele. "I go through strings like crazy!!!" I don't know if spraying industrial lubricant on them might be a reason...

This is also an old bass player thing for the picking hand, too... I used to steal a bit of the horn players' valve grease and dab it by my bridge so I could get some on my fingers when needed during long gigs with a jazz band, but an older bassist saw me once and said "you just use the oil from the skin on your nose, my man..."

I'm glad you have good moral character and never decided on a hobby of crime!

those snobby facebook groups and their gatekeeping... I understand they have to try to keep the groups free of spambots who will overrun it and post porn links or whatever, but on the other hand, they could come up with a way to vet actual humans that isn't so pretentious... but you can google for the answers, really. I have an Electromatic Pro Jet that I put the GFS copies of DeArmond pickups into... it sounds cool, but it's heavier than some of my combo amps... it is the one guitar that is too heavy for me to play onstage because it pinches something in my neck and makes my neck and lower back hurt. So it sits in the corner of my practice building. I've thought about taking the electronics out and planting termites in it for some weight relief.

I grab a sheet of paper and make a list... my wife makes fun of me for doing it... but I still will manage to leave something right by the door sometimes....

I'm the same... when I had a gigging/touring van for my band, it had everything I could think of to keep a gig/run of shows from being derailed on the road wedged into spots in the back: mics and mic cables and stands on collars (indie/punk venues... you'd be surprised), used but usable snare and kick drum heads, spare kick drum pedal, hi hat clutch (a VERY big one) extra drum sticks, bass strings, a soldering kit, a 6 pack of GC house brand guitar cables, a big pack of 9v batteries, old spare tubes and a spare amp head for guitar/bass (the Crate Power Block ended up being a blessing for this when it came out)... the bad thing is that my band members starting thinking they could not bother with having stuff because they depended on me having it, but they also would not return it after they used it, necessarily... but being the guy who got paid and dispersed the money I just started factoring in replacing all of that and keeping track.

I probably have about 6 of them... but after the first two the reason for that was a bunch of times of loading up, hitting the road to play a gig in New Orleans... realizing I'd forgotten the bag where accessories are kept so darting to the Guitar Center or closest music store before they closed and buying another one and a couple of cables and picks. Eventually, one of them and a couple of cables just got zipped in a big ziplock bag and put under a seat in the car.

I was being jerky... but it is all about what style people are playing. Americana/country/blues/roots/classic rock-influenced people will want traditional response and sounds. Modern rock-influenced people will want a different thing, usually more saturated. My brother had a Dual Rectifier half-stack... I used a Dual Rectifier combo for a bit when a bandmate left it in my van when he left the band and then promptly moved away... you can get sounds I like from them, but the way I hear most people dial them in the clean sound is lifeless then the overdrive sound is just a loud indistinct roar... tastes... just not my personal thing.

Ooops, yes, you're correct... I was confusing/conflating ma s with volts.

I was actually thinking about this after leaving this thread: A bandmate/buddy is a Kemper devotee... constantly kind of telling us we need to ditch our amps and "get with the future." He was originally a bassist but he plays keys and synths more than anything, usually... he wants bass and guitar to respond like synths, if that makes sense... that's kind of how he approaches them. And when I think of the younger players I know who are devoted to digital sims, they're kind of the same way (they pride themselves on not bending strings like "some 70s boomer") and they kind of play guitar like they're synths... touch dynamics are not part of what they do... but then, if I feel like being a jerk, they've grown up listening to horrible digital music formats compressed to hell with music recorded to be soft one moment then kick to really loud with no subtlety in between...

don't want to seem too "SPAMMY" but this one got me, too...

This amp model was designed for knob surfing and touch dynamics, due to its pedigree as a Matchless/Mark Sampson offshoot!!! And that's how I'm playing it at the moment... and usually how I play around the house (and a volume pedal gets used onstage to the same extent for some things). The original Cub design back in the day had 12ax7 and EF86 preamp tubes that you could switch between... as I understand it, for this they just stuck with the 12ax7 but added a "tuned tube gain stage" for the overdrive setting... still trying to dig into what that is and how it works, but it sounds wonderful. I have it plugged into my Komet AmbiKab, just using the 2 x 12" section and not the 2 x 10" stereo effects section at the moment. I can't remember exactly which speakers are in it... I'll take off the back panel (not easy) to check... I know they put Celestion Classic Lead 80s stock in them, but the one I have was a demo prototype that got dragged around to trade shows and used in the shop when people stopped by (the idea of which I love... the mojo from people playing through it, especially since I think that was people like Sonny Landreth) so it might have one of their upgraded/preferred pairings of speakers... it just sounds so good I forgot what they told me, ha. This is the demo vid that pushed me over the cliff (I just love listening to R.J. play in general)

Zevon is one of my favorite songwriters... My stepdad has hit his 70s, and was born a Type A diabetic (both of his parents were Type A diabetics and all 14* of their kids were, too)... 70 is the "average life expectancy" of a diabetic so he's beaten the odds but his health has deteriorated rapidly - especially his vision, meaning he can't drive anymore - and for someone who is naturally fiercely independent that means he's bummed out... So I pulled up this song to play for him to cheer him up, he laughed all through it and then said "that guy wrote the most true and profound song I've ever heard!" * yes, 14 kids... as my stepdad says "my parents did love us... but we were born as much to be free farmhands as people."

this version popped up after I'd watched something the other day... I was surprised to see John Kay strap on a guitar at the end and add a slide solo...

It's not an "issue," just that it's not able to supply enough current for a high-current draw pedal. I knew when I bought a one-spot that it would not power my old big box Electro-Harmonix pedals (Deluxe Memory Man, PolyChotus...), BBE Acoustimaxx, etc. Those each have their own dedicated 225ma adapters... I do have a fancy pricey power supply with a couple output sections for 225ma but I haven't built a board using that, yet.