p90jr

Zander always played Telecasters and Rickenbacker 12-strings from the start of the band, from what I remember as a guitar and rock magazine reading kid... then he got a late 50s Rickenbacker solidbody, blonde with a brass pickguard I think, from a pawn shop on tour... turns it is the exact same guitar Johnny Ramone played as a back up for a bit, including when The Ramones had done some dates with Cheap Trick, that had been stolen... so there was some weirdness about that... If you look at early video footage of the band from The Midnight Special, etc., and the Budokhan concert footage from that album you'll see him with the Teles and 12-strings. These days he has his own signature model semi-hollowbody from Schecter, and the clips I've seen he's playing 6 and 12 string versions of those... haven't paid enough attention to know if the Rics and Teles still put in appearances.

The action is like a very good Wah, and is adjustable!!! The taper is as good as I can imagine outside of the pricey pedal steel pedals...my one good attribute on drums is a really fast right foot on the kick drum, so I did sit down and play my best wah wah licks and it did well. but I've been getting a feel for the TC Electronic Crescendo auto-swell pedal... at first I thought it was a bit useless and I was looking to modding a capacitor for longer swells, but luckily I found a vid with a guy who explained that you shouldn't think of it as pedal that just does all of the work you, but as a pedal you play with touch and dynamics... basically a reverse noise gate, the harder your attack the faster the volume bloom. Gently plucking strings and using the Rolling B Bender as it blooms is giving me good faux pedal steel. Playing fast my giving it a millisecond mute for the envelope to close lets you do rapid-fire swells... depending on what else you put in the chain (and where) you can sound like a steel or a violin or cello or a synth... pretty handy little gadget for $45.

I play a lot of electric 12 in a couple of acts, including parts high up on the neck and solos... and so I pay a guy to intonate my Charvel Surfcaster 12 (which he says is a real pain...). I do use a Peterson Strobo tuner using the "sweetened 12 string" tuning setting... I couldn't tell you offhand about the bridge and saddles, I'll look when I get home...

He disappeared into the fog: Mark Hollis the ethereal outsider https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/26/mark-hollis-talk-talk-singer

I'm a fan of those records and have read a lot about them and the making of them... apparently as they could just do what they wanted more than direction from their label(s) they did... it all flowed at the time, to me... alongside The The and World Party and Depeche Mode, as the 80s went on a lot of electronic-based bands started incorporating guitars and acoustic piano as they grew out of synths, and dug back into the stuff they were into growing up before getting caught up in new wave.

A friend of mine was working for a company in Austin that was making a replacement pickguard that put a touch screen and midi stuff right below the pickups, and might've included a sustainiac pickup or something... but I haven't heard anything else about it so I guess it didn't work out

On the Rolling Bender... my thought on the string pull thing... why don't they come up with a way for you to do that using the hole already through the bridge that the string originally went through? Know what I mean? I misspoke/typed... "all the way back" should've been "all the way forward," towards the neck (the other right hand?)... then after playing it for a few hours and the string really getting stretched and settling, beyond my usual yanking it up and down the neck to stretch it out, it was a wee bit sharp in the upper register of the neck so I had to tweak it back just a bit and it's perfect. The point where the string actually crosses over the saddle is just a bit behind the high E string saddle, where the original saddle was... I started to just mark that position with tape and use it as a starting point but then thought that was silly... I guess it wasn't, and it's a good reference if you aren't changing string gauge or anything. I only watched one short installation vid so others might have suggested that... I also tweaked the "raised pitch" to bring it down a few cents to be exactly one whole step... and playing it I keep finding the half-step point fairly consistently, though that's based on hearing it so I'll see if that's possible with a band. My hand usually rests on the bridge when I play and fingerpick... and I have big hands, I'm finding it natural and intuitive to rock back a bit to use the bender, or use my pinky to push it down. The real plus for the bender is bending notes within a chord voicing, so that's a slower more dramatic thing bathed in compression, reverb and delay... for the Clarence White-style licks that I've faked for so long by bending with the JangleBox adding treble-boosted sustain, for now I'm faster doing it the way I have for decades. No problem with 8s... they stay in tune for me, my tough lightens to fit them, and the Bender isn't causing problems with them.

I forgot to respond to this before, but - to my embarrassment - you posting this reminded me that I already had one of these in the "guitar project drawer" that had been there for months and I'd forgotten about it... I'd been put off by a comment I saw that said "They're right, it takes 5 minutes to install... and 5 hours to get your intonation right again." I woke up too early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep so for some reason decided to put it on (anything to not think about the work project that will eat up next week that I'm in a waiting pattern on...), and it took 5 minutes to put on, then trying to intonate it (and my Tele is an AM Std with the 6 bridge pieces, so it only had to work about that one string) seemed to be taking forever with careful slight adjustments, until I just got frustrated and cranked the piece as far as back as it could go... and that was right on! I did that with the existing set of strings, then playing around with it instantly broke the high E, so I decided to just change the entire set... and I've been meaning to go from a set of 10s on that guitar to 8s like my other Strats and Teles... so I finally did that... Rick Beato has the same Tele, I think it's from around '98 - '00... in a video thing focusing on his guitars his tech guy mentions that he's only had to set that guitar up ONCE... when Rick first brought it to him straight from Guitar Center, and since then no matter if he changes string gauges when he checks everything is still right... So I swapped the strings, stretched them, tuned them up, checked everything on the Peterson StroboClip Pro or whatever it is... and no need for any tweaking. That's nice considering going from 10s to 9s on my Gibsons/Gibson-style guitars has involved a day or so of careful truss rod adjustments because they instantly fretted out in spots and the neck tension was thrown off... I know Leo wasn't using the "classic" concept of string and neck tension in his design... and I thank him for that!!!

Working on an original song with one of the bands I play in, I had a part/sound come to me ... a staccato trem/reverb/delay thing... I could fake it with my picking (the way I learned to play U2 songs as a kid who didn't have a delay pedal...) but I couldn't get the Boss Trem pedal or EHX Deluxe Memory Box that I had on the board I was using to do it... it dawned on me that I had just watched a rig rundown with Adam from The War On Drugs and he did something similar with a Lightfoot Labs Goatkeeper pedal, the problem is those are rare and pricey, but a search uncovered the Malekko Goatkeeper, a smaller, somewhat simplified (two channels of tremolo as opposed to four) licensed to Malekko to manufacture, so I ordered one (had I also seen one of you talk about it here in this thread?) Just got it in, it sits with the Boss Space Echo I finally got in waiting for me to have the time to play it... right after I hit buy on the Goatkeeper I noticed the DOD Rubberneck delay pedal I bought as a deal of the day for $99 that I maybe played once on a shelf, hooked it up and played with it and got the exact slightly modulated "percolating" repeating delay I was looking for in that song, of course... so i bought a new pedal unnecessarily... but I ain't sorry!!!

I almost bought one a couple of times as the stupid deal of the day for $99, I think...

I have a mid-90s (I think) Les Paul Special with P-90s that has the same problem... it's not Heritage Cherry but a darker burgundy and with the black pickup covers and black knobs and pickguard onstage it just looks like a dark blob, thought the binding on the neck always shines. I bought some brass pickup covers, and a gold tortoise-shell pickguard for it... I'll see if that livens it up. I've had the headstock repaired on it twice and currently the back of the neck does not have a finish (which is smooth and fast, actually)... I've thought about just having it refinished in white or something... or maybe gold. like this

"Do what thy will shall be the whole of the law." - some guy Ozzy sang about, once... Guitars are expressions of the owners...

This is cool, but c'mon, man... it's begging for a brass pickguard!!!!

Well, after one practice with a band using it the Mission VM-Pro is awesome... the internal setting was set to preserve the highs when you back off on the volume (I bought it used) and I like that feature so far... it comes with an allen wrench that lets you adjust the "action/stuffness" of the pedal rocking mechanism... I don't think I've ever come across a volume pedal (besides the expensive ones my pedal steel playing buddies use) that someone put so much thought into... I also bought a TC Electronics Crescendo (auto swell) pedal because it's pretty cheap and seems to work well...

Scott, I solve this problem (the full-on humbucker tone is usually too much/too thick for the songs in the indie rock and americana acts I play with...) with Seymour Duncan Triple Shot pickup rings, which are an inexpensive and unobtrusive addition (they just replace your normal pickup rings) and have coil-splitting (either of the two coils from the humbucker) while still using the other coil to cancel hum, as well as the ability to switch the two coils together to parallel instead of series wiring, which is a mellower and more open sound. (I used to just use a Voodoo Labs Giggity "guitar mastering" pedal to try to do the same thing but I prefer using the Triple Shots onstage). (trying to find a good demo vid)

Proud Bee Gees fan here!!! This song is up there with Bacharach & David... I grew up with my mom playing Bee Gees records next to Dionne Warwick all the time, so they're linked in my mind. Barry Gibb is the second most "successful*" composer of all time, number one is Paul McCartney... Someone called bullshit on that fact when I repeated it, arguing "Bach or Mozart or Beethoven are the most successful composers, their music has been played for centuries!" Well, how much money do you imagine they got from that? Neither Bach nor Mozart nor Beethoven were rich (aside from having Kings as patrons at times) or famous or even well-known outside of their countries in their lifetimes because... they couldn't be! There was no broadcasting... no radio or TV or newspapers to transmit their music or stories around the world or to the other side of their continent... they were locally-known while they were alive, and became famous in time as technologies allowed their works and legends to spread. Even among circles of people devoted to music there was no mechanism to share their music widely even if their reputations spread. The very reason Kings patronized musicians and composers was for their own entertainment. If they wanted to hear music they had to have it played by someone for them, and if they wanted to hear new music they had to have it written for them. The "world" was smaller then, but not as connected. The weird fact of the day the other day from a site I follow was: "There was a unique piece of music commissioned by the Vatican that was only played in The Sistine Chapel... the musicians were sworn to the Church not to copy it or teach it to anybody else, or perform it elsewhere if they memorized it. You could only hear it in the Sistine Chapel... UNTIL... Mozart's father took him to the Sistine Chapel as a boy, and he heard the piece... then later that day he perfectly transcribed it from memory, then let people widely copy his transcription."

The girl who lived across the street when I was a kid was BCR fanatic, though a bit late for that... this song and "Rock and Roll Love Letter" are my faves... which reminds me... my wife and her friends as kids turned on the TV one day after school and saw this zany show called "The Monkees," and loved it/them... and when it was over they walked down the street to a convenience store and were excited to find teen magazine special issues devoted to them... so they went to buy them, and the man working the counter looked at the magazines and then looked at my wife and her friends and said "Y'all know these guys are my age, right? This isn't new... they're from the 1960s!" And they were heartbroken...

I think this will all change as the generation who've had supercomputers in their hands since birth and have grown up "inside" videogames (not merely playing them) age into prominence. As I make mental peace with aging into the social and musical space reserved for "old farts," I'm reminded that I am not the future, my daughter is... Someone added me to facebook group for guitarists that pretty much is just a humor site where people in their teens and 20s make merciless, mean fun of everything in existence. I notice significant differences in that age cohort in attitudes about: 1. Tube amps. It's not that they don't like them, they just just don't think they're inherently better than digital or analog modeling or sims or solid state amps because they're not in complete awe of older styles and tones, and anybody who tries to insist that they are is rebutted with a quick "OK BOOMER!" They make fun of AXE FX and Kemper rigs just because of the enormous price-tags... they had great fun mocking screenshots of "older dudes proudly hoarding amp tubes like toilet paper" a couple of months ago (which was dumb and silly): "Oh no, without tubes I can't nail the tone to annoy my wife with my endlessly playing of the riff of 'Life In The Fast Lane' in my living room. I don't gig, by the way, but I got to have my pure tube tone and just ordered 100 6L6s! The leftovers will be buried with me for tone in the afterlife." 2. The Blues. I get it... it makes no sense to people who've grown up in urban or modern suburban environments immersed in technology in the past couple of decades to connect with a musical form rooted in rural life 100 years ago... especially when they've grown up overwhelmingly having it presented to them as the music of nostalgic uptight white lawyers. Uniquely merciless hostility is aimed at: bending notes widely, Eric Clapton, Joe Bonamassa, and the Pentatonic Scale. 3. Country Rock, Country Music, The Eagles, Bob Seger... pretty much the same as #2. 4. Modern Country. the soundtrack of the jerks who've threatened to kick their asses for being "weirdos" when they've ventured out into the countryside. 5. AC/DC. A combination of numbers 2 and 4, plus "it's like listening to your gross drunken great-uncle brag about his ancient sexual exploits and sexual harassments. Real cool, bro!" 6. Gibson guitars. 7. Stratocasters (including the PRS Silver Sky). Mainly for connection with number 2 above. 8. Rick Beato. Poor Rick has just become the "boomer" face of "everything was better when I was young and everything new sucks" to them, so they hate him for it. What do they like? Effects, the weirder the better... "Offset" guitars... computers and anything related to them... modeling and "IRs"... anything that older people don't like or get, and bonus points if it greatly agitates or offends them, which is hardly a new sociological development, right? If Fender were smart enough to release a VG Jazzmaster or VG Jaguar they'd make a fortune.

With the exception of my beloved Jodavi Zzyzx Snap Jack cables (somebody buy the patent or whatever and put these back into production) and my Pedalsnakes I've had every kind of cable fail... the worst being the molded Planet Waves cables I bought on clearance (seemed like a bargain)... the first one I used lasted 30 minutes. They break themselves under the weight of sticking up from my top-mounted amps. The Hosa cables I have haven't faired worse than anything else... A friend was re-cabling his studio years ago and just took my pedalboard and made me cables using blue monster cable and Neutrik jacks... but he made the pedal board cables with no slack, so some of them started breaking just from transit, though I still have most of them in use... the longer cables he made for me lasted a few years (longer than my luck with anything else) but I managed to get shorts in them, too. I don't intentionally mistreat them. These days I unplug cables between pedals before loading out... time consuming to plug them in at load in (kind of defeating the purpose of a pedal board) but oxidation is a real problem down here in the swamps... better than scrambling to unplug and plug everything when something cuts out. but that also might avoid strain in transport?

I have a few of the flat EBS patch cables and the Donner version... I actually haven't used them, yet, but I have a couple of the Donner aluminum pedalboards to assemble...

there's a current/recent company doing a similar thing to the old Dan Armstrongs but I forget the name... Cool... but, I have a Variax. Infinitely more flexible (alternate tunings, too)... I really don't get why they aren't more popular.

Surfergirl... look for a used Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster pedal. I used one when I had to do a show where I switched between guitars that had drastically different pickup output, as it was intended to remedy, but a buddy of mine in a doom metal band tried one while just experimenting with whatever was on the shelf in a studio while he was recording and now uses it as a preamp for his Les Pauls w/ humbuckers into his amps, just cranked for more gain and craziness...

The Mission VM-Pro pedal is here... I'm too tired to play with it... it looks brand new and is in the original box, etc. here's a funny thing: one of my earliest lessons in economics came as a small child watching "Happy Days" when Mr. Cunningham had some medical emergency and was laid up in the hospital before some big weekend when the hardware store usually had a sale that cushioned them for the rest of the year with profits, and Mrs. C - in his place - had a 1¢ paint sale (I think, it's been decades), which almost made him have a heart attack because he paid 25¢ for every can of paint... but at the end of the episode he was going over the receipts and said "Marion... I don't know how you did this... you sold the paint at a loss for every can but we made a huge profit!?!" and she said "That's easy... nobody can just buy paint... they need drop cloths and brushes and rollers and stirring sticks and masking tape and scrapers, and while they're here for the paint they're going to remember all the other stuff they've been needing like pliers and screwdrivers and screws and bolts and hammers and nails and doorknobs and whatnot, so I marked everything else in the store up 500% and they never thought twice about it since they were so excited about the cheap paint, and the profit margin is already higher on all that other stuff" The VM-Pro pedal tuner solution is cool... it uses a 1/4" TRS jack, the outer ring adjusted by the pedal and goes toyour other pedals, the second ring goes to the tuner and is not adjusted by the pedal... the "adapter" they sell to go with it is one 1/4" TRS right angle male plug which splits into two 4" lengths of cable into two 1/4" TS right angle male plugs, one labeled for the tuner. It sells for $40. I'll try the $10 Hosa cable instead...

I happened upon a barely-used Mission Audio MV-Pro Volume pedal at a good price and it's highly regarded, so I ordered it... it seems ideal for front of board/direct to pickups stuff, like swells, eBow wrangling, etc. I am also kind of interested in the Boss FV30L for the other end of the board, post-effects, stereo ins and outs... especially with the AmbiKab stereo returns that seems perfect... An hour after ordering the Mission I was packing for a gig where I needed a wah and grabbed one of my Cry-Babys off a shelf... only to discover that particular pedal was actually a Dunlop "High Gain" Volume pedal... go figure, and I have no idea where it came from but I have been given boxes of stuff by people. In a quick test to see if it worked it left no real impression, but I'll check it out later.