I'm Worse At What I Do Best

Something very subtle happened this weekend, subtle and tragic.  I officially became old.

This weekend is the twenty year anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s First label-backed album, “Never Mind”.  I’m not old because I remember the release.  I’m old because, at the time, I was old enough to be one of the musician’s who thought, “What!?  They picked those punks to be the vanguard of the Seattle Sound!?”  Everyone I knew agreed that they were talented but not really ready yet … and they didn’t have enough experience.

My wife and kids think it’s funny when I talk about the good old days of the Seattle scene.  It’s funny to them that the guy I am now could have rubbed shoulders with people that became legendary.  And that’s actually a good thing because the early years of the Seattle music scene – what some people named the “Grunge” scene – were different from any other music scene I know of, with the possible exception of the Hamburg scene in the late 50’s and early 60’s (here), and the Nashville/Memphis scene from the same time period.

The Seattle music scene in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s was more like a group of people who never expected to be famous.  The resulting attitude created something magical.  There are so many stories about people bumping into Eddie Vedder and spilling his beer, which only resulted in him buying the next round and asking you to sit at his table.  Or stories about sitting in American Music trying out a Gretsch and talking it over with Chris Cornell.  Or sharing a table with Jon Auer at the Still Life.

The attitude of Seattle was not the arrogance of King Making – for the most part – it was an attitude of commonality, community … of a unity that meant something beyond success.  Everyone was in this thing together. 

So there it was.  Nirvana was taking over the world; even though “10” came out a month before it, even though “Man In The Box” was a hit the year before, and even though many of us thought Nirvana was NOT the Seattle Sound.  Most people I knew thought The Fastbacks or Mudhoney were much better vanguards.  But there it was: Kurt Cobain was now what everyone in the world thought of when they heard “Seattle.”

Nirvana did, in fact, pave the way for many many bands and everyone who made a dollar from music in those days should be at least a little grateful … even if we might quibble about the particulars.

But in thinking back on it all this weekend I was struck by how many people I remembered being so very pivotal to the Seattle Scene but who never really got noticed.  So tonight I would like to raise my glass and send one out to my Home Town Heroes.  Some are famous, and some are not but in true Seattle tradition they all share an equal part of the praise.

The names that follow are responsible in part for making me who I am, but I would say they had a part in making many others, including some now-famous people, who they are also.            

Thank you one and all!

• Sam Vance (for being the renaissance soul Seattle too soon forgot it had) 
• Mark Naron (Still amazing and deft!)
• Stone Gossard (one of the best guitarists of our age)
• Michael Lord/Michael Lord Studios (For teaching us what sound really was)
• Don Carlson/Jet City Studios (for providing a place where aspiring musicians could find themselves - and audio engineers too)
• Matt Cameron (for showing that you can be great and still a person)
• Jon Auer
• Ken Stringfellow
• Charlie Kester
• Andrew Wood
• Bill Power (and)
• Jeff Ament (for teaching everyone that you could be a mean bass player and still artistic)
• Eddie Vedder
• William Azaroff (Seattle and Independent Film in Seattle would not have been any good without you)
• The OK Hotel
• Anne Willson
• Nancy Wilson
• My Sister’s Machine
• The Young Fresh Fellows
• The Kingsmen (I know, Portland – but still)
• Duffy Bishop and the Rhythm Dogs
• Geoff Tate
• Pike's Place Market (so ... very ... many ... hours ... there - still seems like home)

A piece of me will always belong to you all - and that deep cold Puget Sound.

And Kurt, rest in peace man.

Progress and nerves

So my rough sanding is 99% done.  Just have to sand the set-in jack area. Then it's fine sanding and sealing and painting.  But I have discovered the source of the sanding issue earlier.  Turns out The RGZ 621 is a butcher block construction with a lam on the top and bottom.  Not too bad.  The sound quality can be pretty good with butcher block construction.  The wood is good and gluing can make a joint that is as solid as a solid piece of wood.

But that laminate is a pain because it doesn’t take well to sanding.  So I have some rough spots were the lam wore thin (in this pic you can see it on the bevel where your right arm would cover when playing).  I think that I’ll have to do something like a sunburst to cover those places.

The problem I’m having is that I really like the natural color of the lam.  So I don’t know what I’m going to do quite yet.  I need to cover it the blemishes but I don’t want to go too dark.  
I did a test fit with the pickups and the floyd and the neck.  After this pic was taken I sanded the headstock so it's just wood - no words.

Also I’m not putting a pickup in the middle again so I don’t know what to do about that hole either.

It’s looking good though - better than pink at least … I think.  So nervous!

Big Day For Birthdays

Happy Birthday to:

Sting

Mike Rutherford

Don McLean

Eddie Cochran

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Leopold Widhalm (Luthier)

Notify My Next Of Kin

I have never NEVER had good luck with neck pickups.  It’s so hard to find a good tone.  And when you do finally find a pickup that should be right you have to decide if it will be good for your guitar’s body.  And then you have to deal with the fact that there are a gazillion bridge pickups sitting around the local Guitarget but the neck version you want is on backorder and should arrive just in time for your next of kin to read about it in your will.  All of this leads me to believe that people generally don’t pay attention to their neck tone as much as they do their bridge tone.  Too bad.  There's a lot of tone up there people!
This is one area where Fender has always had the advantage.  Fender, in my opinion, is King of the neck tone – second only to my beloved Les Paul standard loaded with a PAF.  But if you want a good crisp responsive single coil tone even my beloved Les Paul will not get you there; close but not quite there.
Then there is also the issue that even if you have a Strat the pickups could be cheap, like in a Mexi-Strat (which always makes me think of Mexi-Fries).  But let’s face it. Even in a Mexi-Strat that neck tone is giving you a lot of bang for your minimal buck.  Fender FTW.
The place that Fender can’t help you is if you want something in between: something that has that clear bell-like pounce like a fender but has the deep tone of a humbucker.  For that you pay Uncle Seymour or Rio Grande for something hot.  But you still never get over the fact that that thin winding of copper just never gets any wider in relationship to the sound field of the strings.  And that, THAT my friend, is why Gibson invented the P-90. 
The P-90 has a wider footprint and bar mags running across adjustable posts so you get the fat roll of a humbucker but it’s still a single coil so you get that attack of the single coil and the clarity of a Fender-type sound.
But they are noisy, and they are an odd size for a guitar that takes humbuckers.  And just when your head starts to hurt from all the hurdles there are to getting a good tone, Uncle Seymour steps in with the Phat Cat SPH90-1.  True, it’s not an exact p-90 replica but it’s pretty friggin’ close!  And the Phat Cat solves all the noise issues.  PLUS! They put the Phat Cat in a humbucker form factor so it can drop right into my superstrat!  Happy happy joy joy!
That is … after it gets in … because it’s on back order … waiting for Uncle Seymour to make one … because no one keeps them in stock for the neck position … because no one pays attention to their neck tone.
Sigh.

1943

The second world war is starting to wind to it’s inevitable conclusion.  While FDR, Stalin, and Churchill meet for the tenth major conference of WWII, Hitler decides that the key to victory is Nazi superiority in the air.  As a result Hitler orders the increased production of jet powered aircraft in particular fighter bombers.  Many great jet propelled vehicles were fashioned that year in Germany, including the Me 262, the Blohm & Voss BV 222 Wiking “Flying Boat”, and rocket powered bicycles.

Wait.  What!?

If we made a list of the great German inventors that came from the “rocket boom” of 1943, the list would have to include names like Hellmuth Walter, Dr. Hans von Ohain, and a twelve-year-old boy named Willi Lorenz Stich.  As near as I can tell Willi didn’t give a rip or even know about what Hitler was asking.  He only knew two things: one, rockets were awesome, and two, he didn’t really like to play the violin his mother made him play.

So on that day in 1943 when he finally hooked up his home made rockets to his bicycle and did his first test run I am willing to bet that he had dreams of grandeur running through his head.  Perhaps, those dreams distracted him – and that’s what caused him to crash and break his left hand in seven places. 
I am also willing to bet that when the initial shock wore off his first thought was “YES!  No more violin!”

Willi had limited movement in his hand after it healed so the violin was too difficult to play.  Willi, however, came from a musical family and so his parents insisted that he must play an instrument.  So, after a short stint with the trumpet he discovered that what was limited movement on the violin was perfectly workable for the guitar.  So Willi became a guitarist.  As he grew and post-war Germany started to find time for entertainment Willi started to become a well-known guitarist in jazz clubs.  He made such a name for himself he got an endorsement from a local guitar luthier and changed his name to Bill Lorenzo.  He was continually reshaping his sound by creating new pickups and new ways to make his guitar be heard over the horns in the bands he played in.

One night he went to the Castel bar to see a friend who was playing there and he struck up a conversation with the owner; a man by the name of EZ Wajcman.  They began talking about pickups and the things that Bill née WIlli, had done to get closer to that elusive Charlie Christian sound that all guitarists were trying to emulate back then.

Turns out EZ was a tinkerer as well.  They decided to build a pickup together and the spent the weekend working on it and by Monday they had what they considered a very fine pickup.

Now.

From here the story takes a turn.  Bill and EZ had a falling out at some point in the following years.  As a result each of their stories are very different and focus largely on discrediting the other.  The facts as far as I can tell are that EZ Wajman owns the name “Bill Lawrence” and the man who has now legally changed his name to Bill Lawrence has nothing to do with the Bill Lawrence company.

HOWEVER!

Bill Lawrence (formerly Willi the rocket boy) has made a career of improving the guitar.  He has worked for Gibson and many many other companies and has literally changed the face of technology for the guitar.  He is probably second only to Les Paul in that regard.  He does have his own business still and he makes pickups that are custom to a player’s needs and they are by all accounts amazing.

EZ Wajcman has been no slouch either.  He has taken the original designs and made pickup history with the Dimebag Darrel L-500 that Dimebag himself used in his "Cowboy From Hell" Dean custom guitar as well as other guitar luminaries like Nuno Bettencourt and Kim Thayil.

There is much dispute about who is the real genius but there seems to be a large amount of agreement that the pickups you get from either gentlemen are nearly identical except that Bill and his wife Becky will customize the pickups to suit you perfectly.

And with a history like THAT how could I not use these pickups!

The Tragedies of the 80's

OK.  I'm waddin' deep into snobby waters here.  I really am not trying to be snobby it's just that I feel strongly about this subject.
My friend and I have a great affinity for some 80's music.  There are a lot of good memories there and there were some good things that came from the 80's - but there are so very many bad things.
One of them was the idea that you had to paint every guitar.
I give you exhibit A:

This piece of wood was MADE to be stained and lacquered and then played.  Admittedly, it's not curly maple but it's gonna take a stain so nice and it's probably going to be more resonant too!
This guitar is gonna actually be pretty cool I think.
On the sad front I totally biffed the little area where the angle changes.  Sigh.  I might have to putty it - or maybe do a little black paint over that part.  I admit it.  I goofed up.  Do what I say not what I do.

Some definitions

A friend of mine just informed me that my snobby ways have tripped me up again and that I should give some definitions.

First off: I know I come off as a snob. I really struggle with that. I don’t really try to be a snob but I think that there is a difference between good and the marketed impression of good. And it’s not based on bias but on what is actually going on. For instance the combination of what naturally comes from the wood of a guitar and what your ear naturally hears is the measure of quality that I use for a good guitar sound.

But for each person a lot of that is based on what you like. So if you like the high-endie bright guitar sounds of like a Warrant type band or the muddy thickness of Nickleback I’m not saying you are wrong or that that’s a bad tone. I’m just into a different tone that’s all. I like really balanced tones that are expressive even when loaded with distortion. I think a guitar should be clear and precise across all 6 (or 7) strings. And each tonality from the highest note to the lowest note should be equal and just as clear as the last. And these qualities should be the same from no effects to when you have a metric tone of effects layered on like ice cream on pie.

There you go. Not trying to be a snob or elitist just looking for the best a guitar can give.

So some definitions:

Super Strat. Kind of a fuzzy term. Some people call them evolved strats. Basically the term just means that style of guitar that started happening in the 80’s when people wanted a strat because it’s the gold standard but they wanted something that would annoy their parents. We also wanted something that looked tough because we were beginning to realize that big hair and spandex was NOT masculine after all ;) . So it’s a guitar that has the general look of a strat but is elongated and “Rock-n-Rolled” out.

Floyd Rose. A Floyd Rose is the floating bridge system that Floyd Rose designed and built for a long time and Eddie Van Halen made famous. It was designed to overcome a lot of issues with the stock Fender floating bridge. In the 80’s and early 90’s it was considered standard. Basically you take a bar attached to the bridge and push down on it and it creates slack on the strings which effectively makes them longer which in turn makes the note of that string lower. On a standard floating bridge that would throw the guitar out of tune unless you were really really careful. Eddie (and the rest of the world of guitar) wanted to be able to get nuts with the bridge and make it dive bomb all the way until the strings were slack and then back up again and not have the tuning go out. So Floyd saved the day. There are a lot of other types of floating bridges out there but one thing that Floyd did that others didn’t was that he made his bridge really sensitive. So it’s very very expressive. You can use it to make the guitar more like the human voice instead of just yanking it around like a crazy person. I’ve used it on jazz gigs before even.

Tone woods. Hmm. This is tough. Basically, in my opinion there is no pickup in the world that can give you a sound that is not already in the wood of the guitar. Well, let’s change that. A pickup can either enhance the natural tone of the wood of your guitar or it can totally ignore it and make it sound like hell. There have been many popular guitarists who go the route of not paying attention to tone wood. Basically their sound comes from the pickup. I’m not into that. I want a good tone wood because, again, balance is the goal. And it isn’t even a factor of the type of music you play. There are a lot of examples of pickup oriented tone in the same genre as tone wood balanced with pickup oriented tones.

So basically what I’m saying is that pickups should be matched with the tone of the wood they are going into no matter the style of music you are playing.

So there you go. Some definitions for you. Next time I hope to talk about my pickup selection since it goes with these definitions so well. Might be interesting to talk a little about different sounds that come from different tone woods too.