Why Two Strats (Teles, Les Paul's) Sound So Different (It's NOT the Tonewood)

Why can two guitars from the same model range, allegedly with the same pickups, tuners and switches, sound just different enough so that you prefer one over the other? Shouldn't they be the same? Because modern manufacturing techniques? I watched a couple of videos on how guitar pots are constructed, and very enlightening it was.



There's a sweeper arm attached to the knob, which runs over a ring of resistive material. At both ends are bits of bare metal that the sweeper can reach. One of those ends is at 1 and the other is at 10. At those positions, there is no resistance. As soon as the sweeper gets wholly on to the resistive ring, there's resistance. (Half-on and half-off, the electricity sees the zero resistance half-off bit and goes down that path, so the sweeper is not on the ring until it's all on the ring.) This why there is the well-known leap in tone or volume change on reaching 0 or 10. Personally, I think that's bad design, but there it is masquerading as a feature.

It seems guitar manufacturers think that 10% variation on the resistance of the pots and the capacitance of the cap is acceptable. This means one guitar might have a 550k ohm pot and another a 450k ohm pot, which is more than 20% different, which you will be able to hear. A 0.022 microfarad capacitor (a popular choice for tone controls) would vary from 0.0198 to 0.0242 microfarads, and that makes a difference of e.g. 3,000 ohms (!) in the reactance to A440, which is 16%, and that will also be noticeable.

That's why one Fender or Gibson sounds better than another, because the components vary so widely. (Paul Reed Smith says we can go into any guitar store anywhere in the world, pick out the same make and model of his guitars, and it will sound the same. Which if it is true means his manufacturers are doing some wicked quality control. If so, how did they miss the dry solder joint in my 594?)

But here's the thing.

The difference between any two guitars played through the same amp with the same settings is most noticeable when playing clean, and with either wide-open or mid-point dial settings. Reverb and delay blur the details, as does modulation (chorus, flanger, tremolo, phaser, univibe), and once the distortion goes beyond edge-of-breakup, no-one can tell the difference between a £100 Harley Benton S-style and a £6,000 Les Paul. Add enough effects and no-one can tell if you are playing a Custom Shop Jazzmaster or a Squire 335. A few dozen kilo-ohms difference between the pot values will vanish in the noise.

So that, I think, is why guitar-makers feel they can get away with what hi-fi manufacturers would blanche at. Anyway, this is about tradition, and traditional construction was even more erratic. Manufacturing has come a very long way since 1980 and even 1990, but guitar electrics did not seem to join the ride.

If Fender is prepared to use skanky (because that's what taking kit from the 10% bin is) guitar pots, why wouldn't they do the same for their amp pots? Makes a mockery of all those settings for this and that tone (you know, "to get that so-and-so sound, use 5 on the treble, 6 on the mid-range and 3 on the bass") because the writer's 5 may well be my 6 or 4. It really amounts to no more than "keep twiddling, it's around there somewhere".

90mm Prime Photos

So I have been out and about with the 90mm prime, and liking the results. This one is an official London Street Photography shot, for which I get 50 points,

and this one demonstrates why taking photos in London when Spring has sprung is so difficult. Everywhere you turn there's a big splotch of green blocking the details. It doesn't go away until autumn.

And it is great for getting close-ups of dogs who just love going for a walk in the Thames.

How To Overthink A New Guitar

The Les Paul and Flying V are religious icons. If you want to drop a Flying V at my place, I will not turn it away. The SG looks like Batman's ears. The 3XX-series look like workmanlike hollow-bodies for session players. The Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Explorer, and others, look quirky and interesting. We will pass over those Ibanez with long curly horns, Strandbergs, Mayones, headless guitars, and other weird modern stuff. Also 7-strings. Gretsch's and the like are too big and hefty for my old shoulders. Anything with a Bigsby is just... why?

There are two basic electric guitar sounds: humbuckers (Gibson) and single-coils (Fender). There are variations of single-coils - Strat, Tele, Jazzmaster, P90 - and each has a slightly different clean tone, but sound very similar when going into distortion, as this shows...



Humbuckers are the same: a common characteristic sound with differences around the edges which fade when going into distortion. Watch this...



Can split humbuckers can get close enough to a single-coil sound? Well, watch this...



Three things from this. The Strat was always identifiable, but only just; in the final section, all of them could have been Les Pauls, because that's what distortion does; otherwise split-coil is more or less the same as single-coil (because that's what coil splits do, only take output from one of the humbucker coils).

Turns out the PRS McCarty's have coil taps, not splits. Here's the difference...



My PRS McCarty 594 SE ticks the double-humbucker and coil tap boxes. The Paranormal Tele kinda ticks the offset look and Tele / Jazzmaster pickups. In theory that leaves P90's, about which someone said...

When compared to Fender-style single-coils, P90s are noticeably fatter and warmer. They don't have quite the same sparkling top end or quack, but they compensate with a more substantial midrange and beefier low end

Okay, so given the range of tones I have recently understood I can get by making the 594 and Princeton do tone acrobatics, I'm not sure this is going to fill any gaps. P90 guitars are expensive unless it's a Yamaha Revstar, weighing around 9lb, or a Sire L7V New Gen which is a Les Paul shape and maybe heavy as well.

I would like a Jaguar or a Mustang (who wouldn't)? But. The affordable ones do not have the original toggle switches and circuitry. Guitars with the original circuitry cost over £2,000 even in the second-hand market. Without the extra switching, it is not quite the real deal. I'm not a collector.

So to fill what I'm missing in the sounds I have, I need a Strat. So, now, uh, this is where it gets awkward.

The Fender Stratocaster is the most played electric guitar in music history. Yet 1) the whammy bar is in the wrong place; 2) the tremolo goes out of tune too easily; and 3) the controls are in the wrong place; 4) Fender's quality control is erratic, on a wall of the same model Strat, no two will sound the same; 5) it does not look cool. Yes, you read that right. It's too long in the waist. Those horns are disconcertingly thick close up. Some of the headstocks can be over-large. It’s a bloke’s guitar, and I’m not a bloke.

By contrast the Telecaster is discreetly, unutterably, cool. Zippo lighter cool. Ray-Ban cool. Lou Reed played one for years. The Boss plays one. Julian Lage plays one. The Tele came in a vision from God to Leo Fender. It is the guitar that shows up and plays. Hell, Mike Bloomfield played one at that notorious Dylan Newport gig. Ralph Macchio uses one in the duel with Steve Vai in Crossroads. What more do you want?

Well, those position 2 and 4 Strat tones for one thing.

The Player II series offers chambered Strats and Teles, putting them within my weight requirement, so a visit to Epsom or Guildford is in the offing.

There's birthdays, and un-birthdays, and Christmas and un-Christmas. Plenty of occasions.

Re-Thinking Zoom Lenses (And Getting A Fuji 90mm Prime)

Buying a zoom lens for the X-E4 has been in the Pending tray over the winter, and I've taken it out now. Which means watching more YT reviews. Now play this (for about ten seconds to get the point)



and if that doesn't remind you of an extending p***s to you, I can guarantee it will to someone on a London street. Those zooms look like a neat package tucked away, but whip one out and give it a yank, and it's damn nearly fourteen inches long. That's going to make the ladies turn their heads and not in a good way. Everyone for about fifty yards around will see you waving it around, peering down the EVF and think you are going to invade their... privacy. On a tripod, with the flip-screen flipped, and operating the shutter with a cable so there's no obvious contact between you and the camera, it may just pass, but tripods mean "professional photography" for which you may need a licence from the Council - you need one from the Port of London Authority to shoot with a tripod on their river and riverbanks.

I can't, I just can't. I had zoom lenses for my OM-10 back n the day and none of them behaved like extending p***ses. Maybe in the country or by the sea with no-one watching, but in Covent Garden? You try and let me know how it works out for you.

So there went my plan to get a zoom lens for the X-E4. No-one makes discreet internal zooms for X-Mount. Yet. I would imagine it would cost a whole lot of money even by the standards of Fuji lenses. If I'm going to zoom, and a lot of the better shots I took in the past were zoomed to nearly the max on my Panasonic DMZ-TZ40, I'm going to need a smaller lens. For instance the Panasonic Lumix TZ99, with a 4/3's 20.2 MP sensor and a max 30x optical zoom. That's around £520 on Amazon, and MPB only has one at near-full price, which means a) nobody buys this, or b) having bought it, nobody wants to sell it. One is very bad and one is very good.

Another plan is to get the longest X-Mount prime I can find / afford, which turns out to be the Fujifilm XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR, which costs £949 new from Fuji and around £480 - £500 on MPB. Fuji prices, right? A while back Roman Fox (and a whole bunch other people, damn the algorithm) did a video on how much he liked this lens, so there's that. The plan would be to use it as the daily driver for the rest of the year, as I use the 27mm (40mm equivalent) pancake now. Learn to see and take 90mm (135mm equivalent) shots.

Or I could do both, but my concern is that if I did get the TZ99, I might never use the X-E4 again, which would be silly. So I did my first order with MPB for the XF 90mm, which arrived presto by DPD. Here's the first couple of decent shots with it...

No cropping, just framing. I had not realised that all those great candid people shots from other people I like were all taken with a telephoto lens.

I could still get the TZ99 later and both bits of kit would have cost no more than a new XF 90mm, so I wouldn't really be spending more. (Which is called "Hobbyist economics".)

Why I'm Stopping My MUBI Subscription

I have been subscribed to the online streaming service MUBI for a LONG TIME - since autumn 2018 according to my viewing history page. It has a contemporary art-house catalogue, occasionally runs a good retrospective (I caught up with a lot of Rossellini movies thanks to that), and sponsors new movies, in part I guess by giving them distribution. I saw some good movies through it.

But for the last couple of years when I run through the catalogue, I have not thought "oh wow, yes, must watch that". Instead I've thought "Seems okay, I could if I didn't need to wash my hair right now" or "Jesus... 165 minutes?" or "Sorry, not interested in the tribulations of a transexual in Baghdad". I'm of the age when "art movie" meant France, Germany, Sweden, American indie, Italian, Kurusawa and Ray. Simpler times.

There's something cutely undergraduate film society about MUBI's choice of films and its descriptions. Whoever writes them has definitely drunk the post-modern feminist everything-is-power-relations Kool Aid, and may go on to a job writing comments for the Tate Modern or National Gallery. Whereas all they really need to do is say "contains Adele Exarchopolos" and I'm in, now that La Reine Isabelle is no longer making movies. Let's say that the pre-occupations of today's film-makers are not mine. I'm watching the Battlestar Galactica box-set again at breakfast.

I watch new movies in the cinema, and part of that is the whole going-to-the-Curzon thing (i'm not really an Everyman Man).

Also, MUBI is a subscription service. I have access to the Curzon catalogue, because Sis very kindly for Christmas bought me a Curzon membership (which pays for itself with the free movies) through which I can watch a movie for what amounts to a nominal rental. The films it has now are more interesting to me than the MUBI films, though there is some overlap.

So I have just pressed the button on "Cancel Subscription" in my iPhone settings. Not really because I needed to save the money, but to stop there being one more thing I should be doing but am not.

Film Emulation Bracketing (on Fuji X-E4)

Bracketing on the X-E4. I kinda knew what it was - it takes three pictures of the same scene with one parameter varying - but wasn't sure what I would do with it. Until I saw it did film emulation bracketing. Suddenly I could take lots of shots with three different film emulations and compare them.

The Standard / Velvia / Astia emulations can produce a lot of shadow, which it often takes shoving the Shadow Adjustment clear over to 1.0 to reduce. Those algorithms produce way more shadow that the human eye sees, or maybe the eye does some computational photography as well, just not as egregious as Apple's. A first pass through convinced me that Monochrome was way more to my taste than ACROS, and that the Eterna was, well, wintery

 

Summer (Astia)

Winter (Eterna)

Now take a look at these, taken on the Regent's Canal

Astia - feels like now

Eterna Bypass - feels like 1975 

Monochrome - feels like a quiet day in 1930

Which conveys the majesty of St Pauls better?

Personally, I prefer the Monochrome version of these

If you have film emulation bracketing on your camera and have never tried it, give it a whirl. In the end, I think I arrived almost where I started from: Astia is fine, I've added some HDR tweaks from You Tube, and I must pay more attention to the range of brightness in the frame. Like I did when shooting film back in the day.

Somewhere in Soho

I leave this one with no comment. It doesn't need one. Eterna, Fuji X-E4 with 27mm pancake lens.