What Black-and-White Excels At

 A kid, his Dad, a bloke walking down stairs, some random lines... in colour it would be... meh. For some reason, in black-and-white, it really works. The people are more significant than they would be in colour.

Happy Christmas

 

Tone is Not (Only) In The Fingers

Everyone says tone is in the fingers.

Here's an experiment.

Take your guitar with your favourite schredmeister tone.

Play My Favourite Things, you know, the song Coltrane made a hit.

Uh-huh.

You sound like a guy playing My Favourite Things with a metric tonne of distortion.

Not a wicked schredmeister.

A mixture of sound effects only becomes a tone when it fits the style of music.

Only the Blues can survive anything from an acoustic to heavy fuzz. Everything else only works within a fairly narrow range of tonal variation.

Choose the genre you are playing, and within that, what the song demands.

There is a cottage industry of people creating effects, from downloadable settings for modelling amps, to complicated plug-ins for DAWs.

I'm going to leave DAWs for now, so this is about getting tones from an amp and/or pedals.

The starting point is easier for most guitarists than it sounds: to judge by what the majority of YT guitar guys say, we take up the guitar because we want to play like (enter name of hero(s) here).

I was horribly mislead in my early years by wanting to sound like John McLaughlin, who has himself at one time said he’s what people who don’t play guitar think is a good guitarist. I have no urge to be a virtuoso. Allan Holdsworth leaves me cold (I know, I will be saying several Hail Marys later), as do all the heavy metal shredders and a lot of the jazz virtuosi. Playing hundreds of notes a minute and permuting arpeggios is what people with no musical ideas do. Not that I want to be controversial or anything. Shredding is the rock / metal version of those be-bop solos that relay on playing arpeggios. Done well it sounds and can be impressive, but it’s one of the first styles that will turn up as an AI plug-in.

I liked what Indian raga players did, those long slowly-developing single-string improvisations based around some traditional changes and themes. It has moments of high skill, but always at the service of the groove music.

I prefer Bert Jansch to John Renbourn, even though it is obvious Renbourn has the superior technique. The players I admire most are Neil Young, Larry Carlton, Eric Clapton, Dave Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Cropper, and Frank Zappa before he started shredding. None of those guys play fast, all of them play intense, sometimes funky, and even melodic. All of them can do the important thing, which is make one note count.

All of them were fussy as heck about their instruments and sound. If you want to make one note count, you kinda gotta be fussy about tone.

The search for tone is also the search for soloing style. By now I was realising that what I did / do on the acoustic was NOT going to translate to a Les Paul.

But let's start by getting a) a decent clean tone, b) a decent distortion-y Blues tone, c) some nice Ambient-y sounds.

Another Classic Street Photograph, London Bridge

 

Yep, the one with the guy turned into a black shadow against strongly-lit stone buildings.

First Sessions With The Les Paul

Okay. Les Pauls are a touch zaftig.

All electric guitars are heavy, but Les Pauls are the king of heavy. There's a Rhett Schul video about buying a Les Paul, and he weighed the ones he was trying out. 3.8 kg. I paused the video and weighed mine on the bathroom scales. 4.1 kg, just over nine pounds. I weighed my acoustic for comparison, 1.2 kg.

At first it kept sliding to the right from my knee. Was this a bad guitar? Was I doing something wrong? Did I need to wear a strap? All the cool guys in the videos had their LPs resting naturally on their right leg with nothing holding it. Maybe I wasn’t cool enough to do this?

Then I picked up the acoustic, and was reminded it was neck-heavy, so my left arm held it up slightly. Muscle memory that transferred itself to the Les Paul. Which is body-heavy and so kept sliding off, because I was lifting the neck. So I made myself hold the neck down and it stayed on my lap. That took a few hours to become natural. Playing a musical instrument is a lot about getting the physical relationship to it so it becomes a part of you.

Here's something else no-one will talk about.

Electric guitars do not sound great out of the box.

Unless you know what you're doing, which as a first-time buyer, I didn't.

Out of the box, electric guitars sound pretty... meh. When I was choosing in the shop, I was choosing between one meh and another. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Now began the real learning curve with electric guitars.

The Search for Tone. Learning how to play the amplifier and pedals.

Another Classic Street Photography shot, Waterloo Station

 

I really am starting to understand how those B&W guys took so many evocative shots.

In Which I Buy an Epiphone Les Paul Standard

Yep.

I am now a two-guitar household. I've been noodling on that steel-string acoustic since about 1972. I bought it from a music shop in Kingston that has long since gone. It cost the equivalent of £325 in today's money, which is bit more than half the price of the Martins it's a copy of. I never intended to play live: it was for personal pleasure. I never had (or never made) the time to dedicate to learning licks, chords and the like.

I'd been thinking about buying an electric guitar for some time. After watching a few YT videos on guitars, I realised something, and while looking up stuff for this, I found a Fred Frith quote that says it very well:

There is actually no such thing as an electric guitar. This [holding up his modified Gibson ES-345] is not really an instrument...it doesn’t become an electric guitar until I plug it in. And also send it through whatever I want to send it to [indicating his pedalboard]. It’s only this, plus that, plus that [pointing to amplifier], which is an electric guitar.

So if it's my first electric guitar, I have to buy the amp and some pedals as well. (Well, duh!)

Now here's the surprise.

The price of an iPhone 13 Pro with 256GB RAM is £1,049.

A perfectly acceptable, brand-name, entry-level electric guitar, and a perfectly-acceptable brand-name amp, can be had for less than that.

Epiphone (aka Gibson), Mexican Fender (aka Fender), plus a cheaper Vox or Fender amp.

Less than an iPhone. That you have in your pocket.

So towards the end of September, I boarded the train for Epsom, where there is a branch of GuitarGuitar.

What? You expected me to go to Chandler’s. You think I’m rich or something?

Having watched a whole bunch of YT videos, I intended to buy a Mexican (Fender) Telecaster. You know, the twangy one that country players use. Because I’ve always liked the look of Teles and with the right strings and pedals they can be made to sound not like a country guitar. I didn’t want a Strat or an ES335, as those are for people who are going to play live.

Here's the most important thing about buying your first electric guitar: if you know someone who knows their way round electric guitars, pedals and amplifiers, take them with you. This is not a something you can figure out from reviews. I don't so I couldn't, but you should.

Here's the second thing: don't sweat it too much. You might buy The One. But it probably won’t be. It’ll be good, or you wouldn’t have bought it, but it’s not going to be the only one. I may only buy one because of my mature years, but you youngsters are going to buy more than one. And you’ll maybe trade in the first and others.

When you buy the second one, you will have a much clearer idea of what you want in terms of feel, tone, interaction with your amp and pedals, and all that other stuff. The first time is an experiment.

I tried this Tele, that Tele, something else, I may even have tried a Strat, I nearly tried an ES335...

I came away with an Epiphone Les Paul Standard.

For those who aren't familiar, Les Pauls are at the opposite end of any guitar spectrum you want to construct from a Telecaster.

The Les Paul felt right, more comfortable than the Fenders: this is because Les Pauls have a neck length about the same as acoustics. So it felt familiar. Humbuckers have a fatter sound than single-coil (I knew that, but I didn’t know how much fatter it was.) and I was used to the rounder tones of an acoustic. And damn, Telecasters are twangy.

Delivered it the next day. Along with a 50W BOSS Katana (I don’t need 50 watts, but it gets me all sorts of electronic gadgetry), a 3m cable, a replacement set of strings so I don’t buy 11 gauge from sheer habit, and a strap with locking loops. I have picks.