The Second Guitar

Telecasters are for professionals. Julian Lage plays one. Everyone in Nashville plays one and has another as a backup. Show up with a Tele and people will assume you can play anything from chicken' picken' to Jimmy Page licks.

This is not me. Also, the neck is half a baseball bat, and I can't get on with it.

Jazzmasters are for indie guitarists, and I'm just a little too old to fall into that demographic. By a few decades. Also, a real Jazzmaster has the rhythm circuit control on the upper section of the body, and quite a few of the Fender models don't now. The Squires do, and the Fender Vintera's. I played a Vintera a few months ago, and it needed to be better finished for the £1,000 price tag. Sounded nice. Then there's all that stuff about how the bridge is not the best design, and the neck needs re-setting to make it better. Maybe not.

But still, and all, never say never. And also, I need a single-coil guitar with Fender wiring. The McCarty is double-humbuckers with Gibson wiring.

I was browsing the Regent Sounds website, which goes under "day-dreaming", and came across something only a guitar nerd could love. A mash-up of a Jazzmaster (body, neck, headstock and neck pickup) with a Telecaster (bridge pickup and ashtray, selector switch and controls).

You know when you see the girl across the room and know you have to talk to her?

That feeling. Well, nearly.

Except about a guitar.

(Musicians are not normal people. Amy Winehouse even wrote a song about a new guitar.)

So the next time I was in town, I wandered down Denmark Street, like I had any right to, and into Regent Sounds. They set me up with a Fender Blues Junior, and I noodled around for a while. Yes, it balanced on my knee. No, it did not weigh 9lbs or so. It sounded good. I knew I was going to buy it.

So I did.

And eventually, UPS delivered it.

It sounds and plays real good.

Here it is...

Worst Photo Ever

It's a big claim, but I think this one is a pretty good contender. 

It's boring to look at - oh look! a bush! and water! - it's has far too much shadow and is black in places it should not be dark in. The sky isn't quite blown out, but neither is quite convincing. How much did the X-E4 and lens cost? Getting value for money then.

I should have taken the shot with my iPhone, which would have given me this.

 

It's not from the phone, but it is as close as I can get with Photos to that eerie iPhone sky and foreground clarity. Shadows is maxed out and Brilliance tweaked down a touch. It's a much better-looking shot, and probably bears a strong resemblance to what I actually saw, which was something like this...

The sky is slightly fuzzy, but that is what midday glare does to our eyes. The shadows under the bush are more realistic, but overdone in the trees in the background.

I would never have taken that photo with the OM10 and Kodak ISO 200, or if I had, I would have focused on the bush and water, and tried to keep the sky out of the frame. Keeping the dynamic range low was something else we did by instinct back in the day even though we didn't know it was called that.

But with a super-clever digital camera, for some reason, I expect to be able to point the lens at whatever mess is in front of it and have the camera sort it out. Wrong. The old rules still apply. When shooting JPEG. (1)

And if I do follow the old-school rules, any big-brand camera will produce a really nice JPEG.

My candidate for Worst Photo Ever is not such a one. Not only is it technically poor, and shot with no care at all, it's not very interesting to look at. Green, right?

There's a reason why hip street photographers don't take photographs of what's left of Epping Forest - in this case a little corner of Highams Park Lake. Trees have lots of shadows created by the leaves. All those leaves are the same colour, but some reflect the light and others bounce it around, depending on where the sun is. Trees do not have neat geometrical shapes, and make a poor background for someone in a red coat striding purposefully from the shadows on the left to the light on the right. As opposed to a staircase in the Barbican, say. Or a street scene with a nice even light and some not-too-deep shadows.

Anyway, the weather looks highly un-photogenic for the next few weeks, so I won't be taking the X-E4 anywhere soon. And I will not be taking another photograph of anything green or plant-like when I do.



(1) Why? Digital cameras can create RAW files and JPEGs. RAW files are a copy of the data from the sensor, and need to be processed to be at all pleasing, so processing the messy bits out is all one with processing the nice bits in. RAW requires a monthly subscription to Lightroom or Capture One, and either putting in a heap of time developing one's own presets to turn the dull RAW file into something worth looking at, or putting in a heap of time experimenting with other people's presets. 

JPEGs are the camera's attempt at doing all that processing for the user, using the photo-relevant camera settings and algorithms the camera engineers have devised. Here's the thing: Apple has way more engineers working on that sensor data-to-JPEG / HEIC conversion than Fuji, Sony, Panasonic, or any other mere camera maker will ever be able to afford, and the iPhone has a chip way more capable than a camera chip will ever be, so the resulting computational photography will produce far superior conversions of RAW-to-JPEG / HEIC than the camera makers ever will. (Given a reasonable amount of taste on behalf of the engineers and product manager.) The camera companies are still comparing their gear to top-end film cameras, and may be missing the part where we-the-customer will be comparing it with what the top-end phones do.

The Looming Walkie-Talkie, Fenchurch Street

 

It looks like some weird Photoshopping, but it is what the camera sees. It looks just like that.

30 Fenchurch Street

 

Does what it says on the tin.

60 Great Tower Street

They were the only two who came into the office that Friday.

 

The One With Reflections In The Window

 

I like a good reflection shot. The original has some awkward perspective issues, so I dug out DxO Perspective and corrected it. 

How To Get A Katana To Sound Almost Like A Valve Amp

(Ingredients: a BOSS Katana, a 10-band EQ pedal or 10-band EQ effect in a digital effects board (DEB), guitar of your choice. Has been tested with humbuckers, not yet with single-coils.)

Valve amps have that sound. It pops and snaps, it's clean and clear and as crisp as fresh winter frost.

Which is no-one's description of the sound of a BOSS Katana.

Well, I'm here to tell you how to make a Katana sound like a valve amp. Nearly.

On the 10-band EQ control, add at least 10dB to the 2kHz, 4KHz and 8kHz bands. (Unless you are a bat or a teenager, you will not hear the 16kHz stuff, but change that if you want). I find the 2kHz and 4kHz bands are better at +12.5dB, but your ears may vary. 

The EQ control should be the last one in the chain (except for a compressor). 

Connect the output from the EQ pedal or DEB into the POWER AMP IN socket on the back of the Katana. This by-passes all the pre-amp and effects and sends the signal straight to the power-amp. The only controls that affect the sound are the power selector and the MASTER volume control. Put the power selector to 25W and the MASTER volume at 12:00. Alter to taste later - according to how much oomph your pickups provide.

Turn the guitar volume and tone pots to 7 or so. (I turn the volume up on the  McCarty SE, because the lower the volume pots are set, the less audible the effect of coil-splitting, tone-adjustment, and distortion effects from the HX Effects.)

Strike a note.

It should be whoa, that was sudden, or something similar. It should also sound a whole lot more like a valve amp. 

Tweak the volume on the amp to make it more neighbour-friendly (but not so much the sound hides away in the speakers. I find that happens before 10:00 on the dial.)

What's going on? 

The frequency response curve of a 12-inch Celestion Gold (available on the Celestion website), the kind of speaker used in valve amps, is

 (All their speakers have a broadly similar curve. Actually, so do all guitar speakers.) 

It comes on song around G on the low E-string, is reasonably consistent all the up to the 18th fret of the high E-string, and then has strong(er) area between 2kHz and 5kHz, after which the response drops off a cliff. 

Guitars produce a trail of harmonics, many less than 10 dB down from the base frequency. Reproducing the sound of a guitar properly means making sure those harmonics are amplified equally. Up to 5kHz, the Celestion Gold is giving good treatment to the first, second and third harmonics of all the notes on the guitar, and to at least the fourth harmonics of notes below middle-C (concert pitch - 2nd string 1st fret) - except for the harmonics between and 1kHz - 1.8kHz, where it's a bit soft.

The Katana speaker is not a Celestion. BOSS say it was designed to match the amplifier. My guess is that the Katana speaker remains flat up to 2kHz and then drops about 10dB - 15dB to 5kHz, when it too drops off a cliff, as all guitar speakers will. (Google can't find anything under various variations on "Katana speaker response curve", so BOSS will have to live with my speculations.)

To correct for that slump between 2kHz and 5kHz, we need to boost the frequencies in that range, which is what my suggestion does.

Give it a whirl.

(Edited 6/11/2024)