zenmindbeginner

I literally stopped bending strings so dang much on Gibson scale guitars. If I can slide into or out of a note instead of a bend, I do it. Worse case scenario would be a bend on record, but a slide live (I obviously don’t play live so YMMV). The worst thing for me was replacing bluesy and emotional bending with actual fucking licks... I’m self taught and don’t know theory, don’t know any chords or know any scales. My first iteration as a guitarist was a Kirk Hammett “Kill em” All” era clone (LOTS of whole step bending)... my next was a grunge era Mike McReady/DeLeo clone (LOTS of whole step bending)... basically my solos were comprised of mostly blooz bends in the 80s and 90s. Coming up with actual licks was like pulling teeth with me... not easy. I wish I had some tips but I’ve tried everything I can get my hands on and nothing ever works. I do happily bend single notes on my Floyd Rose equipped guitars... no pedal steel, unison or adjacent bends involving more than one string though. These bending limitations really fucking suck IMHO.

Lindley used his own amps when recording despite Browne’s Dumbles being available. Yet when Rick Vito played for Jackson, he used a Dumble. I’m not the best Jackson Browne expert but Rick played the iconic solo on “Tender is the Night” and those great double stops on “Somebody’s baby”... in fact most of Browne’s 80’s stuff has Rick on it, just not “That Girl Could Sing”. Rick Vito used a Dumble for the masterful and epic slide solo to Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock”. Use these tones as a guideline for the “D” sound. picture in your mind a Vox’s crushed glass overdrive paired with a Fender’s clean sparkle and a Marshall’s detailed compression... you get an amplifier that can transmit the most minute of sonic details and deliver them with flair and authority.

I went from 1986-2007 with only one guitar and it was a Hamer. Now I own multiple Hamers (mostly USA but one MIK) & a couple of partscasters based around Fender USA necks... oh and a travel guitar that is a GFS Xaviere. Hamer guitars are an incredible value... the sort of Hamer you can get for less than $1500 used is miles above any other USA brand. I’m pretty Loyal to Hamer.

I could have done a waaaay better demo. Iommi licks are an essential part of my style. Garbage tone and flat lifeless playing. I hate the way there is zero sustain but think this pedal might be a lot better than the video shows... I could be wrong though. Rangemaster fans are some of the best people.

Yup! I use a stack of Post-its... easy to get the exact perfect height.

It’s all about the “feel” to me. The “feel” of an electric guitar to me, is the way the pickup hears the notes that I am playing. The pickup is the first timbral shift you can experience in the chain from our hands all of the way down to the speaker’s output. This timbral shift should be the one that you desire and allows your playing style to come through as closely to your expectations as it possibly can. The magnets + how they are charged + the type of wire used + how it is wound around the bobbins + the materials of the poles, baseplate & spacer ALL contribute to a pickup’s sound and most importantly how a pickup “feels”. Our hands touching the strings is translated to millivolts of energy by the pickup... how the pickup translates your physical force into electrical energy means EVERYTHING. All of this requires a set of ears to perceive and if one’s ears aren’t interested in discerning these nuances... they simply won’t be heard or even perceived. Ham fisted players that don’t vary their playing force won’t have a need for subtle changes in sound and timbre... not much need for the hair splitting that some pickup swaps provide in their case. It’s also about what role the guitar will be playing in the mix and in the setting of a band. If the guitar is sort of a secondary instrument to a keyboard or electronic arrangement, there might not be a need for subtlety since all of that gets lost when the guitar isn’t front and center in the mix. Let’s look at EVH. In his band, his guitar rarely if ever competes with any other element than DLR’s vocals... only one guitar and solos get no underlying rhythm guitar... EVH is naked, all eyes and ears are on his guitar track. Which makes the subtleties of his tone readily apparent. We can hear EVERYTHING. So his choice of pickups is fantastically and widely debated. Plus there is the use of ambience and effects. Some guitar players wear sonic spandex bodysuits and some wear sonic trench coats. The more naked a guitar player’s tone... the more subtlety we can perceive as listeners. Subtleties like pick attack and the quality of the attack, how it breathes and contracts, how the note blooms afterwards, the harmonic content of the pick attack and the texture of the attack are all incredibly important to some players and indeed some listeners. All of this sums up into the aggregate quality of tone... and could very well translate into the quality of a given song. A lot of time, it just differs into vintage, medium and high output pickups. Even the least discernible players will react to a change in feel between these three output types. How each output hits the front end of an amplifier is another matter... certain pickups jive better with certain speakers + amp combinations but that equation is crossed with one’s playing style and pedalboard rig as well. Besides all of that, certain genres of music were put on the map by players using a certain type of guitar loaded with a specific type of pickup. Attempting to emulate these styles using the wrong pickup can often translate into tonal inaccuracy. Rarely do metal players use vintage output single coils... and rarely do country players use high output humbuckers. Lots to chew on here. Lemme know if I need to clarify or expand on anything.

Your music was always good... but is it just me or is it getting even better?!? I enjoyed this tune and jammed the hell out of it. Sounds like it would be perfectly at home on WREK 91.1FM. If your music is getting even better then what does this say about your commitment and determination? I’d say you are on your way to where you wanna be... your hard work and perseverance is just flat out paying off. Great video too!

Plenty of songs have a peak at the bridge... no probs with that idea at all. I really dig the tune. I like the “feel” and vibe which is maybe the most important aspect of a song IMHO. Good vocals and you’re really getting the double track thing down... there are so many ways to accomplish this but how in particular did you get that effect? I think it’s a quality song. For some odd reason I think it would make a great “Synthwave” song. Right now, it’s a sort of laid back - California - late 70s soft rock arrangement... sort of the target Sugar Ray was reaching for in the mid-ish ‘90s with Someday & Every Morning. Those songs punctuated their vibe with breaks containing small and simple ornamental licks. You might want to figure out how to periodically get people’s attention with little breaks or whatnot but in the end it’s a good song & you should be proud of it.

Got my vote!

Church of the Cosmic Skull Band is out of Nottingham and is doing a sort of Polyphonic Spree thing... maybe more tongue in cheek? But maybe not... they might be an actual attempt at a psychic revolution. Music is easy to listen to, fairly straight up rock music, is simple to understand and is quite catchy. I absolutely dig that band! Fusion is my jam. Not sure why there is two guitarists though... one's playing and tone is waaaaay better than the other guy.. I'd rather hear the keyboard player step up and do that with his right hand. I'll bet the worst guitarist has all of the connections. lolz +1000000 for the Hamer Talladega content. The dude smokes.

I suppose the nice dried wood seems to stay in tune a bit better than the wood that hasn't been as carefully dried. I don't think that Cort guitars can afford to dry their wood like the high end manufacturers can. Of course I can make even the finest guitar sound out of tune. I play guitar like a boxer boxes. I like to put a little sting or heat into every note unless I am deliberately playing lightly. All of that force just whacks any guitar I play out of tune... I attribute that ham fisted playing style to my roots in thrash metal. I started out playing thrash metal for the first couple of years. I was obsessed with Metallica, Anthrax and Slayer... I also had friends who were into hardcore music and listened to a lot of that stuff too... D.R.I., Agnostic Front, Wehrmacht etc. Oh SHIT! I was describing the break in the song and you were referencing a different part. Lolz That tremolo whammy wham-work actually just flowed into the next lick and there was an overlay where the whammy part went down and out while the next lick started playing. I suppose I should note that my solos are written phrase by phrase... I record it phrase by phrase too. Its not a secret that my videos are "play-throughs" right? I record the song and then painstakingly set-up each camera angle for each shot. I usually only manage to do a camera angle or two a day. I have to absolutely NAIL my parts during the play through and if I make a mistake, I do another take. It's a laborious and time consuming process. In the old days I would chain together endless licks and then by the time I get ready to shoot the video, I forgot the initial parts I laid down. lolz! Nowdays, I limit my licks to just enough for the song but not enough for me to have a hard time remembering the individual licks. The worst thing is that I have to play outside of my actual style for these demos... which makes them a good bit harder to remember. If left to my own devices, I will just sound like Kirk Hammett. lolz For slide, I am always chasing the Ozark Mountain Daredevil's "Jackie Blue.".. not emulating any blues guys, Duane Allman, Derek Trucks or anything like. Those slinky and haunting licks dug deep into my soul and I am obsessed with re-creating that vibe as many places that I can in my solos. Sorry for the mixup... all of that stuff I mentioned was for the break in the middle of the song. Ooops I am sorry I led us down a rabbit hole. I'm pushing 5 foot 8 but have the hands of someone 5 foot 6... not only that, but I have slender fingers without much meat on them. My daughter's hands are literally the same size as mine and she is fucking 5 foot 1 (obviously her Mom has big ol' hands. lolz). I get all of my force from my shoulders and arms. My skinny fingers help my hands to not seem so small visually. From my memory of seeing a picture of you that you have heavily muscled forearms and seemed to be of normal height? Am I wrong, are you shorter than 5 foot 9? You definitely look strong as an ox! You are pretty dang tall... but you might just enjoy the comfortable feel of the V profile. You might not have the longest fingers but I'll bet your mitts are plenty big. Yep, the tension would be similar to .009 in standard tuning just a slightly different feel as far as the diameter of the string goes.

Oh shit.. this more neutral lower light picture shows the telltale red hue of alder... dangit, it's alder. 2 piece means that there could have been knots on the other side of the blank. Definitely AAA grade alder (hence the many open pores which gives it such beautiful texture).

Congratulations. I have access to a Cruise bass and use one for every track I lay down. If it doesn't have a knot on it's backside, I'd assume it's ash. To my eyes, it's too blonde to be alder and this would have been the era where there was a massive stock of swamp ash available. That said, obviously alder blanks can come in blonde, knot-free and nearly as light as swamp ash so it could be alder just as you surmise. The Lake Placid Blue Cruise basses are all heavier and are probably alder... all of the painted Cruise basses are probably alder IMO. To me, ash is harder than alder and makes better basses. Plus, clear finished alder is sort of avoided as a rule of thumb but... again there are plenty of exceptions to that rule.

Thank you ArnieZ! I actually really liked it! The forearm cut, belly cut and compound radius made the guitar extremely comfortable to play. I would have liked to adjust the springs a bit making the action a little slinkier but maybe that would have affected the tuning stability. A tremolo without a locking nut always has the potential to be a tuning disaster... this wasn't too bad and the locking tuners operated well without any of the binding issues associated with normal tuners. I thought the birdseye maple neck felt great... super comfortable V profile. My hands are on the smallish side so I really love a "V" profile... it's my favorite profile. Scale length was 25" which gave it a more of a Les Paul style action and feel than a 25.5" strat/tele style action. I actually really liked the shorter scale length. Pickups were decent... wiring was noise free and stable. All in all it's everything that one would want from a $600 2HB strat style flame maple guitar. Not enough of these on the market to find one used. They are currently all sold out in the USA... which is weird because this video is to sell them. I was told that a new production run on this model was finished at the end of October, so we'll see how long it takes for them to hit the retail shelves again. Oh man, thank you so much dude! And thank you for the specific part shout-out. That part was actually inspired by the feedback'd reverb trail off of BOC's "Don't Fear the Reaper". I had a little octave up part that was buried in the mix and the last note was awash in Soundtoy's Space Echo setting within Echoboy. There is a sample mixed in a very subtle way... I used Thomas Dolby's synth intro to Foreigner's "Waiting for a Girl Like You". It blends in with the reverb and you can hear the reverb note sort of shift pitch right before the drums come back in, but that's just the reverb blending with that beautiful sample. I mixed it super quiet but will probably raise it in the mix for when it actually comes out as a song. Speaking of "songs"... I think I may need to solicit your help on putting this stuff on some sort of "album". Yeah it DOES resemble those Peavey's except for a forearm cut with a flame maple top, a slightly shorter scale length & a maple body (Cort) vs a basswood body (Peavey). Both have house brand pickups... I'd give that edge to Peavey since they have mos def made some great pickups over the years.

I feel like this is a pinnacle sort of guitar... can there be any such GAS left in the tank after this exceptionally awesome acquisition? I am elated that you picked this up J... couldn’t have gone to a better dude!! Rock out my brother!!