velorush

Props to Stike, as well! But Stike's Les Paul Custom runs counter to my argument! The WS vid was actually not the one I was looking for - I was looking for the Not Rush vid shot by Zen (IIRC) with you playing the Hamer, but I couldn't find it. I searched for "Not Rush" and came up with a gazillion videos for Big Time Rush songs that had "Not" in the name. ​Freakin' 21st century Monkees...

Just got a note from my Sweetwater rep: Collector's Items! That's a way to make lemonade!

Oh, that seems perfectly arms-length [/sarcasm]

My favorite example on this argument is our own Brooks. Brooks has what I'd term "chops of doom," and from what I can tell, gigs successfully as much as he'd like in a number of different genres. I've never seen Brooks post a NGD with any boutique instruments or amps (there was the Axe Effects trial that ended in a sale). His instruments are humble, run-of-the-mill affairs (no offense meant); his amps and effects are decidedly utilitarian (wasn't he using a Power Block at one time?), but what tone! What chops! It's in the hands, ladies and gentlemen! http://youtu.be/pqi25iW0Neg Jimi didn't start playing in '67. He paid incredible dues and just so happened to be extremely talented and was into psychoactive recreational pharmaceuticals. These combined to tap into some outrageously interesting original music and great versions of existing tunes - but at what personal cost?

Was that Thorn's wrestling name? ¡Feliz cumpleaños a los cinco!

I would love to have a set of those pickups! They are an incredibly good spec. When this was first proposed I offered to duplicate the Big Apple super switch wiring and PA wanted phase switching, for which I recommended the S-1. He decided a three-way would work better for him and elected to have the S-1 for coil splitting. The S-1 switch is icing on the cake. It takes the screw coil out on each which should offer some cluck in the middle position and tasty single-esque tones neck and bridge.

Everyone in NC okay? I was at my daughter's high school athletic banquet last night and twitter was lit up by TWC blasting out "tornado sighted" warnings every couple of minutes! I couldn't help but think - lots of HFCers in NC!

So I'm not the only one that puts everything it its case when this comes up? Well that's at least one 'curiosity' that doesn't mean I'm off in the head! It was pretty rough here last night (north west Tennessee), but my buds in Arkansas got it really bad. Tupelo, Mississippi got hit this afternoon. We've been trouble-shooting and overnighting parts out all day (we sell transmission equipment to telephone companies). Looks like we've got more coming in tonight. Batten down the hatches!

Thank Wynton Marsalis!

From all I can tell through googling, it appears the song is actually attributed to Dvorak. I found a score here. Check it out for yourself - if you recall (or maybe I'm just a nerd), Dvorak was brought to America to help America develop it's own 'music' and discovered that (in his opinion) it already had it's own music in the form of the Sprituals. That's what inspired the New World Symphony which many consider to be the beginnings of jazz harmony. I'm a huge Wynton Marsalis fan and if you catch his show on XM radio on Wednesday nights he's generally teaching as much as he's playing and mentions Dvorak often as the originator of harmonies used in jazz, so it fits. Do let me know if this is what you're looking for as this would definitely connect a few synapses in my understanding of the development of jazz. Oh, and very sorry for your father-in-law's situation. Prayers headed his way. ETA: kind of hard to tell with the choir arrangements, but this instrumental excerpt seems to have the right melody (though at a slower tempo). Hope this helps.

That's... well, that's... to quote Byrne, "same as it ever was!"

Amazing. I love that headstock, the color, everything!

BGE lives! Great stuff, Brent! Love the spanky clean tones. What pickups did you go with (or did I miss that?)?

Nah, now they've got the corporate types out of the way!

Offering a friendly amendment. When I think Guild, I think archtop jazz guitars (Artist Award, X-series). Perhaps the brand prestige died as the genre went.

Really sorry for you guys.

I've played their acoustics, but never knew they made a jazz box - congratulations!

That was my first thought when the thread opened. We've all seen Greg fix these breaks (to our collective amazement), it's just that metallics, especially gold are such a difficult match. This will be interesting to watch!

This should work out for a great example (and please, I am self-instructed, so if anyone with any modecum of formal education sees any error, please, please correct me!): Mindset One: The G Major scale is G w A w B h C w D w E w F# (with the convention for whole and half-steps). To play G Mixolydian, you could play the major scale of the key for which G is the 5th or the C major scale. Spelled out, C major is C w D w E h F w G w A w B, but if we begin with G, we get G w A w B h C w D w E h F. Now let's compare: G Major: G w A w B h C w D w E w F# G Mixolydian: G w A w B h C w D w E h F [ = C Major: C w D w E h F w G w A w B ] This shows what I couldn't figure out from reading Vai's article that night: That G Mixolydian is spelled 1 2 3 4 5 6 7b. That's one way of looking at it. Mindset Two: From a guitar neck point of view (and this is where it opened up for me), if you learn, positionally (i.e., boxes) how to begin a major scale from any degree of the scale on the 6th string, you'll encounter seven patterns (I think of it more like five patterns because the Phrygian and Lydian (3rd and 4th) and also the Locrian and Ionian (7th and 1st) are so close to each other). Learn those seven (five) patterns. When you begin those patterns on your root note and you'll be playing the mode rather than the major scale. Next, learn the patterns beginning on the 5th string, 4th string (by now the patterns will be old hat because they are contained within the patterns you just learned). I just read Geoff's post as I Previewed for clarity - please consider this a relatively poor supplement to his more lucid and learned explanation!

Great posts Zorrow! To the OP: personally, I can (and did) read scales, have them shown to me, etc., but until I 'discovered' it for myself, it wasn't mine. One of my fraternity brothers let me borrow some sort of blues scale book around '86 or so - it had all these boxes and I thought, "I'll never memorize all this stuff." I began playing over them and discovered they each contained the same notes (and only 6 - pentatonic plus the flat 5). I then began to map out which notes and it (the obvious) became clear to me. The night after he loaned me the book we were jamming on Johnny B. Goode and I launched into Chuck's solo - he was greatly impressed ('cause neither of us knew how to do that prior). He asked, "where did you get that?" I told him out of the book he loaned me. He said, "just keep it!" My discovery on modes came in nerd school, reading an article in "Guitar for the Practicing Musician" (around '88). Steve Vai was waxing on about this mode is spelled 1 2 3b 4 5 6 7b (that'd be Dorian, IIRC) and that mode is spelled 1 2 3 4 5 6 7b (Mixolydian) and I just couldn't figure out how I was ever going to memorize all that. I began to write the actual notes out on a legal pad along with the modes and the following pattern occurred to me: W-W-H-W-W-W-(H back to the root - where W is a whole-step and H is a half-step) - that's how you spell a major scale. Root to second is a whole-step, then another whole-step to the major third, etc. Starting at the second position, but keeping the pattern static got me the Dorian mode; third position got me the Phrygian mode, etc. Suddenly, I had it! These "modes" were simply a major scale, but started at different positions within the scale. What that gave me for guitar was, I could play any "mode" anywhere on the guitar by simply finding the related and familiar major-scale pattern. Starting at the sixth position gets you the natural minor scale (aka Aeolian mode), by the way. Nerd school did not last long enough for me to figure out the 'harder' things like the modes of the Melodic Minor scale and all that more interesting sounding jazz stuff, but my point is (yes, after all that, there is a point) - I think everyone has to come to the guitar neck in their own way. Taking this information to a keyboard seems (to me) infinitely simpler (though I play keys so seldom, it certainly doesn't appear simple to me).

Bored? The look she gives the camera at 2:17 is priceless - she's concentrating! It's very encouraging to see someone younger than 35 playing a real guitar. Seems pretty rare these days. I love seeing stuff like this. If everyone played as poorly as me the world would be a desperately uninteresting place.

If Serial had a photo of a Californian (I don't recall ever seeing one), I'd be glad to cobble that together. It's much simpler using his photos as they are incredibly consistent. The Californian has a certainly less radical headstock and might be more generally appealing.

Back at home, I humbly submit these two quickly cobbled images: WMG 1 WMG 2 They could have used some blending, but I figure you either like this or don't and no amount of additional editing would do anything to promote the concept...

I concur with one Hamer-specific modification: this body I'd photoshop the result but I don't have my tools here at work.