Sleepy John's Musing on the Merits of Musical Instruments

[sleepyjohn]

I thought I should move the discussion away from the charity thread.
Will post my likes and dislikes(not many) in the New Year,but please feel free to start without me!

[banjo]

With a little apprehensiveness, I 'fess up that I own just shy of 30 strung instruments of which (I think) 19 are guitars. I also have an 88 note digital piano, loads of amplifiers, tons of effects, a 10 channel FireWire mixer and a couple of microphones. My reservation comes from trying to avoid boring the chuddies off everyone.

e&oe...

[banjo]

I don't have any time for those six string things I saw high up on the musical instruments stand at Woolworth's in the early 1960s. Many have now become desirable to young turks ape-ing Dan Aurbach and Jack White and mining anything left field to annexe a perceived individualistic edge over the competition.

Those (predominantly red) electric guitars bristling with plastic knobs, cheap sliding pickup selecting switches and cast Mazac "pot metal" hardware made my jaw drop as a six year old just learning to cope with the majesty of Hank Marvin, but I soon moved on.

I know a lot is in the set up and the rest is in the fingers, but you have to call them out sometimes.

e&oe...

[sleepyjohn]

Guitar making must be in my blood.
I am told that I started at the age of 4, when I dismantled (broke!) a plastic guitar toy, and then managed to fix it, but I don't remember much about that.
My first foray into guitar building was around 1958 (yep,I'm that old!)when skiffle was the rage. After several aborted efforts, I managed to make an acoustic guitar from a tea chest, and some lengths of discarded wood mouldings.
Using a shopbought guitar from a friend, I traced out the shape of the body, measured the fret distances and managed to get something that actually looked like a guitar. It sounded OK as well!!!
All the hardware came from a fantastic shop, the like of which you don't find now. If any of you knew Manchester in the late 1950s, then the place to buy anything electrical or musical was Mazel Radio.

To be continued

[banjo]

I've "assembled" five guit-fiddles. Assembled in so far as they are screwed and bolted together Leo types. Three Strat-like objects and two Tele-like objects, although the S-types are more like Trigger's broom nowadays!. I won't do it any more because they cost a lot to do properly and no one wants them, so you're stuck with them unless you "break" them down and flog off the parts piecemeal.

Anyone that actually "builds" a guitar gets my admiration SJ.

e&oe...

[sleepyjohn]

You're talking about a partsocaster,as I have known them.I have built several in my time,not only from strat,and very occasionally tele parts, and have also converted the odd accoustic that had seen better days into a resonator.As you say, it is a not for profit enterprise,and I only have one left,which I will.keep. It's a strat to look at,but doesn't have much to do with Mr Fender,except for the transfers!It also has a non standard wiring system,which allows you to have any combination of pickups not just the 5 way switch.Thinking about it,I suppose that you could call Blackie a partsocaster!!
Nowadays I am sticking to building CBG types...back to my roots for me.

[banjo]

Two of my "Strats" are wired so that they appear as a normal five-way, except the middle position does not render the middle pickup- it delivers a Tele type neck +bridge combo which I find more useful. Throw the piggy-back switch on the "middle tone pot, and the middle three positions go from parallel to series and the 1&5 go to all three in parallel and all three in series respectively. With all three in series, people are disbelieving that they're single coils and go searching for the battery cover! A pretty complicated wiring system to say the least.

My first go at nailing them together was an Esquire, but even that sports a four-way with a clandestine pickup hidden beneath the scratchplate. I can't leave anything alone SJ.

I have an Asian brass-bodied 12 fret single cone biscuit. Something after the flavour of a slot head Style "O". Resos are addictive aren't they? I played nothing else for years until I bought another superb acoustic in 2015.

Fair play on doing reso hacks from acoustics. Old Stellas or Ekos? Along the lines of an Estralita or wood bodied Triolian? There is (as you are aware) a great deal more than meets the eye with a resonator.

My experience up until recently has been that I burn out on the latest acquisition, but that changed with the last acoustic I bought.

I have considered a CBG a lot, but I am long enough in the toof to know I need to be selective about what I take on. A quick scan around the debris at Hippie Towers confirms that!

e&oe...

[sleepyjohn]

Can't say that my wiring system is anywhere like as sophisticated.
Just a toggle switch that turns on the neck pup at all times,so you can have neck+bridge, or all 3 as well as the usual 5way variations.
How many guitars are too many?....2 more than you have now.There's always room for 1 more!!

[sleepyjohn]

However,I have come to that time of life when tidying up of loose ends is required.(at least that's what I've been told bySWMBO)
So I'm down to 5 guitars,and one in the course of a build.
2 dreadnaught accoustics,one of which must go...whichever I can sell first.
The partsocaster mentioned above.
A CBG 6string, with a fender neck and the oldest humbucker you've ever seen..tuned to open D.
The build is a CBG uke, with a genuine Cuban cigar box( pre medical labels)
Which leaves my pride and joy,even if it is of little monetary value..my 1958 Hofner 449,which was my first shop bought guitar ,purchased in 1965 for 5gns ( including hardcase). More rambling on about this one to come.

[sleepyjohn]

Changing the subject completely,why did Leo F design the headstock back to front?
Surely the string with the LEAST tension should be the longest.
Perhaps JMH had more than lefthandedness in mind when he declined a LH strat in favour of a standard one strung back to front. 


Apologies to any non guitarists who are finding the above gibberish.

[banjo]

My Firebird has the longest string on the bass side. It's unintuitive at first but you soon adapt. Firebird banjo tuners are pants though. It's fair to say that the Firebird does have a sound of its own, but I think that is a lot more to do with the mini hummers. The 'bird tuners do look the part, but they're terrible engineering.

After Katrina, they went over to Steinbergers, claiming that the machine head tooling was lost. I reckon that was just a chance to bury bad news (sic). Interesting that the James Marshall "efforts" generally have the reverse styling headstock, often on a RH body.

SRV even had First Wife routed to accept a southpaw "trem". There's dedication for you! I think Leo just went for the straight string pull. He could not even play Three Blind Mice by all accounts, so subtleties like speaking length to total length ratios probably escaped him. It is claimed that he robbed the outline from Paul Bigsby's landmark, but it has long been known that had already been appropriated from a much older Eastern European arrangement. (as in even I was aware of that argument back in the mid 1970s.) The same discussion could be had about a fixed bridge against a trapeze tailpiece. (My Heritage Sweet16 has an extremely beguiling tone to it.)

I think that no apologies are needed really because Google is everyone's friend these days SJ?

e&oe...

[sleepyjohn]

Jan 24, 2019 9:23:04 GMT banjo said:

The same discussion could be had about a fixed bridge against a trapeze tailpiece. (My Heritage Sweet16 has an extremely beguiling tone to it.)



e&oe...

I  am not very familiar with Gibsons,but how could I forget about tailpieces as a dedicated Hofner Hound?

The compensator tailpiece was designed to solve the problem,but the concensus is,after years of forum discussion,that it makes not a jot of difference!!!

[banjo]

Regarding JMH, I understood that he joined The Isleys without any "serious" instrument and the brothers said that he ought to have a decent axe, so was there anything he had in mind? "Hell yeah- a white Stratocaster" came the instinctive reply, and given it was the mid 1960s, I guess Manny's probably didn't have a southpaw?

The media were obsessed with filming him from below his trunk, so he often appeared to be quite tall but he was actually quite short ( well going by the stage outfits that I saw at the Experience Hendrix" museum that I went to on one of three working trips to Renton) He nonetheless had really long fingers, so I guess the flipped cutaways were no problem for him? Many players have outshone him, but I can't readily think of anyone who was such a game changer. I often wonder what Leo thought about the sounds Jimi (and others) wrenched out of his creation.

e&oe...

[sleepyjohn]

I also think that the presence of Noel Redding,a bass player who played the bass like the lead guitarist that he really was, and also the excellent drums of MM,had a lot to do with his success.There's a great story about how NR came to be in JHE,that I heard in Ireland.I'll tell it later.

[banjo]

You're probably right. No you are right- someone had to hold it all together! In the studio he was excellent. A lot of his work still sounds timeless, while live he was frequently quite messy. Actually, I think that Billy Cox and Buddy Miles in The Band of Gypsys were more in tune with the direction in which he was set to travel, but Electric Ladyland and the posthumous Cry Of Love are both wonderful stuff. Here's a thought- can you visualise Voodoo Chile (not "Slight Return") without Stevie Winwoods keys?

e&oe...