End of the year house cleaning.
Soul cleansing.
e ranting.
All of the following points are made with one huge caveat - I am only concerned about the realm of human hearing.
1. Capacitors of the same value sound the same whether they are made of ceramics or paper and oil.
The selling of vintage is a crime.
2. Electric guitars are not supposed to be resonant. They are not supposed to vibrate at all. If they do, it means those vibrations which had it been working as planned would have gone to feed the signal to the pickup instead of serving naught but heating the wood.
3. Nothing above the nut or below the bridge has any bearing on the sound of your guitar. The vibrations of the string take place in between those two points. And ONLY those two. See above.
4. No one is looking at your guitar, except other guitarists. Not one person in the audience gives a tinkers dam what brand of guitar you have. Or what "look" it confers on you...because...it doesn't.
Your carriage, your demeanor, your ease in your skin is what confers your stage persona. Not what guitar (read that: tool) you play.
They are not figured furniture pieces to be admired from afar - they are meant to be used like any other instrument. Sax players drooling over the patina on a nice specimen? Not as often as guitar players. Guitarists are a singular group in this respect. Misplaced respect for the workmanship of their instrument.
5. SGs are not top heavy - the neck does not weigh MORE than the body; shift the fulcrum. Move the strap, dolt. Every metal age Lothario thinks they are top heavy.
6. Eric Clapton is not God. According to an episode of Becker, God's first name is Larry.
A great player? Absolutely.
So is Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, Carlo Santana, Django, Jimi, Roy Clark...
Subjective assessments are music, but religious ones are not.
(Note to self - future blog on God's favorite music with which to jam)
7. Frank Zappa was the epitome of irony. He was the hippest and also the most unhip. He called us assholes and died of his. I love his music for many reasons but it always has a slightly bitter tinge to it.
Lesson? Be aware of yourself. In real time, if you are good enough.
8. Set neck or bolt on...same sustain, same tone given the same pickups and strings and player.
9. Different wood sounds the same given the same pickups, player and strings. I have two teles and I would bet no one could tell which was the ash body and which was the pine.
In 1982 or so the Japanese decided older guitars were worth a lot of money. They pumped the price artificially by paying whatever was asked for what had previously been junk.
Old guitars were not worshiped as they are today. A really expense guitar was $2,000 when normal production guitars were $300.
Today, $350,000 for a 1952 Les Paul is not unheard of. And get this - each one is different, they are not ALL good, by any stretch. It is by virtue of age alone...now. Sad, really.
These are not violins made by a master, by hand in Renaissance Italy - these are mass production guitars. No more craftsmanship than a car.
The ancillary markets picked up on this and now sell anything from the golden age of guitars at a premium...very little of it is worth the price asked.
Tubes - the snot abounds in the "vintage" tube market.
Facts:
Domestic production of tubes ceased in the 1970s, the last domestic television made by Zenith in an Arkansas plant.
Tubes were then and now even more so - rebranded. Tubes originally made by GE were repainted with the Philco logo if that is what the end customer wanted. ANY logo. So those VOS tubes you are selling on eBay for $$$ are probably not what you think they are.
Tubes are incredibly noisy switches - transistors, besides smaller and more efficient - introduce much less noise into the original signal.
10. You cannot tell the difference between two brand of tubes assuming the test data is similar...close.
If THD, plate voltages etc are similar all around, you can't tell one from the other.
Audiophiles go for tubes with the least amount of noise. Guitarists live to run the tubes near the clipping point...signal saturation, noise - they call it breakup. The reasoning was that the legends of the 1960s used these huge walls of tube amps at that saturation point, so to get that sound, guitarists today have to follow that edict.
What a load of shit.
These are the same people buying $300 oxygen free copper cables. Jimi used a $3.00 piece of junk coiled cord that no one today would be caught dead using.
Audiophiles and guitarists spend money matching tubes. When a tube burned out in Clapton's amp, they changed them with whatever was on hand.
Kinda like the Bible where people pick and choose what they agree with and will obey and what they don't like. It's all or nothing.
If a resonant guitar is something good then let's loosen parts and get to vibrating.
If finish makes one iota of difference in sound - does a blind man hear the difference?
I would guess this true in any pursuit in life.
Ten percent are outright posers. Twenty percent think they want to play guitar,; they also think they look cooler with the guitar than without. Thirty percent really want to play, feel it on some level. Twenty percent are succumbing to peer pressure. And the last twenty wanted to play something else but were handed a guitar - "Here, you play this."
I went to a dance where a band named Spyder was playing, 'I'm So Glad.' I was standing there with my jaw on the floor. Then I noticed the girls were creaming over the long haired guitar player.
Then I went to Woodstock and smoked pot. It must have been a cosmic plan, eh?
Life is about sharing a common experience, the more intimate, the better.
We are social animals.
To read a passage from a book and have it strike you the same as your reading group.
To hear a song and you know the performer is speaking to you - at the same time he is speaking to one hundred others.
Music like math is a language - unlike math music is one of emotions and feelings. I cannot think of a single song that was NOT meant to evoke a feeling. Even a photo can be a record of a moment, void of feeling.
But music goes on. It is like, ugh...baseball - we don't know when it's gonna end.
It is not a snapshot in time, but as Janis said - a piece of my heart.
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