Category: Guitar

Eric’s Birthday

Eric Clapton celebrated his 76th birthday today and I’m guessing he didn’t wear a mask.

I can overlook a lot of shit from my musical heroes, I’m looking at you drunken racist immigration rants back in the… whenever that was, but the anti mask shit you pulled recently… just fuck you, bro.

I still want to hear him play live again. Just one more time. That’s despite the anti mask shit. I mean really… fuck you, bro.

So instead of birthday wishes here’s a pic from 1966 with the legendary Marshall combo amp behind him, and the even more legendary, dare I say almost mythical, 1960 Les Paul Standard in front of him.

Assuming the Instagram link works, of course…

(The guy next to him is John McVie who about two years later became the Mac in Fleetwood Mac)

Finally Played

It’s been like three weeks since the last time I played my guitar. Finally, I got back to it tonight. Therapy… it is definitely therapy.

I used my new Speaker Soak/Attenuator thing with my huge amp for the first time. You need to turn it WAY down in order to tame the volume enough to really crank the amp without instantly going deaf. It sounded good. A little squishy and compressed, but I only turned the volume up to about eight on the 30 watt channel. I liked it. I recorded rhythm guitars for two songs, just to have something to mess with. The first song was just guitar and nearly cranked amp. The second used the Ryra the Klone as a boost to get a little more overdrive. I liked both sounds. Also of note, the 30 watt channel is usually super trebly, but with the attenuator down low and the volume up high it sounded much better. Granted, the treble knob was on about two and the bass and mids knobs were dimed. Still. Pretty cool.

Dig those glowing vacuum tubes. World War II tech at it’s finest.

Music Still Kind of Alive

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. All days that I promised myself I would play guitar and then did not play guitar. Ugh. Tonight.

I haven’t touched this month’s music in over two weeks. Have I given up? No. Not entirely. I added a song last night. I have six now. Two with rhythm guitars, four with just MIDI. Hopefully I’ll do some recording tonight and maybe write some lyrics and do some car music over the weekend? Maybe? I wonder if I could still get through 10 songs with less than a week to go.

I wonder.

Tomorrow

Earlier today Jen actually told me that I needed to play guitar tonight. I told her I was planning on it. The new attenuators thing was delivered today so I had extra incentive.

Guess what I didn’t do.

You guessed it. I didn’t play guitar.

Tomorrow. I promise. It’s a moral imperative.

It’s Finally Coming

I ordered it on March 6th. That’s 14 days ago. Two weeks.

I got a shipping notification from the seller on March 9th. When I ran the tracking number though it said the number had been created but not picked up. Using my vast shipping/receiving knowledge from 20+ years ago, that generally means the shipping label has been printed but the package has not been dropped off with or picked up by the post office.

I sent the seller a message yesterday. I tried not to sound pissy. There’s a pandemic and the previous administration did everything it could to destroy the USPS. I get that it might be rough getting things to where they are going. I hope the seller didn’t read it as if I was pissed off because I wasn’t.

Today I tracked the package and it now says it shipped on the 19th. The same day I sent my non-pissy but possibly still pissy email. I tried to run the tracking number again a few minutes ago and the whole system is down. Go back and re-read the previous paragraph. Specifically the third sentence.

When I tracked earlier it gave the estimated delivery date as Monday the 22nd.

After work on Monday I am going to play the guitar through the 30 watt channel on my amp and hopefully, fingers crossed, not tear down the house and shatter windows all throughout the neighborhood. The attenuator is coming and we are going to see if we can tame that amp a smidge. Again, fingers crossed.

Rock and Roll (or something similar).

11 Days

It has been 11 days since I played the guitar. That’s a week and a half or so.

The desperation is intensifying. I need to get some playing in this weekend. I don’t know if I’ll be able to, but I feel like I have to find a way.

My mental state demands it. My playing chops demand it too, but it’s more impressive to mention how it’s important to me not going crazy and stuff.

I need to play the guitar! I also need a shave, badly, but that’s not what this post is talking about. I need to play the guitar!

Les Paul Mods: A Fantasy

If I were to mod my 1978 Les Paul Custom to make it act more like a late ’50’s Les Paul Standard, this is probably what I would do.

Brandonwould 1959 clones. The question would be do I get nickel pickup covers, which would be correct for a Les Paul Standard, or gold pickup covers, which would be correct for a Les Paul Custom. Gold is more appropriate for my guitar, but they are also super expensive.

For changing out the pots and the switches and the wiring (my ES-335 needs this more than my Les Paul does, but I’m fantasizing here so leave me alone) I would get a wiring harness. The question then becomes, do I get a 50’s wiring harness or do I get a 50’s wiring harness that includes the Peter Green out-of-phase mod? I think I’d do the Peter Green thing. If so, I’d probably go with Gunstreet Wiring Shop- Les Paul Standard – 50S Out Of Phase – Wiring Harness.

Obviously I am way too much of a wuss to even daydream about installing any of this stuff myself. If I do it, I’m getting an experienced tech to do it. That goes without saying.

On a similar topic, when I bought my Les Paul in 1990 it was 12 years old and it was seriously modded already. Both of the original pickups were gone, and it had a Bigsby vibrato. The pickups bothered me. The neck was a DiMarzio which sounded nice. The bridge was a Jackson that was crap, although it had a seriously high output that I liked. I removed the Bigsby within about 10 minutes of bringing the guitar home, but it was years before I did anything about the pickups. I had always thought about trying to bring the guitar back to stock, or at least as close as I could get them. In 2006 (I think) I had Larry replace both pickups with Gibson Classic ’57s. Again, the Neck was nice but the bridge wasn’t. A few years ago I had Guitar Center swap the bridge for a Gibson Dirty Fingers reissue. Again, a really high output.

Now, after doing some research I know that the correct pickups I would need to get back to 1978 stock would be TTops. I can get clones of those too, even with the gold covers. I think I might have a good chance of getting actual 70’s TTops on ebay rather than clones, but if I am going to do this I am going for some really sweet PAF clones. Screw period correct, I want 50’s everything. I wonder how much it would cost to get the body refinished and painted gold like a 1957 Goldtop Standard. I bet that would cost a small fortune. Then again, if I wanted to be Les Paul Custom accurate I would have to paint it black, not gold. Prior to 1958 standards were gold and customs were black. Black Les Pauls look awesome, but nothing beats the old Goldtops.

Suffice to say, if I ever hit the lottery for hundreds of millions of dollars, the first thing I’m buying is a 1957 Les Paul standard. The second thing I’m buying is a 1959 sunburst Les Paul Standard. A ’57 would be insanely expensive. A ’59 would cost me pretty much all of my lottery winnings. Totally worth it though.

ADDENDUM: I tried to write about the Peter Green “out of phase mod” and typo’d it to “out of phrase mod”. I am clearly mentally defective. I fixed it though.