Category: Guitar

Whaling Stories

I went down a YouTube rabbit hole a little and ended up here. A live recording of Procol Harum playing Whaling Stories not long before Robin Trower left the band and stopped playing Gibson guitars.

I’ve never heard this recording before, but the song is from a record called Home and I knew that album like the back of my hand. So did everyone in my house and most of my neighbors. Not only did I play it a lot, but I played my guitar along with it a lot too. Loudly.

I could fake my way through most of the songs, and even learned a couple of them (poorly) on piano. This one was a favorite to play along with. Those double bends Trower did… damn.

How Many Guitars Do You Need

Interesting guitar question. How many do you actually need?

The video doesn’t really answer the question realistically. You need one, yes. But there are other answers too.

I only need one, but I need to keep looking and trying different guitars until I find THE ONE. Specifically, the one that makes me not want any others.

x = n + 1 where x is the number you need and n is the number you have.

For me, I need two. Two of everything. I play bars in a cover band. I don’t have a tech sitting off stage who can fix things if my equipment should fail. I need to get to the set break. If a guitar (or amp, or cable, or mic, or pedal) should fail I need to swap it for something that’s working immediately. I can tinker with stuff all I want in between sets, but while the band is on stage I need to be up and playing right now.

In the video he talks about needing different types of instruments for different situations. This song needs a strat sound, that song needs a Les Paul. I am guilty of that all the time. In fact, when I think about trading in my strat I think about picking up another guitar with single coil pick ups. The strat is the only single coil guitar I own, so I should get another instrument that fills that role even though that logic is bullshit. No one is ever going to call me up for a gig that requires single coils. That’s absurd. If they want me, then they’ll be perfectly fine with double coils, all day long.

So maybe the answer is just that your needs aren’t as important as your wants. Who knows.

Rewrite Or Two Parter

I put lead guitars onto the song that got the vocals during car music this morning. All tracking is done on one song so barring any catastrophic failures I’ll have a song to send into RPM this month.

Before recording that lead track though I recorded the first thing to pop into my head when I picked up my new guitar tonight and wrote a whole song form around it.

You’d think that was a good thing, right? It would be if the first thing that popped into my head hadn’t been 95% the same as the chorus of the car music song. It’s 34 bpm slower, and the turn around in bars four and eight is different, though still similar. Otherwise it’s the same thing.

So what to do with it? Is it a rewrite? No… it’s part two of a two song suite. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s go with that.

I’m Not Guitar Shopping

I am absolutely not guitar shopping. I am, however, suddenly curious about lower end, sort of affordable, fully hollow electric guitars. I own a semi hollow guitar but I’ve never played a fully hollow electric.

It’s all just curiosity.

July is Coming

After working on a couple of seriously atrocious song ideas tonight it’s got me wondering about the near future. The 4th of July is right around the corner, and for a musical net nerd like me, the 4th of July means 50/90.

Should I do 50/90? I’ll definitely do Record Every Month, so there’s three songs. Should I try to bang out the other 47 as well?

I’m not sure. I’ll be pulling shifts at my parents house again probably starting next week, so there’s a lot of time where I won’t be recording. I’ve used that time to put initial ideas down, and to mix, but I can’t do guitars or voices.

I guess we will have to just wait and see where my head is a couple of weeks from now.

Play

I did it. I snuck in some guitar playing. Dinner is going to be late tonight so I went straight from work to the new Les Paul.

I worked on rhythm parts for two really terrible songs. Les Paul Standard 50s into a Rock Your Repaired Amp The Klone overdrive pedal into a Vox AC15. Life felt good for a few minutes there. Excellent.

Up next is some hamburgers cooked on the grill where life will continue to feel good for a few more minutes.

Baby steps, babie. Baby steps.

Guitar Commercial

This video is a commercial but given the subject matter I don’t mind sharing it.

Gibson guitars and Alex Lifeson from Rush once designed a Les Paul model together. It was called the Axcess Les Paul, or Les Paul Axcess, or whatever. Despite Alex being pretty much the guitar god to me, and Les Pauls being my favorite guitars by far, the Axcess didn’t really do it for me. The look was just a little off, and a Les Paul with a Floyd Rose bridge just bothers me on a fundamental level. I watched Alex play them more times than I can count and he always sounded amazing, but that one just wasn’t for me.

He’s working with Epiphone now to make an affordable Axcess model. I’m sure it’s great, but again it’s not for me. This video is a four minute intro to the new guitars where he basically tells his entire history with Gibson. It’s pretty cool. The music playing is pieces of the two new instrumentals on his new website. It’s been kind of a busy week for old Lerxst.

For the record, Gibson did once release a custom shop copy of his ES-355 in a very limited quantity for an absolutely stunning price. I’d kill to get my mitts on one of those, but I’d likely have to sell my body for medial experiments in order to afford it.

California Tweed

The Mesa Boogie California Tweed is probably the only non-Fender amp I am seriously GASing over. It’s crazy expensive, but I hear it’s worth every penny.

It’s way out of my price range, even if we didn’t have two tuitions to pay for. Robbie just likes fantasizing about groovy gear sometimes.

Lunch Break

Lunch break on a Wednesday. We’ve been talking about the desks in our new building today. March 13, 2020 was the last day at our desks in the Waltham building. Two months ago the Waltham building was sold. Now we have desks in another building but prior to this morning none of us had gone to check it out. One guy went today and reported back that none of our stuff from Waltham has made it to the new desks yet. Uh oh. The upside is that some of us might be getting new monitors out of the deal. I had two when we left. They were both old and less than good. This could work out for me.

Wait… didn’t I write something about not talking about work?

The AC folks have come and gone. The window for their arrival was between 7:00 and 11:00. They knocked on the door at 10:50. His first question was, would you like me to wear a mask? Yes, yes I would. Thanks. It was just a routine cleaning and the AC in the wall in the bedroom clearly benefitted from it because it’s working like crazy now. It’s actually cold in here. I haven’t spent much time in the rest of the house yet so I don’t have any news from that front yet.

The tech said the wall unit in the bedroom was pretty old. Huh? It was installed three years ago. How is that old? Was it sitting on some warehouse shelf for a decade before it was installed in our house? Worse… was it used?

My father is in the hospital again. Day two. My brother is with him. The idea is to move him back into a rehab so that he can get back to a point where he can take care of himself better than he can now… which he can’t. He asked to have some of his more common aches and pains looked at while he was in there. Good idea. No real news on any front yet. Hopefully he’ll be in a new rehab quickly and he can get back to working on getting better. I am scared and worried and stressed and wracked with guilt and I am just overwhelmed with it all… and I’m not the one in the hospital bed. I can’t even begin to imagine how he feels. I hate this. I want my dad to be better again.

So Covid is over, right? The world is opened up again, right? People are still getting sick and people are still dying, but it’s all over, right? I’m thinking about things that I can do that were put on hold. Vacations would be first on that list but we have two college kids now and we are out of money. I already had a haircut, but I need another one because my hair grows faster than light. I need to get my eyes checked. Jen has done that already but see the previous sentence regarding money. I may have to ride out my old glasses for a little while longer. There is a guitar and an amplifier that I’d like to trade in. It depends on how much I can get for each item, but if I can get a used ’68 Deluxe Reverb or a used Les Paul Junior in exchange, I might. I don’t know how that will go.

Okay, time to clean up my lunch and get back to work. The hope is we will be watching episode two of Loki by 6:00pm. Four hours or so from now. Fingers crossed.

Wish my dad good luck, okay? Thanks.