Blog post #9: Gearophobes

In this blog post… Graham Stove fails to tame HAL 9000. Blazing guitar solos vs. plink-plonk guitar solos. A sleek, red Ferrari vs. Charlie Chaplin’s car. Careless Santana and his tiny 5-inch speaker. Tambana’s gig at the yacht club. Dave Perry does an amusing impression of a microphone.


In blog post #4, we looked at a common character who you can expect to meet when playing in rock bands and at open-mics and jam sessions. Namely, the Gear Nerd. The Gear Nerd is obsessive about equipment. He must have the optimal guitars, amps and pedals. The gear aspect of making music is more important to him (invariably the Gear Nerd is a guy) than other aspects, such as learning how to play the chord G or how to play a C major scale.

The exact opposite of the Gear Nerd also exists: The Gearophobe. A classic example of the gear-phobic guitar player was a former guitar student of mine who played in one of the student bands I organized. The band was called Philosoraptor. The guitar player was called Graham Stove.

Graham Stove

Graham Stove owned a large guitar amplifier. It was a so-called modelling amp, with an LCD screen, lots of small buttons and many options in terms of guitar sounds. Unlike the typical Gear Nerd, who would probably spend upwards of 10 hours researching an amp before purchasing, Graham, being a gearophobe, had not researched this amp at all. He had simply popped into his local guitar shop on a Saturday afternoon and bought it on the recommendation of the salesperson.

Graham’s amp turned out to be a liability. It behaved in totally unpredictable ways and seemed to have a mind of its own. Sometimes, one of us would try to make a simple adjustment to the amp, for example lowering it’s volume slightly. The amp would then inexplicably switch to a different preset (sound). What had been a nice clean sound was all of a sudden transformed into full-on Scandinavian death metal. And then we would spend ages trying to find the clean preset again. I christened the amp “HAL 9000” after the disobedient computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

After wasting time at several rehearsals, I concluded that Graham would never get around to reading the amp’s manual and we could not rely on him to gain control over HAL 9000 any time soon. So, I suggested he borrow a more ‘normal’ amp from a fellow Philosoraptor band member for future rehearsals and gigs.

When borrowing this other amp though, Graham’s approach was similarly non-interventionist: he would simply plug his guitar into the amp and switch it on. Job done! Whatever sound happened to come out of the amp at that moment was Graham’s sound for the rest of the evening. No attempt was made to improve the sound to better suit the music we were trying to play. Even the simple controls (especially compared to those of HAL 9000) were too much for Graham to be bothered with. His “hands-off” approach caused two main problems…

1. He sometimes attempted blazing rock guitar solos, like those in songs by Guns and Roses or AC/DC, using a totally clean amp sound with no sustain whatsoever. This resulted in a series of short plink-plonk noises in the place where the blazing guitar solo should have been. The effect was very comical. If I compare Slash’s Sweet Child o’ Mine solo to a sleek new red Ferrari, Graham’s version of the same solo was more like one of those Charlie Chaplin cars in the old movies: wobbling from side to side, the exhaust pipe going bang! and the steering wheel coming off in the driver’s hands.
   
   
   
   
2. His guitar was too loud while the singer was singing and too quiet during his guitar solos. Graham played open-position cowboy chords for the majority of each song (i.e., hitting all six strings hard) and then would suddenly stop this to play a guitar solo (i.e., hitting one string at a time delicately). This was done with no attempt to change the guitar’s volume level to compensate for the difference. I call this phenomenon Digging a hole to fall down and I will cover it and its solutions fully in a later blog post on the subject of Dadolescent Rockers.

Careless Santana

My old band, Tambana, once had a gig at a yacht club in Cornwall in the U.K. The guitarist, Careless Santana, considered his small practice amplifier to be sufficient to play this gig. His thinking was that amp size doesn’t matter: the sound engineer can position a microphone in front of the amp and run the sound it captures though the big speakers of the P.A. system. This is true to an extent, but perhaps not when the amp is a very cheap one with a speaker measuring an unimpressive five inches, as was the case with Careless Santana’s amp. Despite the band’s reservations about his little amp, Careless assured us that all would be fine at the gig.

At the gig, Careless positioned his tiny amp on the floor beside himself. The top of the amp was at a level just slightly higher than the tops of my Dr. Marten’s boots.

Dave Perry was the sound guy that evening. At Careless’s request, Dave positioned a mic in front of the tiny five-inch speaker of the amp. When Careless was out of earshot, Dave did a funny impression of the microphone, looking left and right as if searching for something and saying “What am I supposed to do?”

That evening, Careless Santana’s guitar sound had all the warmth and charm of a handbag rape alarm.

Summary

As I mentioned in blog post #4 (Gear Nerds), musicians need to have some okay gear and know how to use it. See the end of blog post #4 for my advice on basic gear for guitarists to play local rock gigs.



(Some names of individuals and bands mentioned in this blog post were changed to protect identities.)


Mark Baxter (c) 2024