Category: Guitar Gear

Blog post #11: Dadolescent Rockers

10/3/2024

A Dadolescent Rocker is a guy who, after a Saturday afternoon spent choosing cushion covers with his wife, finally says enough is enough and decides to rekindle a teenage dream. He goes online and orders a brand new, cherry red Fender Stratocaster guitar from Andertons.co.uk. It’s an American-made one. A good one. Expensive. One like the pros play.

The Dadolescent Rocker’s goal is to recreate the muscular guitar style of certain famous players in the Classic Rock/Blues Rock genre. In rank order, the most-admired and emulated players are:

Jimi Hendrix
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Angus Young
Eric Clapton
Slash

Following these players, in no particular order, are the likes of Kenny Wayne Shephard, Joe Bonamassa, Popa Chubby, John Mayer, Jimmy Page, Eric Gales and Richie Blackmore.

More than simply emulating these guitarists, Dadolescent Rockers (DRs) aim to recreate, precisely and in fine detail, the original versions of their famous guitar songs. The “tone” must, of course, be spot on: being a DR often goes hand-in-hand with a degree of gear-nerdery. The original guitar solos must be replicated note-for-note. Transcriptions of the solos are bought from online teachers. DRs often go as far as to recreate small mistakes the famous guitarist made on the original recording.

This insistence on attempting an exact replication of the original guitar parts always seemed odd to me for a couple of reasons:

Often, the original guitar solos are WAY too ambitious for the DR’s current level. So, the end result is a bit naff, despite them often owning great guitar equipment.
The idea of precise replication is against the spirit the original music was played in. Hendrix, Clapton and SRV never played their OWN songs the same way twice! Their much-copied guitar solos, for the most part, were improvised. While I agree that a period of imitation can be useful before starting to improvise or before coming up with your own guitar solo ideas, DRs rarely make that leap. They tightly hold on to playing the original guitar solos forevermore.

Other typical DR behaviour when first playing in a band:

Placing his amplifier on the floor next to his legs and then complaining that he can’t hear his own playing once the rest of the band starts playing. His ankles can hear his amp very well. The other players can hear his amp very well. Perhaps too well. As the DR’s ears are positioned five foot directly above his amp and in the shadow of its speaker, he keeps turning up the amp’s volume to hear it better, deafening his band mates, who in turn increase their volume to match, leading the DR to again increase his volume, and so on… A vicious cycle begins. A volume war! The trick is for the DR to place his amp on a stool, or tilt it up somehow and then stand further in front of it, so he can better hear it. Also, he can play around with the EQ rather than the brute volume control. He can try to find frequencies where his guitar sound can cut through the mix and be heard more clearly (usually this will be the middle frequencies for the electric guitar). Ultimately, the degree to which the DR will hear himself distinctly will depend on the song arrangement (see the chapter titled Arranging the songs).
Bending notes inaccurately. The Classic/Blues Rock genre requires guitarists to bend notes, i.e., stretch guitar strings to increase pitch in a way that mimics the old-time Blues singers. The DR has not mastered this skill. It is not just a case of arbitrarily stretching a string when the TAB (written notation) indicates a bend. There is a precision to it. Some bends, for example, a bend from the flat 7 to the tonic, require you to bend the string to an exact pitch. You can use a little vibrato at the top of the bend, but you need to vibrato around the correct pitch or it will sound out of tune. Other bends, for example bending the 4th degree of the scale, don’t need to end up at a particular pitch, but you should use a certain technique to get such a bend to sound good. Again, you can’t just stretch the string a little and think the job is done. The technique for these type of bends is to bend slowly to begin with, then fast at the end. And, the bend should be muted while the pitch is still ascending. All of this needs to be executed quickly. The technique takes a while to master, and it should be practised slowly to begin with. If I were to plot this bend on a graph, with the y axis as pitch and the x axis as time, it would be a hockey stick curve: a slow incline to begin, then a sharp increase. The line would stop while still ascending. Probably it’s better to listen to an example to get the idea. A good example would be the very first lick of Eric Clapton’s solo in Strange Brew (from the album Disraeli Gears, 1967). The bend happens around 1m20s into the song. Clapton bends the 4th degree of the scale and he bends it way sharper than it should be. He used the aforementioned technique though, so it sounds great: bend a little to begin, then bend strongly and cut the sound off while the note is still ascending. Don’t let the note descend at all before cutting the sound off by muting. Otherwise it will sound like a demented electronic cow mooing. This mooing is the hallmark of a DR’s solo.
Over playing. Composers of orchestral music never write a composition in which ALL instruments play ALL of the time. They make use of the full textural palette of sounds the orchestra has to offer by using different combinations of instruments and having some instruments sit out and be silent for periods of time. Even compositions for smaller groups of players, like string quartets, have instruments sit out and be silent for periods of time. Unlike musicians in the classical tradition however, the DR will NEVER sit out and be silent, not even for one second. When the song begins, he begins, and he only stops making sounds when the song ends. This can even include playing an extravagant guitar solo while the singer is trying to sing. In addition, there is often a lack of dynamics in his playing. For example, he won’t lighten up his playing during the verses and get busier during the choruses. He’ll just be equally busy the entire time.
Making noise between songs at rehearsals, thus rendering any discussion of the songs and their arrangements impossible for the rest of the band. It’s tiresome to constantly have to ask the DR in your band to stop fiddling with his instrument. This really slows things down at rehearsals. It’s super amateur behaviour. In the DRs mind, the rehearsal is his time to blast out and use his equipment to the full. He’s just having fun! He can’t do this at home, for his wife and neighbours’ sake. His noise-making in rehearsals between songs may take the form of general noodling or twiddling dials to perfect his ‘tone’. He may also tune up using a headstock tuner while his guitar is at full amplified volume. He could simply turn the volume down on his guitar to tune. This is band etiquette 101. Ideally, the DR should rent the rehearsal room for half-an-hour before each band practice, so he can set up his sound, blast out on Foxy Lady or Voodoo Chile and get it all out of his system before the rest of the band arrive.
Digging a hole to fall down. A DR will often play fully-strummed chords (several strings played heavily) and switch mid-song to playing a guitar solo (one string at a time played lightly) with no attempt to electronically adjust his volume level. By thrashing away while playing rhythm, and initially setting his volume to this rhythm part, the DR has set himself up for failure. This is what I call digging a hole to fall down. When it comes time to play the solo, the DR will have to hit his strings super hard for any of it to be heard. And even then, all that will be heard is the initial attack of each note, not the sustained tail end of the note. This gives his solo what I refer to as a “plink-plonk” quality, which is far removed from the soaring, stratospheric solos of a Slash or a Dave Gilmour, for example. Graham Stove and Mr. X, who were mentioned in previous blog posts, both suffered from this plink-plonk affliction. The cure is to bump up the volume of the guitar by several decibels for the solo. This can be done using the volume control on the guitar, although perhaps a better solution is to use a pedal of some kind. For example a volume increase could be gained by using a volume pedal, a clean boost pedal, an overdrive pedal, a pedal which switches amp channel or an EQ pedal.

Summary

DRs are new to the game. They may have played a little in their youth, but have only picked up the guitar again recently, within the last couple of years. Some DRs will advance to a good level quickly and some will not. If you meet a DR who is exhibiting the traits mentioned above, then perhaps you should avoid them in a band context, at least for the time being. A novice DR would rate around 8/10 on the musician toxicity scale. You’ll end up wasting a lot of time trying to correct certain aspects of their band playing and you’ll also waste a lot of time continually asking them to be quiet between songs at rehearsals, so that some discussion of those songs can take place. Those DRs who have already been in a band or two are a much better bet.

Mark Baxter (c) 2024

0 Comments

Blog post #9: Gearophobes

9/2/2024

0 Comments

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…

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.
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

0 Comments

Blog post #4: Gear Nerds

7/30/2024

0 Comments

In this post… Dave Pinoli and his enormous pedal board. A disastrous gig at a children’s music recital. Handbag CEO. Gear Nerd characteristics. The basic guitar gear needed to play local gigs.

The Gear Nerd is always a middle-aged guy, and nearly always an electric guitar player. He is obsessed with the technical specifications of various guitars, amplifiers and other guitar-related gadgetry, and has downloaded a lot of guitar apps onto his computer. He can talk knowledgeably for hours about the pros and cons of all manner of guitar gear. He spends a lot of his spare time reading online reviews of the various products. In most cases, this time would be better spent learning basic musicianship: for example, how to play a C major scale. Gear Nerds support a global industry of guitar gear manufacturers that totals billions of dollars in annual sales.

As you form you first bands and start to play gigs, jam sessions and open mics, you are bound to come across the odd Gear Nerd or two. Perhaps you have already? Compared to other 'types' of musician I will mention in future blog posts though, the Gear Nerd is mostly harmless. I would rate the average Gear Nerd a moderate 6 on the musician toxicity scale. However, do read on as this blog post will help you to:

Identify Gear Nerds in the wild.
Judge the severity of gear nerdery a Gear Nerd suffers from in order assess whether you should pursue a musical collaboration with them or not.
Deal with a Gear Nerd in your band
Check yourself for early symptoms of gear nerdery and, if necessary, take steps to mitigate a full-blown case.

Dave Pinoli

One amateur musician I knew, Dave Pinoli, was a gear nerd par excellence. Dave had a huge pedal board. For those of you who don’t know what a pedal board is, it’s a collection of small and colourful metal boxes containing electronics that flavour the basic sound of an electric guitar. The pedal board is placed at the feet of the guitar player and it is operated by tapping little switches on and off using the foot. Normally, an amateur guitarist playing local gigs has a modest pedal board that takes up the same amount of floor space as a shoe box. Dave Pinoli’s pedal board, on the other hand, occupied the same space as a large dog basket and would not have looked out of place as the control panel of an alien spacecraft in a 1970’s sci-fi movie.

Dave Pinoli's gargantuan pedal board

A few years ago, Dave was asked if he could help out at a music school recital, where his young daughter and other children would be performing to an audience of mums and dads. Dave was scheduled to play two rock songs along with two other dads: a drummer and a bassist. They were to support a singer who was a 12-year-old girl.

Dave had set up his enormous pedal board before the recital began and it effectively cornered off a quarter of the available stage space for the entire evening. Teachers and young kids were constantly tripping over it during the course of the evening. When it finally came time for Dave to step up to the stage and perform, he himself tripped over the pedal board. Halfway through the first song, he got confused, activated the wrong pedal and the resulting feedback (a high-pitch squeal) forced everyone in the audience to cover their ears with their hands. Bewildered young children in the audience anxiously looked up to their parents for reassurance. An equally bewildered Dave frenziedly tapped his foot on random pedals until his guitar suddenly went totally silent, and it remained that way for the rest of the song, much to the relief of the audience.

Dave’s second (and final) song thankfully went better.

After the show, Dave’s wife came up to me and asked “What do you think of all of his little boxes on the floor?" She was referring to Dave’s pedal board. I gave a non-committal shrug and she replied, “It’s pathetic, isn’t it?" Others were standing close by and within earshot, including Dave himself. I’m not sure if he heard his wife’s disparaging words. Mrs Pinoli was not one to save her husband’s blushes after a disastrous gig!

Handbag CEO

I offer the following story as an example of a case of gear-nerdery so severe, the sufferer was most probably never able to get his guitar playing to the level required to play in an amateur rock band. In fact, he was most probably never able to play the chord G.

Years ago, the CEO of a well-known deluxe handbag company hit me up for some guitar lessons. He took three lessons with me. At each lesson, he brought along a different Les Paul Gibson guitar. These were expensive guitars and he wanted to talk about their features (or ‘specs’ as they are known in guitar circles): the woods used, the chambering (?), the inlays, the tuners… I tried to teach him the chord G. He wasn’t interested. He just wanted to show me all of his guitars for some reason. As he owned three Les Pauls, three lessons were enough, and he didn’t book a fourth lesson. However, two months later, he re-contacted me and he did book another lesson. As it turned out, he had bought a fourth Les Paul. This one had state-of-the-art robot tuners. In other words, the guitar tuned itself up at the push of a button. After this lesson, I never heard from the handbag CEO again, so I presume his guitar collection remains at four items.

Gear Nerd characteristics

The Gear Nerd is generally not a great musician nor a great creator of art. His priorities, in order of most important to least important are…

Owning the correct equipment
Learning to play the guitar
Creating art (often not a consideration at all)

Typical Gear Nerd behaviour at rehearsals includes…

Taking ages to set up all his equipment
Starting conversations about equipment between songs
Using the word “tone” to mean the sound of a guitar
Using the phrase “tone wood” instead of simply saying “wood” (when referring to the particular wood a guitar is made of)
Excessive knob twiddling
Making mistakes in his playing as most of his focus is on getting exactly the right “tone” for the current song

I have painted Dave Pinoli, Handbag CEO and gear nerds in general in a rather pathetic light here. I should say that the Gear Nerds I have known were all very decent people and successful in their day job professions. And, in their defence, a guitar player, or indeed any musician, does need to have some good equipment and knowledge of how to operate it (as we will see in a future blog post concerning the Gear Nerd’s arch-nemesis… The Gearophobe). However, perhaps you shouldn’t let gear get in the way of making music and art. Once you have some half-decent gear, stick with it and concentrate on creating within the gear’s limitations (all gear has limitations).

Which guitar gear to buy to play in a local rock band

Here is my take on gear if you are an amateur rock guitar player looking to play local gigs. Get yourself a combo amp with a 12” speaker. My preference is a single-channel amp. A two-channel amp would effectively have an overdrive pedal built into it that could be activated via a foot switch. Another preference of mine, and many guitarists, would be that the amp is a tube amp (a.k.a, a valve amp) due to the warm sound of these old-fashioned-styled amps. A 30- or 40-watt amp is normally sufficient. The amp can be miked and put through the P.A. at larger gigs if necessary.

As for pedals, you probably need one or two overdrive pedals. Most of them are similar in my opinion. (OMG! Gear Nerds will NOT agree with that!). If you have a couple of them, you are sorted and you don’t need to buy any more. You can use these two pedals together for a more complex sound and more distortion. A tuner pedal is also a good idea.

With this relatively simple gear, and the use of the volume control on your guitar, you should be able to get these three distinct sounds:

A clean(ish) sound.
A crunchy, overdriven sound, suitable for rock rhythm playing.
A louder and very distorted sound with sustain, suitable for soaring rock guitar solos.

For most types of rock music, there is no need to go on a crazy quest for gear, in my opinion. Ultimately, your sound comes from your hands, not your gear. I’ve heard this old cliché many times over the years, but it is true to a large degree. For example, two guitar players who have been very popular with Gear Nerds over the last few decades are Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn. They both hit their guitar strings hard with accuracy. They set up their guitars so their strings were high relative to the frets and this enabled them to hit the strings hard without fret buzz. (This is called ‘high action’.) Both Jimi and SRV could play soft and delicately also, and so their range of possible dynamics was vast. Playing around with this dynamic range made for very expressive music. Also, both Jimi and SRV played with great groove and timing. These things are the secrets to their sound. Not a certain green Tube Screamer pedal nor a certain amp from 1968 nor a curly guitar cable.

Conclusions about Gear Nerds

Guitar Nerds are not the most disruptive character you will come across in a rock band. You may need to excuse yourself from tedious conversations about equipment occasionally. You may need to gently convince the Gear Nerd to simplify his rig (amp and pedals) so that there is enough room remaining for the singer to stand on the stage at a small venue.

Gear obsession is often coupled with other traits however, such as being unrealistically ambitious or being rhythmically dyslexic. (We’ll examine these two traits in upcoming posts.) Then there can be a problem. So, evidence of gear-nerdery is not on its own a red flag when auditioning a guitarist for your band.

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

Mark Baxter (c) 2024

0 Comments

Blog post #11: Dadolescent Rockers

Other typical DR behaviour when first playing in a band:

Summary

Blog post #9: Gearophobes

Graham Stove

Careless Santana

Summary

Blog post #4: Gear Nerds

Dave Pinoli

Handbag CEO

Gear Nerd characteristics

Which guitar gear to buy to play in a local rock band

Conclusions about Gear Nerds

Blog: How to form a rock band. Also, how NOT to form a rock band.

About this blog

Author

Archives

Categories

General

Beginners

Other