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Looper's Delight
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This is not another dating thread. > And one could argue that - every electromagnetic nuance of a plucked >string > on the best Les Paul or PRS is Not accurately reflected by even the best > pickups. There are many of us that would say that this is a blessing, although a mixed blessing. I moved last weekend (I'll get to the point in a bit), and stripped down to only the barest possessions. For me that is. When I moved from Hoboken to Brooklyn, I managed to fill a 14 foot U-Haul truck almost to the top with all of my stuff: I had nine guitar amps, five guitars (real ones, not including the junkers I was kicking around, drilling holes in- more on these poor victimes later), a big ole rack of recording gear, and other less important stuff (you know, clothes, a bed, stuff like that). This last move, I was able to get everything a large Econoline van. One of the things that I was forced to do was finally give up on a lot of projects that I was working on- In particular, the Fred Frith neck pickup project. I would up giving this guy three of my junk guitars for him to turn into sculpture, along with about 15lbs of junked guitar parts I was saving, just incase I ever wanted to, I don't know, make my futon frame into a tune-able electric zither or something. Now that I have been forced to move into the dreaded singer/songwriter realm, I have tried to stop playing my electric unplugged, because nothing sounds the same plugged and unplugged. Rather than use a well designed, comfortable guitar like you Klein lovers out there, I have sold my Paul Reed Smith and my Custom Shop Les Paul, because I never played them- why? How can you resist the ol' Fender Jaguar (highly modified, of course). Who needs to stay in tune. Buzz Feiten would laugh his ass off if he played my guitar. The problem with the Jag is that the way it sounds plugged into and amp is completely different than the unplugged sounds. Don't laugh- I'm not talking about volume and tone controls here. Through the amp, you only hear the section of string between your fingers (or nut) and the bridge. Sitting in my bedroom at 4:00am, I here countermelodies from the strings between my fingers and the nut, as well as all those groovy sympathetic vibrations from the section of string between the bridge and the tremelo. Hence the Fred Frith Pickup Project. Mr. Frith has a pickup that he has clamped to the headstock of one of his guitars (so I am told) to get those string sounds between his fingers and the nut. BTW: Lee Renaldo had one of his Jazzmasters routed out between the bridge and trem so that he could install a pickup there. I guess it didn't work out very well as he has since taken it out. I had this one seriously abused plywood SG copy that I had routed out (chiseled out, actually) between the bridge and trem from the LR pickup idea. All it really did was give some kind of weird comb filtering and a few strongly resonent but otherwise not very interesting tones- I have since determined that I like the sound of the sympathetic vibrations to the real thing. I should have known that I wasn't going to get what I was hearing through my ears. I drove myself crazy for a LONG trime trying to get a sound out of my guitar that sounded like it did when I was unplugged. But I still haven't given up totally on the FF pickup project. With enough bow in your neck, you be playing with double hammer-ons and quadruple stops! Anybody try this out ever? Trevor Piezos in the bridge and nut might be kind of cool, harmonywise, but I hate the sound of those things......