Guitar thread

[StevG57]

I like guitars but don't play a lick. I know, it's kind of weird but having a daughter who's a musician gives me the excuse to buy and sell and we both end up with guitars we like. I strive to get bone stock, unmolested guitars and with the exception of the part-o-caster, they are original. All are in about 8/10 condition but they are instruments and all have been played. It's a low end collection but we enjoy them and it's fun for me.


All Parts Fender part-o-caster and Washburn WI-64


Yamaha 120SD and Yamaha SC300T


Cort and Yamaha SE110


Dean Hollywood and Jackson Outcaster


Peavey T-27

I like this thread, there are some really neat pieces out there and it's fun to see who has what. Thanks for looking!

[assquatch20]

I sold some old no-name guitar a few years back and me and some friends are gonna try to track it down. I got lucky and found some pics this morning.





Thing sounded like a banjo, but I miss it.

[Dismount]

Ok... Once you start playing how do you make yourself stop Before you pay attention and notice that you cant straighten out your hand anymore?


And it feels really weird typing with the tips of my left fingers having less sensation than the right.

[Cutsit]

Peavey T-27

My Favorite!

[cornercarver]

Originally Posted by StevG57

I like guitars but don't play a lick. I know, it's kind of weird but having a daughter who's a musician gives me the excuse to buy and sell and we both end up with guitars we like.

At least you live with yours! I played guitar in high school but was never very good. Good enough to acquire GAS, though. Now, I just use them to work up changes when I'm writing music and record simple rhythm tracks with them. I don't have kids so if I want to justify my guitars I'm stuck buying them for my nephew, who lives 3000 miles away! Needless to say, my 'collection' doesn't look like yours. I've got a low end Takamine acoustic and a '72 tele reissue here at home, my ex-wife took my Fender Jaguar (out of spite. She doesn't play), and I have a fretless Rick Turner Renaissance bass that I use for temporary bass lines when I'm recording demos until I can get someone in who can actually play bass. I've never really formed an attachment to the tele, so I think it's going to my nephew on his 10th birthday in March - he's been playing for a year or two on a beat up old acoustic - and I'll find something else for around the house. I've never owned just a good 'ol regular strat, so I think it's time for that.









It's a shame that my instrument (keys) is almost entirely mass produced and 100% identical within a given model with no variation. No one ever looked at a modern digital synth and thought "that sure is a pretty synth." There are good reasons to collect keyboards, but you can't hang 'em on the wall and enjoy them in the same way. Obviously, an acoustic piano is a unique instrument, but how many people own more than one of those? I don't even have one, due to the noise factor. I do have a Hammond B3 and Leslie 122 from the year of my birth. I just sold a 1978 suitcase Rhodes electric piano yesterday, and I have my new vintage vibe electric piano to replace it.

[StevG57]

Thanks Cutsit. I got that one from Craigslist, and it came with the hard case. As I hoped, it was stock and barely used. It's a neat piece and I found a guy on YouTube who raved on the Peavey T series guitars, so I think I did ok.

Cornercarver, you have a lot of cool stuff. You'll be the best uncle EVER if you send him that Tele. Make sure he knows it's a Permenent Loan...that way he'll treat it as it's yours and won't trade it for a computer game. Bummer about the Jag, that was just mean. I don't know anything about Rick Turner so I'll search his guitars out later but that is a beautiful bass guitar. Man, you have to tell us about that rad looking purple metalflake keyboard. I know, it's a guitar thread but that thing is just too much!

[assquatch20]

I think I'm gonna sell my old aluminum-neck Kramer. I see plenty of the lesser models on eBay, but no real bidding prices. Anybody know a good price on these?

[cornercarver]

Originally Posted by StevG57

Thanks Cutsit. I got that one from Craigslist, and it came with the hard case. As I hoped, it was stock and barely used. It's a neat piece and I found a guy on YouTube who raved on the Peavey T series guitars, so I think I did ok.

Cornercarver, you have a lot of cool stuff. You'll be the best uncle EVER if you send him that Tele. Make sure he knows it's a Permenent Loan...that way he'll treat it as it's yours and won't trade it for a computer game. Bummer about the Jag, that was just mean. I don't know anything about Rick Turner so I'll search his guitars out later but that is a beautiful bass guitar. Man, you have to tell us about that rad looking purple metalflake keyboard. I know, it's a guitar thread but that thing is just too much!

Rick Turner was the founding luthier at Alembic. He headed out on his own at some point - I don't really know his history. A friend's girlfriend was nanny for his kids, which is how I came by that bass. It's not exactly custom, in that it is a standard spec, but it was made for me. I have no idea why I went with a fretless. It's not like I'm a bass player, so it's a lot of work for me to sound good on it (the neck is lined, but not fretted). It's a holy body bass with a piezo pickup in the bridge, and the strings are wound nylon - so super light and easy to play. The bass is also incredibly light, weighing less than any of my guitars. The tone is amazing and it is, by far, the easiest bass to play that I've ever encountered.

As for the purple piano - it is a constructed-from-new electromechanical piano that is functionally very similar to a rhodes piano - mechanical hammers bang into an asymmetrical tuning fork, the struck side vibrates near to a guitar pickup (one pickup coil for each note on the piano!), and the resonating side provides harmonic content above the fundamental for tone.



So it really is basically a hammer-struck guitar, though the 'strings' are thick and only anchored at one end. You tune them by sliding a spring up and down on each tine. Tuning it takes a few hours, but it only goes out of tune over the course of years as oxidation and hammer strikes wear the metal away.

Here's a photo of the piano under construction at the factory. The action rail is installed, but the harp with the tines and pickups is not. It sits on top of those hammers that strike upwards on the piano.




Electronically, it is very similar to a guitar - 73 pickup coils, treble and bass attenuation knobs, and this one has active electronics which can also boost treble and bass. It also has stereo output and the built-in preamp can tremolo between left and right, with both depth and speed controls. There's also an effects loop that allows me to put guitar pedals or other effects before the piano's preamp. I play it through a new(ish) Fender Hotrod Deville amp, though I need something smaller. I have yet to get either the gain or master volume knobs over 3 on that amp and it is still fucking loud if I've got the volume on the piano up.

I had them build this one with an optical midi sensor underneath the keybed. It optically reads the velocity and position of each key and turns it into midi data without any mechanical interaction that would mess with the feel. It has serial midi and usb outputs.

I tend to use a phaser, an analog delay, an auto-filter (or sometimes a footpedal wah), and I use an Ibanez tube screamer to add some extra harmonic content, though I tend to keep the boost all the way down, so it just adds the slightest bit of crunch.

The piano is completely craftsman built by a small company in New Jersey (Vintage Vibe) from all new parts (the keys themselves are sourced in china, apparently, but absolutely everything else on the piano is made in New Jersey, by hand). It is not a vintage piano, though they founded the company originally as a vintage electric piano restoration company. The paint is a purple metal flake that actually looks a lot better in person than it does in the photos, though it isn't nearly as dark of a purple as I thought I was getting. The samples I selected showed something nearly black and with a lot more blue in the purple tone, but I really like the colour as it is, too, now that I've gotten used to it. I was kind of disappointed when I first saw pics and then saw it in person for the first time. I've only owned it for a couple of weeks. I've only played 3 gigs with it so far, but I love it. The action is so much faster than my old rhodes piano and the tone is amazing.

Here's a recording of a gig I played on the day it arrived. Aside from a couple of songs I'm not linking directly to here because I was still getting used to the action, these are the first notes I ever played on it (and I think that shows, unfortunately - I play it much better now that I'm more used to it). Also, because I wasn't familiar with the tone, I failed to realize that my wah pedal was actually on and all the way up for the first 5 songs, so you are getting a band-pass filtered impression of the tone. You can hear it's natural tone in the later tracks, though the whole thing is recorded from a handheld recorder in the audience, so it's not exactly high fidelity.

Soundcloud embeds never work here, but here's a link.

http://soundcloud.com/sam-gendler/04-track-4

You can hear the whole set here, though I'm not fond of the first couple of tracks. This was only the 3rd time this band had played together. It's an improvisation project so we don't really rehearse, though we have started to at least nail down grooves and basic structures so we aren't limited to one-chord jams. http://soundcloud.com/sam-gendler/se...10-22-obriens/

[StevG57]

Assquatch, that aluminum neck bass has to be pretty rare. Any idea of the year? It has a cool shape and it looks fantastic. I've never seen anything quite like it before, but then I know less about bass guitars than I do regular 6 strings.

Cornercarver, I like your band! Nice, easy funk sound and as you said, the keyboard comes alive later in the set. I went to the Vintage Vibe site and listened to some samples. Their stuff sounds beautiful. Congrats on a really neat piano. It's no Casio but it'll have to do.

[jdgretz]

Originally Posted by cornercarver

It's a shame that my instrument (keys) is almost entirely mass produced and 100% identical within a given model with no variation. No one ever looked at a modern digital synth and thought "that sure is a pretty synth." There are good reasons to collect keyboards, but you can't hang 'em on the wall and enjoy them in the same way. Obviously, an acoustic piano is a unique instrument, but how many people own more than one of those? I don't even have one, due to the noise factor. I do have a Hammond B3 and Leslie 122 from the year of my birth. I just sold a 1978 suitcase Rhodes electric piano yesterday, and I have my new vintage vibe electric piano to replace it.

I LOVE Hammond B-3s I owned a Lowery with full pedals and a Leslie cabinet (needed work) for a while. Unfortunately my ex- decided I needed to get rid of it as it wouldn't fit in her condo (should have kept the organ and dumped the ex- sooner) so I never really learned to play it.

Jimmy Smith, Joey DeFrancesco, Lee Morgan, Rhoda Scott, Barbara Dennerlein - oh yeah, I can listen to them all day long.

jdg

[cornercarver]

Originally Posted by jdgretz

I LOVE Hammond B-3s I owned a Lowery with full pedals and a Leslie cabinet (needed work) for a while. Unfortunately my ex- decided I needed to get rid of it as it wouldn't fit in her condo (should have kept the organ and dumped the ex- sooner) so I never really learned to play it.

Jimmy Smith, Joey DeFrancesco, Lee Morgan, Rhoda Scott, Barbara Dennerlein - oh yeah, I can listen to them all day long.

jdg

That one has pedals, too, but I can't play 'em so I don't leave them installed, since it takes up a lot more room that way. I have to confess, I play a digital keyboard version that is also made by Hammond much more than I play the B3. To really get the organ to sing and growl, the volume has to be pretty high. And I sure as hell don't take it to gigs, though I do sometimes drag the leslie out and run the digital organ through it. There's something about feeling the wind from a spinning leslie on the back of your neck as you play... I pretend to myself that I keep it around for recording but the truth is that I usually keep the organ low enough in the mix that it's impossible to tell it from the digital one and the digital one is vastly easier to record - no wind or motor noise to deal with and I can record direct so no excessive volumes required.

It's sometimes tempting to free up the cash I have sunk in the organ in order to buy other studio hardware, but I know I'll regret it if I do. I've gone so far as to put it up for sale a time or two, but the internet has so far always spared me a serious buyer until I've come to my senses, though I did almost sell it to Stevie Nicks. I guess they decided to rent one in the end.

[Stressfest]

Late to the party, but here are my kids...

Historic Les Pauls... Left to Right, 59, 58 and 57 loaded with Wolftones except the 57 which has Duncan Seths.

**Not pictured...PRS Single Cut and Taylor 810*

[Tripped1]

That '59 makes me hard.

[Cutsit]

[QUOTE=StevG57;19975166]Thanks Cutsit. I got that one from Craigslist, and it came with the hard case. As I hoped, it was stock and barely used. It's a neat piece and I found a guy on YouTube who raved on the Peavey T series guitars, so I think I did ok.


Carl Perkins could really make the Peavey go!

[StevG57]

Cutsit, you made my day! I've always liked Carl Perkins and to hear him make that Peavey sing was a real treat. Thanks for sharing the video.