Don’t Smoke Weed, Play Music.
By McDougalAK
This should be the new motto for all anti-drug campaigns.
Music, sex, marijuana, and food all have similar affects on the human brain. All four of these induce a state of relaxation on the mind. They all stimulate similar areas of the brain; sex, food, and music stimulate by releasing chemicals where-as marijuana stimulates by killing, and numbing cells. Surprisingly the most potent of these four “drugs” is music. Here’s the Link
If your a hack with a $3,000 Guitar, you’re gonna need one of these babies.
Only $30, goes great with a fanny pack! Seriously though, if your Axe is sooo nice that you are afraid to scratch it, put it in a safe.
You don’t see Carpenters using silver and diamond encrusted hammers, do you? Of course not. A Guitar is a tool, you shouldn’t be afraid to break, modify or even lose it.
It’s easy to get attached to a nice instrument, but if you make a point to try other Guitars, it will help you pinpoint exactly what you prefer about a certain model.
If you’d like to find out more about the “Git-Bra” here’s the link
Now if somebody would just make a Fretlight, Robot Guitar with one of these, they’d be millionaires!
I found a great article at Preacher Mikes Blog , it’s a welcoming address by Karl Paulnack for freshman at the Boston Conservatory. He writes;
The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works. One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.
He also notes that, Musicians are more likely to save the planet than Politicians, Generals or Engineers. Reminds me of the old joke “I told my parents I wanted to be a Musician when I grew up”. They said “I had to do one or the other”
Here’s a link to the whole article
Here’s another bad joke; a Doctor arrives at the pearly gates and St. Peter asks him who he is, replies “I’m a surgeon, I helped the crippled to walk and the blind to see” Come on in St Peter says. Next person shows up, Peter asks who he is, “I’m a Teacher, I help educate the ignorant and prepared them for successful careers”. Come on in. The next guy comes along and says “I was a Musician, I made depressed people happy and I gave lonely people a reason to go out and celebrate life”. St Peter says ” That’s great, you can load your gear in through the kitchen”
Here’s Chopper Sivertz of the Deadcats and the Reverberators showing his Sparrow Big Daddy”Ace” with Kent Armstong single coil p/u’s and a licensed Bigsby whammy bar
We tried doing a side by side comparison of Choppers’s Big Daddy, and my Twangmaster but we had some technical difficulties videotaping it. The results were; suprisingly the Hollow-body w/ single coil pickups sounded a bit thinner. The Twangmaster has a wider range of sounds, going from a sort of mushy humbucker sound to an ice-pick in the forehead tele bridge sound. I was quite surprised how much bite the Big Daddy has! Definitely a great axe for Rockabilly, Blues or Instro-Surf. It has the tone block under the bridge so there’s no feedback problems and it sustains well. The only problem we’re having is the “floating” bridge tend to float right out of place, when you press the whammy bar too far. The weak point of the Twangmaster (or just about any stock tele style Guitar) is the input jack. It’s about a $15 part to replace. There’s something weird about those recessed jacks, it’s better to have it flush w/ the body.
When left to our own devices Chopper and I both tend to buy “vintage”(pawnshop) gear. So we were pretty lucky that Billy Bones came along and offerred to set us up with a pair of brand new axes. I’m going to be demoing some of their new pickups. Sparrow is making their own pickups now and with the attention to quality and detail they put into their Guitars, I’m sure they’re going to sound great. I’ll keep you posted of course.
Don’t gets so carried away in the pursuit of technical excellence, that you start ignoring simple, tasteful playing. It’s fairly common, when you start to feel comfortable playing an instrument, to overplay. Even playing at 100% consistently is bad, you need to leave yourself someplace to go during the climax of your solo’s.
Also playing live, you have to pay attention to situations and surroundings. When improvising, try to make all your choices A or B. Fast or slow, mean or fancy, major or minor, high or low register. Never put yourself in the situation(live) of thinking “gee, there’s so many thing’s I could play here”.
Now style is a kind of vague thing, just like good music, everyone has their own idea of what style is. The easiest way to tell if you are developing your own style, is ask the question “who do I sound like”? If you find yourself borrowing from one particular player exclusively, then you are going to fall into the trap of being a copycat.
Everybody learns note for note passages, and this can do wonders for your technique, but music is a communication skill. If all you do is communicate someone elses message, then you are essentially performing the task of a tape recorder.
I’m not sure who said this but “being creative means NOT BEING AFRAID TO MAKE MISTAKES, being an Artist is KNOWING WHICH MISTAKES TO KEEP”. So when you make a mistake and it sounds ok, make a mental note of it. The more obscure your influences, the more unique your style will sound.
To me a big part of a Guitarist’s Style is the way they balance melody and dissonance. Try experimenting with noises, sound effects, if you can control a noise you can make it part of your sound. The only way to come up with new sounds is to try unorthodox techniques.
Mixing two or more styles of music together is an obvious way to sound different. The more different styles you can play competently, the more unique choices you’ll have, writing or playing. It’s definitely not a waste of time for a Rockabilly Guitarist to learn Celtic music or Klezmer music. Look at Paul Pigat, he has a degree in classical music. Or Roddy Radiation from the Specials, he started out playing Rockabilly and you can really hear it in his playing. Jeff Beck plays some mean Cliff Gallup lines and I’ll bet he bases part of his sound on those solos, whether it’s note for note or just the feel.
No matter how many notes you can play and how fast you can play them, if your granmother can’t recognize you when she hears you on the radio, what good is it?
I’ve been getting lots of people asking about this guitar so here’s a quick demonstration of what it sounds like.
Here’s the Sparrow Artist’s page
Update- so they decided to call this an “Ace”, but the folks at Sparrow will know what you mean if you ask about a “Gorecaster”
Check out Arlen Roth’s Blog at Gibson lifestyles. He’s one of the pioneers of video instruction with his series of Hot-Licks tapes/DVDs. He’s full of very helpful hints. For example, don’t obsess over copying another players style, just try and get the essence. There are some great posts about developing your own style and reading verses TAB. The other blog at Gibson worth reading is the Performance Tips & News.
Just don’t forget, you can buy 3 or 4 used USA Tele’s, or Sparrows for the price of a new Gibson” Headless Wonder”. And just a side note, Canadian readers have you ever noticed we’re not eligible for any of their contest’s (Gibson)? Sorry but I’ve never forgave Gibson for discontinuing the L6-S, everyone that’s played mine is amazed what a versatile, easy to play, simple, solid axe it was. The flat frets were kinda weird, I replaced those w/ Dunlop super-heavies right away. It’s the perfect combination of a maple neck tele and a les paul! It’s a maple, laminated neck-thru body design with Bill Lawrence electronics, Unfortunately it has an oblong les-paul sort of look to it.
While I’m bashing Gibson, everyone knows that Gibson tried to sue Actavision over the Guitar Hero series, right? They sued Wal-Mart, K-mart, Toys R Us, Here’s the Wiki link (look under lawsuits). They claim that the Guitar Hero controller is a musical instrument. They are also trying to sue the makers of Rock Band.
The best example of how big companies screw their customers, is the way they way way they offer budget priced guitars that look ridiculous next to the expensive line. Melody Makers could be a wicked little axe, but the reason they are there, is to make Les Pauls and SGs look better. The only real problem with them is is the ugly pickguard and pickup. The shape of the headstock kinda screams “budget” too. Here’s an example 
Is this not one apologetic looking Guitar? How much would it cost them to put a P-90 and a less retarded looking pickguard on it? We’ll never know because they don’t actually want to sell them. They want you to look at it and say, “well for a couple of hundred dollars more I could get a Les Paul Jr”.
