This guy thoroughly A/B'd a nice guitar against a series of ever-more-minimal guitars to see if he could figure out which factors are relevant to an electric guitar's tone.
I'm usually pretty cynical about this stuff, so I was thinking it's going to be: pickups and the kind of wood used in the body and neck and fingerboard - pickups definitely make a difference just because some are 'louder' than others; I assume woods resonate differently; fingerboards would absorb/change tone too, etc.. Body shape? Meh. Finish? Meh. Pickup height? Just a volume thing. Bridge metal? Meh.
But even my list of what I thought matters was too big.
obsessive nerds make the world go round
and I’ll bet the folks at Anderson are thrilled about all of this…. :(
no doubt.
i bet he still plays his Anderson, though. all his experiments might sound close to his Anderson, but i bet none of them feel as good in his hands. IMO, that’s what more money gets you: better playability (and aesthetic stuff, which can be important, too).
Like a blind wine-tasting, you are always shocked at the money you can save.
I wonder if he replaced the Honda motorcycle engines weighting down the table with Harley engines if he might get better distortion? Plus, more interesting groupies, though his roadies might object to lugging those engines around all the time.
The DAWs with unlimited plug-ins that can emulate every variable in the audio signal from its source to its destination could conceivably allow a creative person to play a Bach Toccata on a foghorn, as Time Magazine once in the last century said of Paul McCartney’s abilities.
Fascinating. You find good stuff, cleek.
Jack White’s hands on a Monkey Wards guitar did the job.
The Beatles nearly always bought cheap guitars, both electric and acoustic, and now those tones are classic and expensive.
Of course, they also had the nerd technicians in their lab coats at the Abbey Road studios to run away and emerge from a back room with a new electronic marvel (for the time) to capture the sounds the Beatles’ heard in their amazing heads.
I want this song to sound purple, Lennon demanded once. Or like I’m a yogi singing from a mountaintop.
Came pretty close in both cases.
this has inspired me to spend all day shopping for new pickups to put in a Strat i almost never play because i don’t like the way it sounds.
He could play the guitar just like a-ringin a bell
cleek, I’m sure it was here I read about this:
and the subsequent justified mockery of this claim. You’ve probably seen this, but somebody just sent me this wonderful letter sent to Chuck Berry when Johnny B Goode was put on the gold disc in NASA’s Voyager spacecraft:
https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/843241615502295041/photo/1
The sign-off is so wonderful it almost slays me ….
damn. i wish i had a Sagan letter. he was my hero when i was a kid!
You know, after I posted that wonderful Johnny B Goode letter, I was thinking more about Chuck Berry and what we now know about his character, and his abuse, because Johnny B Goode has always been one of my absolutely favourite songs.
We talked here recently (I think on the specific example of Joss Whedon) about how much one should let knowledge of an artist’s sins (or crimes) affect one’s views or feelings about their art. For anybody still pondering, and interested, there is a piece on this very subject in today’s NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/arts/television/bill-cosby-documentary-w-kamau-bell.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Television
i’d love to see that.
hope it shows up somewhere besides Showtime eventually.