Wednesday, September 30, 2009

That was weird

I play a Tele. I play clean. Normally, this means I have icepick tone, sharp treble that just pokes in the ear. The good thing about it is that you can always find yourself in the mix, but the bad thing is that you can't hide if you're having an off night.

Tonight, I tried a new, similar patch. And it was a ball of mud. No definition, all low end. This on my Tele strung with .009 strings. Normally, the thing has no bottom end. I could not find any top end with that clean patch.

During sound-check, I was playing around with patterns, adapting one that I learned off the Tommy Shannon bass tape, which, when put to B, is a lick from Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell".

E -----------------------------------
B -----------------------------------
G -----------------------------------
D -------------7-9-------------7-9---
A -------9-9-9-----------9-9-9-------
E -7-7-7-----------7-7-7-------------
Isn't it enough to make you want to pull out the ray gun? But, while playing around with it in another key (F#, which I'm not sure is the right chord but I think it might be) ...

E ----------------------------------------------------------------------
B ----------------------------------------------------------------------
G -----------------2-2-4-4-2-2------------------------2-2-4-4-2-2-------
D ---------2-2-4-4-------------4-4------------2-2-4-4-------------4-4---
A -----4-4--------------------------------4-4---------------------------
E -2-2--------------------------------2-2-------------------------------
"We've Got The Beat". Go-Gos. Who, remember, were so wild they got tossed out of Ozzy's backstage when he was still snorting ants and biting the heads of small flying animals.

Meanwhile, we didn't have a bassist — and if he called in and begged out, I never heard it — but between my mud, the piano and our friend coming back to sit in on organ, the low end was covered well enough. But still, it makes me very much want to get a bass. If you have two guitars and no bass, that's not right. And a whammy pedal set for going down an octave? That doesn't really do the trick.

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