My Headful of Ideas and their Ultimate Effect

You know I want a paisley guitar, right? Well, wouldn't this be a good one?

That is Trussart, which is the first maker of metal electric guitars that I can think of. I always enjoy going back to them to dream.

This is part of my dream. This is their Graphtech piezo three-saddle bridge. Graphtech's piezo system is called the Ghost system, and you can use it to make your guitar a MIDI guitar. This is a good thing. But you can't get them without getting a Trussart! Or if you can, I don't know it.

So, for those keeping score at home, I'm thinking of a piezo acoustic/MIDI B-Bender Sustainer Tele. A bit crazy, I suppose.

Explain The Effect, Vol 1

Following is the first solo from French Frith Kaiser Thompson's "Killing Jar". I have it both forward and backward.

"Killing Jar", Kaiser solo, forward (1:09)
"Killing Jar", Kaiser solo, forward (1:09)

My take is that this is a reversed solo, that they ran tape backwards to record it. The steel guitar on "This Moment", Matthew Sweet's contribution to the Sweet Relief compilation, has about the same sound. It sounds so otherworldly. First question is this: How can I get something like this effect while playing live? What box should I shop for?

Second question is more detailed. About :50 on the solo, there's a flutter. That's about :20 reversed. It's more than just a BB King butterfly vibrato, although that's kind of what it sounds like. It's there in the reversed, so it's not just the backward-recording. So, what is it, and how can I get my hands to do it?

Beau Bridges

That is the before. My 1988 MIJ Tele, expertly relic'd over the last 15 years by yours truly. Picks jammed under the pickguard and control plate. The old Ultra-style 3-screw bridge. Plus the new bridge that was to be installed. Ordered from Guitar Fetish last week and arriving yesterday.

Speaking of expert relic jobs, I have pulled out the rear strap button screw many times. Most times, I just redrilled it. I think I filled the last time, which makes this five times. In one of Dan Erlewine's books, he shows the tail of Jeff Beck's Strat, which evidently he lets fall on stage, button first, at regular intervals, so it looks much like that.

Anyway, the first step is to remove the strings, because when you have tension on the bridge, you can't really take it off. Then you take out the bridge screws — the old one had three — and then take off the mounting bolts for the bridge pickup.

The good thing about doing a Telecaster bridge is the fact that the bridge plate is how you mount the pickup. If the pickup is in the route, you have to be close to right with the bridge placement. If I was putting on another kind of bridge, I would have been rightfully very worried, but I wasn't.

Perhaps I should've been.

This picture shows both bridges head-to-head. (OK, I took the strings off the tuners, not out of the bridge. You can see the ball ends in the shot. It's a good way to keep 'em together while you wait to reinstall.) It shows, specifically, the fact that the outer screws are the same width. I figured that I could use the same screw holes. A careful eye would notice that the pickup holes do not overlap in the center, but rather over at the bass end. Just as a guess, I would say that the screw holes go about 1/4" away from where the old ones were. When placed, you could see the old screw holes through the string-through holes on the bridge. This was OK for me, as this is not a string-through loader.

This is a bridge-setting trick I found on TDPRI. Put some thread through the outside tuners, over the nut, over the bridge, through their repective holes, then weighted off the edge to hold it tight. I thought I was being cool. And I guess I was, but I didn't get it fully. I thought it was to ensure strings going correctly over the pickups. It's also for getting the right placement on the fretboard. This I do not have. I'm within 1/'16" from the edge of the fretboard at the 21st fret. At some point, I will have to fill-and-drill (take some toothpicks, goop 'em with wood glue, stick 'em in, cut 'em off: that's the Guitar Repair Book way) then re-set the bridge to get some more space for the 1st string. But not today.

I find that you just need a little bit of help to get the screw through the finish and into the wood. Not much. So I took a tiny drill bit, put it into my Dremel (with a little bit of paper as a shim), started the holes with that. My power drill is just a bit too powerful and ungainly to really do this job.


And here it is. Set up and with picks jammed back under the pickguard. I did a good-enough-for-comfort job for string height, but one day would like to build a radius card that can go under the strings and allow me to get the 1st and 6th strings as I want them and move the others as needed. But they work for me now.

This is a three-saddle compensated bridge, so intonation is not quite as true as you can get with a six-saddle, but I'm OK with it. Surprisingly, the E and A are almost right on, and the D and G are real close. Right now, it's the B and E that are the most off, and I've split the difference.

The new bridge is noticeably lighter. I think that makes the tone more icepick, which is fun. My eldest came to see my progress at the end, and I was showing him the icepick. "Going to ten on the volume knob makes you bass-heavy, so if you roll back a little, you get more of that icepick." Then I fretted on the neck pickup. You can't do that on every guitar, can you?

The wife said, "So, none more black?" I pointed at the neck pickup cover and said "Some more black. Just not right now." I'll have to get a soldering gun and the belief I can do electronics first, because the cover is grounded. And a friend has a set of black tuners he's not using and offered a straight-up trade. I'll blog all that, too.

I suppose I should add a title....

You know the players. We will call them Guitar and Keys. They are the guys I normally play with. And when we jam together, Guitar plays guitar, Keys plays keys and I'm on bass.

Guitar is a lefty guitar player who has played for a long time in the flipped-over string style, like Dick Dale. He's recently trying to learn how to play the other way, and that's cool, but making it harder to look at his hands to try to figure out what's going on.

Keys doubles on drums on occasion, but he mostly plays keys for himself. He has one problem from two reasons. When I was in college, I mostly played with myself and for myself. I'd play some blues, and so I could hear the 12 bars go by, I pretty much hit root for whatever chord I was on at the time. I couldn't play without referencing the root for a good long time, which hobbled me as a player. Keys mostly plays for himself, so he self-accompanies.

He also plays Praise and Worship.

P&W, as a genre, is keyboard-centered. You can't have P&W without keys. You can have it without a drummer, without a guitar, without a bass, but not without keys. So the P&W style for keys is to play like you're playing alone and the rest of the instruments falling in, more or less.

All in all, this is fine. Where it becomes a problem is when he's playing in the bass range with his left hand. If he's covering the bass part, what do I do with the bass?

This is a problem for two reasons. The first is me being new to the bass, which is tuned like the top four strings of the guitar but is not a guitar. I'm trying to pick up the style, but it's hard. The second is the fact that it's a complicated song. It's lopsided, and it's in something that can resolve, I guess, into 4/4 if you squint at it hard enough. There's no drummer, so I'm having a devil of a time trying to figure out where and how to lock in, especially with having to find some odd place to be because Keys' left hand is covering exactly the best ground for my instrument.

So, I'm sucking.

I'm trying to take inspiration from Peter Hook's playing on New Order's "True Faith", but I'm not really hitting the rhythm for that, either.

My Potential Upgrade List, with links and commentary

Tele neck pickup cover, Black $10 at Guitar Parts Resource.
Probably the next mod, after the bridge. Should be an easy mod: unsoldering the ground, bending back tabs, pulling off the cover, putting on a new cover, and soldering a new ground directly to the back of the tone pot, because I'll eventually redo the electronics and I'm thinking about a 4-position switch to give me parallel and series, and much of what I read suggests you separately ground the neck PU if you do that.

Schaller Mini Tuners, Black $67 at Stew-Mac.
Not so essential, because it came with about the same, except chrome. But it would follow trend toward the all-black hardware.

Gotoh Schaller-style Tuners, Black $45 at Stew-Mac.
Replacing the real Schallers. My Tele has Gotohs anyway, so this should be a straight conversion. And that's great, too.

Hipshot Extender G2 Tuner, Black $91 at Hipshot.
Also not crucial, but somewhat cool. So much stuff happens with Drop-D these days.

GraphTech nut $7 at Stew-Mac.
I'm OK with my nut, but I am within delta of believing it's too high. I'm told that stock is too high for most purposes. But mostly to make the nut black.

GraphTech string trees $5 at Stew-Mac.
But it isn't only for the blackness of it. I like above-the-nut bending, which is the technique which is ultimately the source for string-pull methods like the B-Bender.

Hipshot Parsons-Green B-Bender $380 at Stew-Mac.
Hipshot B-Bender $190 at Stew-Mac.
This is ultimately where I want to get. I want to bend. I played a Bender at Dave's Guitar in La Crosse, and I know I can make music with one. And I am assured that I could move the Hipshot to bend on the G instead, should I desire. Brad Paisley bends the G, you know. My wonder here is whether the act of cutting so much wood out of my basswood Tele would wreck the body. This is required, I insist.

More a way of saving links than anything else, but comments are always welcome.

This time, really Dave's Guitar

There is a black Wilkinson Compensated Telecaster bridge in town. It waits for Brown to decide to bring it to me. This looks to be Monday. Same source as the pickguard, the control plate and the knobs.

This, if you recall, is my Fender family. It is my best picture of my Telecaster. As you can see, there's a black/white/black pickguard, black control plate and knobs. The chrome bridge sticks out like a big silver thing in the middle of a big black thing. And soon, it will be gone.

The big worry is the screw issue. The current bridge is an Ultra-style bridge from Japan, held on by 3 screws. The bridge to be installed is held on with four screws. So I will have to redrill the bridge screw holes. And likely fill up the old screw holes.

If it was an ash or alder body, I would care much much less. As is, it's a basswood body. I have had to fill screw holes for the control plates, the pickguard and the strap buttons. The rear strap button at least five times. So I'll do that process, showing you how Dan Erlewine showed me. Through his books, of course.

So, when it comes, I'll set my bridge. And I'll take pictures and blog the process. Wish me luck!

Dave's Guitar

Nope, that is not my guitar.

I'm talking about Dave's Guitar of Lacrosse, Wisconsin. It is a great and wonderful place.

Their electric room has all the basics and some really nice upper-end pieces. I was able to pull down and plug in a B-Bender Tele, plug in, and play enough to believe that, if I owned one, I would actually be able to make music with it, not just sounds.

I am sure my house could fit in their acoustic room. It contains some wonders, like several Nationals, a Kona weissenborn-style and an old Oahu with the high nut for lap playing, several nice and beautiful Martins and Gibsons, and the pictured Larivee parlor-sized slot-head. For most of my acoustic playing, my Fender electro-acoustic dread works well, but this would be just the one for sitting around and fingerpicking. Isn't it just beautiful?

But the real reason to visit is upstairs. That's where Dave's stash is. A good ... 200? ... of some of the coolest instruments ever. This picture is 2 pink paisley Teles and a blue flower Tele. There's also sunburst Customs, blackguards and other great Telecasters.

Plus the Strats.

Plus the Gretsches.

Plus the Rickenbackers. (Pictured above.)

Plus the Explorers, the Moderne, and the Flying Vs.



A Flying V with a Bigsby. Just how iconic is that?

While I was there, I got my lap steel appraised. It's a National or Supro, they say, without a serial number. Worth about $350, they say. That's a good $200 more than I paid for it.

If you're ever in western Wisconsin, it is well worth your while to visit.