Box of Slides

I've seen it said that anybody who starts trying to play steel guitar ends up with a box full of steels. This is my box, built by my father. I occasionally play slide and I occasionally play steel, both basically as a bedroom player, so it's only a small box, but we'll see.

There's the fake Coricidin bottle slide, which I think is a little big but is my go-to. There's the Lowell George-approved 11/16s socket. It's a Craftsman, so if I play my blues hard and break it, I can take it to any Sears and get it replaced. There's a Zippo, which I never really used as a smoker. I think I saw a video of John Mooney playing like that. I have a shiny chrome slide and a less shiny brass one. I think the brass grips a little more, causing more of the characteristic string noise for bluesy acoustic work. I have a Stevens bar that came with my lap steel, and a Dunlop bar I picked up later, and they're heavy enough that I can really only use 'em for action-enhanced steel playing, rather than slide playing on my normal guitars, which is fine. The big one is a threaded test tube I got from the lab where I work when they were ridding themselves of glasswork. I thought I could make it into a bottleneck but never cut it off. I use it for steel stuff but it is light enough to easily go over to the spanish-style guitar, for playing like Danny Gatton and his beer bottle. Except that I'm not that good. But that's OK — saying you're not as good as Danny Gatton is like saying you're bipedal.

I know, this post is useless without audio, so I'll throw that on the list.

Metalcaster

I have to thank Guitarz for this one. It's like a combination of '72 Deluxe Tele and a Zematais . It looks dang cool. And looks like you can get it on eBay for $300.

Isn't That Special?

Fender is introducing the American Special series, which includes 2 Stratocasters and a Telecaster. With the Strats, there's the option of three Texas Special single coils and two and a humbucker in the bridge, and the Tele has the requisite 2, with the three-saddle bridge. Intonation be damned, that's what we Tele pickers like! Anyway ...

They are designed specifically to bring the full Fender experience of a terrific-sounding, smooth-playing, rock-solid-built U.S.-made Fender guitar to the workingman without emptying his bank account.

Just so you know, that number is just north of $1000 MSRP.

Where do I sign up for a review copy?

All These Changes

We've All Been There

I've been showing my son a little bit about how to play bass. This is the second lesson. The first was a discussion on keeping time. They call it "woodshedding" because you really don't want others to hear you until you've figured something out. Still, I am proud of him and how hard he's working at it. I'm also testing out my new camera. Without following to YouTube to check, who can recognize what he's trying to learn?

Man, That's ...

Long time readers of this blog might remember me mentioning Steve Kimock. Specifically, back about two years ago, I wrote about a then two-year-old article in Guitar Player about intonation. I wrote about it then and I think about it on occasion because I thought and think it was very insightful. Not going to do Steve the injustice of restating his theme in my words. Kinda did that 2 years ago anyway.

Anyway, Steve wrote this about three months ago, then abandoned his personal blog. That's a well-written piece by an engaging author, about his inability to reconcile his ears with music theory.

Although it was perfectly clear to me that if the answer to the question, “What is a D Major chord?” was “D F# A”, and if the answer to the question “What is D F# A?” was “D Major”, that I hadn’t learned anything at all about that D Major triad.

I thought the ‘music theory” bit was going to explain to me why I felt the way I did when I played and listened to music,
but instead it just churned out a bunch of circular logic bullshit, perfectly protected by the really not so diabolically clever Catch 22: DON’T ASK WHY!!

I must disagree. I really think he's asking music theory to do something it was never meant to do. Music theory to my mind is about establishing an instruction set, a shorthand to allow the composer to tell the musician what to play. It establishes a vocabulary, a way of talking about what we expect to play, so we can say "D major" or "D" instead of "Put your index finger on the third string second fret, your middle dinger on the first string second fret, and your ring finger on the second finger third fret". Science is to be involved in explaining that, and

I confess, my ear is not nearly as developed as his is, and with the ringing I hear when I sit in a quiet room, I'm quite sure that it will never be nearly that good. (Curse you, Ramones.) Considering that guitarists, as a class, think of intonation as something you do with a screwdriver whenever you change strings, I believe it's well worth considering these issues, learning more. I don't think that the language of music theory is able to contain the question, much less the answer, but he starts this as a young learning guitar player, and that's a bit much to expect someone to understand. But recognizing a chord by the notes is as circular a logic as recognizing poison ivy by the number of points on the leaf. Far better to recognize than to have to count.

Not To Be Gross

Remember the ugly high end issue I was having? I kicked out a bunch of mucus when I brushed my teeth this morning and now my ears work better.

Might make it a 'Not Suck' post later.