Guitars of future past!

Just noticed, sorry about that, was lazy and didnt read everything

Do you have any pictures of that pinecaster it sounds really interesting?

I don't have picture of my particular one that's not a blurry and small stage shot of me, but ehre's one of the other 4 right before she got strings and went off to her owner... (I know its not mine because the grain is less knotty and the lower bouts are cut and sanded more precisely to fender pecs on this one):

http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt117/emcrae1968/Pinecaster%20Vintage/P3190682.jpg

Eddie also designed and made his own hum-cancelling early-style tele pickups.... they were kidna wrong for the guitar authenticity-wise being more 52ish when a pine guitar with broadcaster steel saddles like this oughta have something hot with thin wire and A3 magnets, more like a lapsteel bridge pup. But they really managed to do hum cancelling early tele sounds better than anything I have heard (and I have tried most everything at this point). I don't know what he did to make them so amazing. I should buy a set... he really overaged the hardware on these 5 tele though. It looked funky with all that rust and such... maybe a little wear to take the sheen down a bit woulda looked good, but he really got carried away with the patina given that he didn't age or distress the finish. reclaimed wood or not, the finish was brand new and perfectly executed. I am griping over smalls tuff. It was a very good Tele overall... I wanted to love it but I failed to bond with it.

okey doke, I'll take your word for it on Iabnez stuff as I am unfamiliar with most of their model sub-designations like you are talking about.... I pretty much know what each model looks like broadly and I know a lot about the old 702/80s model designations for the artist guitars like my Greco and their semi-hollows a bit...

I've said before on the forums, that I'd like to get a guitar, with humbuckers, and a trem, though one not specifically aimed at metal. I've admitted to myself that I'm gonna have to save a fair bit, so I'm thinking musicman sterling JP model, JP70, or JP50. I really love the possibilities of a 7 string, and not just for metal, it's great for jazz, and proggy post rock. I also love Ibanez S series guitars, though they cost a bit more, for a good one.

I can't say anything bad about the musicman shredder guitars of their strat-like guitars either. They do a great job over there. I always forget about musicman when I'm thinking about getting a superstrat....

The plan is to get the mod pedal, the OD, and the dist, then save up £500ish, or as much as I can until Christmas, and combine forces, with my annoyingly big family. My band are due to play a fairly big gig in the local O2, as part of this concert with up, and coming bands, and I'm not doing it, with a shitty behringer OD, and a chorus that's more exercise to turn on than it is to walk up Everest. My muff is good, but I use it as a fuzz, so I'm looking at the tone city wildfire, or Movall scorpion.And while I'm at it maybe something to reign in the P90s, a friend is going to give me his joyo dyna comp, but apparently it's a pile of utter crap, and doesn't do anything. I'm sitting here listening to the Mogwai live in Roskilde concert. It's amazing, I feel so mortal.

I keep getting tempted to buy an entry-level Gibson explorer (maybe one of the unpopular "goth" ones LOL) to be my 'metal/shred' guitar. I could just slap a stetsbar on for whammy tricks I guess.... It won't be a superstrat type thing, but its more me... and maybe I could do something crazy with the bridge pickup too like another 59/custom hybrid (have I mentioned that the hybrid is the best balance between a crazy hot PAF tone and an 80s hard rock sound ever? well it is... I am so into it)

my washburn would be a killer shred guitar if it had a vibrato system capable of divebombs and such.... as it is it has the tone (maybe it was more right before I swapped the super distortions out, but like I said I like the hybrid for hotrod bucker sounds), but the fixed bridge, while great for sustain holds it back from full shredtasticness... not that I will really do a lot of crazy, heavy shit beyond some cheap van halen, paul gilbert and geoerge lynch impersonations, but you know.... it might be fun

why don't you just make use of your amp's natural overdrive and the muff, man? What kidna music are you playing that needs more rhythm gain than the laney has in channel 2?

Plus, if you get to play loud at this show you can get the power amp cooking hard. Try turning the clean channel up until it breaks up and then abck off a 1/2 number on the dial, then set the gain channel to have a great OD tone at the same level as the clean channel and then turn that gain channel up a whole number so its working the poweramp a bit harder than the clean pushing her into sweet, sweet overdrive whenever the drive channel is engaged.

Why does everyone think they need so much kit these days to play a simple, local show for other kids? My 1st rock show? I ahd a fender amp, a Carvin guitar, a borrowed MXR distortion+ (I think, or it mighta been an OD250 or morley wah/distortion for lead boost, its been 20 years) and that's it and it was fine. I set my amp to break up when I opened my bridge volume to max, did a little verb, and the pedal was for solos... I love gear, but tis not about making tons of sounds, its about playing well and rocking like a testosterone and coffee fueled 15 year-old boy with a chip on his shoulder and something to say about it! I remember being blown away by local bands who got on stage with 80s crate gear, a DS1 and radioshack mics and they just bashed it out. As you get odler it will matter more, but right now your mission is to play with maximum enthusiasm and pay your dues while doing it....

Heard music man are meant to be insane! THough so expensive! Ibanez RG prestige models are amazing with the Edge zero and Lo-pro Edge zero tremolos. The pickups on them are very versitile too with autosplits on the hsh models and even on the hh models. They typically use Dimarzio pickups, the prestige RGs always seem to have amazing clean sounds and handle high gain amazingly. I really want a RG970 Premium

http://www.thomann.de/gb/ibanez_rg970wbw_wlb.htm?ref=search_rslt_ibanez+rg_329455_8

I came close to buying an mij S (i think, i get the ibanezes mixed up easily) but the wizard2 neck was so slim it fatigued me doing chords. Compound radius helped but i need more shoulder! At least something assymetrical like a evh wolfgang.

That sucks, I'm alright doing chords on the wizard necks, they are stupid thin though! I prefer the body shape of the RG over the S models though both play great and sound great providing you play a mid to high end model. I've never had a problem with Ibanez though myself, my ART120 is made in Indonesia, I still have half the guitar shop sticker on the neck where it meets the headstock LOL and their phone number on there too, they ain't even in business anymore. The RG I have put a down payment on is made in Indonesia too. I've never played a bad Indonesian or Korean built guitar but I have played a lot of shit Chinese built ones!

I really want a Japanese Ibanez, the build quality and craftmanship is just immense! same with those Jap fenders, Japanese fenders are hard to come by in the UK, don't think fender sell them here anymore because they was out selling the more expensive American ones or some stupid shit

Well... I did play the thing for at least 2 hours to get that handcramp while chording. I always do that before buying a guitar in person and also when I 1st get a guitar from the web. If i get handcramps in an hour or so I don't buy or, in the case if internet buys, I pack them back up and return them. The 1 time i didn't play a guitar for hours before buying i wound upwith a jackson that just wasn't comfortable for me for more than 15 minutes, so I am cautious now... even with the odd midset guitarswitch, you really need to make sure you buy necks that are comfortable for long sets, rehearsals and sessions when required. Even after my Jackson I thought I liked relatively slim necks and gravitated to Gibson slim taper and such before settling on medium-big late 50s shapes like the Gibson/Gretsch/Guild roundback, so-called Fender D shape and that soft V shape fender and some other companies did and still put on a few models. The boat and U shapes are a little too big to keep my thumb back where it oughta be when I am not bending.

EDIT: Everybody is different, but I think most people with normal man-size hands eventually find that while the flat necks facilitate a lot of fancy playing with less work than a rounder neck,, overall the lack of support for your palm gets fatiguing if you play for a long time. Guys who are unaware of this phenomenon have not had to play a variety of different style on one guitar in a 4 hour rehearsal or have small or oddly proportioned hands. I think the old neck shapes were made the way they were for 2 reasons, 1? stability! More wood means less warping, less truss adjustment needed and less danger of cranking wood or metal. To say nothing of the tendency of thin necks to twist, argh! But reason 2 is that the larger, rounder shapes suit the average player with average male hands well enough and are non-fatiguing back in the day where big bands, country and western groups and blues guys would play clubs and bars from duck til dawn every weekend providing music for working class stiffs to dance to... believe it or not it was fender who pioneered the term "fast neck" for a slimmer profile with a slimmer nut width. Their real motivation was to reduce the amount of wood required to make their necks so they could get 2 necks out of each maple blank instead of 1 (switching to the rosewood board helped too). The marketing department at fender was amazing at selling cost-cutting measures as 'improvements'. HAHAHA, but that 60s fender marketing lore has become written in stone. While now it is accepted that wider string spacing is better for 'fastness', the slim neck thing hangs on and has been taken to extremes because the thin necks do feel good for speedy runs when you 1st pick them up... and girls like them too. YMMV, but I can play a long time on my LP which has an ungodly huge neck even for me, I can play fast runs with ease now that I am used to it, I can play anything and everything for hours on end without tiring and my bends and different vibrato techniques are much easier with all that wood to anchor my thumb to. A skinny neck feels comfortable right away, sure. It feels easy. You think you are playing your best... but are you? and for how long? The big fatty will feel intimidating when you first pick it up but won't hold you up a much as you are expecting it to as long as you get past the mental block of "big necks slow," but if you keep it you will get used to it quickly ad discover its virtues. None of this matters if you suck though. you'll be just as bad no matter what....

Being 6'4/6'5 I have huge hands but still find the thin necks very comfortable but if I playy for 2 and a half hours, maybe 3 hours I do start to get cramps in my hand/wrist which just makes playing beyond that painful and difficult. I love the Gibson/Epiphone slip taper D neck I think its called, extremely comfortable and best of both worlds, though any thicker than the '50s necks and I find them uncomfortable. I should do that when trying a guitar at a store if I have the time and they don't get shitty with me playing and not buying for two hours haha.

I love Telecasters and everything about them. Thinking of buying a Mexican Telecaster in Lake Placid Blue when I haven't got important things to buy. Really want a Tele though and it has to be lake placid blue with a black pickgaurd which I'll have to buy at the same time

want to get tolerance from a jerkoff store clerk? fill out a financing app before asking to play the same guitar for 2 or 3 hours straight! Then they knw you mean business. But seriously, if a clerk at a music store gives me shit I won't buy there. I flip them attitude and complain to the manager too. One Guitr Center manager knew me and when he heard me tell off a new salesperson he stopped me from stalking out, scolded the guy and offered me a discount on the marshall amp I wanted to crank up to test but that jackass condescendingly told me to turn down. I did in fact buy that amp and it was a serious sale for the store. Sometimes when I get a similar guitar somewhere else I go back with the receipt to show them their lost thousand$+ sale just so the jerk get fired. I am usually a serious shopper. There have been times when I went into a store just putter around and left with a guitar or amp, lots of them! If you fuck with me while I am deciding you will lose your sale. I am always shopping whether I say so or not....

My Laney is surprisingly low gain, actually. Maybe I need to play it louder, and kill my neighbours. Lots of the time in the places I play I don't actually use my amp, I use whatever they have, at the place where my band rehearse they've got some nice Fender combos, and at school, I use the valvestate. I only use my amp at Church, or for home playing. In terms of gear it depends what is being played. Fair enough if I was just doing a straight up rock gig, I'd take a comp, or EQ, overdrive, distortion, and delay. It all depends on what you play, and personally my band plays I guess proggy indie, so I use various effects.

Change to high gain preamp tubes, give you more gain but less headroom

Dual triodes don't come gainier than a 12ax7/ecc83. Gain of 100. Some varieties have an earlier internal distortion onset when overloaded but they still pass a max potential gain of 100 to the next stage. I cannot imagine 3 cascaded stages into a cathode follower tonestack being too few. Thats what that laney's gain channel has. Thats the same gain structure as a jcm800. Enough for all but the heavist metal at 10. More than any amp I've owned in 10 years. With p90s those tubes should get a big whack of signal to go into overdrive. I have trouvle keeping a 15 watter with 2 stages dead clean when playing p90s or medium output paf type humbuckers in a band setting. My clean usually has a little dirt. I don't get what's up with this laney. I am thinking its suffering from bedroom player sindrome. This is a case of inexperience.

Ahh, I see. I just thought you could get higher gain preamp tubes, didn't know it was just distorting earlier. Silly me! How can you play with a little overdrive on your clean? I hate it! Then again I play a solidstate which I presome the diodes pr chips or what have you are being overloaded by my guitar when I turn it up and it sounds horrible! Not natural at all, just sounds like a speaker/amp struggling to cope with the signal its being given it also makes pedals sound shitty compared to when I use the same ones through a tube amp. With tube amps I still like it dead clean but don't mind too much if there's slight break up overdrive but I mainly like to stay fender clean when possible.

Maybe his tubes need changing if they aren't producing much gain? Or maybe he's not getting the amp loud enough

Guys, I've already said I don't play it that loud, and probably should play it louder,, though I can't without my parents excommunicating me. Read the whole thing.

When they aren't in, crank it!