Last Chance Gas

Picked up the crossbreed Tele/Strat yesterday and played it for the first time in a long while as I watched the It Might Get Loud documentary (with Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White). Weird. After months of playing nothing but a bass with a 34½ in. scale, a regular neck felt like a ukelele. I have pretty big hands and my left hand is used to really stretching out.

Not bad, from a website that sells boots and stuff.

Where were you in 1960?

Two pickups and two pickup guards. Much thinner neck than the Precision Bass. The first thing any of us did was to take the guards off. The first Jazz Basses had string dampers, necessary with the kind of strings they made back then. (They got in the way as well.)

For all their relative sophistication, J-Basses seemed to cry out to be stripped down and modified. The ultimate example was the one owned by Jaco Pastorius, who ripped out the fret wires, filled the empty grooves with varnish and created his own fretless bass.

Unlike the Precision Bass, which had one pickup and a single passive tone control, the J-Bass had a lot more sound variety depending on which pickup had the volume cranked up. Nowadays both can be bought with active electronics, so the point is moot. You choose based on which neck you like.

Last Friday night I played on the Stones’ “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown” for the first time since… well, probably since it was still on the charts.

When he wasn’t shaking his booty Jagger wrote a good lyric. Internal rhyme schemes! “She’s the kind of person you meet at first at dismal dull affairs…”

And, yes, that’s the song where the bass player gets to do that one octave descending glissando during the last few bars.

Here is Richard Thompson doing “52 Vincent Black Lightning”, which is a contemporary take on the tragic border ballads of the 16th-18th Century. (You know: man steals wife of another, is hunted down and slaughtered, wife roams the countryside at night lamenting.)

Those ballads and other forms of “border” culture travelled to America with the Scots-Irish immigrants who migrated up into the Appalachian Mountains.

Those same immigrants adapted and preserved that form of music and it became (among other things) bluegrass music. Here is one of the founders of bluegrass, Del McCoury (note Scots-Irish surname), doing a version of Thompson’s song.

Full circle. Wheels within wheels.

[A tip of the Stetson to pops for the link to the RT video.]

The GHS tapewound bass strings arrived yesterday. I installed them (not without difficulty) and the results are… mixed. Still a half-dead E string and a floppy B string. Suspicion now points toward the bridge itself as needing work.

I may get the fatter B string from the Rotosound set, which is said to require a lot more tension, although I could barely get the GHS string through the nut. Once I start filing and sanding all bets are off.

The bass still sounds OK when amplified, in fact it has a much more “acoustic” sound to it even when put through the amp. I would definitely take it to an “unplugged” gig, provided I could run it through the PA.

Damn you, eBay! Why do you constantly put me in the path of temptation!

It would be several firsts for me: tapewound strings, chambered solid body… I know a couple of people with Godin conventional solid body strat-style guitars. Seemed like great quality and finish for no more than the price of an American-made Fender.

I saw and played with my first iPad. It is basically a large scale iPod Touch. Slickeroo, but I can’t get too excited about it. It is for consumers of content, not creators.

Tonight at The Store: Michael Andrew, Lisa Rott (a fellow Gettysburgian) and whatever musical guests that can pass a police background check. 8 PM. Be there or be… somewhere else less appealing!

This would be a 1978 “Malay”. I built this steel-string acoustic in a luthier class. It’s based on a Martin D-19. All work was done by hand, except that the frets were cut on a computerized saw in order to get the intervals exactly right. Still plays well 32 years later, in fact, as the wood has aged it actually resonates a bit better.

I enjoyed making it (it took 8 months of off and on classes), but it did teach me I had neither the patience or the temperament to be a guitar builder.