Wow, well I woke up this morning and I felt great because the only blues we`ve got in our office is usually something by Freddie King, Howlin Wolf, Eric Clapton or Mississippi John Hurt.
Pretty good for a Monday morning and we`ve finally opened a new bag of coffee. No more stale, granular, loathesome, weird, sunfried, spoonful – back to flavor.
Besides the gonzo debates regarding Russel`s teapot or invisible pink unicorn and other various ontological questions things are relatively normal. Perhaps. But I just keep asking myself “Can the blue men sing the whites?”
Joe from Pasadena has asked us to recommend ten tasty guitar lead tracks. After a quick shout out on twitter the general consensus is that these are pretty sweet examples. If anyone out there would like to offer up any more superlative examples then please comment.
1. Peter Green Slabo Day
2. Jeff Beck Where were you & Blast From the East
3. Junior Wells & Buddy Guy Stormy Monday
4. Chet Atkins Kicky
5. Eric Clapton Blues Power Live on Just One Night
6. Jimi Hendrix Are you Experienced Live at Winterland UK L.P.
7. Billy Corgan Soma on Siamese Dream
8. Johnny Winter Stranger Blues or Johnny Guitar
9. Dire Straits Sultans of Swing 10. Alvin Lee Live with 10 years after playing Im going Home live 11.Eagles Hotel California 12. Santana – Soul Sacrifice 13. Ry Cooder – Paris Texas 14. Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb 15. Joe Satriani – Back to Shalla-Bal 16. Nirvana – Smells like Teen spirit
Unfortunately this is an endless list! If you want to catch up with these awe inspiring idols of fretboard greatness then Jamorama is a great place to begin. Mark McKenzie is currently teaching The Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler on Song Pond.
POST UPDATED – see comments for more guitar tone information !!
Jamie from the US has asked us how to get a fat tone from his Les Paul. Well, tone is a particularly personal matter but also comes in as many flavours as the imagination. There is no single method, set up or solution. Alot of TONE variation is achievable simply through your guitar to start with. If you simply use your neck pick up you will find the tone becomes more warm, more naturally rounded, rich, arboreal and smooth. Compliment this through changing your tone selector pot and you`ll be on the way. A tube or valve amp such as a Vox AC 30, or a Sunn amp will also help. Personally I use an Award Session amplifier.
It`s best to experiment with as much gear as you can. If you can`t get hold of a valve amp try a valve based pedal – maybe an Electro Harmonix English MuFF`n or Big Muff PI. These things`ll give you a fat range of tones from Clapton through to Leslie West and more. You could of course hitch a ride along the digital highway and look at stuff like the Line 6.
Another week surrounded by otters, exploding eggs and talent.
It`s been a critical week for “strategy”, design, “branding” and leveraging this or monetizing that…except we rarely resort to using rhetoric where frenetic gesticulations, nonsense, riddles and non sequiturs will do.
We`re all completely fizzed out from crazy concept meetings, mad games of all night table football (le babyfoot), hair metal poodles, and mark McKenzie`s hyper guitar licks. Plus trying to keep up design and content for this blog. Not only that it`s Friday the Thirteenth.
Lock us up.
One of the great things happening here at Rock Star Recipes for the last few days has been posed by two simple rhetorical questions that came up in a recent, highly animated conversation we had whilst rocking out in the kitchen to to the sounds of the exploding eggs in a microwaved ploughman`s lunch:
Are we corporate?
Are we even a business?
If you arent asking these sort of questions where you are then maybe its time to leave.
Mark McKenzie is an awesome guitarist, highly fluid, fluent and versatile. He`s also a great teacher. Mark has just finished filming the video for the Sultans of Swing tutorial for Song Pond and sitting here in the office, just kicking back with a coffee, it`s a pleasure to listen to the riffs in the edit suite, and have a chat with him too about guitar techniques, riffs, chords, playing by ear and all the other jazz guitarists tend to yak on about.
What is particularly interesting about Mark is his choice of equipment. Mark is no dinosaur when it comes to kicking out the jams…unless there`s a digisaurus laying buried in the soil somewhere. On a personal level Mark may have also delivered the solution to some of my own recording woes – having to haul several different guitars through the airport on multiple trips to the recording studio has become a logistical, risky nightmare.
Mark is using a Line 6 variax guitar and a Line 6 amp. Variax gives you an endless variety of sounds from classic acoustic and electric tones all the way to sitar and banjo, all in one instrument. I`ve had a quick play and Mark has taken me through a demo: the guitar plus the amp combined gives you a full range of tones and sounds, a range of guitars to choose from and a range of effects. For example the sounds from Sunshine of Your Love, Smoke on the Water, Pink Floyd instantaneously dialled in.
Cameron our tech guy and resident DJ has also pointed to a similar offering from Gibson – the robot guitar.
Here are some more blog posts about digital guitars, tools and concepts:
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