Unusual guitar III
Bukka White
Unusual guitar II
I previously wrote about unusual guitar practices and sometimes you`ve gotta have an unusual name just to back yourself up….Furry Lewis, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Blind Lemon, Pink Anderson & Little Pink, Keb` Mo, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Black Spider Dumpling, Hound Dog Taylor, Pine Top Smith, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Smellfoot Johnson, Jake “The Snake” Edwards,
The Art of guitar
At today I`m going to stretch the art of guitar metaphor a little further and give everyone out there an insight into some visually shredded guitar art that combines fast colour kinetics, motion and explosive emotional intent.
Visit www.babyakart.com for more – all paintings are copyright Michael Babyak.
The Art of Guitar
IMHO, there are ways to shred and burn on the guitar that far surpass the egocentric simplicity and slavery to technique of that whole guitar school, speed focussed, sweep picking, notes for notes sake playing that occurs in a vacuum devoid of taste, subtlety and emotion.
Real guitar shredding is emotive, not mechanical, slick or polished unless it needs to be as part of the expression – e.g. a Freddie King Lick an Albert King bend, a Clapton phrase, the Leslie West tone, Hendrix` sustain etcetera…..
Music Party
We had a bit of a Rock Star party last night to celebrate the incredible man that Ben Edwards is and beautiful Sade too!
It was great fun. Here are the incriminating pictures.
Choosing Acoustic guitars
Yes, I`m talking about acoustic guitars and Im going to try and outline what you should be looking for in your acoustic and it applies to any guitar, whatever your price range. Dan receives alot of questions in customer support regarding these matters so I`m going to outline a strategy to help make the right selection. Apparently “a bad workman blames his tools” and to some extent this is true, but a good workman will select his tools wisely.
Jeff Beck
I`ve been lucky enough to spend an entire gig standing next to Jeff Beck, drink a few beers, chat awhile and ask him some questions about tremelo and the performances I`d seen at Hammersmith Odeon. I also saw him at The South Bank in London and he played with John McLaughlin and The White Stripes.
Valve Echo
The absolute beauty of tape based echo units lies in the fact that tape itself is analogue – moving the tape across a tape head polarizes the magnetic domains in the tape in proportion to the fluctuations in the audio signal. The granular nature of the magnetic material adds noise to the signal and because the magnetic characteristics of tape are not linear tape exhibits a characteristic hysteresis curve, which causes unwanted distortion of the signal. Any measured analog signal must theoretically have noise and a finite slew rate. It`s the imperfection in tape that makes the sound so delicious.
Guitar amp tubes
Paul has written in asking about the best practices in replacing the vacuum tubes in his amp. I`d try and replace old tubes with the same models from a new manufacturer simply because these tubes were more than likely built into your amp in the first place and from a part of the amplifiers response, although experts can probably help with using different tubes to gain differing tone characteristics. Here are two great places to buy replacement vacuum tubes and find out more, including how they work.
Robert Johnson
I said yesterday that I`d write about Robert Johnson; there`s a lot of hoodoo wrapped up around the man, in particular that he sold his soul to the devil down in Clarksdale. Originally, Son House suggested, Johnson was not regarded as a good musician but after the trade with Satan he returned with the blazing skills and blues mastery of a demi-god.