= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Emil El Zapato (9th March 2023), modwiz (9th March 2023), Wind (10th March 2023)
Sounds very creamy...clean
“El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"
This one's for the Wiz, and especially so because there's one bass in there — a Sire — in his favorite color.
I myself am not a bass player — even though I have on occasion played bass guitars, and I do also have more of an affinity with the bass guitar than with the traditional role of the rhythm guitar — but to my ears (and eyes), the Ibanez and the Dingwall are the two coolest basses in that lineup.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Emil El Zapato (10th March 2023), modwiz (10th March 2023), Wind (10th March 2023)
I found a better video still, which clearly illustrates how powerful the Duncan Distortion pickups are, even when going into the clean channel of an amplifier without using any drive pedals — he switches to the overdrive channel of the amp after about a minute or so.Originally posted by Aragorn
As it just so happens to be, I've just come across a (still fairly recent) Youtube video of a 2002 Gibson Les Paul Standard Mahogany just like mine. It should give you an idea of what it sounds like and what it looks like from up close.I took this picture last night, and it was the first time ever that I took a picture with my current phone, so it's a bit out of focus and the lighting is not exactly correct either. But it should give you an idea.
It is a 2002 Gibson Les Paul Standard Mahogany. That was the official name on Gibson's website, but what the name does not reflect is that it came with three pickups. Also, the pickups are not the Gibson Burstbucker Pro pickups that were en vogue on the Les Paul Standards of that era, but instead Gibson opted to put three uncovered Seymour Duncan SH-6 "Duncan Distortion" pickups in this model. They are scatterwound ceramic magnet pickups, and they sound very bright and articulate, as well as that they hit the front of the amplifier quite hard if you don't back off on the volume controls. Hence the "Distortion" moniker, of course ─ they were intended for hard rock and heavy metal sounds. As the name of the model says, it also has a top made of mahogany ─ like the rest of the guitar ─ instead of the maple used on other Les Paul Standards, resulting in a somewhat sweeter and warmer attack.
Also, in my opening post of this thread, I mentioned that Gibson had already done the mahogany top on a Les Paul Standard once before in the early 1990s, and that this was a guitar with P90 pickups. Well, technically, that was not a Les Paul Standard, but a modified Custom Shop R6, and they made only 200 of them. The "R6" moniker refers to a reissue of the 1956 Les Paul Goldtop, which normally would have had a maple top, but so in this case, they made the top out of mahogany, and instead of the Goldtop finish with a gloss "natural wood" finish on the back, they then finished the whole guitar in Heritage Cherry, just as as on my Les Paul.
The video below shows you what those looked and sounded like.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Emil El Zapato (10th March 2023), modwiz (11th March 2023), Wind (10th March 2023)
Now that we're binging on Les Pauls again, I don't think I've posted this one before. In this video, Lee and Pete are comparing their personal Gibson Custom Shop '58 Les Paul Standard Reissues. Lee's is a stock '58 Reissue with the VOS ("vintage original spec") treatment as they come from Gibson's Custom Shop, but Pete's is a specially relicked one by Tom Murphy and costs about three times more than Lee's. They tell their story in the video.
I have now found the links. They are all backing tracks only — no vocals or lead instruments — and they can be downloaded for £0.99 stg. per track.No, because these are all ad hoc jams. But I do believe that Pete's backing tracks are available for download via the Andertons website.
Disclaimer: I haven't looked around for them, and maybe it's on their YouTube channel somewhere.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Emil El Zapato (11th March 2023), modwiz (11th March 2023), Wind (12th March 2023)
These are not actual gear videos, but rather a set of jams and lessons from the Andertons YouTube channel that I think all guitar-playing members here may probably pick up a thing or two from. Beware however that each of these videos is about 40 to 50 minutes in length.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
I lost my post somehow...I was remarking that I was a bit confused about their reputations as guitarists. Is one generally considered better than the other?Now that we're binging on Les Pauls again, I don't think I've posted this one before. In this video, Lee and Pete are comparing their personal Gibson Custom Shop '58 Les Paul Standard Reissues. Lee's is a stock '58 Reissue with the VOS ("vintage original spec") treatment as they come from Gibson's Custom Shop, but Pete's is a specially relicked one by Tom Murphy and costs about three times more than Lee's. They tell their story in the video.
I have now found the links. They are all backing tracks only — no vocals or lead instruments — and they can be downloaded for £0.99 stg. per track.
Um, are you referring to a comparison between Peter Honoré and Ariel Posen, or between Peter Honoré and Lee Anderton?
Ariel Posen is a Canadian recording and touring artist — he's a guitar virtuoso, but he also sings and writes songs — and I would personally rate him quite a bit higher than Pete on the scale of virtuosity. But on account of a comparison between Pete and Lee, Pete is obviously the better guitarist, and by quite a huge margin.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Wind (13th March 2023)
yeah, that's what I meant, Pete and Lee... I've heard Lee play better but here it looks like he just gives up and lets Pete play due to greater skill.
Well, he's giving up — albeit not really; it's just what he says — because it's all a bit overwhelming to him. By his own admission, he's been stuck in that minor-pentatonic box for over 30 years, and if you stick to such a narrow confinement for so long because you think that the blues is all there is to playing an electric guitar, and that five notes is all it takes for playing the blues proper, then the sudden confrontation with all the other aspects of music theory (and how to put them into practice) will certainly be overwhelming.yeah, that's what I meant, Pete and Lee... I've heard Lee play better but here it looks like he just gives up and lets Pete play due to greater skill.Um, are you referring to a comparison between Peter Honoré and Ariel Posen, or between Peter Honoré and Lee Anderton?
Ariel Posen is a Canadian recording and touring artist — he's a guitar virtuoso, but he also sings and writes songs — and I would personally rate him quite a bit higher than Pete on the scale of virtuosity. But on account of a comparison between Pete and Lee, Pete is obviously the better guitarist, and by quite a huge margin.
Even though I certainly don't consider myself a virtuoso — albeit that I did for a while have the ambition to become one when I was younger, and have effectively been called a virtuoso by three people, two of whom were guitarists (of whom one was himself an incredibly talented artist) — my own learning process was quite different from that of Lee.
I had already been playing various musical instruments from when I was very little, and I've also always passionately loved music, but it wasn't until my early teenage years that I really became obsessed with the electric guitar. Nevertheless, my parents were not keen on the idea, and so it took until the summer vacation of the year that I had turned 16 before I got my first guitar, and for that matter, it was an electric, because the electric guitar was what it had always been about for me. Acoustics were cool, but the electric was where the fun was to be had, and they looked so awesome on TV.
But that said, even though I come from a musical family — my dad used to be a trumpet player in his younger days, and we had professional musicians on both sides of the family — my parents did not consider a career in music a respectable job, and so I have never had any formal music training, and I also never got any guitar lessons. I had to learn and discover everything by myself, with the help of a thin booklet with the most used chord shapes, and some chords that my contemporaries at school taught me.
Another difference is that, unlike Lee — and unlike many of my contemporaries who also played an electric guitar — I was never into the blues, or even into blues-inspired guitarists like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. I didn't even have the financial resources to buy a lot of full-size albums — although I did have a few — and so I was mostly listening to the radio, and specifically, the weekly Belgian top-30, and occasionally, the Dutch top-30 and the British top-20. And then there were the weekly top-20/top-30 shows on Dutch television.
As such, my own influences are very eclectic, and then there were also the influences from old black & white movie score music, from the medieval (and other) folk music that served as the backdrop for TV-series set in the middle ages, from Spanish and Latin-American music played on nylon-string acoustic guitars, and from the music that my parents listened to. Given that my dad used to be a trumpet player, he was very much into the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and I loved that sound. Both of my parents loved The Platters, and I loved that music too. And my mom was very much into crooners — Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck — and I liked some of that stuff too.
Either way, all of it made my musical background very diatonic, rather than pentatonic, and so I also approached my guitar playing from a diatonic vantage. As a teenager, I also listened to bands like Boston, in which the guitar solos were almost always diatonic, as well as the very Latin-sounding ballads of Carlos Santana — things like "Samba Pa Ti", "Europa", "Moonflower", et al — and the also fairly diatonic solos of Mark Knopfler. I liked progressive rock, but unlike most of my contemporaries, I also liked Motown stuff, soul, disco and funk. And there's quite a bit of jazz guitar in those particular styles.
I did also pick up some pentatonic stuff from Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work on Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" album, but that was mostly because he was playing a white Les Paul Custom — which I had so far never seen before, and which I thought looked really cool — and because of his sound on that album. He was using the preamp of a broken Echoplex unit as a distortion device, which gave his Les Paul a really warm and creamy distortion sound. But I didn't really associate his playing with the blues — mainly because I didn't really know what the blues as a musical genre sounded like — and it didn't change a single thing to my diatonic approach to guitar playing. It would only be much, much later that I became more familiar with the blues, and with blues scales.
Now, most guitarists who play the blues, or who play blues-inspired solos, approach the blues scale as a pentatonic scale with two blue notes added. For people not familiar with the term "blue notes", they are notes that fall out of the diatonic scale, which itself, if you're playing in the key of C Major, comprises only the white keys on the piano. So, sticking with C Major, the diatonic scale is C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C, giving you the familiar "do re mi fa so la ti do" melody, as Julie Andrews sang in the musical "The Sound Of Music".
Reducing the diatonic scale of C Major to a pentatonic one, you then get C - D - E - G - A - C — the addition of that last note actually makes it a hexatonic scale, but it's just another C, one octave up from the root note, so we don't count it as part of the scale. Therefore, strictly speaking, C Major Pentatonic is C - D - E - G - A, or "do re mi so la", which means you're dropping two notes from the normal diatonic C Major scale, being the F (fa) and the B (ti). And then what the blues scale does, is add two notes to that scale again, but the two added notes are blue notes, corresponding to — in the case of C Major — two black keys on the piano, namely a sharp 4th and a sharp 2nd (or flat 3rd, if you will). As such the C Major blues scale becomes C - D - D#/Eb - E - F# - G - A.
The D#/Eb blue note can be referred to as either a sharp 2nd or a flat 3rd because neither the normal 2nd (D) nor the normal 3rd (E) are substituted by the blue note — the blue note is simply added in between them — unlike in the case of the F#, which replaces the F in the diatonic C Major scale; the 4th (F) is raised by a semitone, rather than that the 5th (G) is lowered by a semitone, because the 5th is still there in the blues version of the scale, and therefore the F# is referred to in the key of C Major as a sharp 4th, rather than as a flat 5th.
Bringing this back to what I said earlier, most guitarists who play the blues or who play blues-inspired solos do indeed approach the blues scale as a pentatonic scale with two blue notes added, but with my diatonic background, I don't look at it in that manner. Instead, I see the blues scale as a full diatonic scale with two chromaticisms, while still being aware of the original diatonic notes that were omitted (B) or altered (F to F#, and a D#/Eb added in between D and E) against the diatonic scale. And this in turn then opens up the path toward thinking chromatically — seeing all 12 of the notes in an octave — and exploiting this for inserting chromatic passing notes in between the diatonic ones.
And so that is how I myself approach the blues scale; I don't "feel the blues" as such, but instead, it all simply becomes a greater collection of notes to play around with. But my approach to melody is always primarily diatonic, because I want my solos to sound musical. Many jazz musicians for instance know all of this stuff by heart but lack a sense of melody — they know exactly what they're doing in terms of the music theory, but the notes they play sound dissonant rather than musical.
Something I also do like a lot — and which harks back to medieval music — is the concept of modes, something that also gets used in jazz and progressive rock/metal quite a lot. When used well, modal phrasing can sound very interesting in both solos and in chord progressions. But that's a topic for another day.
Anywho, by thinking he could get away by simply learning how to play solos using only the minor-pentatonic scale, Lee had seriously painted himself into a corner, and breaking out of that again is very difficult, as well as overwhelming, due to the complexity of all the things players like Lee dismissed out of hand in their decision to limit themselves only to pentatonics instead of opening themselves up to the grander musical reality beyond the white man's attempt at blues. This doesn't mean that Lee would be unable to learn all of this (for him) new stuff, but it'll require quite a bit of effort, and especially so because he's been doing it "his way" for over 30 years, and old habits are hard to break.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Wind (13th March 2023)
This is effing brilliant.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Wind (13th March 2023)
Well, most of that is WAY over my head, I do see your taste in music reflecting what you wrote, but how about the likes of Satriani? I consider him rock blues, but am I wrong?Well, he's giving up — albeit not really; it's just what he says — because it's all a bit overwhelming to him. By his own admission, he's been stuck in that minor-pentatonic box for over 30 years, and if you stick to such a narrow confinement for so long because you think that the blues is all there is to playing an electric guitar, and that five notes is all it takes for playing the blues proper, then the sudden confrontation with all the other aspects of music theory (and how to put them into practice) will certainly be overwhelming.
Even though I certainly don't consider myself a virtuoso — albeit that I did for a while have the ambition to become one when I was younger, and have effectively been called a virtuoso by three people, two of whom were guitarists (of whom one was himself an incredibly talented artist) — my own learning process was quite different from that of Lee.
I had already been playing various musical instruments from when I was very little, and I've also always passionately loved music, but it wasn't until my early teenage years that I really became obsessed with the electric guitar. Nevertheless, my parents were not keen on the idea, and so it took until the summer vacation of the year that I had turned 16 before I got my first guitar, and for that matter, it was an electric, because the electric guitar was what it had always been about for me. Acoustics were cool, but the electric was where the fun was to be had, and they looked so awesome on TV.
But that said, even though I come from a musical family — my dad used to be a trumpet player in his younger days, and we had professional musicians on both sides of the family — my parents did not consider a career in music a respectable job, and so I have never had any formal music training, and I also never got any guitar lessons. I had to learn and discover everything by myself, with the help of a thin booklet with the most used chord shapes, and some chords that my contemporaries at school taught me.
Another difference is that, unlike Lee — and unlike many of my contemporaries who also played an electric guitar — I was never into the blues, or even into blues-inspired guitarists like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. I didn't even have the financial resources to buy a lot of full-size albums — although I did have a few — and so I was mostly listening to the radio, and specifically, the weekly Belgian top-30, and occasionally, the Dutch top-30 and the British top-20. And then there were the weekly top-20/top-30 shows on Dutch television.
As such, my own influences are very eclectic, and then there were also the influences from old black & white movie score music, from the medieval (and other) folk music that served as the backdrop for TV-series set in the middle ages, from Spanish and Latin-American music played on nylon-string acoustic guitars, and from the music that my parents listened to. Given that my dad used to be a trumpet player, he was very much into the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and I loved that sound. Both of my parents loved The Platters, and I loved that music too. And my mom was very much into crooners — Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck — and I liked some of that stuff too.
Either way, all of it made my musical background very diatonic, rather than pentatonic, and so I also approached my guitar playing from a diatonic vantage. As a teenager, I also listened to bands like Boston, in which the guitar solos were almost always diatonic, as well as the very Latin-sounding ballads of Carlos Santana — things like "Samba Pa Ti", "Europa", "Moonflower", et al — and the also fairly diatonic solos of Mark Knopfler. I liked progressive rock, but unlike most of my contemporaries, I also liked Motown stuff, soul, disco and funk. And there's quite a bit of jazz guitar in those particular styles.
I did also pick up some pentatonic stuff from Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work on Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" album, but that was mostly because he was playing a white Les Paul Custom — which I had so far never seen before, and which I thought looked really cool — and because of his sound on that album. He was using the preamp of a broken Echoplex unit as a distortion device, which gave his Les Paul a really warm and creamy distortion sound. But I didn't really associate his playing with the blues — mainly because I didn't really know what the blues as a musical genre sounded like — and it didn't change a single thing to my diatonic approach to guitar playing. It would only be much, much later that I became more familiar with the blues, and with blues scales.
Now, most guitarists who play the blues, or who play blues-inspired solos, approach the blues scale as a pentatonic scale with two blue notes added. For people not familiar with the term "blue notes", they are notes that fall out of the diatonic scale, which itself, if you're playing in the key of C Major, comprises only the white keys on the piano. So, sticking with C Major, the diatonic scale is C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C, giving you the familiar "do re mi fa so la ti do" melody, as Julie Andrews sang in the musical "The Sound Of Music".
Reducing the diatonic scale of C Major to a pentatonic one, you then get C - D - E - G - A - C — the addition of that last note actually makes it a hexatonic scale, but it's just another C, one octave up from the root note, so we don't count it as part of the scale. Therefore, strictly speaking, C Major Pentatonic is C - D - E - G - A, or "do re mi so la", which means you're dropping two notes from the normal diatonic C Major scale, being the F (fa) and the B (ti). And then what the blues scale does, is add two notes to that scale again, but the two added notes are blue notes, corresponding to — in the case of C Major — two black keys on the piano, namely a sharp 4th and a sharp 2nd (or flat 3rd, if you will. As such the C Major blues scale becomes C - D - D#/Eb - E - F# - G - A.
The D#/Eb blue note can be referred to as either a sharp 2nd or a flat 3rd because neither the normal 2nd (D) nor the normal 3rd (E) are substituted by the blue note — the blue note is simply added in between them — unlike in the case of the F#, which replaces the F in the diatonic C Major scale; the 4th (F) is raised by a semitone, rather than that the 5th (G) is lowered by a semitone, because the 5th is still there in the blues version of the scale, and therefore the F# is referred to in the key of C Major as a sharp 4th, rather than as a flat 5th.
Bringing this back to what I said earlier, most guitarists who play the blues or who play blues-inspired solos do indeed approach the blues scale as a pentatonic scale with two blue notes added, but with my diatonic background, I don't look at it in that manner. Instead, I see the blues scale as a full diatonic scale with two chromaticisms, while still being aware of the original diatonic notes that were omitted (B) or altered (F to F#, and a D#/Eb added in between D and E) against the diatonic scale. And this in turn then opens up the path toward thinking chromatically — seeing all 12 of the notes in an octave — and exploiting this for inserting chromatic passing notes in between the diatonic ones.
And so that is how I myself approach the blues scale; I don't "feel the blues" as such, but instead, it all simply becomes a greater collection of notes to play around with. But my approach to melody is always primarily diatonic, because I want my solos to sound musical. Many jazz musicians for instance know all of this stuff by heart but lack a sense of melody — they know exactly what they're doing in terms of the music theory, but the notes they play sound dissonant rather than musical.
Something I also do like a lot — and which harks back to medieval music — is the concept of modes, something that also gets used in jazz and progressive rock/metal quite a lot. When used well, modal phrasing can sound very interesting in both solos and in chord progressions. But that's a topic for another day.
Anywho, by thinking he could get away by simply learning how to play solos using only the minor-pentatonic scale, Lee had seriously painted himself into a corner, and breaking out of that again is very difficult, as well as overwhelming, due to the complexity of all the things players like Lee dismissed out of hand in their decision to limit themselves only to pentatonics instead of opening themselves up to the grander musical reality beyond the white man's attempt at blues. This doesn't mean that Lee would be unable to learn all of this (for him) new stuff, but it'll require quite a bit of effort, and especially so because he's been doing it "his way" for over 30 years, and old habits are hard to break.
Satriani has a lot of blues influences — which he already got from listening to Jimi Hendrix, but which in more recent years has also started coming from the more traditional blues guys, like B.B. King, Albert King, and so on — but at the same time, he's a very technical player, and he uses the modal system quite a lot. So he's actually more of a jazz-rock/jazz-fusion guy. He even gets billed a lot at high-profile jazz festivals, such as the one in Montreux.
As an example of a case study, let's take a look at "Flying In A Blue Dream", the title song of his award-winning album by the same name. That song appears to mostly be played in the key of C Major — it comprises only the C Major, F Major, G Major and G# Major chords — but upon closer inspection, he's actually playing his solo in C Lydian mode, with some occasional blues licks thrown in.
Without getting into the explanation of what modes are and how to use them, what it basically boils down to in this case is that even though the song centers around a C Major chord, he's actually playing the notes of the G Major scale over that. And that works very well, because if you compare the C Major scale to the G Major scale — never mind the order of the notes — then all of the notes are the same except for one, i.e. the C Major scale has an F in it, while G Major has an F# instead.
C Major = C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
G Major = G - A - B - C - D - E - F# - G
The result of using Lydian mode is that the melodic phrasing of his solo begets a mysterious vibe without sounding "off". Here, listen for yourself.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Wind (13th March 2023)
Back in the day when I was playing that album 'universally' my entire family would beg me to turn it off, I was totally mesmerized by it. Yeah, I 'hear' what you are saying.Satriani has a lot of blues influences — which he already got from listening to Jimi Hendrix, but which in more recent years has also started coming from the more traditional blues guys, like B.B. King, Albert King, and so on — but at the same time, he's a very technical player, and he uses the modal system quite a lot. So he's actually more of a jazz-rock/jazz-fusion guy. He even gets billed a lot at high-profile jazz festivals, such as the one in Montreux.
As an example of a case study, let's take a look at "Flying In a Blue Dream", the title song of his award-winning album by the same name. That song appears to mostly be played in the key of C Major — it comprises only the C Major, F Major, G Major and G# Major chords — but upon closer inspection, he's actually playing his solo in C Lydian mode, with some occasional blues licks thrown in.
Without getting into the explanation of what modes are and how to use them, what it basically boils down to in this case is that even though the song centers around a C Major chord, he's actually playing the notes of the G Major scale over that. And that works very well, because if you compare the C Major scale to the G Major scale — never mind the order of the notes — then all of the notes are the same except for one, i.e. the C Major scale has an F in it, while G Major has an F# instead.
C Major = C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
G Major = G - A - B - C - D - E - F# - G
The result of using Lydian mode is that the melodic phrasing of his solo begets a mysterious vibe without sounding "off". Here, listen for yourself.
Back in the day when I was playing that album 'universally' my entire family would beg me to turn it off, I was totally mesmerized by it.
It's one of his "best ever" albums. 18 songs, and they're all great!
They has no tasteses, Preciousss.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Emil El Zapato (12th March 2023), Wind (12th March 2023)
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