The One Truth's Lounge Thread

[Aragorn]

An oldie but a goodie.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPwZaQfoIbU

[enjoy being]

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[Dreamtimer]

I thought this was Florence Welch when I first heard her.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUdyuKaGQd4

[Wind]

What a performance.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e63gBOVfVO4

[enjoy being]

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[Aragorn]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoaBjHYsDAg

[enjoy being]

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[Lemual]

As a teenager, Steve Vai..

Being that you're a bit of a music nerd (that's a compliment ) and you mentioned Steve Vai have you heard of true temperament necks? Apprently Steve has changed all his guitars to these!

http://www.truetemperament.com/?attachment_id=48

[Dreamtimer]

Oh boy! Here comes some fun guitar jargon.

Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite have made a new recording.

[Elen]

Oh boy! Here comes some fun guitar jargon.

Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite have made a new recording.

Loved the music

[Aragorn]

Being that you're a bit of a music nerd (that's a compliment ) and you mentioned Steve Vai have you heard of true temperament necks? Apprently Steve has changed all his guitars to these!

http://www.truetemperament.com/?attachment_id=48

Yes, I'm familiar with them, although I've never played them. I imagine that it will be difficult to play a guitar like that under certain circumstances, such as when you're using wide string bends.

However, there's a new kid on the block already, and this year's NAMM is full of them, i.e. fanned fret guitars.

I had already seen that on bass guitars — Leland Sklar played a bass like that when he was hired to replace Mike Porcaro on Toto's "Falling In Between" tour — but now it has crossed over onto regular guitars as well, both acoustic and electric. I imagine it's a logical consequence of the evolution of heavy metal, with more and more guitars coming out with 7, 8 and even 9 strings.

Tosin Abasi of Animals As Leaders plays an 8-string with fanned frets, and he has recently started his own guitar company that makes these instruments. They're equipped with the new Fishman Fluence Modern pickups. Those are very radical too. They no longer have any bobbins and coil wire in them. It's basically a stack of circuit boards around one or two magnet bars, or around magnetic pole pieces for Strat- or Tele-style pickups. They're battery-powered — the battery is rechargeable and the charge lasts up to several months — and they have both an "active" voicing and a "passive" voicing, as well as coil-splitting for the humbucker models.

Whether you like Animals As Leaders or not, their music and virtuosity commands respect. It is commonly called progressive metal, but one could just as easily say that it's jazz played on heavy metal instruments. It may sound chaotic when you first hear it, but everything they play is meticulously arranged.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQWQjZxfs4g

[Lemual]

Tosin Abasi of Animals As Leaders

I've been following Tosin for a while now, in fact before I'd fully scrolled down and only seen the guitar pic I automatically thought of Tosin. Love me some Animals as Leaders! The are frikkin amazing, I'd love to see them live. Javier Reyes is amazing too, if you haven't heard it you should check out his solo stuff, his EP is called BASAL GANGLIA. I may have mentioned it before or you may already know but Tosin and Javier where in a "super group" with the drummer from Suicidal Tenancies (Eric Moore) and horn player from The Mars Volta (Adrián Terrazas-González). They where called TRAM and only released 1 EP as far as I know.

Those pick-ups look AWESOME!

Ah love music nerding out with you!

[Aragorn]

I've been following Tosin for a while now, in fact before I'd fully scrolled down [...

You know, you don't have to scroll down to get to the latest post. If you click the "" icon at the front of the thread in the thread list, then it'll take you straight to the first unread post.

...] and only seen the guitar pic I automatically thought of Tosin. Love me some Animals as Leaders! The are frikkin amazing, I'd love to see them live. Javier Reyes is amazing too, if you haven't heard it you should check out his solo stuff, his EP is called BASAL GANGLIA.

I haven't heard his solo stuff, but I agree that he's an amazing guitarist as well. In fact, he has to be, in order to keep up with Tosin.

I may have mentioned it before or you may already know but Tosin and Javier where in a "super group" with the drummer from Suicidal Tenancies (Eric Moore) and horn player from The Mars Volta (Adrián Terrazas-González). They where called TRAM and only released 1 EP as far as I know.

I've heard of them, but I don't know whether I've ever actually heard them. I haven't been keeping up with modern bands and artists anymore. Most of the music I listen to is old stuff — all the way from the 1960s to the mid 1990s, with the 1970s and 1980s most prominently represented in the range.

Those pick-ups look AWESOME!

Ah love music nerding out with you!

The design of the Fishman Fluence pickups is really revolutionary. For over 60 years, pickups have essentially always been constructed in the same way. The first single-coil pickups appeared in the late 1930s, and at the time, people didn't even realize that they had created something completely different from what they had in mind.

You see, back then, electric guitars had only really come into existence because people were trying to amplify the sound of an acoustic guitar. But the way to do that is with piezo-electric pickups, which didn't exist yet at the time. Magnetic induction pickups are a completely different thing, and they don't produce an "acoustic" sound. So they started off with putting a single magnetic pickup in the neck position of the guitar, to get a rounder, bassier sound that somewhat resembled the sound of an archtop acoustic guitar with F-holes. It was only later that Gibson started putting two pickups on a guitar, the additional pickup being in the bridge position. That's why they still traditionally refer to the neck pickup as the "rhythm" pickup, and to the bridge pickup as the "treble" pickup.

However, single-coil pickups are highly susceptible to electromagnetic interference from transformers, dimmers and rheostats, which generates a humming sound through the speakers. This is why Seth Lover, who was working for Gibson at the time, set out to create a noise-canceling pickup design in 1955, which he dubbed a humbucker. Gibson applied for the patent on this humbucking pickup, and so their own pickup design was from then on known as the PAF ("Patent Applied For").

Other companies set out to create their own humbucker designs, and because of Gibson's patent, Fender's humbuckers on the 1970s-era Telecaster Deluxe, Telecaster Custom, Telecaster Thinline and Starcaster — which they called "Wide Range Pickups" — were designed differently, by that very same Seth Lover. One of the key differences beside the form factor was that Fender's pickups used individual magnets as pole pieces, whereas the Gibson design had a single magnet bar sitting underneath the two bobbins, with iron pole pieces connecting to them. Gretsch's humbucking pickups were similar in design to those of Fender, but this design wasn't patented, so anyone could use it.

But so anyway, the Gibson humbucking pickup first appeared on the Gibson Les Paul in 1957, and ever since then, the design hadn't changed anymore, other than some individual tonality-tuning by choosing different types of magnets in different sizes, the degree of polishing on the magnet, and the thickness and number of windings of the coil wire around the bobbins.

Now, I don't know whether they were the pioneers, but EMG is certainly the best-known manufacturer of active pickups, with low-impedance bobbins and a solid-state preamp built into the pickup base itself. Other manufacturers — e.g. Seymour Duncan — also offer active pickups, but EMG has the bulk of the market share in that regard. Yet, apart from being low-impedance, it's still that same old design. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it does have its limitations.

And now here comes Fishman, with these bobbin-less pickups, which have both an active and a passive voicing, which use almost no battery power when compared to the active pickups from EMG or Seymour Duncan, and which allow for coil splitting "out of the box" — something EMG only offers on a few select models, but then you're essentially limited in choice to only two pickup models from the EMG catalog. And an EMG always sounds like an active pickup, which means that many guitarists don't like them, because they have only very limited dynamics in response to one's picking, due to the low impedance of the coils and the solid-state preamp.

For now, Fishman only offers a "modern" set and a "classic" set, each set having an alnico magnet for the neck pickup and a ceramic magnet for the bridge pickup. However, given the possibilities of the circuit board technology they use, I expect that they will be offering many more models in the future. They're already offering signature sets, which are tuned to the preferences of a particular artist.

So yeah, I think they're on the right track to taking the market by storm. But it'll still take a while, though. Guitarists tend to be rather conservative, and especially so the generation of people who were influenced by the likes of Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and all those blues and blues-rock guys from the 1970s. But the metalheads are certainly embracing the new design, and most kids who learn to play the electric guitar in this day and age are more likely to lean toward progressive music styles like heavy metal and progressive metal, which is exactly where the Fishman design shines.

Here's some more Tosin, albeit that he's still using EMG pickups here.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihqT1aA4Q88

P.S.: Talking music gear is on-topic for this thread, because it was never even intended to be a music video thread to begin with. It just happens to have evolved along those lines.

[Dreamtimer]

Holy Crap! My husband is the music man, as in the one who purchases most of the music we listen to. I gotta play this for him.

I sang in a choir and played piano in my younger years. I want to get back on it and play. The hubby is picking up the acoustic guitar again. He plays basics, never had lessons.

[Aragorn]

Holy Crap! My husband is the music man, as in the one who purchases most of the music we listen to. I gotta play this for him.

I sang in a choir and played piano in my younger years. I want to get back on it and play.

You definitely should. Being able to play an instrument will give you a way to express your emotions and thoughts, and I personally find that when I'm playing the guitar all by myself, then all kinds of thoughts and memories come to mind, almost like when you're asleep and dreaming. I'm sure you'd love that.

The hubby is picking up the acoustic guitar again. He plays basics, never had lessons.

I've never had any lessons either. Everything I know is basically self-taught, although I did pick up a few things from watching and listening to other guitarists, and from hearing professional musicians explain things at a couple of guitar clinics I've attended. As such, I have also come to meet and talk to some really big names: Michael Angelo Batio (who is fully ambidextrous), Jennifer Batten (who played the lead guitar for Michael Jackson on his World Tour), Neil Zaza, and Mike Stern (who played with Miles Davis).

I haven't been playing the guitar all that much anymore in the last 15 years or so, but even though I have never had any guitar lessons or musical theory (beyond the first two years of middle school), back in the 1990s there were people who considered me a virtuoso. I can't do anything of what Tosin Abasi does — even if only because he plays an eight-string guitar — but I can play some stuff from Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Nuno Bettencourt and others.

A good musician is one who teaches himself/herself to play. Having a teacher is a bonus — one that I never had — but the discovery of the principles of music theory and the techniques for playing the instrument have to come from within, because — at least, when it comes to the guitar — everyone's got their own way of fretting the notes, holding the pick, strumming the strings, and so on, and you just have to find what works best for you.

The choice of guitar also matters. I currently own five Gibsons and five other types of electric guitars — as well as two acoustics — and even though I am now used to the feel of those Gibsons, my favorite recipe is actually a so-called superstrat-type of guitar, i.e. a guitar based upon the layout of a Fender Stratocaster, but with more modern features. They feel the most comfortable to me, and they allow me to do everything, even though for certain specific things, the Gibsons will sound better. But for instance, one of the big differences is that a Gibson always has a tilted-back neck because of the height of the bridge, whereas on a superstrat, the neck sits parallel to the body and the bridge sits lower.

On the other hand, I've always loved the fingerboard radius of a Gibson. Many superstrats have the same fingerboard radius, but the original Fender Stratocaster has a much rounder fingerboard radius, which I don't like. I also don't like it when the radius is too flat. The Gibson fingerboard radius is 12" (or some 305 mm), and that's ideal for me.

But then again, Gibsons commonly have a 24.75" scale length, which means that I have to use .010-.046 strings on them in order to get a good tone and a tight enough feel to allow for low string action — i.e. the height of the strings above the frets — while superstrats have a 25.5" scale length. I put .009-.042 strings on those, and that still provides for enough tension to allow for low action, but most importantly, it also gives me a more comfortable feel on account of the string tension for my picking hand. Also, the string spacing on a Gibson is slightly wider, and I prefer the Strat-style string spacing.

Some people buy a guitar that is a signature model for their favorite guitarist. For instance, Joe Satriani has a signature model with Ibanez. And it's a great guitar, but even if you're a devout Satriani fan, then that still doesn't mean that a guitar designed for his hands will work well for you personally, or that you yourself would be able to get the tones out of it that Joe gets.

Discarding the importance of the amplifier, the effects, the pickups, the construction, the tone woods, and even the gauge and brand of strings for a minute, a lot of the tone also comes from the guitarist. So if you want to sound like Joe Satriani, then chances are that you might actually come closer to that sound on a completely different type of guitar, possibly even from a different manufacturer. Maybe you'll sound better — and feel more comfortable with — a Yamaha, or an ESP, or a Jackson, or a Charvel.

The whole idea of "I want the same guitar as my favorite guitarist so I can play and sound like them" is very, very wrong. But of course, the guitar manufacturers won't tell you that. After all, if they release an artist signature model to the public, then first and foremost, they intend to make money off of that model. And they won't be making any money off of the guitars that their endorsing artists themselves are using, because those guitarists are usually being sent their guitars for free — as several prototypes for testing first, and as the definitive model later.