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jeantue · 7 years

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SLAIN by guitars

I love guitars! Though as a guy in a band, I usually think of the song first and the guitar second. At least that was the case up from my Pie days through Verst’s last album Starship Crash. But leading into our new album David Slain, that started to change. The songs on this new record are built around riffs and I did stuff with the sounds just to make the guitar louder, more cathartic, and more over the top than ever before. I don’t know why. It’s just the way I felt. Anyway, here are the guitars we used to record Verst's David Slain LP..

Rickenbacker 4003 Bass

Since he bought it a couple years ago, John Parsons has played only this instrument. I've never seen anything else in his hands. He just loves it.

JP's ricky sounds incredible, and stays in tune like an absolute champ - much better than you'd expect for such a lightweight bass. Like any stock Rickenbacker bass, it hummed quite a bit when he got it, because the single coil pickups do not come with reversed polarity. I have no idea why Rickenbacker doesn't set them up in humbucking mode. Weird. Anyway, I tried to do the polarity mod myself, but realized pretty quickly that there was a possibility that I was going to damage a pickup irreparably. So I backed away from that, and John had Chris Barnett do it. Now it doesn't hum when both pickups are selected. I don't think John ever sets it any other way. The both-pickups sound seems to be his jam and I just love it.

Speaking of Jam, Bruce Foxton played his Rickenbacker through Marshalls and it sounded like God’s piano.

I just see that bass and famous Ricky players come to mind - Lemmy, Paul Gray, Paul McCartney, Bruce Foxton, Lou Barlow.. the list goes on. I think that in order to play a Ricky you really need to be a BASS GUITAR player, not a low end or clean player. I suppose you could use it as a slap pop machine, but with no gain loading from the amp, it's a pretty thin sound. But run it through a cranked up tube amp, such as John Parsons' 200-watt Hovercraft, and you are on your way to achieving a very rich, thick, punchy, piano-like tone. Now that we have only one guitar in the band, there is a huge amount of space for John's bass to own. His Rickenbacker really does that space justice. You can hear nothing but this bass in the first couple minutes of Secret Sea.

That’s Paul Gray on the right here with The Damned. Gray’s extremely sick Rickenbacker tones and guitarish playing can be heard on The Black Album, Live at Shepperton, and Strawberries.

1993 Gibson Les Paul Custom

This guitar is the living document of just how far my Les Paul obsession has gone. Last time I wrote a blog entry, I said that I was obsessing over a cherry sunburst Custom. Then voila. LOOK at the thing.

It's gorgeous. And it plays like a big heavy brick of butter. Smooth as hell. Resonant, but not overly midrangey. It is so heavy that the notes it produces are like icebreakers smashing and cutting through a mix like so much glass. I'm pretty much playing this guitar 95% of the time and it pretty much comprises about that much of the guitar on the album, so I guess that makes me a real Les Paul guy. For all the fighting and ergonomic crime involved, it is so addictive and sounds so powerful that I just can't put it down. It’s the best instrument I’ve ever had.

While I was thinking about this album, and wanting the guitars to fucking completely take over, I kept going back to Iggy Pop's Raw Power - the sound of James Williamson's LP custom through a dimed Vox AC30. It’s so huge and in-your-face. I realized pretty quickly that the stock 90s pickups that came on my Custom were too heavily wound, too dark. The key to Williamson's sound is the brightness, the presence. So I got some fantastic pickups for this guitar - some Throbak PAF-style things that give it a holographic, smoky brightness. Man, that hit the spot. Because in a big way, I was tired of polite and pretty sounds. I wanted this record to be an aggressive guitar album. I wanted weaponized guitar. The LP Custom seemed to force all of that to happen anyway. My challenge was just to capture those sounds and mix them in a way that didn't puss out.

James Williamson wielding a generator of raw power back in the day.

I also changed the tuners on this guitar, from the big fat stock Grovers to Schaller knock-offs that I found on eBay. They're not quite as good as real Schallers, but they're much better than the Grovers. I don't know why people like the Grovers. They're heavy and they have all this unnecessary, undignified lash in the way the gears mate up and move. Now the guitar is incredibly stable. I can often play 4 or 5 songs with string bends and everything and it's still in tune. I love the dependability and stability of it. And that's a change for me, because in the past, one thing I've loved about Jazzmasters was their very unpredictability and the cool pitchy wooziness you can create with them. Now when I want to do that with the Les Paul, it all has to be in my left hand - not in a whammy bar or from waving the neck around. It's a different way of playing and I think it makes me a better, more deliberate player.

Homemade Stigmata Jazzblaster

For the first time since I started playing a Jazzmaster (1992?), my Jazzmaster took a back seat to another guitar - the Les Paul. But I did have to pull out the Stigmata. This is the best Jazzmaster I've ever owned, just incredible. And I made it! (See my old blog post about it). It is a weapons-grade Jazzmaster, with all top shelf bits, and it's black with that anodized aluminum pickguard. It's all business and looks like some kind of weapon. It just so happens that it plays beautifully and has incredible halo of harmonics ringing off the string lengths after the bridge. Somehow all those dimensions lined up perfectly to make that happen. And the light swamp ash isn't too light on this one. I think it's too light on the red Jazzmaster I made, but that's a topic for another post. Sadly, I sold that red guitar.

Even though I am still more comfortable playing a Jazzmaster than a Les Paul, I only played the Jazzblaster guitar on a handful of songs on this record.. Sick Pretty Pilots, Laid Off For The Summer, and (Nice). There are songs, like those, where the Jazzmaster sounds better, either because you can hear the notes of the chords more clearly, or because a whammy bar is needed to do the parts justice. When we rehearse, sometimes I stick with the Les Paul all the way through, even on those songs. But I don't think I'll ever get away from the Jazzmaster for shows and recording. It's in my bones.

Homemade Telemaster

"Burnt candy grind" is how my brother Matt so vividly describes the incredible and unique sound a Tele can produce with its bridge pickup and the right kind of bright clean amp setting. This is the sound you get just before breakup, when the tubes are loading up some compression, but not breaking up yet, bass is set on 0, treble is on 10. The first three Echo and the Bunnymen albums are rife with that sound (example: Do It Clean). I kept hearing some Will Sergeant style chords over the final ending section of Sick Pretty Pilots. For as long as I've been into EBM you'd think it would have been easy for me to get the sound. But I'd tried several times to get it right, using different guitars or having Mike play it on his Telemaster, and none of that quite worked.

Will Sergeant doing it right.

I finally got it right myself with my own Telemaster and a 70s silverface Fender Twin Reverb. Right when I hit record and it was sounding perfect, Christine and Eli came home and I was already late making dinner for them. So I just finished my one take, saved the file and that was it. But it was the perfect sound and take. Luckily, finally.

I guess the neck pickup isn’t quite aligned, but it’s still a cool guitar.

2014 Fender Johnny Marr Jaguar

This was not my guitar. I don't like Jaguars very much because of the short scale and the brittle-sounding pickups. But sometimes, that's just what's needed, and Fender did a really sweet job on this model. This guitar belonged to Brian Shultz, but I believe he has sold it by now. Brian is a super cool guy with fabulous taste in guitars. We share rehearsal space with him. I used his Jaguar for the left-channel rhythm guitar in Bath Salts & Me, where I needed a single coil sound that would provide just the barest but still great-sounding sketch of the chords and rhythm.

Squier Bass VI

This is also Brian Shultz' guitar. I used this to fatten up the power chord refrains in Bath Salts & Me, because it can actually dip down for the low D-flats that are in that part. It's in there sorta subliminally in the left channel, slamming through a Marshall Super Lead with the volumes on about 6.

Not quite sure what one would accomplish with the whammy bar on this thing but it must be fun to try.

"Plastic Hippie Values" - 1977 Yamaha FG-345 Acoustic (wounded)

Poor Plastic Hippie Values! A couple years ago I took it on a Summer camping trip to the Southwest where it was basically roasted in the back of my pickup truck for a week. Stupidly, I tried to adjust the truss rod while the neck was in the throes of warping and swelling. The truss rod snapped. So now the neck is permanently bowed inward and the guitar has painfully high action. This is my only acoustic guitar, unfortunately, so it's all I had to use to double the arpeggio parts in the choruses of Plastic Cow.

Sometimes I create parts I refer to as "music box" sections, where several layered guitars play the same or interlocking arpeggiative parts together to form a machine-like arrangement. It reminds me of a music box or player piano because of how prescriptive and interlocked the parts are. I don't know if that's how it comes across to other people when they hear the recording. But playing that particular part up around the 12th fret with some strings ringing open on this super high action guitar was really difficult. It's already the kind of part that I have to learn by muscle memory and not think about while I play it, or I'll screw it up. The high action made that all the more difficult to do.

Here’s a very little Eli back in San Leandro with Plastic Hippie Values and a couple Jazzmasters I don’t have anymore.

I do have an emotional attachment to this guitar, because it is the only acoustic I've owned in my adult life and I've had it since around 1991. But replacing a truss rod is very expensive, certainly costing more money than the guitar is worth. And what I really want for an acoustic guitar is a vintage arch top, like a Gretsch or Gibson. I'm not really an acoustic person anyway, so I don't know what I'm going to do.

#gibson #gibson les paul #yamaha fg-345 #jazzmaster #jazzblaster #les paul custom #rickenbacker #rickenbacker 4003 #fender #jaguar #squier #bass vi

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