The rock and roll lifestyle...

[Raventele]

Rubber mat..rubber on feet or feet at least covered, rubber gloves if possible ..there are capacitive charges amp on or off..

[Johnny]

Cooooooooool! Some very nice stuff here!

That used to be my main obsession too... All my life, I was on a very strict diet of ramen noodles and peanut butter, so I could spend my money on gear instead... I used to be a Marshall guy. I've owned like 10+ Marshall amps... I had my share of other goodies as well, Mesa, Fender, Soldano etc... All the pro rackmount stuff from Line6.... Even got to the point of buying Kevin O'Connor's The Ultimate Tone book... But that was in another life...

Here's a younger version of myself with my Brian Wilson hoodie and my handmade 1969 Mosrite Celebrity, serial #M000029. Notice the snow... (I don't do that much anymore, playing guitar in the snow...)

[MikeK]

My Martin D16 was my first 'real' guitar. I bought it when I was 16, on my own, with my own money, when all my friends were buying cars. It probably cost more than most of their cars

I had to walk everywhere, but I played the shit out of that guitar. My mom gave me a crummy Squire Stratocaster after that and those were my two guitars until I got a good job in engineering, many moons later...

Needless to say, I played the acoustic guitar mainly because it was a far better guitar, and I never had a good amp.

My first tube amp was a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe -- shitty amp, but it was a virtual masterpiece compared to the solid state, 10" combo I had. I also bought that American Sunburst Strat shown. I still have that guitar... and the D16 - the D16 I will never sell.

Since then there have been tons of amps... so many amps... and lots guitars. I remember my first $35k per year paycheck. Man I was rich! I bought so much gear!

I don't still own a single amp in that picture, that is how quick I go through them. Once I got into building and modifying they were coming and going like crazy. My basement was full of shelves of resistors and capacitors - I'd sell the ones I off I built to fun making new ones. My music room was a mess of speakers and wires... and an oscilloscope which I scored for free from a university who was chucking to upgrade - still works great.

Oh man - I was a stereotypical mad scientist except with transformers and speakers instead of tubes of chemicals.

Anyway, I've toned down - no band, not much amp building, no recording... just a few amps I really like, a couple guitars, a bass, keyboard and a PA. My wife is a musician, like a real one... but she doesn't play or sing much anymore. Life got it the way.

[Raventele]

Jeff Healy played a Squire Strat! Modified , of course, but it's amazing what a few changes might do to an otherwise not-so-great guitar..
I think music has gotten kinda stupid with gadgetry..It's all fun but, enough is enough..
A Ratt, a Strat, a Crybaby and a Twin Reverb with that great Vibrato!

[MikeK]

The thing is Ron with a mass produced guitar like that, if you go through enough of them, you are bound to find one that is decent.

The squire itself is not a bad guitar. It's just made from poor quality wood and has shitty electrics. The electrics are easy to upgrade, but the wood not so easy. It's amazing what a good shop can do for making one of those guitars nice though. A lot of detail with a file and a good setup and you probably couldn't tell.

The amp makes much more of a difference in the sound in IMO. As for feel, I had some high dollar custom shop guitars that just weren't for me. I wanted to like them, but they just didn't have it.

Les Paul's in general I love the look of, and the tone (although they are certainly not all equal - play an old, non-chambered version and you'll see what I mean) but they just don't feel as good as a SG to me.

I really like that guitar Johnny is playing. I have a soft spot for semi-hollow bodies and I definitely prefer a double cutaway. I've never owned one, but I've played many that I really like. Looks like he a P90 in the neck, which I love, and I prefer a humbucker in the bridge. Again if you get into it there are so many different types of P90s and HB's, but generally, it's hard to get the mud out of a neck bucker and have any sort of output, and singles in the bridge are often a bit brittle for my liking.

Despite all this, I have my eyes open for a SG. Doesn't really matter what the electronics are because I'd modify like I said above (P90 in the neck and bucker in the bridge).



Most likely I'll have Wolfie wind me a set if he's still doing it by the time I find that guitar:

http://www.wolfetone.com/

I had a set on my LP. His neck bucker was amazing but the bridge was too weak. I could never get it balanced. If I wouldn't have sold the guitar I would have had him rewind with something hotter, but I kept the OEM Gibson in the bridge with his neck p/up and it was pretty balanced.

[Raventele]

Yea, it's cheap (squier) but it's ez to add density/mass to the thing and change the pickups..but , just buy a decent guitar to start..
But I will have to disagree with you about the amp..the guitar is more important for the sound quality..
The amp is ..an amp..You have to start with a decent signal to get to first base..even a s shitty little solid-state amp can sound good if it has a decent clear signal to work with.

[MikeK]

I don't know... what I said before is a bit of a misnomer. And we're actually both wrong.

Any part of the signal chain is important.

I've actually done a ton of blind tests on this sort of thing, and not everyone likes the results. Transformers, speakers and PICKUPS are huge contributors.

Of course if you change the topology of the amp circuit or the bias, or filters, it has a huge impact as well.

There have been countless debates over what is important. For heavy distortion, I feel it is more the amp and speaker, but, that being said, a single coil will sound different than a humbucker even at the same input voltage level. A hollow body will sound slightly different than a solid, etc...

Clean amps, it's all about the guitar or all about how they deal with pedals. Some amps make certain pedals sound good, others accentuate their bad qualities.

I've actually never, ever experienced the scenario you describe though where a nice sounding guitar will make a shit amp sound good. The definition, in my mind, of a shit amp is it always sounds like shit no matter what you put in front of it. Lots of 'good' boutique amps are one trick ponies. They might as well just have a volume knob because they are so finely tuned to one tone and one speaker type.

When I built amps for people I would tune them to one guitar, one speaker, one volume setting so they would sound their absolute best there. I was often searching for the 'holy grail' of amp tone in which I could go from a sweet shimmery clean to thumping crunch to a screaming lead tone with the flip of a switch. It's hard to obtain no matter how good the guitar is...

And of course there is the real deciding factor: the player! A lot of tone lies in the fingers. More than you might think.

[Johnny]

Yeah, I once thought it was all in the amp. Then I thought the pickups were more important. Then transformers. And speakers, even guitar cables make a big difference. Most of it all, the wood itself, the thickness and the shape makes a HUGE difference.

All this stuff is all important... But...

"Jeff Healy played a Squire Strat"

That's it. It's EXACTLY the same thing as skiing. It's not the gear that matters, it's the way you handle it... Jeff Healey would totally rip on NNN, he really wouldn't care about any of your scientific lateral stiffness arguments...

And EXACTLY like skiing, where I believe it's all in the toes and ankles, you may have the most expensive "holy grail" gear, the ultimate guitar sound is 50% in the fingers...

[Raventele]

^^ It's both..if a musician CANNOT get sounds from his gear that inspire him, he's sunk.That applies to good and average musicians alike..

[MikeK]

Sometimes a good artist can take a lot of different, and relatively poor equipment to make a masterpiece.

Jimmy Page is pretty well known as using some cheap little amplifiers and getting some tremendous recordings from them, in fact, some would argue the most popular in all of rock and roll.

He was, and probably still is, a master of the studio. Give him enough gear and he'd find a way to link it together or use it strategically to give unique, and full sounds.

Because he almost always played a Les Paul and Marshalls live, one would think those recordings came from similar gear. It was rarely the case.

Marshalls were only the choice for live players at that time because they weren't mic'ing amps live due to PA quality and to play large venues, you needed some 100 watters to cut through.

They also happened to sound great when the power stage was working hard, but that's hard to tolerate at anything but stadium scales.