***The Official Guitar Thread***

[Nitefly]

We used to have a pretty buzzing guitar community on here featuring some stunning musicians. These days it's all gone a bit quiet, so in attempt to kick-start that community feeling once again I've decided to start a thread for all things guitar (complete with mirrored asterixed title).

This thread coincides with my recent re-addiction to the instrument (conveniently saving me from from babbling away on this subject to anyone equally disinterested in real life). Having neglected guitar for the best part of 10 years I now find myself dashing home and completely losing my evenings noodling away, wearing an evil smile that could only be worn whilst furiously playing some half-speed Slayer. The ultimate aim is to *deep breath* start my own band, which I'm hoping will come to be within the next year or so once I've got the chops and the musical know how to back it up.

Unlike 10 years ago, I now have disposable income, so I have today spanked out some hard earned cash on a few treats that I thought I would share, namely:



I tried the Boss equivalent of this at PMT in Bristol today - it made the single coil Squire Strat I was given sound like the ****ing apocalypse. I could not believe the difference an EQ pedal can make to tone (having previously dismissed it as an unnecessary addition to amp controls). How have I lived without one before! I look forward to perfecting my mad ...And Justice For All tonez.



I rarely have a free house but when I do and get to turn my amp (a Blackstar HT5) up to 'I can just comfortably stand in the the room' levels, it gets rather noisy and unpleasant with amp hiss and squeaks. My intention is to put this in the effects loop and chop out all that nastiness.



This is a Keeley modded Ibanez TS9DX. My intention was to find an overdrive pedal to play with and shape my amps tone and i thought an Ibanez TS9 was an obvious place to start. I found some info regarding a Keeley mod to the stock DS9 (recognizing the name from an awesome modded Keeley DS1 I played with years ago) which led me to two variants... a high gain mod and a higher gain mod. There was then a further available mod to make it true bypass. Whilst trying to find stock in the UK, I then realised I could just plump for this beast and get all the mods in one box. Mwahaha!



This is a now discontinued pedal that I always wanted 10 years ago so managed to nab it for £35 on ebay. It had good reviews and I'm eager to test out its octave function for some Muse goodness.

So all in all, not quite Raymond Lin levels of excess, but I'm getting there!

I could go on endlessly but rather than bore you all to death - what's your latest news? Any gigs / new songs / practice woes / purchases / techniques / anecdotes / anything you want to share... please do so!

 

[Nitefly]

Haha that is ridiculous

I went for one more... which I think Gustov will approve of.

Apparently HBE went bust last year

 

[Nitefly]

Haha yes - I'm sure even a budget recording set-up would smoke the tones I'm coming out with

My only means of recording at the moment is via a dictaphone I use for work and it doesn't sound great (or at least a lot tinnier than it does to my ears). That's not even getting on to the subject of my actual playing, which is very amateur! I'd love to put some recording up here though for a bit of fun. My original idea for this thread was actually a 'shred-log' similar to the training logs we have in the sports forum, which I'd update once every 2 weeks with a new clip. It will take it years to get it up there I think.

Oh and yes, everyone feel free to post any recording compositions / youtube vids / anything broadly subject related

 

[Nitefly]

The MXR and the ISP have landed! First impressions:

ISP - being frank the first thing I realised is that I don't really run my amp loud enough in the bedroom to make best use of this pedal - my Blackstar amp is only 5 watts so hiss is already fairly low at reasonable volumes. I did a bit of experimentation though (sorry neighbours) and at 'annoying the crap out of your housemate level' it does what it says on the tin to the point where I nearly pulled a 'Back to the Future' All in all, it's clearly not essential for the bedroom maestro but perhaps more useful if running a beastly amp head at lower volumes. It would be useful for gigging, but yeah, let's see if I get that far!

MXR - OK now we're talking! All I know so far is that dropping those 1khz / 2 khz sliders fractionally, barely at all really (to my surprise), results in that 'scooped' sound I'm after It's amusing to me to have all of these sliders that go up and down this huge distance.. but it seems that only make very subtle movements of the sliders (as you view them on the pedal) makes such a pronounced difference to the entire 'feel' of the tone. My current experimentation is with raising with the mids on my amp then dropping them via the EQ and vice versa. It's difficult to decide where to start when there are so many options, which is kind of overwhelming - happy to receive any hints from the more experienced!

 

[Nitefly]

Dimple - awesome

The modded tubescreamer has arrived and I'm genuinely shocked (and delighted) at the difference in tone it has made. I'm used to cranking up the gain with my amp which leads to lots of string noise (which I fight to keep under control) and chords can end up 'mushy'. With the tube screamer, everything sounds distorted but also super 'clean'. There is absolutely no mush to speak of. I'm having fun just playing one note and vibrato-ing away. It sounds that good.

 

[Nitefly]

Oh wow this got resurrected!

I think I might have about .... an hour's free time a day past 11pm at the moment.

No guitar for me

I would add that I saw Metallica recently and James powered through Disposable Heroes - that riff

 

[Nitefly]

Necro-posting for some tab help. Yup, Metallica again, specifically one.

Almost everyone knows the fast riffing section by ear, but I'm not convinced I've seen anyone explain the picking properly. We have (in short hand):

A -----------------2-*-*---------------2-* *--------3-* *-
E -0-0-0-0-0-0----------0-0-0-0-0-0-------- 0-0-0------

The *'s representing how long that B/c chord (or note, above) is held for. So 24 beats in total.

My instinct is to start that third low E section (highlighted with underscore) with a downpick, but that makes hitting the final C chord horrible IMO. So is it:

a) the last four notes are down-up-down-up; or

b) the last four notes up-down-up-down (easier but out of kilt with the natural way to play the first two runs)

c) down-up-down-down (I've seen video lessons doing this... surely not!)

Thoughts? I really don't know. It's too fast so the strip skip, surely.

 

[Nitefly]

Thanks for the replies, but there are two groups of seven notes and one group of four notes. It's the group of four notes that concerns me.

I agree that for each group of 7, it is clearly: d-u-d-u-d-u-d

And there is no way he's playing the whole thing with downstrokes, no matter how godlike he is

Down stroking on the very last note means he surely starts the first note of the four on an upstroke. It's either that or playing two downstrokes in a row, economy picking style, but that's a headache too!

 

[Nitefly]

I concur with the above but the trickiness comes from multiple strings, specifically the fact you have to jump from the low E to do an upstroked chord from the D string, which is really quite unpleasant at full speed. Try it yourself

I think it might just be hard to play!

 

[Nitefly]

3.58 - the heavy bit after 'left me with life in heeeeyelllaaah' [/hetfield]

I'd go with 3:57, but yup

 

[Nitefly]

So you play: d-u-d-d? Interesting...

I'm leaning towards u-d-u-d

 

[Nitefly]

I end on an upstroke. And I think it's cool.

You heathen! Udud is the way forward.

 

[Nitefly]

I've had technical difficulties with a Mesa Boogie head I ordered (JP-2C) - replacement coming today fingers crossed it's 100% in order this time!!

 

[Nitefly]

Right - so it's my birthday today and my girlfriend bought me a new pedal....

Who wants to hear what a Miku sounds like through a boogie?

 

[Nitefly]

Thank you for the birthday wishes!

Well no demos today as "unfortunately" for you guys it didn't arrive in time so I just told it's coming instead... From Japan!

The above YouTube video made me laugh and I showed it to her months ago, so she sneakily found and ordered one as a joke present

 

[Nitefly]

Raymond = Mr. 1337 sw33pz.

 

[Nitefly]

So being the bedroom rockstar I am, I've been practising a lot with standing up and playing guitar. Basically - how low does my guitar need to be to look cool? As low as possible really. As you all will know, things get miserable as your left and right hand start bending to uncomfortable angles. The real tricky part for me is picking angle. As the guitar gets lower, the angle increases and encourages 'scrapey' picking particularly with relatively thin tortex picks. Different picks can alleviate this (I.e heavier picks with a more rounded edge e.g jazz iii) but it largely technique based.

Just random musings!

 

[Nitefly]

Thanks for the pick recommendation - I've always opted for .60s myself. But they don't help the scratchiness!

Tbh I think unless the tone is awful, it doesn't really, really, matter unless you are recording.

 

[Nitefly]

My philosophers Tone Micro showed up today - the final pedal I was after! Possibly the first in the UK?! Looks lovely

Also Paul Gilbert is touring for those interested

 

[Nitefly]

I paid £22 for a lifetime subscription to Tab Pro and it's amazing - https://plus.ultimate-guitar.com/tab-pro/browse/

Nice! I just plumped the best part of £60 to finally buy guitar pro... after years of free trailing it every so often.

Really need to get some solid practice in. I'm terribad these days.