The Guitar Post

When I started this blog, I planned on putting up a guitar post at some point.  This is my take on guitars: which ones I like, which ones I own.  I don’t claim to be an expert on guitars.  I also don’t claim to be a great guitar player by any means.  However, I, like most musicians, do have my (lengthy, rambling) opinions.  Hopefully they are worth something.

so here it is, my two cents thrown into the giant change pot of guitar dorkdom.  enjoy…

I am a guitar player.  I have been playing guitar for around fifteen years.  I took piano and voice lessons as a kid, so I had a basic understanding of music theory and chord structure when I first began working out chords on my mom’s old acoustic as a teenager.  I am basically self-taught, save for a semester in my second year of college during which I took a guitar class as an elective.  My guitar teacher was an Argentinean Ph.D. student in classical guitar performance who considered John McLaughlin to be American pop nonsense.  Yikes.  I just wanted to rock.  I got an A in the class and promptly forgot most of what I learned.

I received my first guitar for Christmas when I was sixteen, and I still have it.  It’s an acoustic made by Art & Lutherie, and it’s a really nice guitar that, despite my often harsh treatment of it, has held up well over the years.  There are dents and nicks everywhere, and the neck is worn down on the second and third frets due to the fact that the sum of my guitar expertise consists of bar chords.  I’m a rhythm guitarist, and I do not hold any illusions about my technical abilities, but I’m better than some who make a living with their guitars, even though I’ve never mastered the ability to play power chords, or “cheat” at anything.

At presstime, I own four guitars.  The aforementioned Art & Lutherie acoustic still gets daily use – the action is great and the sound is fantastic.  Now, however, I have a new favorite.  Behold, the awesomeness that is my guitar:

This is a picture of me, taken about two years ago, with my Ibanez Artcore ASF 78.  It is a full hollow body guitar with a five piece neck, a tremolo bar on the tailpiece, and a double humbucker pickup configuration.  I tried to find a Google image of a guitar like mine, but I couldn’t.  It’s a pretty unique instrument.  This is the story of my favorite guitar: why I have it, why I love it, and what I think about guitars in general.

Full Frontal Nugity

I can pinpoint the moment when I became obsessed with hollow body electric guitars, and it can be summed up in three words: Double Live Gonzo.  This is a live double album by Ted Nugent, who is really one of the greatest guitarists of all time, weird sociopolitical standpoints and dubious reality-TV career notwithstanding.  The Nuge is at the top of his game on this album, and classics like “Great White Buffalo” and “Stranglehold” have never sounded better.  However, the track that floored me was  “Hibernation”, a floorboard-rattling axe-wanking extravaganza during which Nugent produces some of the strangest noises that I’ve ever heard come out of an electric guitar.  When my boyfriend at the time first played me this album, he explained that what Nugent was doing was standing near his giant Marshall stack with his big Gibson hollowbody guitar, making the guitar feed back into the amplifier to such an extent that he began to control the feedback, forcing the electronic screeching into strange, mournful, wailing notes.  Nugent was playing the feedback.  My boyfriend told me that the sensitivity of the hollowbody guitar makes it more susceptible to feeding back, and Nugent was using this, which could be perceived as a difficulty, to add effect to his songs.  I was blown away.  He was taking his monstrous Gibson hollow bodied guitar, a guitar seemingly more suited to gentle jazz noodling and country picking, and making it into a monster of sound-effect weirdness.  From then on, I wanted nothing more than a hollowbody guitar.  I like the idea of taking a niche guitar and making its perceived incompatibility with certain musical formats into an advantage that makes the music all the more unique.

Gretsch: Tradition and Quality

Fast forward several years.  Boyfriend-at-the-time (Rockula) became a guitar salesman at the now-defunct Larry Morgan Music in Garland.  He brought home a Gretsch guitar catalogue one day, and I began looking through it.  Gretsch is a company that has mastered the art of the hollowbody guitar.  They are famously uncompromising on their exacting standards, and it is Gretsch and Gibson that dominate the hollowbody market.  One of the most notable Gretsch models is the Nashville country guitar (referred to on Gretsch’s official site as the “Chet Atkins”, after one of their earliest endorsees), which is giant and twangy.  The body is nearly four inches thick, and they are the coelacanths of the guitar world: great hulking living fossils that are halfway between acoustic and electric in both function and appearance, with violin-like F holes in the sides.  A Gretsch is a formidable instrument; most well-known musicians who play Gretsch guitars are genre-specific jazz, rockabilly, and country players with the chops to be able to handle such a beast.  Reverend Horton Heat, Jason Pedigo of Boys Named Sue, Brian Setzer of the Stray Cats, and Jack White of the Raconteurs (in the linked video, Jack’s playing a double-cutaway triple humbucker version of my dream guitar, the Gretsch Anniversary), are all proponents of the greatness that is the Gretsch hollowbody guitar.

Now, I am the first to admit that the way to this girl’s heart is through facilitation of catalogue shopping, and when Rockula brought home the Gretsch catalogue, I was fascinated.  However, Gretsch doesn’t do low-end; their “affordable” range of hollowbody guitars start at around $600.  Perhaps someday when I am a rich rock star I will be able to afford my dream guitar (aforementioned mint-green Gretsch Anniversary).  Because I am not a rich rock star, I went in search of a more affordable option, and discovered the fabulousness that is Ibanez.

Ibanez: Pedal to the Metal (and then some)

When most people think of Ibanez, they think of the low-end thrash metal guitars that the company cranked out ad nauseam in the 1980s and 1990s.  While most companies that specialize in mid- to low-priced guitars continually churn out copy instruments whose quality reflects their price, Ibanez has used their status as an under-the-radar company to make some really innovative guitars.  Companies like Fender and Gibson make their money on standards like the Les Paul and the Strat, and they really don’t vary from the formula that puts food in their dish.  Ibanez, however, has put out instruments that are both extremely high-quality and original, and won’t break the bank.  The Iceman model has developed a fervent cult following (Paul Stanley from KISS has played Icemen for years).  Ibanez has endorsed an impressive stable of extremely original and talented guitarists, and they have some unique artist-signature guitars: standout endorsements include Steve Vai’s 7-string Jem, classical wizard Pat Metheny and his high-end hollowbody models, and pop/R&B/jazz legend George Benson, the original Ibanez collaborator.

The Ibanez Hollowbody

The story of the Ibanez hollowbody began quietly in the 1970s, when the company began working with George Benson on a guitar that has floating pickups (click here for a video of the peerless Benson playing a floating-pickup GB10).  The pickup is a magnetic coil that is usually installed in the body of the guitar; it sense the vibrations of the strings and transmits these vibrations to an amplifier.  I may be mistaken, but I believe that the George Benson Ibanez is the only guitar ever made that has pickups that don’t touch the guitar body.  Rather, they are attached to the pickguard.  I have never played one of these guitars myself, but this is definitely one of the most unusual guitar concepts I have ever heard of.  The George Benson is an extremely high-end guitar; it has a place amongst the Gretsches and Gibsons at the top of the hollowbody heap.  

My own Ibanez is far more…er…affordable than the George Benson.  Mine is part of the Artcore line of hollowbody guitars.  Hollowbody guitars are niche instruments, traditionally the domain of jazz and country players, with some notable exceptions.  Because low-end luthiers generally stick to more accessible body styles, it’s near-impossible to find inexpensive (under $600) hollowbody instruments.  That and, the full hollow body takes a certain measure of finesse in both design and craftsmanship, and those things don’t come cheap.  There really weren’t any inexpensive hollow body guitars produced until Ibanez came out with the Artcore line.

My Artcore

Visiting Larry Morgan one day introduced me to the Artcore line; they had two in stock, a semi-hollow with a natural finish, and mine, the Artcore ASF 78 T, with a five-piece neck and a 2 5/8 in. thick body, which is a full inch thinner than traditional hollowbodies.  It is light as a feather, which is great because I don’t like heavy guitars; just thinking about strapping on a Les Paul, which weighs in at a full nine pounds, makes my shoulders hurt (side note: I was discussing all things Gretsch with Jason from Boys Named Sue the other night, and he pointed out that his Nashville weighs almost as much as a Les Paul.  I’m not sure why I can handle a Nashville, but a Les Paul feels like a rock tied around my neck.  Perhaps the Gretsch is just so cool that it doesn’t need to obey the laws of gravity).  I like the fact that my guitar is a pretty rare model.  I’ve never seen another ASF 78 in any store; I couldn’t even find an image of one on Google Images.  I think they stopped producing the ASF 78 three or four years ago; even when they were rolling off the production lines, I couldn’t find any online that were the exact color of mine (gunmetal gray).  I love the idea of having such a unique instrument.

And how it plays?  Like buttah.  The action is nice and low, and it takes only a featherlight touch to make it sound fantastic, but it’s still substantial enough to rock out on.  At first, I didn’t have an amp to plug it into, but one of the great things about hollowbodies is that they function as both an acoustic and an electric, to the extent that many guitar companies use the term “acoustic-electric” rather than “hollowbody” when referring to these models.  I obtained  a little Marshall practice amp about a year ago, and I’ve had limited opportunities to plug it in, as my apartment has thin walls, and I don’t want to piss off the neighbors too badly.

My Other Guitars

My other two guitars are rarely played.  I have a big heavy generic-brand Flying V that stays in tune for about five minutes at a time; my ex scored it for twenty five bucks from a pawn shop, and it’s good for smashing stuff, but as far as playing goes, it’s not the best.  I also have a low-end classical acoustic guitar; classical acoustics have thicker necks than regular acoustics, and three of their strings are made of nylon; my ex got this from his time as a guitar salesman at Brook Mays Music, this guitar appeared out of nowhere during inventory, and they couldn’t place it, so they let him take it home.  It was useful during my semester of classical guitar lessons, but the action isn’t great, and it’s really cheaply made.

Andy the Guitar Player

Andy and I met because we work together.  We have whiled away many a happy hour at work chattering about guitars.  Andy played guitar and sang original songs professionally in the 1980s; I think he was living in California at the time, and he says.  He likes Takamine acoustics, but his favorite acoustic is the Martin Eric Clapton Signature model that he bought a couple years ago from Larry Morgan.  Andy and I have very different tastes in music (I can’t stand the Beatles; he’s never heard of Slayer), but we do share a fervent love of all things Gretsch.  A few months ago, Andy bought a really beautiful Gretsch Duo Jet solid body guitar.  Andy likes the Duo Jet because it is, as he puts it, “a Beatles guitar”.  He had it delivered to our workplace, and he’s let me play it a few times.  Playing a guitar that is as high-end as Andy’s is always a thrill (getting the staff at Guitar Center to plug something expensive into a preset Marshall stack just isn’t the same; I feel self-conscious and weird about all these people in the store judging my lack of ability, and I hate Guitar Center anyways, they are soulless and horrible).  Andy’s guitar has a luster to it that is really something else; when he first brought it in, I observed that this guitar kinda glows.  Andy’s Duo Jet is one of those guitars that makes you sound good regardless of your talent level; it made my silly bar chords sound substantial.

Thus concludes my guitar post.  I know there are tons of guitar players out there who like to ramble on about how cool their stuff is and how everyone else’s stuff sucks.  I am proud to include myself as one of them.