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Post by millring on May 23, 2012 5:30:40 GMT -5
Why a telecaster and not a stratocaster? Why or why not a Les Paul? Why or why not a hollow body? Is it what you're playing, or is it versatility, or something yet again? What are the main categories of pickups and what differentiates them?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2012 5:57:42 GMT -5
How long do you have? For starters, don't forget the amp. It's just as important as the guitar. Most of the rest gets down to what sound you need or want. That's probably followed by ergonomics (weight, neck profile, body size, cutaway depth) that's not all that different from an acoustic, really. Other guys who play better than I do would probably disagree. You'll find a lot of guys trying to peg different guitars into different types of music. Oh, a Tele is a country guitar, and a Strat is for blues etc. Bollocks. With the right combination of amps, effects, and skills, you could probably pull off any kind of music on a good electric guitar. Best advice is to do some Youtubing and Googling, and go to a store and test drive a variety of different ones. Helping by being unhelpful. That's my Wednesday motto.
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2012 6:03:48 GMT -5
Some iconoclastic departures: Hollow body guitars are for jazz, unless you're Les Paul... Teles are for country, unless you're Jimmy Page on most of Led Zeppelin I... The best blues come from Strats, except maybe BB King... Just trying to point out that there are a wide variety of guitars folks use for a wide variety of music, regardless what the "purists" or "pundits" say. Now, should you find a Tele with humbuckers, please inform the owner that's just WRONG!
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Dub
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I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
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Post by Dub on May 23, 2012 6:34:39 GMT -5
This should be an interesting discussion. I'm off to the dentist but I'll catch up with it later.
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Post by aquaduct on May 23, 2012 6:43:30 GMT -5
Give me a minute to get the presses running and I'm in.
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2012 6:46:51 GMT -5
Just wait until Frank sees this. ;D
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Post by dickt on May 23, 2012 6:51:24 GMT -5
The main categories of pickups are single-coil pickups and humbuckers. Generally speaking Fenders are single-coil pickup guitars while most Gibsons feature humbuckers (although there are many Gibson's with P-90's which are single coils). While there are plenty of examples that go against the rule, single-coil pickups offer more jangle, bite, high frequencies and humbuckers are stronger on the low end. At the extremes a tele bridge pickup can be like an icepick in the ear and a humbucker can be all muddy low end but it's not that simple.
There are some familiar iconic guitar sounds that help illustrate the differences. For strats listen to the Beach Boys for jangly chords or to blues players like Clapton or SRV. For teles listen to older country music like Buck Owens, more modern rock sounds like The Pretenders, soul players like Steve Cropper, blues players like Muddy Waters, Roy Buchanan, etc. Gibson Les Pauls are everywhere (even in what's called country music these days) and can be used in most kinds of music. Gibson semi hollow 335's typically sport humbuckers and are used for rock (Chuck Berry), jazz (Larry Carlton--Mr. 335 on Steely Dan records), and by tons of blues players. Gibson archtops with humbuckers are basically jazz boxes.
P-90's are single coil but with more a mid-range quality. I've seen it written that the iconic P-90 sound might be Pete Townshend's Gibson SG on the Who's Live at Leeds.
Then there are the "others." The Beatles and Byrds used Rickenbackers for that jangly sound. Gretsch guitars with Filterons have a sound all their own. Jack White likes to use old cheap 60's guitars like Airline and such for his highly distorted playing.
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Post by epaul on May 23, 2012 7:54:06 GMT -5
It's pretty simple, really. Tele's are for country music. Strats are for the blues. Hollow bodies are best for smashing and keeping snacks in. Those ones that have cutaways on both sides are reversible.,
That's about it. Oh, and they come in different colors. And some are heavy. Actually, they all are heavy.
That's about it.
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Post by mccoyblues on May 23, 2012 8:41:26 GMT -5
In basic terms it comes down to two camps. The Fender tone with the single coil pickups and the Gibson tone with the humbuckers. I'm not a technical person so I can't speak of why these designs do what they do but it sure is easy to distinquish the two with a side by side comparison.
We can name drop examples of guitarists all day long to illustrate the differences but the basic difference is a cleaner almost weaker, janglier (?) tone from the Fender design that a guy like Mark Knopfler, David Gilmour or Eric Clapton works so well and a grittier, on the edge cutting tone of say a Billy Gibbons, Dickie Betts or Jimmy Page solo.
Can you sound like Jimmy Page on a Strat? Sure but not nearly as easy as you could if you played a Les Paul. Can a Les Paul work in a country band? Sure it can but it won't sound the same as a Tele.
As far as playability the Fender is lighter, has a smaller neck radius and a completely different feel in the hands compared to the heavy body and fat neck found on the Les Paul.
Some would say the best of both worlds is a Gibson hollow body. The openess of the chambered body and the grit of the humbuckers works well in tandem to create an almost perfect electric guitar tone that every style can benefit from. You see jazz players, country players, rock and blues players all benefiting from the Gibson hollowbody design.
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Post by aquaduct on May 23, 2012 8:45:24 GMT -5
Start with amplifiers.
There are two flavors- solid state (transistors) and tubes.
The theory of amplification is basically the same between all the variants. It's kind of like a water spigot. A small signal input (turning the spigot knob) opens up a proportional "valve" in a much bigger system allowing large volumes of water to flow from small signal changes.
There are all kinds of ways to rig transistors and tubes to do this, but that's basic amplification.
And up to the limits of the transistor and tube outputs, they both can do a pretty good job.
But then there's distortion.
When the transistor or tube reaches it's maximum output level, any remaining signal gain is cut off. Transistors suck at this as they just square the top of the wave and produce nasty sounding odd harmonics which tend to sound like a fork in a grinder.
Tubes, being mechanical, don't work linearly and as they approach the peak they gently damp the peaks producing pleasant, even harmonics and musical distortion.
If you're in a situation where you want clean reproduction, transistors are the way to go since they're much more reliable, predictable, etc. than a tube. They're great in sound systems and traditional jazz or acoustic guitar amps.
But if'n you've got a notion to make it scream, tubes are the schizzle.
Next up, different configurations of tube amps and distortion.
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Post by aquaduct on May 23, 2012 9:21:23 GMT -5
OK, ways to make a tube amp distort.
Early amplifiers (which of course were all tube amps, the transistor being a relatively recent invention) were small, low-wattage, quite simple things. You basically got a volume knob and not much else. To make the tubes distort, you had to overload the input of the amplifier, hence overdrive and distortion pedals which, among other things, drive up the output signal from the guitar.
As guitar amps developed they got bigger and had more options, like tone controls. A guitar amplifier actually has two stages- a preamp and a power amp. The preamp colors the tone and lifts the signal to match the power amp requirements. The power amp brings the thunder. Each stage has it's own set of tubes. If you look in the back of a tube amp, you'll see little tubes for the preamp and big tubes for the power amp.
This brings us to the second way to make distortion. On many amps there are separate preamp volume (typically called volume or gain) and power amp volume (typically master volume) controls. As a kid you learn that you can make distortion by turning the preamp volume up full and the power amp volume down effectively over-driving the power amp section with the preamp. Then you put your fuzz-face pedal in front of the whole Marshall conglomeration and you're Jimi Hendrix.
There are numerous great examples of these kinds of amps and rigs, way too numerous to discuss in detail, but that's the basic workings. The limitation of these amps is basically that you get one sound out of the amp itself. Amps like Fender Twins have two channels but they're not useful or integrated with each other.
Many, many folks play this way and it's the thing legends are made of. It's also the reason high end studios have 20 or 30 old amps lying around. Each will be set up for specific sounds.
And don't think that early low watt amps have died. Guys like Page and Clapton made a living with small Fender Champs in the studio instead of the walls of Marshalls they used on stage.
In fact the real reason for the wall of sound approach live tends to be that early sound systems sucked. Once sound systems caught up, numerous loud bands like Kiss went to walls of amps for show and small mic'd amps backstage to reduce stage volume and protect hearing.
Next up, cascading gain stages and switchable channel amps.
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Post by majorminor on May 23, 2012 9:45:29 GMT -5
Just because you will get so many other perspectives here I'll bring up my personal observations in the great fender Gibson debate.
Fenders are typically slab guitars(no arch in top) with bolt on necks. As such they tend to be cheaper and easier to tinker with and repair IMO. They do the job well. The scale on a Fender is slightly longer than a Gibson. Makes it slightly more work to play but that can have it's own rewards. The pickup switching and tone knob access on Fenders be it a Tele or Strat is superior to Gibson *IMO*. It's all right where it should be. Nut width on Fenders tend to be 1.625 and the few modern neck shapes that come 1.6875 tend to be of the thinner variety.
Gibsons are just gorgeous aesthetically. Flatter fretboard radius and shorter scale make note bends easier and I think they play faster. Typcially with humbucking pickups you get a generally fatter sound and more sustain than a Fender. Standard width at nut is 1.6875 and you can get both thinner and really clubby neck profiles pretty easily. Did I mention they were gorgeous?
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Post by millring on May 23, 2012 9:58:04 GMT -5
Good stuff so far. I'm learning lots.
I've had two fairly recent epiphanies regarding electrics -- instruments nearly as foreign to me as a fiddle.
1. Jim had just finished an archtop and had it plugged in when I walked into his shop. We took turns passing it around and, until the moment I played "Stardust" on that guitar, it had never occurred to me that my fingerstyle stuff might sound good on an electric.
2. Dru participated in that Tele competition a couple of years ago and talked in some detail about playing jazz on a tele.
But even after those two revelations, I've been forced to admit that I don't know the first thing about electrics.
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Post by j on May 23, 2012 9:58:11 GMT -5
A couple of things that I think have been missed:
1) another important factor in electric is scale length. In general, Fenders like strats and teles are longer scale (25.5), whereas Gibsons are short scale (24.75). This difference contributes both to playing feel (slightly tighter vs slightly looser) and to sound, especially attack.
2) Because of their design, single-coil pickup have a characteristic 60-cycle hum. The traditional way to get rid of this is to wire one of the pickups in reverse. Generally the middle pickup of a strat is wired in reverse, and has opposite polarity than neck and bridge. When the middle pickup is selected together with either neck or bridge, the reverse wound/reverse polarity configuration effectively "cancels" the hum, together with a great deal of musical frequencies. The resulting "quacking" sound is a trademark of strat-style guitars.
3) An important typology of guitar is the "super-strat", or Stratocaster with one or more humbucker pickups. It combines the clarity and snap of long-scale Fender necks with the punch and focus of humbuckers, and it was a favorite of "shredding" guitarists in the 80s (Eddie Van Halen's "Frankenstein" guitar is an example of a Super Strat). Contemporary guitars like Ibanez and Jackson are refined designs of super starts. Also, another "hybrid" design is the Paul Reed Smith type of guitar, popularized by Santana, which combines Gibson and Fender elements in a way that most people either hate or love. I Kind of like them myself.
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Post by majorminor on May 23, 2012 10:06:21 GMT -5
John - an ideal electric for you to do your jazz based thing would be the Godin Park Avenue guitars. Check 'em out.
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Post by Supertramp78 on May 23, 2012 10:11:30 GMT -5
The comments on guitars vs. amps reminded me of some photos on the last Knopfler studio diary. there was a particular song that he was working on and he had a sound in his head but no real idea as to how to get it. Plus it was going to be slide guitar. So it was off to testing. But as was said here, the amp is just as important.... Carr, Ampeg Reverberocket, Tone King Metropolitan, Lazy J, Divided by 13, Gretch 6161, Fender twin '58, Fender Princeton TV '55, Tone King Imperial, Gibson EH150, Fender Bassman '59, Fender Concert, Fender Super Reverb. The guitars were - The Reverend, Gibson ES 175D, Gibson Les Paul R9, MK Strat, Jizblaster and a Dan Electro DC 59
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Post by majorminor on May 23, 2012 10:15:59 GMT -5
"Jizblaster"?
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Post by Marshall on May 23, 2012 10:18:15 GMT -5
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Post by billhammond on May 23, 2012 10:20:02 GMT -5
"CALLING DOCTOR FREUD, DOCTOR FREUD, PLEASE, CODE BLUE"
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Post by Supertramp78 on May 23, 2012 10:25:15 GMT -5
Per Guy, it's a DanElectro (Silvertone) variation
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