Re: Pers latest clip

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On 22 maj 2007, at 10.12, simeon harris wrote:

> your control of the dynamics and the "tremolo" antics gave it a  
> very realistic sound, which made the parts when you played  
> something impossible for a guitarist to play even more surprising!

I know a lot of people associate "the guitar" with a certain physical  
mock-up of wood and metal and I really don't want to upset "vintage- 
minded guitar lovers", but to me it's all just as simple as Sound and  
Expression.

As a child I just loved a certain sound I kept hearing in music.  
Later on I learned it was the sound of a Stratocaster with floating  
vibrato bar cooking an amp's first stage’s three 12AX7A tubes and the  
output stage’s two EL-34 tubes. But that took long time to find out;  
I played Gretsch guitars, Gibson Les Paul and ES335 guitars, but  
never found the sound I heard inside. Until I finally understood that  
this piece-of-crap looking guitar model named Stratocaster was the  
origin to the magic I felt. So I got into strats and started to trim  
them bitches. Which wasn't easy. The pick-ups are extremely sensible  
for hum so you have to learn the correct body posture on stage to  
stay free from picking up the local police radio. You also need to  
adjust the pickups according to the strings in a very delicate way.  
They not only loose lots of high frequencies if too far from the  
string, they also make the string go out of tune if adjusted too  
closely; you have to find the perfect balance where it all comes  
together musically. And that's all dependent on how you set the  
string action and which strings you are using! Then we have the  
vibrato machinery that has to be set up in a floating manner to make  
the sound I like (being able to play a vibrato with the amplitude  
reaching both under and over the normative pitch), but this has some  
nasty drawbacks: when a string pops at a gig all other five strings  
are immediately kicks out of tune because the springs on the back of  
the body does not any more match the pulling power of six-tuned- 
strings. So if you want to gig you need to keep also an equally  
adjusted backup guitar. And more, you have to keep the thing in tune  
while playing, which means learning to play the twang bar correctly  
(never only go down in pitch, always finish up with a short upwards  
gliss to get the strings back into the state when the tension is  
equal on both sides of the nut). You also have to learn how to wind  
up strings correctly to the tuning heads and to adjust the chinks in  
the nut so the strings can stretch freely all the way from the bridge  
to the tuning head (this might as well include the need of bringing a  
graphite pen to "smoothen" the chinks to minimize the friction -  
learned that from Jeff Beck thanks to Guitar Player mag. Great tip  
BTW). Finally, the electric guitar - as in the strat model - is not  
at all a design-wise optimized instrument. Strats would actually  
sound better if the bridge pick-up was tilted the other way! But to  
get that sound you have to buy a left-hand designed strat and change  
the order of the strings for playing it right-handed. It's crazy that  
people still try to copy Jimi's sound without understanding this very  
obvious fact, when it's right there on every old picture of the  
musician!  ;-)

Phew... Making sense of playing the electric guitar is just so  
complicated. In comparison, reaching for that sound and expression  
with the EWI is a very gratifying shortcut. And besides of that, the  
MIDI concept opens up for other fun stuff as in incorporating  
arpeggiators and modular sequencing into your playing.

per
---
"closet shred monster" ;-)