stop-playing-guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

Firstly, some credit for this piece needs to go to @somuchbro for recommending I pull my thumb out and write a piece on this.

I’m breaking my lengthy radio silence to talk a heaping helping of contemptuous shit for Steel Panther and the abomination you see above.

I feel as though this issue has forced men in the guitar community to pick a side. Do I align myself with the spirit of inclusivity and progression so desperately needed in guitar music to welcome everyone and anyone who can possibly become it’s new and long-awaited saviour, OR do I continue to treat music like a locker room full of dudes comparing dicks and smacking each other’s asses with wet towels, all with a NO GIRLS ALLOWED sign hanging on the door?

Remember the 90s? Remember Riot Grrl and the influx of bands and zines that tried desperately to carve a little out of the rock and roll boys club? In a way that movement succeeded, and can be seen as one of the things that has influenced the heightened awareness of gender inequality in society today. Oddly enough, that success seems to have happened almost completely outside the music world that was its home. On that note, I want to make something clear: if you go to a show and assume that any girl you bump into there is someone’s girlfriend, if you’re in a band with someone who treats girls like shit and stand idly by them, if you think that Steel Panther’s response to this controversy is funny: you are part of the problem.

The story of the junior-high-dick-joke-made-flesh that you see above begins with TC Electronic, a Danish effects pedal company who narrowly missed being the country’s national shame behind its racist anti-refugee policy. TC released a line of pedals using their TonePrint technology, which treats pedals as upgradeable units that can be plugged into computers via USB and have various presets downloaded onto them post-sale. One of these presets was the “Pussy Melter,” a preset designed for one of their delay pedals by a man named Satchel, who plays guitar for Steel Panther.

For a bit of background, Steel Panther are the world’s pre-eminent joke band for people who think cultural references are the apex of comedy, along with Funniest Home Video shows and Dane Cook’s Superfinger. They are essentially a touring cosplay troupe glorifying the Aqua Netted slop that was post-Crüe, pre-Nevermind hair metal awfulness. In other words they’re a painfully perfect band to stoop to shameful lows to promote their product because whatever, it’s all just a joke, right? To that, I would say that unless people are paying Monopoly money to get into your shows this is super fucking real, as in you are real pieces of shit.

The description of the preset on TC Electronic’s website went as follows: “When we met up with Steel Panther’s oh-so-humble guitarist, he had only one condition: that the tone be as wet as the ladies on the front row. So if glam rock guitar solos and wet floor signs are your idea of a good time, then ‘Pussy Melter’ for Flashback Delay is definitely the TonePrint for you!”

If you need a minute to heave into a bin, I’ll wait.

After the existence of the TonePrint preset made it to the media and caused a shit-storm not seen since the last time John Mayer opened his dumb mouth, TC Electronic removed it from its online service. It was then re-uploaded with the new name “Repeat Offender,” which isn’t exactly the best name to come up with while non-consenting sexualisation is the hot topic of the day. It’s important to note that the band, Satchel, nor TC Electronic deemed fitting to apologise for the cheap and regressive boys-club joke that they had put out there. Instead, the announcement that the preset would be renamed was itself treated as a bit of a joke itself. Regardless many of us sighed with some relief, feeling as though calling people out on their commodified, phony machismo and tone deafness to the modern world actually got some results.

Then, in an act of free-speech-exercise-turned-shameless-profiteering, they put out their own pedal bearing the effect’s original name. Of course, because the world is fucked and we should burn it down and start again, it sold out in a very short amount of time. And, of course, this was seen as a victory by some. Having a sense of humour has prevailed over the evil forces of censorship! The slowflakes’ safe spaces have been burnt to the ground! The SJW non-binary feminazi battalions have been blitzkrieged by the power of rock and roll!

Except none of those things actually happened. Regardless of what you have in your signal chain, the world is still changing around you, and it’s changing for the better, and now you own the pedal equivalent of a BAZINGA! shirt that compels actual decent people to avoid you like the social plague carrier you are.

Here’s an idea - if you ever play on a bill with a band that has one of these things on their board, stiff the pricks. Don’t even offer them gas money. Key their van, wipe your ass with their merch, and maybe force them to talk to a real live girl for a few minutes without creating a puddle of flop sweat and having to hide their anxious boners.

#girls to the front #stop playing guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

Somewhere, there is a builder who has made a deluxe, rosewood custom Tom Delonge guitar. Because of this, if the aliens ever touch down on Earth it won’t be to trade poop and dick jokes with Major Tom - it’s gonna be full Independence Day but without any Jeff Goldblums there to save us. Or, maybe they’ll see Matt Skiba’s signature acoustic guitar and realise that the less they have to do with us the better.

#as a side note #now that tom isn't in his band anymore #how much better have they gotten? #stop playing gutar

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Fun fact: if the neck on your Gibson looks like the one above, you are an asshole.

In fact, calling people who do this to their guitars assholes doesn’t really cut it. Assholes pucker. I’m thinking of an exaggerated, gigantic shit chasm that never does the world the favour of closing and sparing the world from its stench. Think a Sarlacc pit without teeth that expels rather than ingesting. Disgusting, I know, but so is sanding a painted guitar neck.

There are a lot of options out there, guitar-wise. I refuse to believe that the only one on earth that almost meets your stringent requirements needs to be carted down to your combination workshop/man cave and defaced, especially because painted necks aren’t really that “slow.” The main thing that will impede your playing ability on a guitar is a neck shape that’s incompatible with how you hold a guitar or doesn’t fit with how you need to play. Super-shreddy metal needs wide, flat necks, but once you’re done chucking a Yngvie try playing power chords on it - you’ll hate your life immediately. The same works in reverse - you’re not gonna be able to perform dextrous neo-classical fretboard acrobatics on a tiny Tele or Peavey neck, but as far as fast chords and faster blues scales go, you’re exactly where you wanna be. Sanding your neck down is at best a minor performance boost and a partial answer to a question that has only arisen because you bought the wrong guitar in the first place.

Also, if only a Les Paul through your Klon into your Matchless powered by NOS tubes blessed by Pope Mike Matthews will do, here’s an idea: don’t deface your Gibson. Get an old Aria or Greco copy and take the 240-grit to that instead. Speaking from personal experience, 70s copies from these companies often surpass the genuine articles from the same period in playability and quality. And if that’s not good enough for you, you can still take that trip to Bunnings and do it with a smaller stain on your soul.

#you're not a luthier #you're a dumb dad who thinks you know shit #stop playing guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

“Today’s the big day,” Jethro says to himself. He wasn’t born Jethro, of course, but this was the name he gave himself after he traded in all his youth crew records for Cramps vinyl and got those flaming dice tattooed on his neck. My, that felt like a lifetime ago. As he scientifically constructs his pompadour to hide the shocks of sparsely-populated scalp from view, he glances at his phone, Betty Page posing on the home screen. That goddamn bass player better not be late, their set is at 3:30 (after the screening of Grease) and it’s do or die, they’ll never be anything if they don’t make a strong showing at this year’s Greazefest. The phone screen lights up. “Dude, I blew the transmission in my 56 Caddy, and I can’t fit my bass in the Uber. Stupid new cars.” Poor Jethro. Even Mike Ness can’t save him now.

#rockabilly: the worst possible punk rock retirement plan #stop playing guitar

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Let’s be honest: for the most part, the electric guitar is a dumb instrument used by dumb people to make dumb music. It’s only appropriate, then, that there’s a lot of dumb stuff about gear that’s been accepted as gospel simply because dumb Guitar Center employees have said it out loud enough times. The biggest one is that solid state amplification is inherently terrible. Everyone’s first amp was solid state. Chances are it had a speaker between six and ten inches big, and either fuzzed out when you cranked the volume enough or had the courtesy of having a button on it that kicked in that makes-a-Metal-Zone-sound-good distortion. The sound was probably somewhere between Born Against and early Germs, but seeing as you were learning the instrument nothing that cool ever came out of it. You continued to learn and eventually caught the gear bug and wanted to upgrade to a REAL amp. Mom or dad then drove you to your local music Wal-Mart where some guy wearing a lanyard told you that tubes are magic pixie dust and if you wanna get serious you’d better do a line of the stuff. Sound familiar? The problem with completely writing off transistor amps is that in all likelihood, a guitarist is comparing their one hundred watt tube amp with the ten-watt practice combo they played Green Day songs through in their childhood bedroom. It goes beyond comparing apples and oranges; you’re comparing a brontosaurus to a Q-tip, and one being tube and one being solid state is immaterial. One is a good amp, the other one wasn’t. The thing that confounds me is that even while certain solid state amps are becoming lusted after, the entire platform of transistor amps remain this terrible, shameful realm that one shall not enter lest they lose all credibility. Jazz Choruses are universally accepted as being fantastic amps, and they are. With the rise of dudes in Jawa costumes holding notes for three minutes, the prices on Sunn Beta Leads are at a place where no one would have guessed a mere five years ago. Acoustic amps (the brand) are getting a following that will turn them from modestly-priced pawn shop treasure into something with a collector market in another few years. Hell, even Marshall made some incredible solid state combos back in the 80s that continue to be slept on and sound EXACTLY like the JCM800 you’re about to spend $2k+ on that go for under $500, sometimes way under. I happen to own one of these, a Marshall 5010 combo. It’s thirty watts, has a single twelve-inch speaker, and it’s made in England. Most importantly, it gives you that classic rock growl and when you put a boost in front of it, liquid metal practically pours out of the speaker and T-1000 reaches out of the puddle and gives you the horns before chasing you down with his crowbar arms. My point is, we’re not daft enough to buy the anti-solid state argument hook line and sinker, so why is the perceived inferiority of the transistor still a conversation that people are having? It’s not a valid argument, and it never was. Where I live, we’re lucky to have an independent guitar shop that hosts in-store performances and meet-and-greets with touring bands. One time, Eyehategod dropped by to hang out and shoot the shit with the locals. I remember overhearing someone talk to Brian Patton about how the band makes a point of touring with solid state amps because they’re more reliable. Go to an EHG show and tell me those amps aren’t doing the job, and imagine how much less poor you’d be if your dumb band did the same thing.

[stop-playing-guitar]

Egad, Winston! When the second hand on my pocket watch strikes twelve, we will find ourselves airborne in our winged zeppelin that is powered by synchronised contact juggling and meninist t-shirts. Over the the copper wastes of proto-apocalyptic Victorian civilisation we will fly like eagles until we reach our final destination: a public park where we can LARP and not get wedgies or have people take our money before we make it to Games Workshop.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: no.

#kudos to BC Rich for predicting steampunk in 2003 #i guess? #stop playing guitar

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If you have metalhead friends who are even halfway to being funny people (a tall order in many cases), at least one of them would have shared the “Make Metallica Great Again” Trump spoof hat on Facebook. It’s hilarious. It’s also a worthy but potentially unrealistic rallying cry – can we ever reach the dizzying heights of Lightning or Puppets ever again? If this guitar were the Magic 8-Ball on the receiving end of that question, it would say “Don’t count on it.” The ESP Truckster was, fittingly, Papa Het’s signature guitar in the St. Anger era. It’s your standard ESP Eclipse body shape with cosmetic touches that scream the sort of Americana that Metallica has exhibited at the expense of their early European influences since the early 90s – wearing paint, rust, etc. It looks like someone’s played it on the interstate between Chattanooga and Muskogee and back again in the cab of an old Peterbilt for the last decade, stopping only to catch a snooze in the sleeper or party with some lot lizards. Here’s the problem: Les Paul bodies and EMG active pickups don’t mix. They don’t need to. In an actual Gibson LP (or the various excellent Japanese copies, for that matter), the body and PAFs work in perfect harmony; the body sustains the shit out of the note and the pickups grab it and out it through that sweet, honey-like filter that makes most anything that comes out of a Paul sound magical. In any guitar with EMG actives, the shape and material of the guitar body do not matter because all of the tone comes from those battery-powered black plastic rectangles, nothing else. You can put EMGs in a six string banjo and just so long as your amp is a US-style rectifier with tons of gain you’ll be playing Djenter Sandman in no time. And unlike the argument people make for things like Telemasters, you simply cannot tell me that the Les Paul is a comfortable enough shape to use as a body template for other pickup configurations. Us Paul players are masochists who deal with a sharp, bound corner digging into our forearms for the sake of the amazing sounds these guitars make. It’s like how the nicest high heels are usually the most painful to wear, or so I hear, right Honey? No, I don’t know why those panties on the clothesline are in my size. Do we really need to talk about this now? Also, it’s ugly. Much too ugly for a really expensive artist signature model. Kirk’s signature with the skull and crossbones fret inlays from around the same time isn’t much better, and don’t get me started on Lars’ diamond plate shell snare. No wonder it sounds like hitting a garage door with a nunchuk.

#my lifestyle determines my deathstyle #stop playing guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

who wore it better

(bass photo from Music Swop Shop)

#to be fair that thing probably sounds okay #but say no to bad photoshop fire over dad burst #stop playing guitar

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If there’s such a thing as creating stuff that’s more than the sum of its parts, surely the opposite can be true as well. Taken on a piece-by-piece basis, this guitar is pretty cool. Flying Vs are cool – whenever I see one for a decent price I want to buy it, put together a haggard metal vest, buy a bunch of bullet belts, and start a black metal-inspired dirty thrash band. You know, one that isn’t covertly or otherwise racist, which is all of them, so maybe that’s not a great idea and would lead to me breaking bread with some real garbage humans. Bigsbys are cool – people complain that they are limited in how much they can bend a note but honestly there would be so many more songs that jump the line between good and bad taste if it weren’t for them, because guitarists are children and need these limits imposed upon them. So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, this guitar is an unholy union between things that would be great on their own but should never, ever overlap. Did the person who made this never intend to play guitar sitting down ever again? This is like when your dad gets an idea he refuses to admit is rubbish and so until you move out you have to deal with the remote control holder/spice rack combo he put together on his workbench. At least it’s red, so when you chuck it in the bin it’ll get there faster. 

On a lighter note, please check out Found Sound in Melbourne for some really cool (and occasionally horrible) gear.

#put the tools down dad #stop playing guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

I can hear all two people that read this gasp from looking at the above image - it’s okay. I’m not going to tear apart the Klon Centaur. Hell, I own one. Well, one of the KTR models. It’s cool. What isn’t cool is the legacy it now must answer for.

It is generally accepted that the Centaur ushered in the era of boutique effects: hand-made, hens-teeth stomp boxes made by mad scientists tucked away in their basements under buzzing desk lamps in clouds of solder smoke. These small operations seem to be popping up everywhere now, and people are buying, ensnared by phrases like “discreet,” “clean headroom,” and the ever-misunderstood “true bypass.” They buy custom-made buffers for their signal chains when all it takes is one decent Boss pedal to do the job AND give you something to get cool noises from. More on Boss later, though. 

It used to be that there were two different types of guitarists: bedroom noodlers and active, gigging musicians. Now there’s a third type: cork-sniffing, elitist know-it-alls who wouldn’t be caught dead using stock anything who care more about what they’re playing through than what they’re actually playing. Because of this the boutique pedal market is in an upswing, but sooner or later the whole thing is going to collapse, or at the very least need to downsize considerably, because it’s sitting on a foundation that’s 95% structurally unsound, unsustainable bullshit.

FACT: A medium-to-long signal chain made up entirely of true bypass effects is going to sound like dog mess by the time it reaches your amplifier. Boss, MXR, Maxon, etc, all knew this 30+ years ago and put buffers in their effects. Why? for the same reason that going too far from your home Wi-Fi modem makes your signal drop out. Any signal plus distance equals degradation, i.e. the same effect boasting about your all-boutique board has on people’s opinions of you.

FACT: Thanks to the boutique boom there is now a knee-jerk reaction that musicians have in assuming that the more expensive, limited-run item is superior to the cheaper, mass-produced one. The next time you’re in a guitar store, put a hand-wired Tube Screamer side-by-side with a Bad Monkey. Put a RV-5 next to a BlueSky. If you aren’t succumbing to pure hype and instead trying these things against each other, you’ll find some boutique pedals that blow others out of the water, sure, but you’ll also surprise yourself with how often the Boss or Digitech something-or-other outdoes the Strymon or Eventide whatever-the-fuck, as well.

FACT: Boss pedals rule. Sure they’ve released their share of clunkers over the years, but they’re still put together by hand, have a level of quality control that one-man operations can only dream of, AND they come stock-standard with the buffers that you would otherwise need to buy specially to make your true bypass board not suck horribly. Also, try to break a Boss pedal. I dare you. You’ll probably need a howitzer. By comparison you can look at some boutique effects wrong and they’ll short out, and then you’ll be sitting there before your set, Strat in hand, with no mojo to give. What a shame.

So there, blind allegiance to boutique effects is dumb, costly, and makes you the musical equivalent to the guy that refuses a free beer when it’s handed to him because it’s not good enough, and who likes that guy? Fucking nobody, that’s who.

#stop playing guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

Sit down, kids. This one is gonna be part gear talk, part life lesson.

The best restaurants only serve one type of cuisine - fact. If you’re going to a nice French restaurant, in all likelihood there’s a head chef in the back who has studied under masters of French cuisine. This is something that takes years of hard work and dedication, to mold oneself from understudy to fellow master. When your meal comes out on a plate with immaculate presentation and cooked to perfection, it all boils down to that moment, that first bite. It’s like experiencing your first kiss all over again. Its flavor makes you forget where you are for a second. It’s heavenly. You take someone you like or love to this kind of place because you want them to associate you with this feeling.

By comparison, when you go to a restaurant that cooks a wide range of styles of food, be it some chintzy family restaurant with half a Cadillac sticking out of the wall or some dumpy chain pub, chances are you will be served something with all its corners cut off. It resembles the dish it claims to be but the flavors are muted, the presentation sucks, and as you drive home the heartburn kills you meanwhile you can’t remember it being all that rich to begin with. That’s what you get when you dine somewhere that has both tacos and sweet and sour pork on the menu. You take your wife you’re not all that crazy about anymore and your annoying kids here because why the fuck not and life is a pointless exercise between shifts at work anyway.

The latter example is the Fractal Audio Axe-FX, the class-Z computer that claims to be a guitar amplifier. Remember when people used PODs? V-Amps? This is the modern example, and sure, while the technology has come leaps and bounds since those days there’s still no comparison between this little black box and a legit tube amp. I dispute the notion that having 1,500 amps in a little box is all that useful - if you want lots of sounds, shell out for some decent pedals and something nice to run them through and your audience and sound engineers alike will thank you. I don’t mean to give the impression that getting good sounds out of one of these units is impossible, but at the same time the majority of guitarists are the people at the kids tables of any of the aforementioned restaurants and I wouldn’t trust most of them to get a decent sound out of a blackface Bassman, let alone something with an LED screen.

Oh, and that ad looks like something they’d put together for a new Mountain Dew flavor. Which would you pick - BAM (stylised using the HIM logo) Blood or Whoop Whoop Jugga-Juice?

#your amp is a glorified calculator #stop playing guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

If asked, I couldn’t tell you exactly why I don’t like Mesas. Maybe it’s their lack of midrange which means that unless you’re paying for a top-shelf sound guy they’re gonna sound like rubbish at a show. Maybe it’s their tireless fanbase that say they’re the only amp worth having while ignoring how many classic records have been made without them and willingly paying for a new set of tubes every week and a half. Maybe, just maybe it’s because Carlos Santana coined the name of the amp and anyone who does a song with Rob Thomas should be sacrificed to the great beyond by way of an open, bubbling volcano. All I know is, taking an overrated money pit and outfitting it in something that would fit in at a Smash Mouth concert is going too far. What’s next, a Line 6 Spider in bondage-zippered pleather to pay tribute to Orgy’s classic album Candyass? A Sugar Ray signature Squier? Not only can you get everything this amp can do out of a few VSTs, who wants to explain owning this to a prospective partner? “Yeah babe, I play in a joke tiki band with three other barbers apprentices every Tuesday at the local overpriced cocktail bar. What do you mean you don’t have Kik?” 

#mesaboogie #guitar #amps guitology

#the thing that should not be #stop playing guitar

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This one writes itself - set ur imagination freeeeeee

#namm 2015 #do u lan brah #stop playing guitar

[stop-playing-guitar]

Let’s get this out of the way nice and early: Strats are terrible. If you’re 30 or over and play one, you probably think that McDonald’s scrambled eggs are too spicy and the girl-on-top position is too risqué. If you’re under 30 and play one, you’ve probably covered it in unfunny, ironic stickers and scratched something offensive into the fretboard, which actually helps prove my point that these things are worthless and deep-down even their owners know it. Either way, these guitars seem to attract the worst kinds of people as devotees. The Stratocaster is the Tool of instruments.

Strats twang, but not as well as Teles. They sustain, but not as well as Les Pauls. They jangle, but not as well as a Ric. They are the ultimate middle-of-the-road, jack-of-all-trades master-of-none instrument. By all means though, continue to ignore these things while you play your pompous Gilmour/Clapton/Vaughan white guy blues (ideally through a Tubescreamer, because we all know Strats don’t have enough offensive midrange honk already) and keep saving up for that relic’d sunburst custom shop showpiece to keep in a glass case in your pool room to remind you to keep rockin’ through middle age. Fun fact: your wife is sorely disappointed that you never grew up.

Fender Create a Custom Fabergé Stratocaster 

A tenuous easter connection, we take a look at the perfect alternative to a chocolate egg with this incredible Fender Stratocaster. Inspired by a 1900 Fabergé Pine Cone easter egg created for the Russian royal family, Fender master builder, Yuriy Shishkov, creates an ostentatious, one-of-a-kind guitar with the ridiculously wealthy in mind. Projecting a 3D image of the egg across the body, Shishkov hand-carved each blue scale across maple wood in exact formation stating “if all the scales on the guitar were extended beyond the instrument’s contour, they would create a perfect ‘egg’ shape.” Gilded with fine silver and 10 feet of 18-karat gold wire ribbon, additional shine comes courtesy of 550 high-grade diamonds, also used to decorate the knobs and switches. Auction estimate is 1 million USD.

#strat #stratocaster #fender strat #fender stratocaster #fender #stop playing guitar

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If you want some of that Christmas in July spirit, search the “custom guitar” tag on tumblr - it is your ticket to the Island of Misfit Toys. I don’t know why people need 8 strings to play djent when this idiot seems to do just fine with one. Face it: you’re a bass player in denial. And the meme inlay is perfect if you never intend to play anything that will appeal to people over the age of 17 on this guitar. Obviously there’s some beautiful craftsmanship going on here, but getting a pro luthier to make this is akin to some Objectivist nightmare where you hire the world’s most talented artist to repaint a dentist’s waiting room.

Billy’s new Skervesen custom 8 string. Ziricote top, walnut body, Wenge/Bubinga neck, BKP aftermath pickups, Custom Gooby and Dolan inlay. Seriously, all my guitars had dots on the fretboard, i needed something different for a change!

#custom guitar #memes #djent #stop playing guitar

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With genuine JCM800 parts, even our fridges are awesome. Find out more at http://marshallfridge.com/

#marshall #how to destroy a brand in 25 years #jcm800 #stop playing guitar