guitar pet peeves

For guitars of the straight waisted variety (or reverse offset).
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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by mackerelmint » Mon May 27, 2019 6:33 pm

I have a friend who used to hate teles. He hated the shape. He mellowed on that and ended up buying an affinity tele on a lark, which became his favorite guitar.

I used to play metal on my old one, and years later learned that they're a studio staple for metal players, but never on stage cuz they look wrong. That's pretty funny to me. But they can sound right for anything.
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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by X-Ray Spex » Tue May 28, 2019 4:55 am

mackerelmint wrote:
Mon May 27, 2019 6:33 pm
I have a friend who used to hate teles. He hated the shape. He mellowed on that and ended up buying an affinity tele on a lark, which became his favorite guitar.

I used to play metal on my old one, and years later learned that they're a studio staple for metal players, but never on stage cuz they look wrong. That's pretty funny to me. But they can sound right for anything.
Yeah, that bridge pickup is awesome for downtuned riffy stuff. Only issue is that those great pickups are unfortunately attached to one of the (in my opinion people before I get shanked by the Tele 4 Lyfe crew :D ) ugliest guitars ever designed.
''It's not what you play, it's what you play'' - Troy Van Leeuwen

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by PorkyPrimeCut » Tue May 28, 2019 5:09 am

X-Ray Spex wrote:
Tue May 28, 2019 4:55 am
...those great pickups are unfortunately attached to one of the (in my opinion people before I get shanked by the Tele 4 Lyfe crew :D ) ugliest guitars ever designed.
From the nut up I'm with you. Nowt wrong with the body shape but I can not stand the Telecaster headstock!
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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by TeenageShutdown! » Tue May 28, 2019 5:25 pm

Oh gosh, where do I begin with guitar pet peeves? A few things come to mind, but nothing to quibble over. Bridges...meh. Bad set ups...meh. Terribly out of tune GC guitars...eh. Wait, I know! It’s people that play guitars!

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by Singlebladepickup » Tue May 28, 2019 5:41 pm

Guitars that go out of tune too easily are no fun

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by BoringPostcards » Wed May 29, 2019 3:19 am

I can’t stand the tone that all the “prodigy” metal guys use. Guys like Guthrie Govan and John Petrucci.
They describe it as a ‘soaring’ lead tone.
Sounds corny as fuck to me and leaves me unable to enjoy anything they do, because it’s so cringeworthy of a tone.
That and too many notes. I get it, you play well, but there’s a thing called space. It would serve the composition to have more space between phrasings.
Det er mig der holder traeerne sammen.

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by X-Ray Spex » Wed May 29, 2019 4:31 am

PorkyPrimeCut wrote:
Tue May 28, 2019 5:09 am
X-Ray Spex wrote:
Tue May 28, 2019 4:55 am
...those great pickups are unfortunately attached to one of the (in my opinion people before I get shanked by the Tele 4 Lyfe crew :D ) ugliest guitars ever designed.
From the nut up I'm with you. Nowt wrong with the body shape but I can not stand the Telecaster headstock!
It looks like a sad droopy foot. I can get past the body style IF the headstock is a Strat headstock weirdly but examples of this are few and far between.
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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by 601210 » Wed May 29, 2019 8:29 am

While we're talking about metal, I really can't stand the $5,000 superstrats made out of all kinds of exotic wood (sometimes 2 or 3 at a time), with all the "premium" features like contoured heels, specially fanned frets, high-mass bridges, scalloped fretboards, compound radii, EM fucking Gs and all that stuff. Usually with some copy about how playable or fast or tuneful or whatever old man adjective it adheres to.

Let's be real, nowadays the cost to manufacture an electric guitar is extremely minuscule. Spending all that extra money on some endangered wood or what not is just so boring to me, and the worst thing a guitar can be, far beyond being uncomfortable or having a clunky neck, is boring.

It's also funny cause most of these trace their lineage back to Van Halen's superstrats, and to me the idea of a superstrat has always been to completely strip down a guitar to its essentials and emphasize its rawness. He used basswood on his guitars for fucks sake.

It's also usually the "Your $250 delay pedal won't make you better" crowd that are really into these guitars.

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by øøøøøøø » Wed May 29, 2019 11:21 am

In terms of gear I can find anything I need to find, usually in several price ranges. That stuff is all cool.

The thing that vexes me is the manner in which the guitar's cultural significance has become so crowded. It becomes difficult to play or do anything on the instrument that's not weighed down with all sorts of (often undesirable) cultural baggage.

The guitar accumulated, in the 20th century, several distinct and deep traditions of sound, language, technique, and even visual aesthetics.

To avoid referencing one or more of these traditions (even unintentionally) becomes difficult. The guitar (as a sound) was universal and omnipresent enough in the baby boomer and gen x generations that in many ways it's culturally synonymous with them. It was cultural hegemony, for a time.

And now that those two generations aren't really driving popular creative culture, most of the guitar's many tropes have become exceedingly tiresome. The guitar itself is at risk of becoming "old fashioned" due to that clear and undeniable generational association. And we're not yet in a phase of rebirth, where the old tropes once again become novel, and take on new meanings and life, or get reimagined and re-contextualized. We can't be yet; it's too soon. These sounds are too "triggering."

Something like the "soaring lead tone" on a pointy guitar mentioned just upthread (or a strat playing bent-note blues language into a lightly-overdriven tweed bassman, or a strumming Martin acoustic, or a droning, delayed-out single note theme played on a jazzmaster)... these all steer the music very sharply and heavily in a certain direction; like jerking the steering wheel of a car. The sounds haven't faded from the zeitgeist enough to be able to take on new meanings.

So as a creator, an artist, a collaborator trying to do things that aren't strictly-revivalist or parodistic in nature, it becomes incumbent upon me to mine this instrument for anything new; anything that's not de-rigueur. But it's been strip-mined for three quarters of a century and it sometimes feels like an uphill climb to find what's left. I know it's there. Music is infinite. But there's all of this other cultural detritus that biases one toward the familiar.

To that end, it also becomes incumbent upon me to be vigilant about those moments when I'm implying something with sound that I don't intend (i.e. "wait, if I do this, suddenly it sounds like Foreigner, and I don't want that.")

And I feel like those moments when I hit a new "vein" in the mine are rarer than I'd like. And the amount of creative impulses I abandon upon realizing they'd take the music in an unintended direction is frustratingly high.

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by X-Ray Spex » Thu May 30, 2019 4:50 am

øøøøøøø wrote:
Wed May 29, 2019 11:21 am
In terms of gear I can find anything I need to find, usually in several price ranges. That stuff is all cool.

The thing that vexes me is the manner in which the guitar's cultural significance has become so crowded. It becomes difficult to play or do anything on the instrument that's not weighed down with all sorts of (often undesirable) cultural baggage.

The guitar accumulated, in the 20th century, several distinct and deep traditions of sound, language, technique, and even visual aesthetics.

To avoid referencing one or more of these traditions (even unintentionally) becomes difficult. The guitar (as a sound) was universal and omnipresent enough in the baby boomer and gen x generations that in many ways it's culturally synonymous with them. It was cultural hegemony, for a time.

And now that those two generations aren't really driving popular creative culture, most of the guitar's many tropes have become exceedingly tiresome. The guitar itself is at risk of becoming "old fashioned" due to that clear and undeniable generational association. And we're not yet in a phase of rebirth, where the old tropes once again become novel, and take on new meanings and life, or get reimagined and re-contextualized. We can't be yet; it's too soon. These sounds are too "triggering."

Something like the "soaring lead tone" on a pointy guitar mentioned just upthread (or a strat playing bent-note blues language into a lightly-overdriven tweed bassman, or a strumming Martin acoustic, or a droning, delayed-out single note theme played on a jazzmaster)... these all steer the music very sharply and heavily in a certain direction; like jerking the steering wheel of a car. The sounds haven't faded from the zeitgeist enough to be able to take on new meanings.

So as a creator, an artist, a collaborator trying to do things that aren't strictly-revivalist or parodistic in nature, it becomes incumbent upon me to mine this instrument for anything new; anything that's not de-rigueur. But it's been strip-mined for three quarters of a century and it sometimes feels like an uphill climb to find what's left. I know it's there. Music is infinite. But there's all of this other cultural detritus that biases one toward the familiar.

To that end, it also becomes incumbent upon me to be vigilant about those moments when I'm implying something with sound that I don't intend (i.e. "wait, if I do this, suddenly it sounds like Foreigner, and I don't want that.")

And I feel like those moments when I hit a new "vein" in the mine are rarer than I'd like. And the amount of creative impulses I abandon upon realizing they'd take the music in an unintended direction is frustratingly high.
I feel this so hard, a lot of the time it feels like if I want to do something technically ''new'' I have to deconstruct everything I do down to the minutiae to make sure I haven't accidentally referred to something I'd consider old-hat or with certain cultural connotations (within reason obviously). On the plus side there's so much amazing music being made on guitars which is so modern and interesting and relevant (think Animals As Leaders etc) that it does make me think that it can stay a relevant instrument in music for the foreseeable future, the ''guitar god'' thing has kind've died out in mainstream music but to be honest I'm very very ok with that.
''It's not what you play, it's what you play'' - Troy Van Leeuwen

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by marqueemoon » Thu May 30, 2019 6:03 am

I hear what y’all are saying and I’ve been there. I guess I’ve just come to the realization that other people don’t necessarily hear what I hear and sometimes it’s good to sit with the cliche thing for a while. Often as you work on it more it will mutate into something else.

Other people’s input is key too. On the records I’m working on I’m finally hearing the bass player’s parts clearly for the first time and I’m felling better about some of the stuff I thought was cliche because he’s not playing the obvious thing against it.

One of the biggest shifts in my playing recently is I’ve shifted to more or less straight up dad rock toanz. That’s really pointed me back to the notes I play and how I play them.

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by Larry Mal » Thu May 30, 2019 6:27 am

øøøøøøø wrote:
Wed May 29, 2019 11:21 am
In terms of gear I can find anything I need to find, usually in several price ranges. That stuff is all cool.

The thing that vexes me is the manner in which the guitar's cultural significance has become so crowded. It becomes difficult to play or do anything on the instrument that's not weighed down with all sorts of (often undesirable) cultural baggage.

The guitar accumulated, in the 20th century, several distinct and deep traditions of sound, language, technique, and even visual aesthetics.

To avoid referencing one or more of these traditions (even unintentionally) becomes difficult. The guitar (as a sound) was universal and omnipresent enough in the baby boomer and gen x generations that in many ways it's culturally synonymous with them. It was cultural hegemony, for a time.

And now that those two generations aren't really driving popular creative culture, most of the guitar's many tropes have become exceedingly tiresome. The guitar itself is at risk of becoming "old fashioned" due to that clear and undeniable generational association. And we're not yet in a phase of rebirth, where the old tropes once again become novel, and take on new meanings and life, or get reimagined and re-contextualized. We can't be yet; it's too soon. These sounds are too "triggering."

Something like the "soaring lead tone" on a pointy guitar mentioned just upthread (or a strat playing bent-note blues language into a lightly-overdriven tweed bassman, or a strumming Martin acoustic, or a droning, delayed-out single note theme played on a jazzmaster)... these all steer the music very sharply and heavily in a certain direction; like jerking the steering wheel of a car. The sounds haven't faded from the zeitgeist enough to be able to take on new meanings.

So as a creator, an artist, a collaborator trying to do things that aren't strictly-revivalist or parodistic in nature, it becomes incumbent upon me to mine this instrument for anything new; anything that's not de-rigueur. But it's been strip-mined for three quarters of a century and it sometimes feels like an uphill climb to find what's left. I know it's there. Music is infinite. But there's all of this other cultural detritus that biases one toward the familiar.

To that end, it also becomes incumbent upon me to be vigilant about those moments when I'm implying something with sound that I don't intend (i.e. "wait, if I do this, suddenly it sounds like Foreigner, and I don't want that.")

And I feel like those moments when I hit a new "vein" in the mine are rarer than I'd like. And the amount of creative impulses I abandon upon realizing they'd take the music in an unintended direction is frustratingly high.
That was a very well written thing right there. So much ground has been broken on the electric guitar, well, and the acoustic, that it's hard to come up with anything at all original.

I remember when I got my most recent Les Paul Studio, I was playing it as soon as I got it and I was thinking that everything I played on it made me sound like Bad Company. You could easily point out that this was likely in great part due to my own limitations as a musician and guitar player, and you wouldn't be wrong- but still, that sound of that guitar is a little hard to avoid. The Mick Ralphs Bad Company sound is just kind of something the Les Paul does very naturally (among other sounds) and it's work to avoid that more than anything sometimes.

When I was younger, that's what I loved about my Jazzmaster, that it didn't lend itself to a sound that I had heard everywhere else. I could do things on it that to me sounded very original and I thought that was fantastic. Later, though, I started listening to Sonic Youth and such and realized that a lot of the sounds I was coaxing out of my Jazzmaster weren't really original at all, but to me they were, at least for a while.

So yeah... it's pretty tough! Good thoughts, Brad.
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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by marqueemoon » Wed Apr 01, 2020 4:41 pm

Too many goddamn chickenhead knobs. This makes my brain hurt.

Image

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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by somanytoys » Thu Apr 02, 2020 7:46 am

marqueemoon wrote:
Wed Apr 01, 2020 4:41 pm
Too many goddamn chickenhead knobs. This makes my brain hurt.

Image
Yeah, I get that.
My first good amp, a Laney VC30, came with chicken knobs, trying to help give it that “vintage” vibe, I guess. When I had 2 amps built, they originally offered them with chicken knobs, but I requested more regular round knobs on both of them.

Since then, ALL of the Vox AC amps I’ve bought (and the ones I’ve sold) have had chicken head knobs. I will say that with the layout, they’re not all that prominent on the Voxes (or the Laney), because they’re on the top, and somewhat recessed, instead of on the front like this one.

I get what Brad said, sometimes it seems like it’s all been done. That’s difficult to overcome if you’re working in the business and trying to put new stuff out. It can also be difficult if you’re playing out and trying to do original stuff. Effects can help to change the sounds, or come up with something a little different, whether it’s what’s being played or just the way it sounds.

I find myself in both situations, trying to come up with original music, and sometimes ending up doing something reminiscent of something else, and sometimes blatantly treading over someone’s stuff, even if only subconsciously.

It’s cool to know how and be able to do those things, either to recreate it or to avoid it, but it never hurts to have more to draw from. Like Marqueemoon said, sometimes something vaguely familiar can be made to sound completely different with another arrangement. And most things are derivative anyway, in one way or another.
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Re: guitar pet peeves

Post by fuzzjunkie » Thu Apr 02, 2020 11:50 am

E-lectronics on guitars! The Lord don’t want you playing with that demon Electricity! Pickups, switches! Leave all that nonsense behind brother, and abstain! Here’s a nice acoustic guitar for you to play. The way that God intended.

:D :D :whistle:

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