The time for a new axe has come.

Dragonforce would be great if the vocals were different . I love their shredding.

Congrats on the new guitar man.

 

Joe Satriani

 

Nice, grats! -- looks like a really well-designed instrument. Bolt-on neck for easy maintenance, and the neck joint looks well thought out, with the contoured shape so you can reach the upper frets without contorting too much. I like the design of the top, it's very distinctive. I especially like the HSH pickup configuration, I'm actually going to be ordering a guitar in the next month or so with the same config -- in this case, an EBMM Silhouette:



Only downside is that it'll take four months to come, as they handbuild each one to order.

Got one of these a few months ago:



Two channels, three modes (clean, dirty, and the classic MarkIV "V" EQ lead boost mode). All tube, handmade in the good old USA, and loud enough to kill small animals/children -- I haven't dared to turn it up past 1 yet, even playing with my brother, who can be a fairly loud drummer.

 

That is beautiful burl on that guitar. OMG.

We play gibson les paul guitars here. Did I mention my bedroom is full of guitars and amps?

 

You tricked me!!

 

I love Les Pauls. Nice, thick tone that sustains forever. Plug one into a nice, dark amplifier, like an old Vox AC30 or something, and you get one of my favorite guitar tones. What other guitars and amps do you have?

/I could talk about this stuff all day, much to Mrs. symen's dismay.

 

I just have one gibson les paul studio. All the other guitars are my husbands. His favorite is Gibson les paul standard and he's got an old beat up second hand gibson that he loves, very light weight in comparison to the first two, finish wearing off on this thing, had to have all the hardware replaced.

We have a junky fender we loan out to the kids in the neighborhood when they reach the teenage years and want to try out electric guitar.

We also have a couple of acoustic guitars. We have many amps. My favorite is a huge all tube legacy amp looks just like this: http://park2.wakwak.com/~ibanez_mania/guitar/legacy_all.jpg


and we have a couple of epiphone amps which are more portable and some loaner amps we let the teenagers borrow.

 

My Foul Stench buddies don't use Fenders, but I do....an American Made Fender Hot Rodded Precision Bass (has both the Precision and Jazz pickups) and I wouldn't use anything else!

If Fender did anything right, it was the Bass. I've played others, Corts (Mercyful Fate used them back in the day), Rickenbacher (I hated how it felt, like it was a box or something!!), Kramer (was nice, but not an American Fender).

For Bass, only Fender for me. I think I tune it MAYBE once a year! And that is on four year old strings!! (Steve Harris Signature Series Rotosound Flatwound).

I play through a SWR Working Man's 4000 head (400 watt) with a SWR 15 " Bertha cab and two 10" in a Son Of Bertha II cab.

I will get some pics this weekend.

But I must say, for bass, American made Fender all the way!!

 

My husband always says if you like the sound of a guitarist and want to play like him, get the same guitar. Sounds like you got the guitar that fits your style better, kai. I hope you enjoy it when it gets there.

 

Nice. One of my current guitars is an LP Studio (the other is a Fender Fat Strat). I love those Carvin Legacy tube amps too, they have a great sound.

 

QFT. Fenders are great for bass and guitar. There isn't anyone who had as much influence on the sound of modern music as Leo Fender. Kaikou's new guitar, as well as my upcoming new guitar (I think Fender may have actually designed that one -- he was at Music Man around the time they started selling them), are both essentially hotrodded strats. Every tube-based instrument amplifier ever made, pretty much without exception, is based on Fender's designs, though some are closer than others. Until the 1980's, Marshalls all used nearly identical circuits to Fenders (the only difference was that they changed the power-tube filament voltages and the bias circuit to accomodate the EL34 tubes that were more prevalent in England at the time, rather than the RCA 6L6GC's that Fender used). Modern Marshalls aren't exact copies, but are still heavily influenced by Fenders. My Mesa amplifier is essentially a hot-rodded Fender with a cascading-gain preamp (Mesa Engineering actually started selling mods for the Fenders available at the time). Probably 2/3rds of all tube amps in use today are Fenders, Marshalls, or Mesas. The gold-standard guitar amp for clean tones is still the mid-60's "blackface" Fender Twin Reverb (every guitarist should play one at some point).

 

In my experience, the major contributors to sustain are first and foremost the strings (old, dead strings will kill sustain faster than anything), followed by the pickups, the bridge type (vibrato bars and locknuts tend to rob a bit), the wood that the body is made of, and then the neck joint. It's simple and inexpensive to find strings that work for you and keep them fresh. Active pickups like the ones you are looking at will help a lot if you have problems (though I wouldn't think you would, Ibanez makes a high quality instrument). If you have a tube amp, some sort of boost in front of the amp's input is helpful for heavier music, anyway -- a guitar signal is weak, and it's connected directly to the control grid of the first preamp tube, so any boosting you can provide gives the preamp more to work with, and can help you tighten things up and give you greater control over your amp's sound at higher gain settings.

/I'll stop posting over and over now.

 

Awesome thread and congrats Kai!

I've been playing this since 1992:
Gibson Studio Les Paul - wine red


I've been playing through this since 1992 (A Marshall half stack would be great and is on the "someday" list)
Crate GX-1600 Amp head with celestian speakers cabient


I just got this in April:
Taylor 310ce Dreadnought Cutaway


I record onto my computer with this:
Mbox (The first one)


I just upgraded Protools to 7.3


I picked this up last Monday:
Blue Bluebird Condenser Microphone with studio cans




I've really gotten into recording music lately. I have so many things on my "dream" list that it is giving my checkbook (and my wife) fits.

My old band has been kicking around the idea of recording new material and since everyone has families now its very difficult for all of us to get together at once. So I plan on having the drummer come over and lay down drum tracks and one by one have everyone come over when they can to fill in their parts.

I'm pretty excited to get back into a group effort of writing new material. Writing by yourself tends to get boring, and you don't push yourself as hard to get things done.

 

Wow, BD. Our guitars look almost exactly the same. Mine has silver hardware though.

 

That's awesome Om! That Gibson I fell in love with the first time I picked it up and always go to it first when the songwriting mood strikes.

It has seen me through some pretty desolate times...

 

It's also great to see Dragon Wolves that carry the music torch.

I've just recently begun really "learning" the guitar again through scales, chords I haven't tried or tried together before, and improvisational jamming.


I had always considered myself a songwriter first and a guitarist second. I always needed to have a song structured and then go back and find vocal melody and harmony...now I'm beginning to change that.

It's amazing how you keep reinventing yourself through music.