Let's Make A Racket - VII

Strat and Les.

Or to folk of the non-Istvanski persuasion: the difference in sound between a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul guitar.

Please forgive me for posting a kind of filler racket today.
A little while back I spent a geological era importing eighteen CDs of my crap into iTunes, laboriously typing in all the information about each of hundreds of songs.
When I went to prepare today's post I found (after a bout of head-scratching followed by a bout of swearing, threats and imprecations toward Apple staff) that the latest update of iTunes defaults to importing m4a (Mpeg) files rather than mp3s, and inevitably IVO (the little gadget that plays the songs on my blog) only supports mp3s.
Until I can find the iTunes developer who did that and kick seven shades of crap out of them, I've had to post a fairly ordinary Chicago blues shuffle that I had on mp3 as I really can't face importing all that crap again right now.

To make matters worse, IVO is having one of its regular downtimes at the moment so if the player doesn't appear at the bottom of the post, try again later.
They seem to be out of commission ("We are sorry, but IVO for Sharing is currently unavailable") at least a couple of times a week.
Hey! IVO! Kindly form a circle around your office and spend a couple of minutes kicking one another's arses really hard. That would make your subscribers feel a little happier.
Thank you.

So anyhoo … Back to the racket.

This was from a gig I played as guest guitar player with the London-based Dave Thomas Blues Band.
Dave is a fine guitar player - if a little obsessed with Chicago - and since he guested at our Sunday Blues club one night, has regularly invited Old Dive to sit in with his band.

This was the opening number of a gig in some dingy club somewhere. The song is an old Chicago standard: Sessie Mae.
Dave is on the left channel, Dive on the right.
Dave is playing his vintage pink Fender Stratocaster …
(I'm afraid I don't have any photos so here's my own custom Strat, which you'll have to imagine in pink with a garish US flag strap and a fat gut in a tight-stretched "B.B.King's Blues Club" teeshirt behind it), through a Fender Twin Reverb amp. He does the intro and takes a little solo in the middle.

I'm playing Old Les (my soulmate for the past thirty-nine years of stage and studio work), through a ProAmps VSQ65, and I hog most of the solos.

You'll notice the Strat has a kind of thin, hollow sound, while the Les has more of a fat, brown sound.
Play only one of them and you don't notice it too much, but put 'em together and it leaps out.

The difference comes from the construction and the electronics.
The Strat has a lightweight body, usually basswood or alder, with a bolted-on maple neck which gives a sharper edge to the sound. Together with single coil pick-ups and a floating bridge this gives it the distinctive "Strat" sound.

The Les Paul has a mahogany body, capped with maple and a mahogany neck glued-in. This gives a much rounder sound, which - combined with twin-coil, "humbucking" pickups (the two coils are reversed to cancel hum picked up from stage lighting and other leaky sources) gives us the Les Paul sound.

Both amps in this case are well-used old valve jobs. Glorious, if notoriously unreliable.
Hey ho.

So … Sessie Mae.
Or not … If the player doesn't appear, try again later.
OVI is a Nokia company, so blame them.