Guitar Porn Frenzy

Hokay … Some of my more venerable Blogville neighbours can skip this post as it is primarily for Jacques-Arthur and any recent neighbours who may not have inhaled the heady, if noxious vapours from the fœtid and unsavoury depths of my archives.

It is just guitar porn and also a load of links to me actually playing guitar rather than just dicking around like in yesterday's post.
Sheesh! What a mess that was!

Katie has twisted my arm to post the other two videos I took yesterday morning so those will be coming in the next week or two.
Suffer!
They are truly awful.

Before we get on to the guitar porn, here are a few tracks where I play some much better guitar than on the video.
If anyone is fool enough to want any more, there are lots more under the "Let's Make A Racket" label, but you'll have to scroll back a few pages.

First up is "Cold. Cold Feeling".



This is one of my favourite tracks; just a simple, slow blues, played on my Strat.
Nothing fancy, just long, heartfelt notes.
For once I actually managed to leave my ego at the door for this one (I have an annoying habit of playing a hundred notes where one would do, so this track is a rarity and all the nicer for it), though before the final solo you can just hear Paul yell at me to "Give it some sex!" which was his way of telling me to turn it up and go for it.
Hey ho.

Next up is my PRS (the one in the video).



This time I'm playing it properly, waltzing through cheesy old "Parisienne Walkway", live at the Connaught, back in 2000.



Here's Old Les (see the porn shots below for which guitar is which), widdling all over "Wild About You Baby" from a rehearsal at the Ethel Rump Memorial Hall (I kid you not).

Another Old Les track; this time standing in with the Dave Thomas Band on a completely unrehearsed amble through John Martyn's lovely "Ballad of an Elder Woman".



No flash, this time; just simple hippie fingerpicking and all the better for it.

An acoustic blues now, featuring my gorgeous Martin D-18 and recorded in my home studio with Michael on slide as part of our occasional delta blues duo "The Blind Willies".



This is Blind Willie McTell's beautiful "Mama, t'Aint Long 'Fore Day."

Finally, the infamous "Too Many Monkeys In My Tree", for more information about which, see the even more infamous "ponytail, goatee and pointy sideburns" post.



This is the song that gave birth to my current on-and-off project, "The Groovy Fuckers."

There are at least thirty-five tracks (I've lost count) hidden away in the nether regions of this blog if any of you wish to delve further.

Anyhoo:
Guitar porn …

Jacques-Arthur: these are some friends of mine who I hope you'll get to meet and play with one day.

First up is my main squeeze, a Paul Reed Smith custom built for me at the factory; serial number: PRS 44115.
It took six months of trying out various Private Stock guitars they shipped over to sort out the final spec. and another six months to hand build it, but it was well worth the wait.

The body is pre-CITES Brazilian mahogany with a thick, hand-carved Michigan big-leaf maple top in vintage cherry sunburst (machine routing tends to affect the sonic qualities of the wood; hand carving with violin-makers' finger-planes is much gentler, though inevitably obscenely expensive and only available as a special order).
The neck and fingerboard are pre-CITES Brazilian rosewood (I had A-B tested a Private Stock Brazilian Rosewood neck against an Indian rosewood neck and the Brazilian was so much more responsive; I had to have it even though it added another £1,700 to the total cost (which you don't want to know).
PRS has only got 250 pre-CITES Brazilian rosewood neck blocks and this is number 67, hence the signed and numbered back-plate.

Shit, this stuff is so BORING, but I'm a guitar nerd so please forgive me.
There's even more boring tech info on it here.

And here it is laying on my bed. Guitar porn.

Here it is again, in the studio with Phil's new Pearl Reference drum kit and another old friend, my 1984 Fender Flame Élite, truly a gorgeous guitar which I mostly use for jazz. It plays so sweetly.

And here is my beloved old custom Strat, which can be heard singing on the first of the tracks above (Cold, Cold Feeling).
This is a truly awesome stage guitar and has seen extremely heavy action over the decades.

It has Fender Lace Gold pickups and a Bartolini active circuit.
The first two of those lovely vintage Telecaster knobs do their usual job of volume and tone but the third one cranks in the active circuit so I can get infinite sustain and perfectly controlled harmonic feedback.
Cheaty, but cool!
The long note at the start of the second solo in Cold, Cold Feeling is this knob turned up to about "3". It's great for songs like Boston's "More Than A Feeling", where you need to hold notes for bloody ages, or shove it up to ten if you want to seriously party!
That sucker eats valves for breakfast, though, so I use it sparingly as new sets of Boogie bottles don't come cheap.

The guitar body is refinished in Lotus Sports Cars "Opalescent Pearl" paint (it was originally white). Phil bribed security with chocolate, sneaked it into the factory one night and used around £150 worth of paint on the job (don't tell anyone).
It looks beautiful under stage lights; all the gorgeous pearl colours wash over it as it moves.
It is finished with a hand-applied cellulose lacquer; hard to get these days outside of vintage car restorers but sonically so much better than the plastic crap they put on guitars nowadays.

The neck is a deep, round-profiled flame maple and the fingerboard is pretty-pretty birds-eye maple, cut to my favourite 21" Les Paul radius rather than the usual 17" Fender radius and fitted with Gibson fat frets.
The dot markers are abalone and get smaller as they go up the neck like my Martin D18; a more elegant solution than a normal Strat.

The switch below the middle knob cuts out the active circuit when I don't need it and a pull-switch incorporated into the same knob gives a cut in tone shaped to sound like Robert Cray (that dates the guitar for you).

The trem is a Kahler Flyer. They don't make those any more, which is a damned shame. Its a "cam" style trem rather than a pivot like the Floyd-Rose, so if I break a string it stays in tune so I can finish the song. It also means double and triple stop bends don't detune the upper strings like they do on a Floyd.
Combine that with a graphite nut and Sperzel Trim-loks and I can change a string mid song while still comping with my left hand.

Here is my delicious old Martin D-18, bought from Christian Martin IV himself while he was on tour here in 1977.
I use Gordon Giltrap Hand Wound strings on this and it sounds simply beautiful.

And of course, Old Les himself, my oldest and dearest friend and companion with whom I have shared my every secret since I was a kid.

A 1969 prototype Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, built from leftover '59 and '60 parts (the neck's a deep, round fifty-nine vintage) with those sweet mini-humbuckers added.
Way too valuable to gig with any more, I spent the price of a decent new car on the PRS to replace it on stage, though I still play it all the time at home.

So there you have it.
A boring, re-hashed post of some of my guitar porn for any archive-phobics among you.

Enjoy / Suffer (delete where applicable).