OPM - Other People's Music

This weekend I had the rare opportunity to spend the entire time alone at home (except for drinks, pool, and a cool jazz quintet on Saturday night).

Without much to do, and not feeling rushed to work on the new album, I spent hours playing acoustic versions of some old favourites. I haven't had so much fun in ages, and only stopped when my voice started giving out.

As a brief sampling, the setlist included With Or Without You, Heroes, Working Class Hero, Wave Of Mutilation, Irish Heartbeat, Let Me In, and about a dozen others. All simply one acoustic guitar and one vocal.

When I was learning to play the guitar, it was a huge help to learn a multitude of covers. Since I started writing my own music in the late 90s, for the most part I stopped playing others'. I may have to change that...

Guitars – A love story

I received my first guitar for Christmas when I was 14. A low-end acoustic, it still managed to spark my interest. For my birthday 4 months later*, I was given a cheap electric model. That was enough to get me into lessons, and learning songs like The Stones’ “Miss You” and AC/DC’s “Hells Bells.”

I saved my pennies, and on Thanksgiving Monday 1991, my Dad drove me and 4 friends around Lake Ontario. The purpose: to stop at Rochester NY’s famed House Of Guitars, picking up a Fender Telecaster. This sole instrument would propel me in my goal of becoming Keith Richards.


The 1991 Fender Telecaster (with current modifications):

I bought this guitar in 1991 for $300. New models are almost twice the price.
I upgraded the pickups twice. The first was to put Heavy Metal-type pickups in, unfortunately due to my tastes of the time. A couple of years ago I replaced them with a Fender Texas Special in the bridge, and a Fender Gold Dual-Lace Sensor in the neck. I also replaced the bridge ($1 on ebay) and the tuning keys. I actually had to cut the pickguard to fit the new bridge, but didn't have a saw. If you look slightly behind the centre of the guitar, you can see the wobbly edge of the white, that I cut with A DRILL. When you don't have the right tool, use a drill. Really, only the body and neck are original. And there’s a really cool Skull pin glued into the body, which I bought at the X-Pensive Winos’ Massey Hall show in 1992.
This guitar was my primary instrument from 1991 on. I used to to smash a padlock (dent on the upper front of the body). When I played with Lovejoy in 2000, I performed with them 9 days after meeting and hearing them for the first time. I played so much learning the set, that my finger split while onstage, smearing blood all down the neck.
It has 18 years of extensive wear, eroding my favourite places on the neck. Like water running through a stream, the fretboard has slight indents where it’s most used. This subconsciously directs fingers to specific notes and patterns.

When I was 15, at the height of my Rolling Stones/ Keith Richards obsession, I saw a poster of him with a 1972 Fender Telecaster Custom. It was the most beautiful guitar I had ever seen, and I swore then that I would own one. It’s a classic model, and highly prized. Given the value and rarity, I decided that I’d accept either a 1972 model (first year produced), a 1974 model (my birth year), or a 1973 (because it’s in-between). A 1975 would be worthless to me.

In late 2008, I suddenly came into an unexpected few thousand dollars. After 19 years, I still hadn’t been able to afford my Holy Grail of Guitars. So I quickly went on Ebay and found a model better than I’d ever expected:

The 1974 Fender Telecaster Custom, with a factory-installed Bigsby tremolo system:

The Bigsby isn’t rare in and of itself. But they were usually added after the purchase. Mine has the Fender ‘F’ logo instead of the Bigsby script. Rarer. And the body wasn’t drilled through for strings, like the after-market installs were. The only part of this guitar not original is the bridge pickup, which someone replaced with a Seymour Duncan model. I plan on buying a Fender ’74 pickup, to put it back to 100%.

This guitar has been played by other people for 35 years. It is road-worn. It has a soul, a presence. The fretboard has been eroded by others’ personal tastes, routing my fingers to new and unexpected phrases. These notes and positions are NOT usually my favourites. This actually caused conflict when I first played the guitar, it felt decidedly uncomfortable. I resolved it by locking my ’91 in the closet for 6 months playing nothing but the ’74. It worked, and the 1974 Telecaster Custom is my (musical) dream-come-true.

I do love the history of my guitar – it suits me perfectly. The Ebay seller gave me the name of it’s previous owner, and I google-searched him. Here’s a pic of my instrument with it’s other lover. This pic is wonderful, and I hope to be able to live up to it’s Dead-Elvis past.

This 1974 Tele Custom had a huge impact on the production of Overture. It’s the only electric guitar on the entire album. I wanted to make the songs sound the way the guitar looks, if that makes sense to anyone else.

Hope you enjoyed this history/guitar-geek ramble.


* do the math, it’s coming up soon!

If You Love Music...

If you love music, PLEASE READ THIS LINKED ARTICLE.

One thing you might notice about my recordings: they are noticeably quieter than most 'store-bought' discs. That's on purpose. I put a lot of time into writing and recording these songs. I put a lot of effort, practice, education, and frustration into mixing and mastering these songs. I don't want to waste it by squashing my product to death.

There's an industry-wide process that squashes the life out of music, for the sake of making it louder. If you make the loud bits quieter, and the quieter bits louder (also known as compression), this lessens the dynamic range of the track. With less dynamic range, you can then boost the volume so that the quiet parts are loud, and the loud parts are LOUD! The louder the song is, the more noticeable it will be, the more likely it will be to make money.

This has been going on for over a decade, progressing more and more until reaching a point last year where (rumour says) Metallica's mastering engineer requested to be omitted from the credits. He was so ashamed of what he had been forced to do by the labels. The album was all over the news as fans returned discs either thinking they were defective, or out of disappointment from the quality of the product.

Unfortunately this overcompressing, "Brick Wall" mastering ruins the sound. What it doesn't tell you (and even this article doesn't address this) is that it also causes ear fatigue, increased migraines and headaches, and eventually hearing-loss.

Enjoy whatever you want to listen to, but please - protect your ears and give the musicians some respect. It's probably too late to get back to where the quality was in the Nineties, but hopefully it won't get much worse...

For more information, google "Loudness War" and see what comes up.