Re: Your Grains

I've put together a new song: this one is a simple parody of Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains." This was a "one-afternoon wonder" since I wanted to finish the song in one afternoon while my wife and kids were out of the house. So: not a lot of retakes; get one that sounds reasonably good, even if it has a few little glitches, and move on, no second-guessing.

Currently it is only on YouTube. When I get a chance I will put it up on Bandcamp as well, possibly after re-recording some parts. It's a very silly little parody and a little sloppy, but overall I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. It is encouraging to realize that this is evidence that I'm getting gradually better at this sort of thing!

I'm mentioning it here because it features some interesting guitars. The main "jazzy" accompaniment part is a Peavey Firenza, a version equipped with P-90 pickups, and set up with 11s.

These guitars don't have fancy flame maple tops, but they sound great, aren't too heavy, the necks are really nicely playable, they are built like tanks -- and, most importantly, you can sometimes find them used for bargain prices. Most of my guitars like the Squier Super-Sonics work best with 10s, but this one seems to work best with 11s. Also, if you practice on 11s and get used to them, when you go back to playing a guitar with 10s, it will feel effortless.

For the solo, I'm playing the black Squier Venus. I've written about these guitars before. I think I recorded that solo line with the very bright-sounding bridge humbucker. It's going into some kind of Auto-Wah Logic guitar rig. The tone reminds me a little bit of Jerry Garcia's live sound with the Grateful Dead, circa a couple of concerts I saw around 1990.

Both of these guitars were recorded going directly into the Edirol FA-66, which is an inexpensive FireWire interface that I got used on, you guessed it, eBay. They go for a pretty low price used. The plan had been to use it for live streaming. My expectations for the preamp quality weren't very high, but it actually sounds pretty good, even recording vocals, and I've been using it both for singing and spoken voice. It isn't perfect: it's hard to set levels on knobs that aren't calibrated to anything; the phono plug inputs clip really easily; sometimes when it has sat for a while the audio stream is garbled, and I have to mess with the sample rate to get it to work right again. But in general, it works pretty flawlessly, and I think this would make anyone a fine starter audio interface for a basic home studio.

I bought the Edirol box intending to make it part of a more portable rig, and it is velcroed down next to a Mac Mini on a shelf in a 6U rack case.

It's very awkward to get cables in and out; I have to use a flashlight. It really could use a patch bay. And it is currently on the floor, which is murder on my spine. But this rack setup has one other great advantage for recording vocals, and that is that the Mac Mini is extremely quiet. I don't feel the need to ever run my vocal tracks through Izotope RX to take out background fan noise.

I'm just guessing here, since I haven't used one, but I suspect that it probably even sounds, quality-wise, somewhere in the ballpark as the Digi002 rig that Jonathan Coulton uses. That setup has been good enough for him to record some amazing tracks. He does work extensively with an outboard channel strip, the dbx 376, and his Pod Pro and Behringer rack unit for guitar and bass. I've considered more outboard hardware, especially an outboard channel strip for vocals, but I'm not so big on the idea of rack hardware for guitar tracking. I don't think I'd ever be willing to give up Logic's amazing range of tools for guitar and bass for the simplicity of outboard hardware. I especially like the ability to change the effects setting after recording the track (the channel strip settings are not "printed" on the track, which is recorded on the hard drive entirely dry). I did put some money into the Radial JDV, but that is by way of trying to get cleaner and clearer pictures of the original instrument than the Hi-Z setting on either of these boxes can give me alone, not to color the sound.

In fact, the Edirol box sounds good enough that it is making me wonder whether I should just sell off the Apogee Ensemble and just work only with the Edirol box. But it does seem to be a help to have a second, more powerful rig for mixing and editing, especially when I want to do something CPU-intensive like noise reduction or bouncing tracks, and the Mac Mini just can't compete with the Mac Pro with 8 cores and several extra built-in hard drives.

Finally, there is a third guitar part: I recorded a bass line using my Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless.

This bass is fun to play but it is a little problematic. I have some difficulty getting good tone out of it when I record it. It is driving my Radial JDV direct box, and from there running into the Ensemble. I was getting hardly any signal out of it, for some reason, despite trying the special impedance setting for piezo pickups. I had to add a lot of digital gain even after considerable gain on the Ensemble's input, and it came out sounding strange. Is the battery dead? It shouldn't be; I changed it only a few months ago -- to a Lithium 9-volt -- it should only be "on" when plugged in, and I rarely use it.

Add to this the fact that you can't get strings that fit the bridge properly and this is another gear I'm thinking of getting rid of. It looks damned cool but as far as being able to drop a track effortlessly into a mix, it is a far cry from the XP bass or XQ basses, even the Nashville one that my son plays. (With those basses I have the opposite problem -- they put out a lot of voltage!) But neither of those are fretless. If I had the money available I'd try to find a 5-string Pedulla fretless. I watch them go by on eBay, and they are gorgeous, but quite expensive. I'd also consider a Godin.

There's another piece of new gear; I tracked this song with a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-M50 headphones that I picked up on the Labor Day sale at Guitar Center, along with the aforementioned Reflexion filter. These are great headphones, and work better for tracking than the Sony MDR-V700 or Pioneer HDJ-1000 cans I've been using -- more natural-sounding bass, and better isolation. Again, recommended. In retrospect I should have spent the money on these earlier. I still do prefer the DJ headphones for general music listening, especially if I'm listening to the built-in amp on my laptop, where the EQ can use a little emphasis, and actual DJing.

If it isn't obvious yet, we've moved, and into a house that provides us with much more space than our cramped apartment in Ann Arbor. I have a separate studio room now, as well as an office. However, there are lots of logistical challenges left. The rooms don't have any acoustic treatment yet, and they are all wood.

I added a Reflexion filter to my mic for recording vocals, and that helps some:

The Reflexion is basically a curved wall of audio-absorbing material behind your mic. It comes with a very elaborate rig of clamps and blocks to secure it to a microphone stand along with a mic. It's quite fiddly and takes forever to set up, and it's kind of cantilevered, with a center of gravity that's hard to center on your mic stand -- that's why it is clamped to the extension arm and not the stand itself. And although I have a pretty heavy-duty tripod stand (and I wouldn't recommend trying to set it up on one of those round-based mic stands), and it probably won't come crashing down, doing some major damage on the way, I keep having the feeling that it might. I think a separate, purpose-designed tripod-style mic stand for it would have been a better idea. Also, as it is, I don't have any place left to clamp my pop filter, so that's on yet another mic stand in front. And if I want to read a lyric sheet or a story or something with the whole rig in place, that's a little problematic. So, my feelings on this thing are a little mixed. It does definitely dry up my vocals, though, and that's a big help.

And finally, I have no furniture to speak of in here yet, besides a couple of garage-sale chairs. The general plan had been to have desks custom-built by one of two carpenter friends of the family, but various moving-related projects, like replacing the damaged flooring in the family room, went so far over budget that there isn't really any extra money available for that in the short term. So, for now, the gear is set up kind of unceremoniously on the floor. I'll probably be cobbling something together out of sawhorses and scrap wood but the odd shape of these attic spaces really needs something custom, and I'm not a carpenter. Right now everything is awkwardly placed and very hard on my spine and hips to work with. In related news: I am getting old. But I'm trying not to let that serve as an excuse not to keep playing and recording.

So what's the future of the Potts House studio? Well, after I get myself set up with something resembling desks where I can actually sit to work, and get the gear off the floor, I want to address the acoustics of the room. I don't really want to go whole hog here, but a few panels on the walls, and maybe a few diffusers on the curved ceiling, would probably give me noticeable improvement.

As far as gear, there isn't that much I'm still burning for. I'd like to consider an outboard mic preamp, like a Grace Design unit. I could use that with either audio interface. I've got my eye on USA-made Ovation mandolins. I want to have some of my guitars fixed up and fine-tune the collection, getting rid of some and adding some. I haven't quite figured out the best way to do that yet. I'm always interested in trying out some different microphones, although for now I think I'm interested in sticking with relatively cheap Oktava models, particularly if I can get them modded. I'm contemplating putting a little more effort into a decent pedalboard and PA for live playing.

Does anyone know any carpenters in the mid-Michigan area who would be willing to trade their labor for a guitar or two?

The Herd Mentality, Part 1: the First Dozen

So, I have quite a few guitars now. Most of them have come from eBay, and most of them were bargains. I have a little problem, though; I can't actually tell you exactly how many I have, because I don't know. It's time to take inventory. Here are the first dozen.

I don't have enough space to keep them all at home, so at any given time, a rotating selection of instruments is in a climate-controlled storage unit. I try to keep them all in hard cases wherever possible, which protects them from getting knocked around, but also helps protect them from sudden humidity or temperature shifts. That's the theory, anyway. The guitars in storage look like this:


I recently pulled them out to check on them, photograph them for insurance purposes, and record the serial numbers. Here are the cases lined up:


That's a dozen, plus a couple of gig bags that I wanted to save. Here's a roll call:

1. Squier Super-Sonic, silver sparkle. I actually have three Super-Sonics; this one is A016447. Two of the Super-Sonics, were featured in Guitar Pron 5. This one is in excellent condition with no issues, as is the blue one; the other silver ones has some electronics issues and currently has its guts hanging out waiting for me to finish fixing it.

2. Squier Venus, black. Set up with 10s. Featured in Guitar Pron 10. No issues; this guitar is in excellent shape. It is one of the best-sounding guitars in my collection, especially with the single-coil pickup.

3. Squier Venus, sunburst. Set up with 10s. This one has some minor electronics issues and is waiting to go up to Elderly. I need to take some outdoor photos of both the Venus guitars; they just don't photograph well with a flash.

4. Godin LG. Featured in Guitar Pron 9. I have a new bridge for this guitar, to replace the chewed-up bridge height screw. I think I can do that repair by myself without any trouble; I just haven't gotten to it yet. (Are you sensing a recurring theme here?)

5. Peavey Firenza, USA model, with two P-90 pickups. Set up with 11s. This is an amazing guitar. It's built like a tank, and the pickups sound absolutely fantastic. I'd put it up against any Gibson with P-90s. I'll have to do a write-up about it, and record it. I'm keeping an eye out for another one of these, preferably a minty tobacco sunburst model. This one needs some minor fret work; it's been played heavily, but has no serious damage at all. It's a gorgeous guitar, although this photo doesn't really do it justice:


6. Peavey Limited HB, natural flame maple top. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 6. It is probably the prettiest instrument I've got, and it sounds great too.

7. Peavey T-60, natural ash body with rosewood neck. This one is a somewhat battered player, but it is an earlier T-60, built incredibly well, and has been beautifully maintained, and sounds and feels great. In fact, the action and "play feel" is the best of any guitar in my collection, with the possible exception of the Parker Fly. With scratches and buckle rash, though, it isn't all that photogenic. Here is a shot:


It needs a new output jack. It's one of the long through-the-body types, and the wiring on these is elaborate and delicate, so it is going up to Elderly.

8. Peavey T-60, natural ash body, maple neck. This is the most common kind of T-60. This one is in pretty good condition, but I'm just not a big fan of the maple-necked T-60s. They don't feel quite as nice to me as the models with the rosewood fretboards. I'd consider selling this one (via eBay) at some point. The glue holding the interior velvet-colored panels in the case has deteriorated and so it needs some kind of restoration work on the case. I might try to hot-glue it. I still watch T-60s go by, but I'm also keeping an eye out for just the right T-15, or T-27, or even a T-40 bass.

9. Squier Jagmaster. I have a love-hate relationship with this guitar. It has a neck pocket issue; the fit and finish just isn't quite up to the standards of the other members of the Vista series. Some of the Jagmasters have the truss rod adjustment at the headstock, like the Super-Sonics, but this one has one of those traditional Fender necks where you must partially remove the neck to get to the truss rod. I really don't like that. When I removed the neck, a big chunk of finish alongside the neck pocket came with it. It's also got an overly heavy body. However, it sounds really good, and I love short-scale instruments. Like I said, a love-hate relationship. I'm keeping my eyes out for another one, with the truss rod adjustment at the headstock. I've seen several go by on eBay, but they are either very damaged, have been heavily modified, or are priced far too high for me.


10. Godin Freeway 4-string bass. I'll have to write this one up too; they are real bargains. It would be a great first bass for a student. This one is set up with flat-wound strings and has a very nice mellow tone.


11. Peavey Limited ST, tiger's eye flame. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 1.

12. Peavey T-60, Iced Tea Burst. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 4.

That's it for now. More later!

Squier Venus Single Coil Demo

Here are a couple of recordings I made using the the black Squier Venus. If this experiment works you'll be able to hear what I consider so appealing about the tone of these guitars and why I just picked up two of them.

I ran the Venus running directly into my Peavey Mini Colossal 5-watt tube amp, with the power soak (output volume) turned all the way down so it doesn't drive the speaker at all (it's late, after all). I'm feeding my Apogee Ensemble with the XLR recording output of the Mini Colossal. It's going into Logic 9, into a virtual channel strip with a noise gate (the single coil pickup needs it), a pedalboard containing a compressor and chorus set relatively low, and then through a channel EQ and channel compressor. The whole track is then run through Ozone 4 using a 3-band tube saturation mastering preset, which isn't really doing that much except applying the multi-band compressor with the overall gain rolled down a bit.

The first tune I'm playing is Jonathan Coulton's "Chiron Beta Prime." I dig how this guitar's single coil pickup puts out quite a bit of throaty bass and mids. The volume control is rolled down to about five, and the three-way switch is set on the single coil neck pickup only. Your taste may vary, but I like the slightly laid-back tube crunch together with the chorus. I'm doing some palm muting and there are a lot of seventh chords that would sound very dissonant if the tube distortion was cranked up to heavy metal levels, but as it is they seem (to me) to just give a spray of harmonics that are bright but not shrill. But then, I'm probably going deaf, so your mileage may differ.


Just to do a little comparison and contrast, I also recorded "The Future Soon" using pretty-much identical settings but with the pickup selector switched over to the humbucker. I brought the guitar's volume knob down just a little bit more to keep the volumes at least approximately comparable. Note that the Venus has no tone control. The humbucker is loud and jangly. I prefer the sound of the single coil when recording a lightly distorted guitar part like this, but I think both of them actually sound pretty good. The humbucker is probably better suited to either a clean tone with EQ rolling off the highs, or heavier distortion to smooth it out a bit. Clearly more experimentation is needed!

If anyone cares, I played both using a Herco Flex 50 pick, which gives quite a bit of "snap."

Recent Developments in Guitar Technology

In a discussion about innovation in operating systems, someone on Reddit wrote "look at the electric guitar, that hasn't changed much in fifty years and you don't see people complaining."

Which got me thinking. And blathering. Appended is a somewhat rambling discourse arguing that yes, in fact, electric guitars and their related gear has changed considerably in the last fifty years. My apologies for the lack of editing; I was mostly just getting a string of ideas down.

You are correct that the biggest-name manufacturers seem mostly to be looking backwards: all the vintage reissues, replicas, etc., and even the models where they take a perfectly good guitar and destroy it to make it look like it's been played hard for 50 years. Because there seems to be the most money to be made in feeding nostalgia back to aging guitarists.

But this isn't the whole picture -- there have been some very significant developments. The Parker Fly alone has a pretty radical tremolo redesign, and that carbon fiber and fiberglass make it incredibly light (resonant, and easy on the back). That line alone has a lot of patents.

There's the Adamas graphite-top acoustic, much better protected against humidity and temperature changes than the traditional spruce top. And the Rainsong and similar models that are nearly indestructible compared to traditional acoustics that can crack just sitting in the case, because they get too dry during the winter.

Electric-acoustic pickup designs are vastly improved, to the point where I can record my Ovation without using a mic and have it sound very much like recording it with a good mic. (In fact, I recently tried this, using an Apogee Ensemble direct input compared to a Rode NT-5, and they are fairly hard to distinguish).

There's the guitar synth, the Roland VG-88, the 13-pin output becoming a semi-standard. Fender has a guitar with a built-in guitar synth.

Truss rods are becoming more usable because companies have decided that you shouldn't actually have to take the neck off to adjust the relief. There's the Peavey micro-tilt adjustment, which has made it into other brands; I think you can do the micro-tilt adjustment on some Fenders and G&L instruments now. It really helps tweak the setup.

Pickup designs are proliferating, from the G&L single coils and the somewhat oddball Alumitone pickups. Shielding and noise rejection are much improved. Bridges and nut materials are much improved.

There's the Peterson virtual strobe tuner line, with such improved accuracy that I can use it for setting intonation, something very hard to do with an ordinary tuner. I have one of these that I got used on eBay, and it has made it possible for me to set up my own guitars better than ever before. They play far more in tune.

There's the Buzz Feiten tuning system, which is proprietary and only included on particular models, but it is a huge unsung advancement in making a guitar actually play in tune in more than one key and in more than one part of the neck. And there are related products and parts and technologies.

There's the piezo bridge on electrics, now common. There are now nylon-string semi-solid-body piezo electrics that sound very cool. Godin is making an 11-string oud-tuned electric nylon "Glissentar" for Turkish oud players. That's crazy cool.

There's the whole Variax thing, where one guitar can play like a simulation of a dozen varieties, perhaps not perfectly but enough to inspire considerable creativity, and limited more by your tastes than by the technology.

There's the Chapman Stick, and a whole lot of knockoffs, with tapping and crossed-hands technique and alternate tunings. I don't own one currently but I used to, and I love to play them; they are incredibly challenging and give you a whole new palette of sounds.

There's amp modeling, whereby I can buy a cheap Roland amp that sounds really amazingly like a wide variety of tube amps (basically, solid-state amps in general sound much better than they did when I was a kid). And tube amps sound better too -- I have a 5-watt Peavey Mini Colossal tube amp that is small and reliable and sounds fantastic. It's the first tube amp I've owned despite having played guitar for 25 years.

There's the Gibson robot guitar (which I actually think is pretty dumb, but I'm sure they will sell quite a few of them).

There's even a Moog guitar.

There's a new line of decent-sounding Steinberger guitars and basses including a headless/fretless bass with an ebony bridge, carbon fiber reinforcement in the neck, and piezo pickups that sounds remarkably like an acoustic upright bass. The original Steinberger basses are now highly collectible. The new ones are so strong you can lay one between two chairs and jump on it and it won't even go out of tune. (There's a YouTube video showing this, although I'm not gonna try it on my own instrument, thanks).

There are locking tuners. There are self-locking tuners. There are self-locking tuners that cut off the excess string for you. Yes, even such a basic thing as tuning knobs have vastly improved. It's easy to forget until you go back and actually play a real vintage guitar. You can get locking tuners that are replicas of vintage tuners, to combine the old look and the new tech.

The whole CNC machining thing has existed only since the late 1970s. On the downside, it has made floods of cheap knock-offs available, but on the upside, the basic shaping is heavily automated, which makes even high-end guitars less labor-intensive; it lets the luthier put his or her energy into the finishing touches and final set-up.

Strings are better -- of better quality metals, more uniform and consistent, with coatings, more resistant to breakage. Most of the touted advances are pure marketing drivel (do I really want my strings to be cryogenically treated?) but there is no denying that electric strings with improved windings and ends break less often, and acoustic strings with the various coatings, shipped in nonreactive airtight packaging, stay less oxidized and sound brighter longer. Bass strings come in a huge variety of types now including tape-wound (easy on the fingers), half-ground, flat-wound...

Fretting materials are better. My Parker Fly and Jag-Stang with a replacement neck have stainless-steel frets. There are more varieties in fret shape and design. There's the Plek machine that can do incredibly accurate fretboard leveling, allowing lower action.

There is an absolutely bewildering variety of specially-designed tools available for luthiers. If you get the Stewart-MacDonald or "Stewmac" catalog, you know what I mean. You can even buy them as a home luthier without a true workshop and benefit from some of these great and time-saving tools.

So, actually, I think there have been significant improvements. They are just not radical and revolutionary, more stepwise. And there will always be traditionalists who want their fragile, heavy Les Pauls and Marshall stacks. But if you put did a direct comparison of, say, a vintage Les Paul and Marshall with, say, a Parker Fly Adrian Belew signature model with a rack of synth and modeling gear, you'd see that, yep, things have changed!

Skullcrusher Mountain Nylon Guitars

I recorded 3 parts using my Godin nylon-string electric guitar (with piezo pickups) and mixed and edited them to get this track, which is part of a forthcoming cover of Skullcrusher Mountain. The lines were recorded directly into Logic using my Apogee Ensemble and then run through "virtual" EQ, compressor, and reverb.

MP3 File

Again, not a final complete song, but of possible interest to guitar geeks. I'm quite happy with the way it came out, minor timing flaws and slightly raspy fret noise and occasional buzzing string included.

Stratocaster, Telecaster, Rickenbacker, Ooh Shiny!

That's about what happened when I was browsing guitars on eBay. I'm now the proud owner of this super-cool Japanese-made Squier Super-Sonic. Ooh, ahh! It arrived in fabulous condition for a ten-year-old guitar, and is flashy yet relatively traditional and retro-looking at the same time. And best of all, these things aren't terribly expensive. People keep claim they will become "vintage" but they are still tremendous deals for someone who wants one to actually play, not stick in a climate-controlled storage facility for twenty years.

For a few years a decade ago the Vista series short-scale guitars were pretty much the best short-scale guitars you could buy. They are certainly superior in quality to the Jag-Stang which was rushed into production and has numerous issues, and generally better than most of the other Squier models, and perhaps some of the Fender models from that time period too!

There are four models of guitar and one bass. The guitars are the Super-Sonic, the Jagmaster, the Venus, and the Venus XII. The Jagmaster and the Super-Sonic are quite similar; I will talk more about these guitars in future posts.

The Cavalcade of Guitars, Part 1

I've acquired quite a few guitars lately, and gotten rid of a few as well. Here's an update that isn't really up-to-date, since I started writing it several months ago.

My Peavey Limited's frets are now in gorgeous, like-new condition, thanks to the expert luthiers at Elderly Instruments in Lansing. It's a player's guitar, not (yet) considered vintage or rare or terribly valuable, but I love playing it.

I sold the black/orange sunburst finish Epiphone Les Paul Special II that I was using as my "I don't care if the babies get their hands on it" guitar in the living room. I really like the handsome design, but those instruments are made in Indonesia out of plywood and cheap parts and will just never sound and feel very good. I could have put some money into getting the frets leveled, but the neck just wouldn't get into proper alignment. I wouldn't even particularly recommend one to a beginner student on a budget, since a student could find something far better used, for just a bit more money. Someday maybe I'll find a Gibson Les Paul Special that I like, although I have a whole separate set of gripes about heavy, fragile Gibson designs.

I traded in my old Ovation Ultra acoustic for a newer used Ovation Elite with purple flame graphics. Well, it wasn't exactly a trade in, but I got a little back out of the old one. The flame graphics were not my first choice, but there are certain compensations -- it has an ebony fingerboard and bridge, and a fantastic matte finish maple neck with a very nice soft "V" profile. It has an interesting bridge modification: the bass strings are slightly higher, which means that the overall action can be lower while preventing buzz on the wound strings. This feels slightly odd at first but sounds great. The acoustic (unplugged) tone is altogether better than my old Ovation, and indeed better than any of the dozen Ovations I tried out with the exception of a couple of high-end graphite-top Adamas models. Some day I'd like to own an Adamas, and perhaps a Martin too, but not today.

There's a slight issue with getting the battery compartment open; it's difficult; in the store, it was jammed completely, and I had to get one of the Elderly repair techs to help me with it. But on the up side, apparently one rarely needs to change the batteries in these things. (But when one does, one wants to do it in a hurry).

The only other thing I'd really consider changing are the tuners, since the ones on the instrument are OK but don't feel quite as good as the Schaller tuners on my old Ovation. I think I could drop new black Schaller tuners right into the existing holes in the headstock for an inexpensive upgrade that wouldn't negatively affect the resale value. But I'll probably just leave them alone for now, since the existing ones are not terrible. And the top makes it a conversation piece -- you might call it cool or you might call it hideous, but at least it is a conversation starter!

I also purchased a Music Man 4-string fretted ash and maple bass. It was a wholly excellent instrument, and I got it for a pretty good price. But after finding a lightly used Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless bass for sale at Elderly, I decided that I just am not that interested in playing a traditional bass at the moment, especially one I purchased new, so I returned it.

The Gibson Steinberger instruments have a poor reputation in comparison to the originals, but I think this reputation is only partially justified. The "Spirit by Steinberger" line doesn't have much to offer in the way of design, but the bass is a member of the newer Synapse family, and it really is an intriguing package, with a fully "designed" feel and tone that tells me Ned Steinberger was heavily involved in the instrument's development. Some of the details, though, just aren't as clean and polished as I'd like. With the piezo pickup engaged, it sounds remarkably like an acoustic upright bass. It's definitely the thing for someone like me interested in some more unusual sounds.

Besides, having actually played a few original Steinbergers recently, I can say that although I like them quite a bit, when I find one that I can afford, it is in poor condition. And when I find one that is in good condition, I can't afford it. By "poor condition" I don't just mean that there are some scratches or dings, I mean there are serious playability issues that affect the sound.

Original Steinbergers are considered "vintage" and I have made a semi-solemn vow that I will never pay the "vintage" instrument appreciation tax. I guess it stems from my basic disagreement with the "law" of supply and demand that says that if something is in demand, a seller can and should price it almost entirely out of the market, keeping it on a high shelf or in a locked case until that one even greedier buyer comes along, believing that he or she can make even more money off the future appreciation of the instrument, sell it to that buyer for as big a profit as possible. It has never seemed appropriate to enshrine greed as some kind of fundamental economic principle, any more than it seems appropriate to consider all the human factors and environmental factors that go into manufacturing and selling a product as "externalities." But I guess I'm some kind of tree-hugger and I'd probably do really badly if I tried to run a guitar store.

Besides, I don't believe most instruments really "appreciate" in value in any meaningful sense. While a chunk of wood will get drier and develop more tonal character over time, just about everything else on the guitar will deteriorate and need restoration. Some aspects of guitar-building were done better in the old days -- the "fit and finish" on the neck of my 1972 Fender Competition Mustang was amazing -- and some weren't -- the bridge and pickups were never really very good, and most vintage wiring and shielding is actually worse than its modern equivalents. It's heartbreaking to see the way so many older instruments warp and become unplayable even without severe mistreatment. And original Steinberger parts are becoming scarce, and they are harder and more expensive to repair than wood.

I played several original Steinbergers at Ed Roman's guitar shop in Las Vegas, and I was somewhat disgusted that he had priced these instruments at four or five thousand dollars, but had not even bothered to have his shop clean them up. It set off my alarm bells to hear a store salesperson explaining that if I bought it, then they would fix the broken switches, crackling pots, wiring problems, etc. That didn't really help convince me to shell out the money. What is the motivation for the shop to get it cleaned up after I've swiped my credit card?

Not to mention that Steinberger never released a fretless bass.

But buying a Synapse meant compromising another one of my semi-solemn vows, to only buy American-made instruments. The "Made in USA" labeling is conspicuously absent from the Synapse line. But I like it anyway.

I also picked up a Parker Fly Classic -- a used one in excellent shape. I've wanted for at least ten or fifteen years to have a Parker Fly. There is only one minor issue with this instrument: the battery compartment door latch is cracked, and should be replaced. What is it with battery compartiments? But these things are amazing.

I'm also fixing up the old Jag-Stang. It now has a new Warmoth neck with stainless-steel frets. I've put a new pickguard on it. The fit of the neck in the neck pocket is not quite as precise as I'd like. The next time I go up to Lansing, I'm going to take it with me and ask them to mount the locking tuners (so I don't screw it up) and see if they can turn it into a playable instrument again.

Finally, a Godin nylon-string solid-body, with piezo pickups and 13-pin synth out. The triggering with my guitar synth is fantastic!