Guitar Pron 4: Peavey T-60 Sunburst

I have several T-60s. This is the one that is in the finest condition. The exact date of manufacture is difficult to ascertain, but it may be from 1981. Whatever the exact date, this instrument is almost 30 years old, and when I received it I was very impressed that the eBay seller had not been exaggerating when he called it a "closet classic" and claimed it had scarcely been played.

The Peavey T-60 was an attempt to capture some of the best design elements of the Stratocaster and the Les Paul and blend them together, along with a few special touches dreamed up by Chip Todd and Hartley Peavey. The weight is in between the two, and it has a flatter, more comfortable body like a Gibson SG. The price was considerably lower as well.

Take a look at the superb solid steel bridge with string-through design. Those saddles give you an enormous amount of leeway in adjusting intonation, and the bridge feels totally bomb-proof.

The T-60 has a 3-way pickup selector, a pickup switch (which, of course, only changes the sound when both pickups are active), and separate volume and tone controls for each humbucker. The tone controls have an unusual feature -- when you bring them all the way up, they disable the humbucking wiring and the pickups get brighter (and slightly noisier), acting as single coils. This gives you an even wider range of tones. The T-60 can do a very good impression of a classic strat, and the neck pickup with the tone control rolled down gives a nice jazz tone. I've got mine set up with 10s, but you could use 11s or perhaps even 12s with no trouble, especially if you down-tune.


I don't generally like the "classic" sunburst finishes very much, but this one is a very restrained burst that is almost an iced tea color, and less reddish or orangish than many burst guitars. I'd call it "iced tea burst" instead of tobacco sunburst. In any case, it's a gorgeous spray job, and the finish over top of the dye is in fantastic condition.

The body wood of this guitar is Ash -- not the light swamp ash tonewood a lot of recent instruments are built from, but a dense and heavy northern ash with a lovely grain.




The neck is maple -- a very nice, fast neck, with wide jumbo "schoolbus" profile frets with almost no fret wear. It even has a little flame of its own that you can see in the picture. You might notice that the neck is glued together from two pieces. That's how they installed the truss rods. The T-60 had some (for the time) amazing advances in guitar manufacturing, including CNC machining of the bodies. Necks were carved with a machine originally designed to carve gunstocks.

The nut is aluminum, and perfectly cut. This one has a rosewood fretboard. Having played a T-60 with a plain maple neck -- literally, with frets driven directly into the wood with no separate fingerboard unlike some maple necks -- I believe the less common T-60s built with the rosewood freboard give the neck additional tuning stability. My maple-necked T-60 with the always feels to me like the neck is slightly too flimsy, and when you apply any pressure at all to it while playing you can hear the pitch shift. But perhaps they aren't all like that; mine may just need some work. The rosewood also seems to darken the tone up a bit, which is a matter of taste and the style of music you like to play.

The inlays are not very attractive on this instrument (they are "mother of toilet seat"), but you can't have everything. Another one of my T-60s has real mother-of-pearl on a rosewood fingerboard, and while much more battered, the inlays are prettier.


The tuners are among the finest I've used on any guitar -- very tight and stable. I left this guitar in a climate-controlled storage unit for six months, and when I pulled it out to play, it was still in almost perfect tune. The only instrument I've got that has even more tuning stability is my Parker Fly, and that guitar's neck isn't just wood, but has a shell of fiberglass and other exotic reinforcing materials.


I really like the Peavey Limiteds, and some of the other Peavey designs, but for sheer quality of craftsmanship, playability, and durability, the T-60s are tanks. I like to say that T-60s are the guitars that, quite literally, could smash the competition.

While a bit heavy by modern standards -- back in the day players equated weight with tone and sustain -- these instruments still sound great and and very well-suited for blues, classic rock tones, or country. They won't give you that overloaded DiMarzio metal tone with octaves of squealing harmonics, and of course they are hardtails so if you love to dive-bomb, you'll be out of luck. But they are still very versatile, and it would take a lot to pry this instrument out of my hands!


If you'd like to find one of your own, start looking now. Peavey made a lot of them, and there are quite a few on eBay every week. But collectors are starting to realize just how nice these instruments really are, so prices are going up, especially for the instruments in the nicer finishes (including the somewhat rare white) and those built with rosewood fingerboards.

Guitar Pron 3: Steinberger XQ-4 Bass (v2)

Today's instrument is a Steinberger bass.


This is not an earlier Steinberger with a Newburgh-manufactured neck; it is a more modern instrument, probably built only a few years ago, while Gibson was marketing Steinbergers via the "Music Yo" web site.

It is a pretty good-sounding instrument, but it is not quite up to the standards of the older Steinberger instruments.

Or, to put it a little bit more cynically, since Ned Steinberger no longer has veto power over which instruments get his name stamped on them, Gibson can ship any kind of crap and try to capitalize on the reputation that Steinberger instruments once enjoyed, due to the incredible amount of hand work and attention to detail that went into their construction.


The neck was made by Moses Graphite. It has a matte finish and seems to be graphite (yes, you could write with it). The older Steinberger necks were molded out of fiberglass resin with various formulations of carbon fiber and what-not, and had a shiny finish.

Note that the Newburgh instruments were stamped "N," and the Tennessee instruments were marked "TN." Until recently, that is, when Gibson started re-using "N." This confused me; based on my research online, I thought I was buying an instrument with a Newburgh-made neck.

And, of course, that confusion is exactly the point. Gibson should be ashamed.

The headless bass is for those poor bassists who were circumcised. Unlike the older Seinberger necks, this one has an adjustable truss rod. This model requires strings with double ball ends.


With EMG pickups, two 9-volt batteries, and HAZ Labs active EQ circuitry, It is a very nice-sounding instrument. The tone settings are very usable and musical. However, I am not all that impressed with the construction of the neck. If you look closely, you can see that some of the slots to hold the fret tangs are cut crooked. This means that a small number of the frets above the 12th are audibly out of tune; in other words, I can get the intonation pretty well perfect everywhere, with my Peterson virtual strobe tuner, except for those frets. That's a pretty glaring quality control gaffe. If I had bought it new at full price and it showed up like this, I would have returned it.

Come to think of it, I have a lot of respect for Moses Graphite (I've been very impressed by the Chapman Stick bodies they manufactured for Stick Enterprises). And I doubt they did the fret work.

This particular incarnation of the Steinberger bridge design uses (I think) steel string saddles on height-adjustable aluminum blocks, which ride on two diagonally-mounted set screws, and are not actually attached to the bridge. If you remove the strings and loosen one set screw, you can remove all the blocks to adjust them. They are wobbly, though, balanced on their diagonally-mounted screws, and don't really stand up on their own.

I found this to be an irritating and fiddly arrangement because tuning to intonate the strings causes the blocks to move, and only the string pressure keeps them in place during this process. When you get them where you want them, push them into as square and upright a position as you can, hold them that way, and tighten the set screw, and it clamps all the blocks together. But since you've just positioned all the blocks so that they aren't aligned with each other, that seems a little precarious, like trying to pick up a horizontal row of cubes that aren't quite lined up with each other by squeezing the ones on the end.

Unfortunately I think this fiddly bridge design is Ned's, not Gibson's, although I don't know all the incarnations of the Steinberger bridge in detail. In other words, I'm not sure the older instruments are any easier to work with. And they all tend to have the well-known problem with the tuner jaws. There's an eBay seller that will sell you stainless steel replacement jaws, but they seem awfully expensive at $35 per string.

This instrument also has a zero fret -- which can help with intonation -- although since the strings rest right on the zero fret, bending and tuning them seem to be leading to a zero fret that is quickly developing notches, while the rest of the frets are still in good shape.


With the very light neck and the tuners at the bridge, the instrument is very well-balanced. The basswood body is also very light for a bass body, and the curved body carve makes it very comfortable to play for extended periods of time. Although from what I hear, the bodies are made overseas. And there were some paint flaws that indicate, again, that Gibson's quality control is just not quite what one would expect from an instrument bearing the Steinberger name.

Given these issues, I can't whole-heartedly recommend this instrument, unless you can get it for a really good price. It remains unclear how long I'll keep it. I'm keeping an eye out for an older Steinberger, if I can find one at a price I can stomach. And I'm very hesitant to try one of the newer ZT-3 guitars, or a Synapse Trans-scale guitar.

I have another Steinberger bass -- a fretless "Synapse" model -- which I will show you in a future entry. It is a very different, and quite decent, instrument, but has some of the same attention-to-detail issues that make it frustrating attempting to deal with the "modern" Steinbergers.

Update

I have another instrument now, which is one of the "version 1" Q basses. This gives me an interesting opportunity to directly compare and contrast the two instruments. The quick summary is that my son now has custody of this instrument and I'm playing the older one. Here is the full article. According to Steinberger World (an unofficial fan site with a lot of information on the older instruments), this bass is a "version 2" member of the Q series -- one of the later ones, from the Music Yo (around 2003-2007) years, around 2003-2007. There also exist "version 2" instruments made after Gibson purchased Steinberger, maybe between 1995 and 1998 or so; I'd like to see one of those someday, although I've read that during those transitional years, quality had a tendency to vary more than it did during the pre-Gibson Newburgh years.

Update 22 Dec 2009

I've had the opportunity to work with my "version 1" XQ bass a little bit, and I can verify that although the bridge design in the old model is similar, it has some features that make it much nicer to work with. For one thing, the cubical string saddle blocks are attached to the bridge using an interesting angled bolt that. It's one of Ned's little imaginative design touches. You don't have to balance them on two separate screws to adjust the block height. That makes it far easier and less fiddly to adjust the intonation. The down side of the older DB bridge on that instrument is that it is lacking the steel inserts, which was a design improvement to make the saddles more durable. There is an entire evolutionary series of Steinberger bridges; it is a subject that warms the obsessive-compulsive heart of a geek like me, but I will spare you. Unfortunately, I also found that the bridge on my older XQ has suffered some abuse. I'll go into more detail over on the post about that bass.

Guitar Pron 2: Godin LGX-SA

The second guitar for your viewing pleasure is a Godin LGX-SA, a hard-tail instrument with a Gibson-style tilt-back headstock. Another eBay find, these guitars are assembled in the USA from Canadian-made parts. This one is another flame maple top with a routed edge that is similar to the Peavey Limited. The flame isn't quite as spectacular -- the finish is quite dark in ordinary room light -- but still very pretty. In bright light it appears that the parts are floating on a deep blue sea.


Like the Peavey, this instrument is beautifully constructed, with a lot of attention to detail. The neck joint is a work of art. It came to me in excellent condition, with only a couple of very minor dings and scratches. I paid less than half of the selling price for a new LGX-SA.


This one features an ebony fretboard, and the older Godin "tetrad" pickups which can be coil-tapped by popping up the tone control.


Besides being a very capable and polished Les Paul-style instrument (but lighter, and nicely sculpted in the back for greater comfort when playing), this is a very geeky instrument -- it is a 3-voice guitar. There is a 13-pin output for running into any type of guitar synth that accepts this output; I use a Roland GR-30. The tracking is excellent; it seems to work better than the usual GK pickup arrangement. There is a piezo output which provides a fairly credible acoustic sound, and which can be EQ'ed using a little 3-band EQ. And it has two humbuckers to produce a more usual electric guitar output, which can be coil tapped for a wider range of tones.


The routing options are somewhat complex, as it has two 1/4" outputs and the 13-pin output. The 13-pin output can actually be used alone and will still give you access to all of the guitar's sounds. The Roland GR-30 has a guitar out that will pass through the piezo and electric sounds. By combining the synth level (one of the sliders) together with the piezo level knob and another slider you can adjust levels to blend your synth patch, electric tone, and piezo tone. In this configuration you can't process the electric and piezo tones through separate effects chains, but there are more options if you are willing to use more than one cable.



It's a very playable, very comfortable instrument and one of the best pieces I've found on eBay to date. And last but not least, it came with a plywood (not plastic) case!

I used this guitar to record the electric part for the Mandelbrot Set's cover of "My Monkey" -- at least for my first take, although I wound up using a T-60 on the second take. I expect to make a lot more use of this instrument in the future.

Guitar Pron 1: Peavey Limited ST

Peavey Limited ST, 91026549. This is one is one of my absolute favorites. It has the prettiest finish of any of my instruments. It isn't quite as gorgeous as some of the PRS "10 tops," but I'd say it is at least a 9. And the "binding" -- which is really an un-stained routed edge -- adds a very attractive line of contrast between the face and back of the guitar.

My to-do list of things to fix or adjust on this guitar is blank -- it is perfect. It is currently set up with Ernie Ball 10s and it is a joy to play.

The Limiteds are solid-body electrics, but they are much lighter than similar designs like the T-60. I think they have hollowed-out cavities in the body, under the maple top, that make them quite light and add to their resonance.

It has a 25.5-inch scale length, quilted maple top in Tiger's Eye finish, Grover self-locking tuners, hipshot bridge, tremolo, and oversized strap pegs; shielded electronics cavity, and five-way switch. I recently had the frets leveled and dressed at Elderly Instruments in Lansing.

I got this one at my local Music-Go-Round for a very low price. These are fantastic guitars, built in the Peavey USA custom shop in Mississippi. It isn't widely appreciated what fine instruments they are. The attention to detail in the finish and fret work is amazing. They have extremely tight and well-crafted neck pockets and a smooth, rounded heel with five bolts. It's among the best-built bolt-on neck guitar I've seen, with the exception of some extremely expensive boutique instruments.

Because they are not considered collectible, very nice examples can be found on eBay at excellent prices. I own one more, an HB with two humbuckers and a blue quilt finish, that I will feature later. I'm also on the lookout for the third type, the VT, with three single-coil pickups.








UPDATE: I have a new Peavey Limited with a blonde flame maple top. It's a much subtler look, but still very pretty. Check it out (the link jumps to another entry in this blog).

Parts != Parts

So, I have been trying to fix up a couple of Squier Super-Sonics. Basically, I want to replace some corroded parts and put them back to stock. One of them has a weird set of third-party string trees. One has some of the bridge saddle height adjustment screws that were corroded, turned upside down and re-cut to take a flat head driver. There are a bunch of rusted, stripped pickguard and tremolo cover screws. The tremolo cover on one is stained with rust. Some knobs are chewed up. One of them has a three-way toggle switch that looks like it was deliberately cut off. The pots on two of them are in very bad shape and may need more than a spray cleaner.

I determined that the bridge of these is really a Fender American Stratocaster bridge, or at least made to the same specs, so the replacement tremolo arms and saddles from Fender made for that line fits perfectly. But the other parts?

Chrome pickguard screws/tremolo cover screws: they are just slightly wider and shorter than Fender screws. Because the screws are just slightly different, the tremolo cover is just slightly different too (the screw holes and the bevel around them is different).

Knobs: the kobs on the Super-Sonic look almost identical to the knobs from a Fender Precision bass, but the Fender knobs don't fit quite right. They are shaped slightly differently; the Fender parts have a set-screw, while the Super-Sonic part is press-fit. I suspect that they are the same knobs as the Japanese Mustang reissues, but I don't know that for certain.

String trees: Stratocaster string trees don't fit. Apparently the Super-Sonic parts have specially-sized screws and plastic spacers.

Three-way-toggle: not only is the replacement part not the same as the Super-Sonic part, but the Strat part won't even fit in the routed cavity.

So, I am now the owner of a bunch of Fender replacement pickguard screws, two toggle switches, a tremolo cover, two replacement pots, and some Precision bass knobs which I can't use.

And I'm deeply annoyed.

This seemed like a simple project, a quick and easy replacement for some of the damaged parts in order to make the instrument look as close to mint and close to stock as possible.

Wikipedia claims that a toggle switch for a Les Paul can be used, but after looking at the routing, I think that part is unlikely to fit.

Several scattered sources claim that these were built with American Stratocaster parts, but that really seems to be only true of the bridge and tremolo and possibly the tuners, and doesn't extend to any of the other parts.

Does anyone know where I could even find parts for these instruments?

UPDATE: it seems likely that the differences in things like pickguard screws might be as simple as the fact that we still haven't gone metric. I've been waiting on that promised move to metric ever since I was in grade school!

I Am Not Dead, and Here is Skullcrusher Mountain

Please forgive my lack of blogging. Things have gotten just slightly crazier since baby Joshua came home from the hospital, and I have just that much less free time. I have also been distracted by a little thing called Twitter, and some of the time I might have spent blogging has been spent Twittering instead. I don't ultimately want to be only a twit, though, thinking only in 140-character squirts, and so I will endeavor to blog more often.

Meanwhile, I finally got fed up with making any more changes to the Skullcrusher Mountain mix, and so called it final. Here is the MP3 file (link to box.net, where you can download the file, or play it directly). If anyone would like it in FLAC, let me know.

Jonathan Coulton was kind enough to write about us in this blog entry where he commented "It sounds like a party is what it sounds like, a big internet party." That's exactly what it was, just in slow motion, with people I've never met in person, and involving a lot of endless debate over how to mix the finished product. But it was a great experience! I have continued to record parts for future mixes including two guitar parts and a bass part for "My Monkey," which is being mixed by someone else, and I am playing around with parts for "Creepy Doll" and "Shop Vac" as time allows -- that is, very, very intermittently.

Credits for this particular mix of "Skullcrusher Mountain:"

Bry: Instigator

Joe "Covenant" Lamb: Spoken and Sung Lead Vocals, Ego, White Gold

Charlotte McIntosh: "Miley Cyrus-Style" Bridge Duet and Backing Vocals

Ian "Bigcambridge" Schwartz: Unison and Harmony Backing Vocals

Colleen "Colleenky" Kennedy: Unison and Harmony Backing Vocals, Geek Wrangler

Caleb "voidptr": Soprano, Tenor, and Bass Recorders, LaLa Chorus and Unison Backing Vocals

Dave "H4WK" Scheck: Octave Electric Guitar, Lead Wisperer

Mick "Lunacy" Bordet: Theremin, Electric Bass

Jarrett "SpaceParanoids" Heather: Stylophone

"bobsmitt": Digital Drums

Paul R. Potts: Drone Electric Guitar, Nylon-String Guitars, Additional Electric Bass, Editing, Mixing

My Monkey Tabbed Out and Demonstrated

I've been working on the guitar part for Jonathan Coulton's song "My Monkey" for the Mandelbrot Set virtual cover band. I recorded a track of doubled electric guitar that I think sounds great -- but unfortunately I realized a little too late that the transcription I was using is not quite right. Some of the chords were a bit over-simplified: there are some 7ths and major 7ths in there that are notated as plain old major chords in the transcription.

It's a valuable reminder that the material you find for free online, especially if it is not transcribed by the original artist, may be wrong. If you want to play a piece as recorded, always listen carefully yourself, and slow the part down if necessary to figure out what is going on. In particular, note that things like 7ths and add 9ths and what-not add color to the chords; if you play straight up major or minor chords that match the basic harmonization it will sound OK, and you won't have any minor second clashing notes or sound wildly out of tune, but it will lack the feel of the original and the chords won't help suggest and support certain sung notes in the melody quite as well.

I memorized the part as it was transcribed and practiced it so I could it smooth enough to record, and now I have to un-learn that muscle memory, re-learn the part, and record it again. It is always a bit of a dice roll as to whether you can get it to sound as good as your first successful try.

With 4 kids ranging from age 14 to 3 months, I don't get a lot of time to record videos -- I'm usually trying to throw something together late at night. But warts and all, minor errors included, you can see me playing these riffs on my Ovation acoustic in this video.

Here are my revised chords and tab, which follow the way I'm playing the part now. I'm pretty sure it is accurate, although I may be a string off in my finger-picking pattern here or there.

My Monkey - Jonathan Coulton

Transcription by Paul R. Potts

Chord Shapes Used:

E  02210X
B7 X2120X
C#sus2 X4664X (altered to C#m X4665X)
A X0222X (altered to Asus2 X0220X)
B X2444X
Amaj7 X0212X

Riff 1:

E   B7     C#sus2   A 
e :------------|---------------|
B :--------0---|--4h5------2p0-|
G :--1-----2---|--6--------2---|
D :--2----1----|-6--------2----|
A :------2-----|4--------0-----|
E :0-----------|---------------|

Last Repeat:

E   B7     C#sus2   B 
e :------------|---------------|
B :--------0---|--4--------4---|
G :--1-----2---|--6--------4---|
D :--2----1----|-6--------4----|
A :------2-----|4--------2-----|
E :0-----------|---------------|

Riff 2:

Amaj7          B7
e :-------------|-----|
B :--2---2---2--|--0--|
G :--1---1---1--|--2--|
D :-2-2-2-2-2-2-|-1-2-|
A :0---0---0----|2----|
E :-------------|-----|

Last Repeat:

Amaj7     B7
e :---------|---0-2--| (hold fingering, let notes ring)
B :--2---2--|--0-----|
G :--1---1--|-2------|
D :-2-2-2-2-|--------|
A :0---0----|2-------|
E :---------|--------|

Ending:

E
e :----------0------| (slowly, let notes ring)
B :--------0--------|
G :------1----------|
D :----2------------|
A :--2--------------|
E :0----------------|

The song is structured as follows:

Intro: Riff 1 x 2

Verse: Riff 1 x 4 (the last time, play the variant)
Chorus: Riff 2 x 4 (the last time, play the variant)

Verse: Riff 1 x 4 (the last time, play the variant)
Chorus: Riff 2 x 4 (the last time, play the variant)

Verse: Riff 1 x 4 (the last time, play the variant)
Chorus: Riff 2 x 4 (the last time, play the variant)

Play just the variant Riff 2 twice

Play the final E chord slowly and let it ring.

Note that Coulton plays some of the chords a little 
more freely than the tab suggests. For example, he 
strums a few notes of the Riff 1 opening E chord 
instead of just plucking the single bass E note on 
some of the repeats.