Mar '07 GT interview -- Lordathestrings

Lordathestrings is GT's resident gearhead. If you've got a question about tubes, pups, or anything, really, just ask LatS and he'll answer you in record time.....and in more detail than you really wanted. :)

Is there a story behind your first guitar?

Back in 1968, all of my friends had guitars, and I was getting flack from them for borrowing theirs all the time. Mostly acoustics with bronze-wrapped strings. Money was not something I had a lot of (some things never seem to change). I was busting my butt on a Globe & Mail paper route in suburban Kingston, Ontario. My route started at the corner of Portsmouth Avenue and Princess Street and went through Grenville Park and Fairway Hills, up to where Johnson Street enters Polson Park. Something like 140 dailies, and over 200 weeklies. I finally scraped together $40 for a used Guyatone ES335 knockoff. It was easier to play than any acoustic I could get for that price, and I could still hear it without an amp. I used to plug it into my parent's Electrohome hi-fi in the living room. Mono! TUBES! :D I've gotta credit my parents for putting up with an incredible amount of crap from me.

Have your musical tastes changed at all from when you started out?

Well, lessee now. The first song I learned was "House Of The Rising Sun" as recorded by Eric Burdon. The second song was "The Mountains And Maryanne" by Gordon Lightfoot. We were all 'folkies' back then. The first record I bought with my own money was "If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears" by The Mamas And The Papas. I actually hated the first Led Zeppelin album when it was released. Go figure. I didn't turn into a ragin' rocker until a guy who became the lead singer in my band turned me on to Grand Funk Railroad. I named our band Railroad when GFR dropped that part of their name. When Disco broke out, it turned me off so bad that I stopped playing for a few years. I picked it up again because I realised that part of me was starving without it. I listen to anything that meets my criteria for quality, but my playing is a bit more specialised. I don't use a lot of distortion. I don't tap. Those techniques don't sound like guitar to my ears. Glam-rock and the hair-bands weren't doing it for me, so I drifted into a jazzy kinda blues thing. I'm still there. It fits me like a good pair of jeans. I still jam on Tommy once in a while, but I'm more intent on learning to play "The Messiah Will Come Again" as if I live it.

You've been a guitar tech for practically ever. What got you into the more technical side of guitar?

Look up my profile on this website. I'm a techie who happens to play guitar. I've never earned a paycheque doing repairs or setups. My own guitars are set up by Jim Mozell, in his shop at the back of Axe Music on Blackfoot Trail, here in Calgary. I do the wiring and switch mods, swap out the pups, and stuff like that. Jim adjusts the truss rod, levels the frets, sets the action and intonation, files the nut slots and bridge saddles to get everything just the way I like it. I know enough about these things to recognise that someone else can do it better. I've learned how to keep my axes feeling right, once they've been set up, and I've accumulated a pile of preferences. I pick things up along the way, and I share the bits that I think are useful. I learned early on that what you don't know can cost you a pile of money, prevent you from sounding your best, and maybe discourage you from playing. Makes picking up a few pointers seem worthwhile, y'know?

What's your main setup, and why?

For the longest time, like almost 20 years, it was my 'Brand X' black 1984 Yamaha SBG1000, with a DiMarzio Dual sound pup at the bridge, and a DiMarzio SCHB at the neck. Through about a dozen different amps along the way, until I settled on a 1976 Ampeg VT-22 about six years ago, and then a rebuilt VT-40 about a year after that. I left all the pedals behind when I plugged in to those tone-monster amps. Suddenly, I could get Fender cleans with more balls, and a few control tweaks produced Marshall crunch without the nasal honking. Out of the same amp! Rock'n'Roll Heaven!

A while back, I got hold of a sunburst 1966 Yamaha SG-2, just like the one I played in my first band. It was one of those nice discoveries to find out that it really does sound and feel as good as I remembered. I still like to rip it up with my humbucker axes, but I keep going back to that single-coil, long-scale Yamaha. They got the ergonomics right, in ways that my Strat never did. And the tone!...... uhh, 'scuse me - gotta go play some.

How do you stay interested in guitar after all these years?

I started out as a bedroom (or living room) jammer, filling in as much of a song in one pass as I could. So I've always been more of a rhythm player than a string-slinger. I know that a lot of the people on this site, hell all of the instructors, can play better than I can. That doesn't matter.

I play because I can, but mostly because I have to. I gotta make my music, one way or another. It doesn't have to be the best that's ever been - just the best that I can do at the time. And there's always something I figure I can do just a little better next time.

more pearls of wisdom :D ..... is this a monthly thing??? I like it!! thanks for taking the time to do this you two. Yamaha SG...best guitar ever.

Originally Posted by: earthman buckLordathestrings is GT's resident gearhead. If you've got a question about tubes, pups, or anything, really, just ask LatS and he'll answer you in record time.....and in more detail than you really wanted. :)[/QUOTE]

I got to thinking about whether my memories of 'the day' were fuzzy or not:
... from >this thread< in December of 2003:

Originally Posted by: Lordathestrings[QUOTE=Leedogg]What was the feeling like back in '69? How old were you? It was a really busy year, with immense social implications. I'd really like to hear someone's account of it besides my parents'. My dad was 20 and in the jungles of Vietnam. My mom was 17 and sitting in a one bedroom apartment praying everyday that my dad wouldn't die.

I could write a long book to answer your post, but a lot of other people already have.

I bought my first guitar to celebrate my 16th birthday in October of 1968. It was a used hollow-body electric. A Japanese ES-335 knockoff with the name "Guya" on the headstock. I paid $40 CDN with the money I earned from my morning paper route. I would meet the truck that dropped off my 144 copies of the Globe & Mail for my daily deliveries at 04:30. I was usually home by 07:30, to get ready for school. My Saturday deliveries jumped to over 200. The Globe kept sending me a bunch of extra papers and charging me 65 cents a week for each them, which wiped out a lot of the 17 cents profit from each of my actual customers. That $40 took a lot of work to accumulate.

So, then I did the obsessive practice routine previously described. By July '69, I was playing lead guitar for a band we called "Little Earth". We were the unofficial house band at a night club called "The First Church of Alice", which was decorated with stuff from Lewis Caroll's book "Alice Through The Looking Glass". The back of the stage featured a gigantic magic mushroom, complete with hookah-smoking caterpillar. The cap of the mushroom extended out over the stage like a canopy.

I spent a lot of time either hunched in front of my stack, trying to hear myself through the stage wash, or standing in front of the drummer with one foot braced against the kick-drums, trying to keep our pet maniac from walking his kit right off the stage.

Musically, it was a time of self-indulgent solos and stretched songs. A one-hour set might be comprised of three or four songs. After Cream released "Toad" on the "Wheels of Fire" album, our drummer insisted on doing a solo every night that grew into a 40-minute bash-fest. Try spending your evenings braced against a kick-drum, and see how you like it. :p

Socio-politically? I was in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, which is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where the St. Lawrence River starts. About 20 miles from the Thousand Islands. New York State is about 12 miles south, across the water. All of which is to say that we saw a lot of draft-dodgers passing through on their way to Toronto. At the time we were too young and ignorant to do much in the way of critical thinking, and often too stoned to do much of any kind of thinking. We were push-overs for squishy-pink socialism in general, and anti-Vietnam-War sentiment in particular.