Chabenda
Last weekend I took my son through to Zim for a function at a school that he had attended. We stayed with an old friend who is also an avid music lover and guitar player. I was lucky enough on Sunday morning to pick up his Cort electric HSS, switch on his Boss, whatever it was effects unit (at least 4 years old), and play through his JMP Marshall and 4x12 Marshall box, for half an hour before a splendid breakfast, complete with ( 2nds of) Colcom sausages and bacon. It really woke me up to what I have been missing over the last 15 years. I like playing through a very basic system, reverb and Tube Screamer, but have to admit, you certainly get some serious inspiration from some of those patches! That gear held my attention long enough for me to be called away for breakfast!!!
So, I apologise if I have ever wound any member up, I am GFSA's Stig of the Dump! In the '80's and '90's I was still buying and using gear from the '60's and '70's. You guys are very lucky to have tje access to modern technology that you have had. My advice to young guitarists though - just don't depend on it too much and watch out for the guy from the High Density Suburb who pitches up with a pile of cr*p and makes you feel inadequate. Make sure that you get to play with those guys! It's all about a balance - get stuck with old gear and get inspiration from the new, get stuck for inspiration with the new gear - Get thee to a High Density Suburb, with humility, and play with guys who have great feeling but cr*p gear. (you too may even find a cr*p sounding Fender Strat with bronze strings on it!).
When I was younger my greatest inspiration was a local guitarist called Benny Miller, he had played for Otis Waygood before they arrived in SA. He played with a band called Klunk in Zim, he had an HH amp, either an SG a Strat or a Peavey T60 - straight thru, no pedals. The drummer, Victor Duarte, would play a skeleton kit. Benny would play Run DMC, scratching on "You Be Illin" or "Walk This Way". No effects, just talent. They were punk legends back in Greater Mbare (Harare).
Being a good guitarist is not about the gear or the online lessons etc but more about getting in touch with your heart felt feelings and allowing them to be expressed through your fingers at whatever BPM, through whatever instruments you have. Would you really like to be stuck with the guitar that Robert Johnson owned? Barbed wire strings, cr*p action? Boy, did he make that instrument talk. I'm sure that all of your gear is way better than his was. GAS is GAS and we have all bowed to it and I have no right to criticise at all, and, as it seems like most of our guitar heroes sound like themselves whatever they are playing though, Shouldn't we should be spending more time at the roots? As in playing?
Bob-Dubery
I'm not sure, because the famous guys seem to be forever tinkering with their setups. Presumably they have the same fingers and ability to sound like themselves, but the keep on tinkering. Maybe because they can never quite get to the sound they hear in their heads, or maybe they want a different sound (Clapton is an example of a player who ditched a signature tone, Mark Knopfler another).
Richard Thompson is an interesting case study here. He's one of those players whose sound seems not to come predominantly from his kit, who sounds like he his because of who he is and will never sound like anybody else and nobody else will sound like him (BTW, I tend to think such inimititability comes mostly because of note choices, signature licks, if you will, differences in vibrato and string bending - those sort of things). Yet he's always changing. Through the 80s and into the 90s he played one guitar, his old strat, almost exclusively but kept on changing pedals and amps (and usually different amps on each side of the pond, a practice he still maintains). More recently the guitars have changed a lot - a Ferrington, a 60s strat, another Ferrington, the odd Telecaster for variation, then a "frankenstrat" that is roady put together, now he's just bought a custom build Tele with P90s in it. He's even ditched the Univibe that was on his pedal board for years (at least for electric shows, he still has one on his acoustic pedal board). All the fashionable mags, and just about everybody whose ever played with him say that he's a one-off, that nobody sounds like him and he sounds like nobody, and that it's all in the fingers and the mind - yet he keeps on changing his gear.
I suppose that instruments are tools as well. If better tools come along, then why not take advantage of them?
