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One Thing You Can Do in LESS THAN A SECOND to Improve Your Guitar Tone
One Thing You Can Do in LESS THAN A SECOND to Improve Your Guitar Tone
Stand farther from your amp. Okay, there ya go. If you want the VERY short version, read no “farther”. If you want to know WHY … well then, read on! Reason #1: because your ears are not on the back of your knees. So, a band I play with regularly rehearses in a hall that has a pair of half-stack Marshalls on one side of the stage. Since electric guitar players are a dime-a-dozen in the Nashville area, I usually am on the far side of the room playing acoustic guitar or keys. Guess what? Those dang Marshall’s are WAY louder where I’m standing than where the...
1967 Gibson Melody Maker SG - Love & Historic ’57 PAF Pickups
1967 Gibson Melody Maker SG - Love & Historic ’57 PAF Pickups
“Big, little, short or tall, wish I
could have kept them all … Lord I loved them every one”. This is a line from a Conway Twitty hit
country song in the 80s; when Conway sang this line he was speaking of ladies,
but for me it would be GUITARS. To me it’s
like this … one person can look at a dog and say “that’s the ugliest dog I ever
saw”, and someone else (usually the dog’s owner) will say “no, it’s the cutest
dog in the world”. When it comes to guitars, I'm always the latter, what someone else may call ugly, I call awesome. To me, EVERY guitar
is beautiful...
The Terrible Telecaster Ice-Pick
The Terrible Telecaster Ice-Pick
Hi gang! This blog marks a bit of a first, as it is
the first time I am officially blogging about the pickups that bear my
name! When I began making guitar
pickups, I firmly believed that the best pickups ever made were in fact made
from about 1952 to 1965, and my intention was to painstakingly reproduce these
mid-century works of art. Where
Stratocasters and Humbuckers are concerned, I was dead-on the bull’s eye. However, the Telecaster players were giving
me something further to consider. The Strat
players were on a magic carpet ride to Nirvana with my...
Fake RickenBacker 4001 Bass
Fake RickenBacker 4001 Bass
Rickenfaker? Fakenbacker? Humm, call it
what you want, the bass I recently discovered in a little mom-n-pop music show
was most certainly not the Rickenbacker it claimed to be!
On a recent trip to a small Kentucky town
not many hours out of Nashville, TN my eyes caught something not often seen in
this types of music store, a cool vintage-looking Rick 4001 bass. I took a quick look at the price and got a
little excited … five hundred bucks!
Here is the bass, I handed it to my buddy Brad to snap a quick pic of my
“find”.
Then I decided I’d try to determine its...
Thanksgiving 2014: Is it possible to be thankful?
Thanksgiving 2014: Is it possible to be thankful?
Thanksgiving. Is it possible to be thankful in 2014? I think so, let’s talk about that.
I’m 5-foot, 3-inches tall and that
makes me downright short by national standards.
It’s been proven time and time again that folks as short as me don’t
generally get a fair shake. Let’s take a
peek at the list of “disadvantages” folks like me have:
Ladies tend to see short men as less attractive.Men tend to not want to be friends with short
men.Short men are less likely to be hired for a job.Short men on average earn less than a tall man
for the same job.And of course,...
The Daion Caribou Guitar Lovefest
The Daion Caribou Guitar Lovefest
Hello once again fellow tone-seekers! Sooo, I build electric guitar
pickups … and amps … and am a part of this great WGS family that builds
electric guitar speakers. However, this
week I want to pay homage to an ACOUSTIC
guitar! Hey why not? Acoustics ARE a huge part of the guitar
experience, right? And, it’s probably
been the better part of a couple years since I last featured an acoustic on
this here blog (Read here). So ya ready?
Let’s jump in!
So first I’ll set the stage: It was a
dark, rainy night in London when I walked across...
Tone Capicitors and RW/RP Pickups in Stratocasters
Tone Capicitors and RW/RP Pickups in Stratocasters
Hi fellow tone-seekers! I just had some EXCELLENT questions about Stratocaster pickups come in via my site, VaughnSkow.com. So good I think I might
use tham in a blog :-)
Q: Besides hum - does Non RW/RP mid pup
really sound better and deliver more "quack" to in-between positions
2 & 4, than RW/RP?
A:
It is my experience that the answer to this question is NO. I offer the non RW/RP option on my historic 1954
& 1959 Strat sets for purists who demand it, but such purists would also
demand a 3-way switch on their Strat … which means there would be no “in-...
WGS 10" Green Beret vs Celestion Vintage 10
WGS 10" Green Beret vs Celestion Vintage 10
Howdy-do friends and neighbors, ladies & gentlemen, educated and uneducated, those close, and those far away, folks from all walks of life, all manner of faiths, and from one end of the globe to the other … whew … I gotta catch my breath! I’ve got … news! Ya ready? It’s finally here … the long awaited 10” British voiced 10” speaker from WGS! Everybody say “wooo-hooo! Yea, I announced this thing nearly three months back, and then there was a difficulty obtaining some of the “special ingredients” and it got delayed … but not any longer. It’s here, it’s...
Sleaper Amps revisited ... Great Minds DO think alike!
Sleaper Amps revisited ... Great Minds DO think alike!
Hello Friendly friends! Today I’d
like to start out by pointing you in the direction of somebody else’s blog …
yep, I’m turning you over to the competition! Not really … we’re all one big
blogeriffic family :-)
Anywhoo … I subscribe to Premier Guitar Magazine, and often read their
weekly blogs. The one I just read is
entitled Joe
Bonamassa’s 5 Most Underrated Amps, and sittin’ pretty at No. 1 was the Lab
Series L5. Wow, great minds really DO
think alike! The Lab Series L5, L7,
& L9 (which are all the same amps in 2-12, 4-10, & 1-15 speaker...
Guitar Tone: It's What's Under the Hood that MATTERS!
Guitar Tone: It's What's Under the Hood that MATTERS!
So, a few weeks back my sweet little wife asked a simple question that
really got me to thinking. I was showing
off the super-cool looking new WGS12L, and she simply asked: “what does it
matter what it looks like, nobody ever really SEES the speakers in an amp
anyway, right?
Wow, what a packed little innocent question.
Let’s talk about that.
To ME, it MATTERS. Shoot, I just
assumed everyone felt the same way I do, and truth be told, on this here forum,
I am probably “preaching to the choir”, y’all get me. And that’s so cool! We’re like a dedicated...