So I was on the London underground at about 6.20pm UK time today (Friday), Eastbound on the Central Line. A gang of about 10 quite obviously drunk football fans got onto my coach, and started drunkenly yelling rather unpleasant football songs, mostly relating to WWII and how England was generally great.
At one stop a guy of Asian descent tried to get onto the train; he couldn't because the mob of chanting, drunken football louts had blocked the door. He gave up and went to another door, and one of the group shouted at him:
"F*ck off you P*ki c*nt!"
At which point a lightly-built Asian woman, no older than me (I'm 28), stood up and remonstrated with the kid (about 18 I reckon) at the centre of the drunken mob who had shouted the abuse. She told him in no uncertain terms to apologise and to recognise that what he had said was unacceptable. She was a waif of a girl, and wouldn't have stood a chance against even one of these thugs, let alone all 10, but she fearlessly told him in no uncertain terms at the top of her voice that what he had said was wrong, and why.
I thought about intervening, but if I'd got involved (I'm a big guy, and was wearing a leather jacket and a woolly hat that made me look like a Hell's Angel) I'd have turned a debate into a fight by my mere presence, so I stood down, ready to intervene if it looked like they were going to attack her. Thanks to her remarkable persuasive ability, by the time these idiots got off the train, they were literally lining up to apologise to her. I shook her hand and she received a round of heartfelt applause from the entire carriage.
We talk about courage and heroism, but rarely do we see it in such terms. This woman, who could have stood with her head bowed and toughed it out until this rabble left the train, chose to put herself in potentially mortal danger for the sake of what was right. That is true courage and heroism and represents everything that is truly great about my country. That these thugs could commit such foul-mouthed racist abuse on the one hand, and sing songs about Winston Churchill and the hundreds of thousands of his generation who died in to defend the values of tolerance and fairness that these morons chose to desecrate on the other beggars all belief. It took a woman of a descent not of these isles to stand up for and defend that which is truly British. Of that I am in the utmost awe. I am not worthy to kiss this amazing woman's shoes.
For those of you in London, please help me find this woman. She deserves a fucking knighthood for being the most British person on the train that evening. Email tube.heroine@gmail.com with where this happened and what was said.
Friday 18 December 2009
Saturday 29 November 2008
The 10 most ridiculous rock videos ever
10 Status Quo – Dear John
Are you a huge loser? Has your rocker girlfriend given up on you, with your brown suit and chartered-accountant glasses? How can you possibly restore your cool and your sex appeal? According to this video, you do it by dressing like Status Quo, by means of a Magic Toilet. That is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start.
9 Steven Seagal – Girl it's Alright
What's a fading action star to do when his paunch gets in the way of his roundhouse kicks? Well, the sales of Steve's energy drink (yes, he has an energy drink) obviously weren't going so well, so he decided he was going to become a blues legend, following in the steps of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Actually, Steven followed in the footsteps of the likes of Minnie Driver, Keanu Reeves and Russell Crowe in making an absolute prat of himself. He spends most of this video slimily chatting up some far-eastern girl who looks about a third of his age. Also, he called his band “Thunderbox”, which is a sadly appropriate euphemism for “toilet” in the UK.
8 Survivor – Eye of the Tiger
Oh dear. Some things don't age well, and the 80's denim and leather look is pretty much at the top of that list. Never in the field of human experience has a band tried so hard to look smoulderingly heterosexual, and achieved the exact opposite in such spectacular fashion. The Village People put out less camp videos than this. And for a bunch of guys marching down the street in a strict echelon formation like the toughest heavies on the stip, they don't half look like a bunch of weenies. This video would have been way better if Motley Crue came the other way, beat them to a pulp, and snorted them. Survive that...
7 – Michael Bolton – Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
OK, sometimes it's hard to separate a terrible video from a terrible song, and MB's hideous murder of this classic is dreadful enough in itself (advice to Michael Bolton – look up “soulful” and “constipated” in the dictionary. You'll be surprised at how different the two concepts actually are.). However, the video does the song a perverted kind of justice by being just as objectionable. Amongst the points to note:
* Whilst singing a song about loneliness and contemplation, MB is surrounded by a rock band and a troupe of dancing girls, making it somewhat crowded up on the pier.
* Speaking of the dancing girls, they can't dance. Nor can they sing.
* Just look at the hair. JUST LOOK AT THE HAIR! David Attenbrough could do a pretty thorough natural history of some of those mullets.
6 Nitro – Freight Train
-Hey dad, could you tell me about the eighties?
-Sure son. Watch this, it's all you need to know.
-Dad, what the hell is that?
-That's Jim Gilette.
-No, what's that on his head?
-I'm not sure son. It might be his hair. It might be a failed Cold War experiment.
-Dad, why didn't we let the Russians invade and prevent this atrocity?
-I dunno son. I dunno.
5 Nightwish – Sleeping Sun
This video is nothing if not thought-provoking. Amongst the thoughts I have had while watching it:
* This is a song about the night. Why is it shot in the middle of the day?
* Why does Tarja Turunen spend much of this video climbing out of the bath fully clothed?
* Why is the bath in question in the middle of a field?
* Why didn't Nightwish announce that they had perfected human cloning, seeing as there's anything up to 6 Tarja's on screen at any one time?
* How come they don't all engage in a massive prima donna catfight?
* Is it just me or does Tarja look like ET?
4 Dokken - Breaking the Chains
Jesus Cartwheeling Christ. George Lynch's spectacular mullet can't quite hide his embarrasment in this spasm-inducing late-term abortion of a video. Almost no aspect of it, in any way, is even on speaking terms with "acceptable". Points to note are almost too numerous to mention, but spare a thought for poor drummer Mick Brown - at least the others have their guitars to hide behind whilst pratting their way through this monstrosity, all he can do is wave his drumsticks in the air and fervently wish he was somewhere else.
3 Iron Mask – Revenge is my Name
It's not often that a video starts with an inexplicable two-minute swordfight between what looks like two extras from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and actually gets worse from that point forward. Like many of the videos here, this suffers from “Mighty Morphin' Guitar” syndrome, as Dushan Petrossi's guitar spends much of the video changing colour and shape. Incidentally, someone should have told Dushan that if you're going to slavishly copy Yngwie Malmsteen's guitar playing, it's not 100% compulsory to copy his uncontrollable weight gain as well. Also, a small point, but Yngwie usually has his guitars plugged in.
2 Poison – Unskinny Bop
Some of the videos on this list feature the amazing morphing guitar that changes colour, or even model, from shot to shot, but nothing compares to this outpouring from America's greatest poodle-rock posers. The whole video seems to be a spectacular excuse for Poison's axemen (including the bassist, who manages an impressive 3 different examples) to show off their guitar collections. Who are they trying to impress? Well, judging by the end of the video, having a huge collection of guitars really gets you the girls. Or at least it did in the 80's. Lack of guitars seems to have been a major drawback to your love-life, to the extent that singer Bret Michaels has to make do with two women who he's clearly hallucinated.
1 Dimmu Borgir – Progenies of the Great Apocalypse (NSFW)
This is, without doubt, my favourite video ever. I love the unrestrained creative process that was obviously behind it. I don't know exactly how the creative meeting to decide on the video's script went, but I'm willing to bet that it made an episode of Metalocalypse look under-acted:
-I want this to be the most badass video of all time! Every nanosecond must be 100% metal, and contain as much badass stuff as possible!
-I want to wear loads of spikes! More spikes than anything, ever!
-I want to get crucified at the end!
-There should be a satanic mass!
-Only if I get to play an organ made of bones, on top of a hill of skulls! With snakes on it!
-It should have naked chicks!
-Yeah! Naked goth chicks! In chains!
-I want my hands to be on fire!
-I think there should be a fat guy with a meat cleaver!
-Why?
-Why not!
-My eyes should have pentagrams in them!
-And there should be comets falling from the sky!
-And a fat guy without a meat cleaver as well!
-More snakes!
-This is gonna be so badass! Those guys down the mall won't laugh at us any more now!
Are you a huge loser? Has your rocker girlfriend given up on you, with your brown suit and chartered-accountant glasses? How can you possibly restore your cool and your sex appeal? According to this video, you do it by dressing like Status Quo, by means of a Magic Toilet. That is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start.
9 Steven Seagal – Girl it's Alright
What's a fading action star to do when his paunch gets in the way of his roundhouse kicks? Well, the sales of Steve's energy drink (yes, he has an energy drink) obviously weren't going so well, so he decided he was going to become a blues legend, following in the steps of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Actually, Steven followed in the footsteps of the likes of Minnie Driver, Keanu Reeves and Russell Crowe in making an absolute prat of himself. He spends most of this video slimily chatting up some far-eastern girl who looks about a third of his age. Also, he called his band “Thunderbox”, which is a sadly appropriate euphemism for “toilet” in the UK.
8 Survivor – Eye of the Tiger
Oh dear. Some things don't age well, and the 80's denim and leather look is pretty much at the top of that list. Never in the field of human experience has a band tried so hard to look smoulderingly heterosexual, and achieved the exact opposite in such spectacular fashion. The Village People put out less camp videos than this. And for a bunch of guys marching down the street in a strict echelon formation like the toughest heavies on the stip, they don't half look like a bunch of weenies. This video would have been way better if Motley Crue came the other way, beat them to a pulp, and snorted them. Survive that...
7 – Michael Bolton – Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
OK, sometimes it's hard to separate a terrible video from a terrible song, and MB's hideous murder of this classic is dreadful enough in itself (advice to Michael Bolton – look up “soulful” and “constipated” in the dictionary. You'll be surprised at how different the two concepts actually are.). However, the video does the song a perverted kind of justice by being just as objectionable. Amongst the points to note:
* Whilst singing a song about loneliness and contemplation, MB is surrounded by a rock band and a troupe of dancing girls, making it somewhat crowded up on the pier.
* Speaking of the dancing girls, they can't dance. Nor can they sing.
* Just look at the hair. JUST LOOK AT THE HAIR! David Attenbrough could do a pretty thorough natural history of some of those mullets.
6 Nitro – Freight Train
-Hey dad, could you tell me about the eighties?
-Sure son. Watch this, it's all you need to know.
-Dad, what the hell is that?
-That's Jim Gilette.
-No, what's that on his head?
-I'm not sure son. It might be his hair. It might be a failed Cold War experiment.
-Dad, why didn't we let the Russians invade and prevent this atrocity?
-I dunno son. I dunno.
5 Nightwish – Sleeping Sun
This video is nothing if not thought-provoking. Amongst the thoughts I have had while watching it:
* This is a song about the night. Why is it shot in the middle of the day?
* Why does Tarja Turunen spend much of this video climbing out of the bath fully clothed?
* Why is the bath in question in the middle of a field?
* Why didn't Nightwish announce that they had perfected human cloning, seeing as there's anything up to 6 Tarja's on screen at any one time?
* How come they don't all engage in a massive prima donna catfight?
* Is it just me or does Tarja look like ET?
4 Dokken - Breaking the Chains
Jesus Cartwheeling Christ. George Lynch's spectacular mullet can't quite hide his embarrasment in this spasm-inducing late-term abortion of a video. Almost no aspect of it, in any way, is even on speaking terms with "acceptable". Points to note are almost too numerous to mention, but spare a thought for poor drummer Mick Brown - at least the others have their guitars to hide behind whilst pratting their way through this monstrosity, all he can do is wave his drumsticks in the air and fervently wish he was somewhere else.
3 Iron Mask – Revenge is my Name
It's not often that a video starts with an inexplicable two-minute swordfight between what looks like two extras from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and actually gets worse from that point forward. Like many of the videos here, this suffers from “Mighty Morphin' Guitar” syndrome, as Dushan Petrossi's guitar spends much of the video changing colour and shape. Incidentally, someone should have told Dushan that if you're going to slavishly copy Yngwie Malmsteen's guitar playing, it's not 100% compulsory to copy his uncontrollable weight gain as well. Also, a small point, but Yngwie usually has his guitars plugged in.
2 Poison – Unskinny Bop
Some of the videos on this list feature the amazing morphing guitar that changes colour, or even model, from shot to shot, but nothing compares to this outpouring from America's greatest poodle-rock posers. The whole video seems to be a spectacular excuse for Poison's axemen (including the bassist, who manages an impressive 3 different examples) to show off their guitar collections. Who are they trying to impress? Well, judging by the end of the video, having a huge collection of guitars really gets you the girls. Or at least it did in the 80's. Lack of guitars seems to have been a major drawback to your love-life, to the extent that singer Bret Michaels has to make do with two women who he's clearly hallucinated.
1 Dimmu Borgir – Progenies of the Great Apocalypse (NSFW)
This is, without doubt, my favourite video ever. I love the unrestrained creative process that was obviously behind it. I don't know exactly how the creative meeting to decide on the video's script went, but I'm willing to bet that it made an episode of Metalocalypse look under-acted:
-I want this to be the most badass video of all time! Every nanosecond must be 100% metal, and contain as much badass stuff as possible!
-I want to wear loads of spikes! More spikes than anything, ever!
-I want to get crucified at the end!
-There should be a satanic mass!
-Only if I get to play an organ made of bones, on top of a hill of skulls! With snakes on it!
-It should have naked chicks!
-Yeah! Naked goth chicks! In chains!
-I want my hands to be on fire!
-I think there should be a fat guy with a meat cleaver!
-Why?
-Why not!
-My eyes should have pentagrams in them!
-And there should be comets falling from the sky!
-And a fat guy without a meat cleaver as well!
-More snakes!
-This is gonna be so badass! Those guys down the mall won't laugh at us any more now!
Thursday 9 October 2008
Handy Guide to Musicians
Ah, the rock and roll life. The girls, the money, the glamour. The world tours, the cars, the record deals. None of which you will ever have. Nor me, of course. Us mere mortals have to make do with the usual toilet circuit, with appropriate toilet musicians.
So, if you want to play derivative pub rock in front of exactly nobody while you lose your job, your social life, relationship (if any) and your ability to tell left from right in less than three tries, you're going to need someone to do it with you. That's where (urgh) other musicians come in. Musicians are much like orcs (go with me on this one). They're ugly, often violent, associated with axes (see!) and you wouldn't want to leave one alone in a room with a small child. And, finally, of course, they form into tribes. I've played with a lot of musicians and auditioned even more, and I think I have identified these groupings.
1 – The Unreliable.
"Don't worry, I'll be there. Maybe."
Gender: Either
Instrument: Any, though this tribe contains more drummers than you would expect statistically...
Members of the Unreliable tribe operate on a different space-time continuum to the rest of reality. Time and space have no meaning, and deadlines and soundcheck times are regarded as interesting suggestions that would be worth looking at if there weren't so many other important things to do. There are a great many variations to their M.O., ranging from turning up late every time by a predictable margin (easily counteracted, as we did with one drummer, by lying to him about what time practices were), to those who (presumably) consult their horoscope before a gig, and if Saturn is just the wrong side of Capricorn, emigrate to Ghana.
I have heard all the following explanations for lateness or no-shows at practices, or even gigs. I am not making any of these up.
"Yeah, but Arsenal were on the TV so I watched that instead."
"I thought Dover was 20 minutes from Birmingham by train. Turns out it isn't."
"I snorted some tainted cocaine and couldn't remember who I was."
"Oh yeah, I moved to Devon. I was going to tell you but my phone didn't have any credit."
"I drank two litres of vodka, crashed my car, broke my thumb, but then met a mysterious Rastafarian who healed me with his touch. Then I got arrested."
2 – The Bitter Failed Pros
"Haha, I'll laugh when you fail."
Gender: Usually male.
Instument: Any
The music business can be a cruel mistress. For every man who makes it big, a hundred will be left by the wayside, bitter hollow shells. And for some reason they will audition for your band. And only audition. They will never join your band, or any band. In fact most of the time they won't even unpack their instrument. They will just sit in the corner, drink beer, and mock the feeble, pathetic attempts of the naïve young things in front of them to conquer the music business with their out-of-tune caterwauling. They will recount (usually fictitious) anecdotes of the bands they toured with and the groupies they shagged, none of which you will ever come close to. Of course, this bravado hides the fact that they are not in a band, and you are.
3 – Paranoid Lunatics
"No you can't hear my songs. You'll steal them."
Gender: Usually Male
Instrument: Usually guitar or vocals.
The Paranoid Lunatic tribe is an offshoot of the Failed Pro tribe, but the Paranoid Lunatic has taken his failure to "make it" in a different way. He has decided that his shattered dreams are not a result of his lack of talent or highly defective personality, but because mysterious forces, possibly aliens, have intervened to ruin his career. He thus treats all bandmates with suspicion, regarding them as agents of the evil record industry who want to steal his song ideas, ruin his reputation and render him homeless. Every rehearsal becomes a stressful ordeal, as he must hide his genius, but not so much as to be thrown out. Eventually, he can take the strain no longer, and leaves, citing his bandmates' "ulterior motives" and add those bandmates to his long list of mortal enemies. This comes as a surprise to the bandmates in question, who just wanted someone to play bass on their Queen covers.
4 – Riot Grrrls
"I wrote this one about my mum. It's called 'I hate you and want to kill us both'."
Gender: Female
Instrument: Guitar, Bass, vocals.
A rare female-only tribe of musicians, Riot Grrrls learn the minimum amount necessary to play 3 chords and devote the rest of their time to learning how to shout into the microphone about things that bother them or just for its own sake. Their musical tastes generally run from Bikini Kill to L7 and back again. Most of the time they don't appear to have any reason to be so angry, apart from a residual teenage dislike of their parents, which is often the chief theme of their songwriting. Whereas many males enter rock music in order to attract girls, the Riot Grrrl either hates men for political reasons or already has a boyfriend, the more disreputable and disliked by her parents the better. Their wardrobe consists of torn jeans, faded t-shirts featuring obscene slogans, and things with spikes on them. Their instrument, by law, must be covered entirely with stickers featuring the aforementioned obscene slogans and anime characters wearing very little clothing.
5 – The Wasted
"Whuuuuuuh?"
Gender: Any
Instrument: Any, although once again drummers feature prominently.
Now the world of rock and roll may have a veneer of anarchy and chaos, but it in fact has a great many rules. One of those rules is that your career must proceed in the following order:
1 – Learn an instrument
2 – Join a band
3 – Become rich and successful
4 – Enter a "Booze and Drugs Hell ™"
Some musicians, however, will break this order, and get themselves wrecked on all manner of substances before becoming famous, or even learning to play their instrument properly. Likewise, it is considered bad form to get high as a kite an hour before auditioning so that the audition coincides with your comedown from whatever dubious substance was upside your head. This condition caused one poor soul who shall remain nameless to lurch into the rehearsal room, demand that we turn off the lights, make no attempt to tune his bass, plug in into the keyboard amp by mistake, thump his strings tunelessly, complain that he couldn't hear the drummer that he was standing right next to, swear at us, and lurch out again.
6 – Mr. Jazz
"You guys don't have any songs in 9/14 time? Are you all mongs or what?"
Gender: Male
Instument: Any
There's a distinct chicken-and-egg question that needs to be asked about jazz musicians who audition for rock bands. Are sociopaths attracted to jazz music, or do the smug, vacuous melodies, interminable tedious meandering solos, and complex, unpleasant-sounding time signatures rot the areas of the brain associated with social skills? In any event, any jazz musician auditioning for or playing in a rock band considers himself to have failed, and to have to play with such lower forms of life as (spit) rock musicians damages their egos so much they must demonstrate their superiority both musically and by being a haughty, superior waste of carbon to everyone. Despite his self-assured sense of superiority, Mr. Jazz often has surprisingly poor timing, and is fond of forming side-projects that get nowhere.
7 – Genre Bigots
"This isn't emo-trip-straitedge-techno-metalcore! It's more like emo-trip-straitedge-metal-technocore! What kind of jerk plays that any more!?"
Gender: Male
Instrument: Guitar, Bass
Good musicians are always in demand. Thus to some extent they can pick and choose their bands until they find one that's right for them. This is fine as it goes, but some individuals take this too far. They only own a handful of CDs, usually by bands so obscure they haven't even heard of themselves, but nonetheless have very strong views about the kind of music they'd like to play, even if it's only audible in their head. These individuals (you can substitute the word "tossers" if you prefer) are usually around 17 and suffer from acne. They also combine bagfuls of attitude with a spectacular lack of creativity, motivation and maturity. This leads to some interesting conversations at auditions:
Us: "Shall we jam to something? Maybe a cover?"
Loser: "I don't do covers, man. Covers are for pussies."
Us: "Fine, we want to write our own material anyway. Do you have any riffs or anything you've been working on?"
Loser: [long pause] "No."
Us: "Then we'll play something and you join in then."
Loser: "I've heard your stuff already. It sucks. I just wanna play grindcore."
Us: "But we don't play grindcore. It said so on the ad you answered."
Loser: "You guys suck."
Perhaps some day they will find the three other people on earth who share the same taste in music as they do. Perhaps they will buy another CD, maybe even by a band someone's actually heard of. Or maybe they will be the musical equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to forever trudge from audition to audition in search of the mythical Sludge-ragga-giraffecore band that they're convinced must be out there somewhere for them.
8 - Failed Guitarists
"That's a nice looking guitar. Can I play it? Please??"
Gender: Male
Instrument: Bass
Being a guitarist can be tough – there are so many around that it can be hard to get a gig even if you're really good, so some opt for what seems to be the easy life, and pick up a four-string. I mean, that's 33% less strings, so that's 33% easier, right? They are easy to spot, especially at auditions. They have a cheap bass, purchased within the last six months, which they play in a furious style, at the rate of about twelve notes a second with little regard for timing. They sprinkle their conversation with references to the bands they used to play guitar for, and drop unsubtle hints about how they would like to play guitar "just for a couple of songs." If one of the band's guitarists plays a piece of music that they can't manage on the guitar, or, even worse, turns out to be a better bassist than them as well, then the death wails of their ego can be heard above even the most frenzied drumming.
9 - Flawed Geniuses
"I've written this 13-minute epic, and... Oh, it seems I forgot to put any clothes on again."
Gender: Any
Instrument: All of them. Sometimes more than one at the same time.
Nature has a habit of balancing out people's traits. That pretty girl who turned you down is probably as mad as a sack of eels. The brightest kid in the class is fat and ugly. John Prescott somehow ended up as Deputy Prime Minister, so he must have some talents, even if they only extend to blackmail and hypnosis.
So when you come across a musician who is clearly touched by the hand of genius, run away and hide, because they will have a serious flaw in their personality or general genetic makeup. It may be immediately apparent what the problem is the second they call you "braindead toilet-face", but some flaws are hidden and will only surface at the worst possible time, such as five minutes before your first gig, where they announce that unless they are allowed to play keyboards in a pink catfish costume, the invisible squirrels in their socks will unscrew their feet.
10 – The Prima Donnas
"From now on, I want you all to play your instruments backstage. You're blocking the audience's view of me."
Gender: Any, but girls do it best.
Instruments: Vocals (girls), Guitar (boys).
The Prima Donna tribe have a select choice of role models. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Prince, Yngwie Malmsteen, all people who have got what they wanted and got it in style. Because the Prima Donna clearly has as much, if not more, talent than any of these people, she (and it is nearly always she) is entitled to the very best. Whilst the guitarists struggle to untangle their leads and get their pedals working, and the drummer assembles a kit the same weight as an aircaft carrier and twice as complicated, the Prima Donna complains that no-one has yet offered her a drink and that her microphone is the wrong colour.
Of course, there are two facts that the brave or foolish may point out to the Prima Donna:
1: You are not playing Madison Square Garden, you are playing the back room of the Dog and Vomit in Romford in front of an audience consisting of reluctant members of your family and inebriated street vagrants. Therefore demanding your own makeup artist and a rider of Chateau Neuf du Pape may be considered slightly excessive.
2: Mariah Carey "didn't do stairs" and as a result now "doesn't do record sales", Whitney Houston has been in and out of rehab so often she has her own shuttle bus, Prince gave his last album away with a newspaper who supported the Nazis in World War Two, and Yngwie's last gig was in his garden shed, where he was booed offstage by woodlice. And they were all way better than you.
So, if you want to play derivative pub rock in front of exactly nobody while you lose your job, your social life, relationship (if any) and your ability to tell left from right in less than three tries, you're going to need someone to do it with you. That's where (urgh) other musicians come in. Musicians are much like orcs (go with me on this one). They're ugly, often violent, associated with axes (see!) and you wouldn't want to leave one alone in a room with a small child. And, finally, of course, they form into tribes. I've played with a lot of musicians and auditioned even more, and I think I have identified these groupings.
1 – The Unreliable.
"Don't worry, I'll be there. Maybe."
Gender: Either
Instrument: Any, though this tribe contains more drummers than you would expect statistically...
Members of the Unreliable tribe operate on a different space-time continuum to the rest of reality. Time and space have no meaning, and deadlines and soundcheck times are regarded as interesting suggestions that would be worth looking at if there weren't so many other important things to do. There are a great many variations to their M.O., ranging from turning up late every time by a predictable margin (easily counteracted, as we did with one drummer, by lying to him about what time practices were), to those who (presumably) consult their horoscope before a gig, and if Saturn is just the wrong side of Capricorn, emigrate to Ghana.
I have heard all the following explanations for lateness or no-shows at practices, or even gigs. I am not making any of these up.
"Yeah, but Arsenal were on the TV so I watched that instead."
"I thought Dover was 20 minutes from Birmingham by train. Turns out it isn't."
"I snorted some tainted cocaine and couldn't remember who I was."
"Oh yeah, I moved to Devon. I was going to tell you but my phone didn't have any credit."
"I drank two litres of vodka, crashed my car, broke my thumb, but then met a mysterious Rastafarian who healed me with his touch. Then I got arrested."
2 – The Bitter Failed Pros
"Haha, I'll laugh when you fail."
Gender: Usually male.
Instument: Any
The music business can be a cruel mistress. For every man who makes it big, a hundred will be left by the wayside, bitter hollow shells. And for some reason they will audition for your band. And only audition. They will never join your band, or any band. In fact most of the time they won't even unpack their instrument. They will just sit in the corner, drink beer, and mock the feeble, pathetic attempts of the naïve young things in front of them to conquer the music business with their out-of-tune caterwauling. They will recount (usually fictitious) anecdotes of the bands they toured with and the groupies they shagged, none of which you will ever come close to. Of course, this bravado hides the fact that they are not in a band, and you are.
3 – Paranoid Lunatics
"No you can't hear my songs. You'll steal them."
Gender: Usually Male
Instrument: Usually guitar or vocals.
The Paranoid Lunatic tribe is an offshoot of the Failed Pro tribe, but the Paranoid Lunatic has taken his failure to "make it" in a different way. He has decided that his shattered dreams are not a result of his lack of talent or highly defective personality, but because mysterious forces, possibly aliens, have intervened to ruin his career. He thus treats all bandmates with suspicion, regarding them as agents of the evil record industry who want to steal his song ideas, ruin his reputation and render him homeless. Every rehearsal becomes a stressful ordeal, as he must hide his genius, but not so much as to be thrown out. Eventually, he can take the strain no longer, and leaves, citing his bandmates' "ulterior motives" and add those bandmates to his long list of mortal enemies. This comes as a surprise to the bandmates in question, who just wanted someone to play bass on their Queen covers.
4 – Riot Grrrls
"I wrote this one about my mum. It's called 'I hate you and want to kill us both'."
Gender: Female
Instrument: Guitar, Bass, vocals.
A rare female-only tribe of musicians, Riot Grrrls learn the minimum amount necessary to play 3 chords and devote the rest of their time to learning how to shout into the microphone about things that bother them or just for its own sake. Their musical tastes generally run from Bikini Kill to L7 and back again. Most of the time they don't appear to have any reason to be so angry, apart from a residual teenage dislike of their parents, which is often the chief theme of their songwriting. Whereas many males enter rock music in order to attract girls, the Riot Grrrl either hates men for political reasons or already has a boyfriend, the more disreputable and disliked by her parents the better. Their wardrobe consists of torn jeans, faded t-shirts featuring obscene slogans, and things with spikes on them. Their instrument, by law, must be covered entirely with stickers featuring the aforementioned obscene slogans and anime characters wearing very little clothing.
5 – The Wasted
"Whuuuuuuh?"
Gender: Any
Instrument: Any, although once again drummers feature prominently.
Now the world of rock and roll may have a veneer of anarchy and chaos, but it in fact has a great many rules. One of those rules is that your career must proceed in the following order:
1 – Learn an instrument
2 – Join a band
3 – Become rich and successful
4 – Enter a "Booze and Drugs Hell ™"
Some musicians, however, will break this order, and get themselves wrecked on all manner of substances before becoming famous, or even learning to play their instrument properly. Likewise, it is considered bad form to get high as a kite an hour before auditioning so that the audition coincides with your comedown from whatever dubious substance was upside your head. This condition caused one poor soul who shall remain nameless to lurch into the rehearsal room, demand that we turn off the lights, make no attempt to tune his bass, plug in into the keyboard amp by mistake, thump his strings tunelessly, complain that he couldn't hear the drummer that he was standing right next to, swear at us, and lurch out again.
6 – Mr. Jazz
"You guys don't have any songs in 9/14 time? Are you all mongs or what?"
Gender: Male
Instument: Any
There's a distinct chicken-and-egg question that needs to be asked about jazz musicians who audition for rock bands. Are sociopaths attracted to jazz music, or do the smug, vacuous melodies, interminable tedious meandering solos, and complex, unpleasant-sounding time signatures rot the areas of the brain associated with social skills? In any event, any jazz musician auditioning for or playing in a rock band considers himself to have failed, and to have to play with such lower forms of life as (spit) rock musicians damages their egos so much they must demonstrate their superiority both musically and by being a haughty, superior waste of carbon to everyone. Despite his self-assured sense of superiority, Mr. Jazz often has surprisingly poor timing, and is fond of forming side-projects that get nowhere.
7 – Genre Bigots
"This isn't emo-trip-straitedge-techno-metalcore! It's more like emo-trip-straitedge-metal-technocore! What kind of jerk plays that any more!?"
Gender: Male
Instrument: Guitar, Bass
Good musicians are always in demand. Thus to some extent they can pick and choose their bands until they find one that's right for them. This is fine as it goes, but some individuals take this too far. They only own a handful of CDs, usually by bands so obscure they haven't even heard of themselves, but nonetheless have very strong views about the kind of music they'd like to play, even if it's only audible in their head. These individuals (you can substitute the word "tossers" if you prefer) are usually around 17 and suffer from acne. They also combine bagfuls of attitude with a spectacular lack of creativity, motivation and maturity. This leads to some interesting conversations at auditions:
Us: "Shall we jam to something? Maybe a cover?"
Loser: "I don't do covers, man. Covers are for pussies."
Us: "Fine, we want to write our own material anyway. Do you have any riffs or anything you've been working on?"
Loser: [long pause] "No."
Us: "Then we'll play something and you join in then."
Loser: "I've heard your stuff already. It sucks. I just wanna play grindcore."
Us: "But we don't play grindcore. It said so on the ad you answered."
Loser: "You guys suck."
Perhaps some day they will find the three other people on earth who share the same taste in music as they do. Perhaps they will buy another CD, maybe even by a band someone's actually heard of. Or maybe they will be the musical equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to forever trudge from audition to audition in search of the mythical Sludge-ragga-giraffecore band that they're convinced must be out there somewhere for them.
8 - Failed Guitarists
"That's a nice looking guitar. Can I play it? Please??"
Gender: Male
Instrument: Bass
Being a guitarist can be tough – there are so many around that it can be hard to get a gig even if you're really good, so some opt for what seems to be the easy life, and pick up a four-string. I mean, that's 33% less strings, so that's 33% easier, right? They are easy to spot, especially at auditions. They have a cheap bass, purchased within the last six months, which they play in a furious style, at the rate of about twelve notes a second with little regard for timing. They sprinkle their conversation with references to the bands they used to play guitar for, and drop unsubtle hints about how they would like to play guitar "just for a couple of songs." If one of the band's guitarists plays a piece of music that they can't manage on the guitar, or, even worse, turns out to be a better bassist than them as well, then the death wails of their ego can be heard above even the most frenzied drumming.
9 - Flawed Geniuses
"I've written this 13-minute epic, and... Oh, it seems I forgot to put any clothes on again."
Gender: Any
Instrument: All of them. Sometimes more than one at the same time.
Nature has a habit of balancing out people's traits. That pretty girl who turned you down is probably as mad as a sack of eels. The brightest kid in the class is fat and ugly. John Prescott somehow ended up as Deputy Prime Minister, so he must have some talents, even if they only extend to blackmail and hypnosis.
So when you come across a musician who is clearly touched by the hand of genius, run away and hide, because they will have a serious flaw in their personality or general genetic makeup. It may be immediately apparent what the problem is the second they call you "braindead toilet-face", but some flaws are hidden and will only surface at the worst possible time, such as five minutes before your first gig, where they announce that unless they are allowed to play keyboards in a pink catfish costume, the invisible squirrels in their socks will unscrew their feet.
10 – The Prima Donnas
"From now on, I want you all to play your instruments backstage. You're blocking the audience's view of me."
Gender: Any, but girls do it best.
Instruments: Vocals (girls), Guitar (boys).
The Prima Donna tribe have a select choice of role models. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Prince, Yngwie Malmsteen, all people who have got what they wanted and got it in style. Because the Prima Donna clearly has as much, if not more, talent than any of these people, she (and it is nearly always she) is entitled to the very best. Whilst the guitarists struggle to untangle their leads and get their pedals working, and the drummer assembles a kit the same weight as an aircaft carrier and twice as complicated, the Prima Donna complains that no-one has yet offered her a drink and that her microphone is the wrong colour.
Of course, there are two facts that the brave or foolish may point out to the Prima Donna:
1: You are not playing Madison Square Garden, you are playing the back room of the Dog and Vomit in Romford in front of an audience consisting of reluctant members of your family and inebriated street vagrants. Therefore demanding your own makeup artist and a rider of Chateau Neuf du Pape may be considered slightly excessive.
2: Mariah Carey "didn't do stairs" and as a result now "doesn't do record sales", Whitney Houston has been in and out of rehab so often she has her own shuttle bus, Prince gave his last album away with a newspaper who supported the Nazis in World War Two, and Yngwie's last gig was in his garden shed, where he was booed offstage by woodlice. And they were all way better than you.
Tuesday 7 October 2008
Review: PRS CE24
OK folks, it’s time for the most obvious statement of the year: relationships can be difficult. You meet that someone special, you convince yourself that you’ll be together for all time, and make all your friends vomit with levels of sticky-sweet schmaltz that would shame the end of a Robin Williams movie, and a short time later you want to pull their arms and legs off just to stop them breathing that way, dammit.
I think the problem is this – at the beginning of the relationship, you see everything through the eyes of someone who is deeply in love, and it alters your perception of reality. That slightly larger than average nose, the one that in six months will gouge into your consciousness like some kind of nasal piledriver of doom, is cute. That way she can’t pronounce her r’s is endearing, until six months later, at which point you want to fix her up to some kind of Stephen Hawking vocoder just to get her to pronounce the damn words properly. Grrr.
So basically it’s the little eccentricities that start off so appealing and end up so annoying. And so it is with the PRS CE24 I bought in late 2007.
The RRP on this axe is a hefty £1400 but yours truly managed to wangle one for £949, because of my superior charisma and charm (ok, because the shop I bought it from was about to go bust and it had a chip in the paintwork). This was a whole new level in price for me, so I had high expectations.
And boy were they met. The key points of this guitar are 100% on the money. The pickups are beyond belief. I’ve never got so much tonal versatility from a guitar. The bridge pickup screams like your girlfriend over something meaningless, like a picture of a mouse in a book or something. The neck pickup is as bluesy and melancholy as a girl moaning about how you don’t pay her enough attention, despite the fact that you have spent so much time with her that your friends hate you and your social life has gone down the plughole.
Not that I’m bitter or anything, you understand.
The neck is lightning fast and all 24 frets are easy to access (just like the toilet seat, so what’s the big deal with getting upset about leaving it up? What’s with that anyway?) As you would expect at this price, the tone and volume pots are as smooth as the skin she insists is pockmarked and ugly to justify eating ice cream to make herself feel better (just eat the damn ice-cream, I honestly don’t care any more). The hardware is excellent, and is likely to remain so for the time you have the guitar, so you don’t have to buy shiny things to keep it (her) happy.
Actually, here’s some more reasons why a PRS CE24 is better than a woman:
*It’s always curvy, no matter how old it is
*You can go back to playing your old guitar without it getting upset
*A PRS CE24 won’t object if your best mate brings his for a ‘jam session’
*It has a volume control.
Anyway, I digress. This guitar sounds awesome and plays like a dream. What more do you want?
Well, about halfway through the relationship, sorry, the article, is where the moaning starts. And it’s the little things that first seemed so good…
Take the tremolo arm. It’s based on a strat-type, but instead of a screw fitting, the bar simply slips into a rubber sleeve (har har). No twirling, no fiddling, no screwing (especially if you said the wrong thing, such as “what's wrong?”), just put it in and there it is (though she might complain about that). The only trouble is, it comes out as easily as it goes in (fnurr fnurr), and any serious wang action could leave you with your whammy bar coming off in your hand in the middle of a vital performance (ouch) There's a tiny little Allen bolt that supposedly tightens it, but I think PRS put it there just to keep you amused. It certainly doesn't do anything as far as I can tell. Maybe it's not the size, maybe I'm just not doing it right...
Even more eccentric is the pickup selector, which is a fairly standard 5-way setup, but using a rotary control (the same knob used for volume and tone). This looks pretty, but it’s almost impossible to tell what pickups are selected by looking at it, which can be infuriating. “5” is neck pickup only, whereas “8” is the two humbuckers coil-tapped and out of phase. Yeah, that's easy to figure out on stage.
Oooh, oooh, I thought of some more:
*If you don’t like the guitar’s tone, you can change it
*If the guitar is too highly-strung, you can adjust it with an Allen key
It’s not all doom and gloom about the eccentricities, though. The tuning heads incorporate some rather clever string clamps, giving you both easier string changing and better tuning stability than you usually get with a strat-type trem (though not as good as a Floyd Rose). I can’t believe that putting a little plastic doodad in the tuning heads costs a great deal, so I guess this is an example of PRS thinking just that little bit harder than other manufacturers. That’s why PRS have a user-list that’s a veritable who’s who of just about ever genre of music. And Chad Kroeger. (I bet Chad Kroeger gets loads of hot chicks, despite looking like an accident in a baboon factory. Maybe it’s because he plays a PRS. I’ll keep you updated on that one.).
*If a PRS CE24 screams, you’re doing it right, it’s not faking.
So what’s the verdict? Well, the very best relationships aren’t based on looks, or words, or petty squabbles. They’re based on mutual understanding, and how the other person makes you feel. In a truly great relationship, those, small, infuriating things don’t matter. For me, the CE24 was love at first play. I don’t care what it looks like. I don’t care that the tremolo arm has a semi-detached relationship with the actual guitar, or that the pickup selector seems to have been designed by Salvador Dali. On an intellectual level, this guitar delivers everything. It’s a disservice to this guitar to say that it can ‘do’ a Les Paul as well as it can ‘do’ a Strat. This guitar has its own voice, that is both of those things, and yet neither. That puts it on the same level as those classic designs, and considering that it’s half the price of a Les Paul that’s quite frankly astonishing. PRS may have come late to the design party, but this design, and bear in mind this is at the lower end of its prices, stands up in its own right.
But there’s something beyond that. Something that fuses with your very soul, that makes love to your fingers and soothes your troubled mind (why did she stop talking to me for a whole weekend? What did I say? Why? Why?!?”) For me at least, the CE24 feels right. We were meant to be together. And, like the very best relationships, I am prepared to overlook the imperfections, the madness, the occasional bouts of insanity, for the beautiful thing this truly is.
p.s. A PRS CE24 won’t convince itself that you don’t want it anymore if you don’t play it for a day or two
p.p.s You only need to flick a switch to turn on a PRS CE24
Verdict 5/5
Truly, madly, deeply.
I think the problem is this – at the beginning of the relationship, you see everything through the eyes of someone who is deeply in love, and it alters your perception of reality. That slightly larger than average nose, the one that in six months will gouge into your consciousness like some kind of nasal piledriver of doom, is cute. That way she can’t pronounce her r’s is endearing, until six months later, at which point you want to fix her up to some kind of Stephen Hawking vocoder just to get her to pronounce the damn words properly. Grrr.
So basically it’s the little eccentricities that start off so appealing and end up so annoying. And so it is with the PRS CE24 I bought in late 2007.
The RRP on this axe is a hefty £1400 but yours truly managed to wangle one for £949, because of my superior charisma and charm (ok, because the shop I bought it from was about to go bust and it had a chip in the paintwork). This was a whole new level in price for me, so I had high expectations.
And boy were they met. The key points of this guitar are 100% on the money. The pickups are beyond belief. I’ve never got so much tonal versatility from a guitar. The bridge pickup screams like your girlfriend over something meaningless, like a picture of a mouse in a book or something. The neck pickup is as bluesy and melancholy as a girl moaning about how you don’t pay her enough attention, despite the fact that you have spent so much time with her that your friends hate you and your social life has gone down the plughole.
Not that I’m bitter or anything, you understand.
The neck is lightning fast and all 24 frets are easy to access (just like the toilet seat, so what’s the big deal with getting upset about leaving it up? What’s with that anyway?) As you would expect at this price, the tone and volume pots are as smooth as the skin she insists is pockmarked and ugly to justify eating ice cream to make herself feel better (just eat the damn ice-cream, I honestly don’t care any more). The hardware is excellent, and is likely to remain so for the time you have the guitar, so you don’t have to buy shiny things to keep it (her) happy.
Actually, here’s some more reasons why a PRS CE24 is better than a woman:
*It’s always curvy, no matter how old it is
*You can go back to playing your old guitar without it getting upset
*A PRS CE24 won’t object if your best mate brings his for a ‘jam session’
*It has a volume control.
Anyway, I digress. This guitar sounds awesome and plays like a dream. What more do you want?
Well, about halfway through the relationship, sorry, the article, is where the moaning starts. And it’s the little things that first seemed so good…
Take the tremolo arm. It’s based on a strat-type, but instead of a screw fitting, the bar simply slips into a rubber sleeve (har har). No twirling, no fiddling, no screwing (especially if you said the wrong thing, such as “what's wrong?”), just put it in and there it is (though she might complain about that). The only trouble is, it comes out as easily as it goes in (fnurr fnurr), and any serious wang action could leave you with your whammy bar coming off in your hand in the middle of a vital performance (ouch) There's a tiny little Allen bolt that supposedly tightens it, but I think PRS put it there just to keep you amused. It certainly doesn't do anything as far as I can tell. Maybe it's not the size, maybe I'm just not doing it right...
Even more eccentric is the pickup selector, which is a fairly standard 5-way setup, but using a rotary control (the same knob used for volume and tone). This looks pretty, but it’s almost impossible to tell what pickups are selected by looking at it, which can be infuriating. “5” is neck pickup only, whereas “8” is the two humbuckers coil-tapped and out of phase. Yeah, that's easy to figure out on stage.
Oooh, oooh, I thought of some more:
*If you don’t like the guitar’s tone, you can change it
*If the guitar is too highly-strung, you can adjust it with an Allen key
It’s not all doom and gloom about the eccentricities, though. The tuning heads incorporate some rather clever string clamps, giving you both easier string changing and better tuning stability than you usually get with a strat-type trem (though not as good as a Floyd Rose). I can’t believe that putting a little plastic doodad in the tuning heads costs a great deal, so I guess this is an example of PRS thinking just that little bit harder than other manufacturers. That’s why PRS have a user-list that’s a veritable who’s who of just about ever genre of music. And Chad Kroeger. (I bet Chad Kroeger gets loads of hot chicks, despite looking like an accident in a baboon factory. Maybe it’s because he plays a PRS. I’ll keep you updated on that one.).
*If a PRS CE24 screams, you’re doing it right, it’s not faking.
So what’s the verdict? Well, the very best relationships aren’t based on looks, or words, or petty squabbles. They’re based on mutual understanding, and how the other person makes you feel. In a truly great relationship, those, small, infuriating things don’t matter. For me, the CE24 was love at first play. I don’t care what it looks like. I don’t care that the tremolo arm has a semi-detached relationship with the actual guitar, or that the pickup selector seems to have been designed by Salvador Dali. On an intellectual level, this guitar delivers everything. It’s a disservice to this guitar to say that it can ‘do’ a Les Paul as well as it can ‘do’ a Strat. This guitar has its own voice, that is both of those things, and yet neither. That puts it on the same level as those classic designs, and considering that it’s half the price of a Les Paul that’s quite frankly astonishing. PRS may have come late to the design party, but this design, and bear in mind this is at the lower end of its prices, stands up in its own right.
But there’s something beyond that. Something that fuses with your very soul, that makes love to your fingers and soothes your troubled mind (why did she stop talking to me for a whole weekend? What did I say? Why? Why?!?”) For me at least, the CE24 feels right. We were meant to be together. And, like the very best relationships, I am prepared to overlook the imperfections, the madness, the occasional bouts of insanity, for the beautiful thing this truly is.
p.s. A PRS CE24 won’t convince itself that you don’t want it anymore if you don’t play it for a day or two
p.p.s You only need to flick a switch to turn on a PRS CE24
Verdict 5/5
Truly, madly, deeply.
Wednesday 1 October 2008
Review: Danelectro Fabtone Distortion
Some things just don't seem to go together. Bananas and Marmite for example – a friend of mine at primary school used to eat Marmite-smeared bananas so that he would violently throw up and get to avoid school (Of course, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, any schoolboy can now easily achieve the same effect by performing a Google image search for Chad Kroeger, and no bananas get hurt). Chalk and cheese. Simon Cowell and likeability.
However, some things that seem like they shouldn't go together end up working very well. Take Shane McGowan. His face looks like it lost an argument with a cluster bomb, he drinks enough to qualify as a member of the Politburo and has a voice like a zombie gargling battery acid. Yet somehow he is a professional vocalist, and a very good one. All the ingredients are wrong, and yet the final product is somehow right. I have a friend who is a skinny, ginger, nerdy-voiced, buck-toothed computer programmer called Kevin, who is also, somehow, the coolest man in the universe, with hordes of girls fighting over him. Everyone who meets him agrees on his coolness, yet they are all mystified as to its origin. Sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts.
What I have in front of me here is a heavy metal distortion pedal made by Danelectro. Read that sentence again. This is Danelectro, a company that produces an EQ pedal called “Fish and Chips” and builds guitars that Aristotle would call Retro. I'm pretty sure that their entire board of directors consists of former Happy Days cast members. Now the whole “50's Diner” vibe is great if you're playing echoey surf rock in the background of a Tarantino film, but this pedal purports to produce a high-gain modern metal wall of distortion, whilst looking like a spare part for a Cadillac. Now this really shouldn't work, but as we know, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. So, are we talking Shane McGowan or Chad Kroeger?
First up, this is a big, chunky, heavy pedal that looks like it could survive the climactic gunfight in any good Tarantino film. Everything is controlled by big, chunky, good ol' American hunks o' metal with no mussin' aroun'. If Jimmy Hoffa had a pedal, this would be his pedal.
OK, let's plug it in and...
JESUS H. CHRIST!!!
OK, now I've scraped the last of my entrails off the wall, apologised to the neighbours and convinced the local constabulary that I'm not testing nuclear weapons in my bedroom, allow me to share my first two conclusions about this pedal:
1 – This pedal turns itself on when you plug it in.
2 – This is very possibly the loudest pedal in the known universe.
We can only pray that Kim Jong Il is not developing a pedal such as this. The big round metal button in the middle of the Fabtone unleashes more destructive power than the big red button in the Oval Office. The sheer quantity of gain this pedal puts out almost defies belief. That heavy, chunky metal case is evidently not there to protect the pedal's innards – it's to prevent whatever demonically-enhanced circuitry, possibly a portal to a dimension of pure noise, a dimension where the controls on the amps start at 11, resides within from escaping and possessing your family pets.
OK, so it's clearly very, very loud. Does it sound any good? Well, the unhelpful answer at this stage is that it depends.
The first thing it depends on is how you set the EQ on the pedal. The Fabtone has to have the most unbalanced EQ controls of anything ever, especially the treble control. Anything over about ¼ is unacceptably glassy and harsh, and anything over about ½ surely violates the Geneva Convention. Seriously, if you are ever captured by some third-world dictator and placed in one of his horrible torture camps, it's not the thumbscrews or the gouging knives you should be looking out for, it's a Danelectro Fabtone with the treble control all the way up. Then you know you're in real trouble. The bass control, on the other hand, needs to be set at at least ½, preferably ¾, before you start getting any real bottom end. There's also a third control, called, this being a Dano pedal, “Fab”. According to the manual, this does something about sustaining the distortion or something like that (it's not a distortion control – that seems to be set to infinity by default). All I could work out is that it seemed to make something already face-kickingly loud slightly louder. So, me being me, I set it as high as it would go and left it there.
The other thing the sound depends on, critically, is your amp. There seems to be no logic or reason to what amps this sounds good through and what it sounds bad through. As far as valve amps go, through a Marshall JCM800 stack it was superb. Through a Mesa Dual Rectifier it was horrible, but through a Roland Jazz Chorus it was great again. Almost any large transistor-amp will produce a horrible, tinny buzzing monstrosity of a tone, but my dinky little Peavey keyboard amp creates a great sound. Through my Marshall AVT50 hybrid combo it sounds fantastic, but through my near-identical VS100 combo it sounds horrible. All I'd say is try before you buy, with the exact model of amp you will be putting it through.
But when you finally hit the sweet spot with the right EQ settings and the right amp, this is an amazing-sounding pedal, producing a deep, rich, saturated tone reminiscent of an overcooked Mesa triple-rec, and with a detuned or 7-string guitar, epic, sweeping soundscapes reminiscent of later Deftones albums can be yours without massively expensive equipment (or a spectacular cannabis habit). Turn the treble up (very, very slightly, you don't want to frighten the horses) and add a little reverb and you're in Gary Moore/EVH territory, the super-saturated gain giving you massive sustain and huge harmonics, rewarding shred techniques and massive chords alike. Cut the bass a bit and you're into early Metallica thrash sounds.
It's not all good news sonically, though. This is one hell of a noisy pedal. Even with the guitar's volume at zero, the sound from your amp is not so much hiss as the sound of Niagra Falls in a thunderstorm. In a rehearsal studio situation, it's loud enough to drown out conversation. Should you be foolish enough to actually turn your guitar up, even with the strings muted, the hiss becomes a shrieking wail of uncontrollable feedback – the only way to achieve short, stabby chords is to time your chords with pressing the big round button o' doom with your foot so that the pedal is only on when the strings are vibrating. This is quite hard. A noise gate helps, but not a lot. On another note, unsurprisingly for a pedal with so much ear-smashing power, it eats batteries for breakfast, so get a power supply.
So, underneath all the cutesy 50's styling, this is a raging, rabid monster of a pedal that you don't so much play as desperately try to keep under control. It's (occasionally) wonderful sound is spoiled to a big extent by its raw, uncontrollable power and its infuriating habit of turning itself on when you plug a cable into its input (this pedal really needs a separate on/off switch. And a health warning. And a 2-mile exclusion zone). So, ironically for a company that makes pedals called Grilled Cheese, Corned Beef and BLT, they've overcooked this one a bit.
Verdict: 3/5
Boom shake the room.
However, some things that seem like they shouldn't go together end up working very well. Take Shane McGowan. His face looks like it lost an argument with a cluster bomb, he drinks enough to qualify as a member of the Politburo and has a voice like a zombie gargling battery acid. Yet somehow he is a professional vocalist, and a very good one. All the ingredients are wrong, and yet the final product is somehow right. I have a friend who is a skinny, ginger, nerdy-voiced, buck-toothed computer programmer called Kevin, who is also, somehow, the coolest man in the universe, with hordes of girls fighting over him. Everyone who meets him agrees on his coolness, yet they are all mystified as to its origin. Sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts.
What I have in front of me here is a heavy metal distortion pedal made by Danelectro. Read that sentence again. This is Danelectro, a company that produces an EQ pedal called “Fish and Chips” and builds guitars that Aristotle would call Retro. I'm pretty sure that their entire board of directors consists of former Happy Days cast members. Now the whole “50's Diner” vibe is great if you're playing echoey surf rock in the background of a Tarantino film, but this pedal purports to produce a high-gain modern metal wall of distortion, whilst looking like a spare part for a Cadillac. Now this really shouldn't work, but as we know, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. So, are we talking Shane McGowan or Chad Kroeger?
First up, this is a big, chunky, heavy pedal that looks like it could survive the climactic gunfight in any good Tarantino film. Everything is controlled by big, chunky, good ol' American hunks o' metal with no mussin' aroun'. If Jimmy Hoffa had a pedal, this would be his pedal.
OK, let's plug it in and...
JESUS H. CHRIST!!!
OK, now I've scraped the last of my entrails off the wall, apologised to the neighbours and convinced the local constabulary that I'm not testing nuclear weapons in my bedroom, allow me to share my first two conclusions about this pedal:
1 – This pedal turns itself on when you plug it in.
2 – This is very possibly the loudest pedal in the known universe.
We can only pray that Kim Jong Il is not developing a pedal such as this. The big round metal button in the middle of the Fabtone unleashes more destructive power than the big red button in the Oval Office. The sheer quantity of gain this pedal puts out almost defies belief. That heavy, chunky metal case is evidently not there to protect the pedal's innards – it's to prevent whatever demonically-enhanced circuitry, possibly a portal to a dimension of pure noise, a dimension where the controls on the amps start at 11, resides within from escaping and possessing your family pets.
OK, so it's clearly very, very loud. Does it sound any good? Well, the unhelpful answer at this stage is that it depends.
The first thing it depends on is how you set the EQ on the pedal. The Fabtone has to have the most unbalanced EQ controls of anything ever, especially the treble control. Anything over about ¼ is unacceptably glassy and harsh, and anything over about ½ surely violates the Geneva Convention. Seriously, if you are ever captured by some third-world dictator and placed in one of his horrible torture camps, it's not the thumbscrews or the gouging knives you should be looking out for, it's a Danelectro Fabtone with the treble control all the way up. Then you know you're in real trouble. The bass control, on the other hand, needs to be set at at least ½, preferably ¾, before you start getting any real bottom end. There's also a third control, called, this being a Dano pedal, “Fab”. According to the manual, this does something about sustaining the distortion or something like that (it's not a distortion control – that seems to be set to infinity by default). All I could work out is that it seemed to make something already face-kickingly loud slightly louder. So, me being me, I set it as high as it would go and left it there.
The other thing the sound depends on, critically, is your amp. There seems to be no logic or reason to what amps this sounds good through and what it sounds bad through. As far as valve amps go, through a Marshall JCM800 stack it was superb. Through a Mesa Dual Rectifier it was horrible, but through a Roland Jazz Chorus it was great again. Almost any large transistor-amp will produce a horrible, tinny buzzing monstrosity of a tone, but my dinky little Peavey keyboard amp creates a great sound. Through my Marshall AVT50 hybrid combo it sounds fantastic, but through my near-identical VS100 combo it sounds horrible. All I'd say is try before you buy, with the exact model of amp you will be putting it through.
But when you finally hit the sweet spot with the right EQ settings and the right amp, this is an amazing-sounding pedal, producing a deep, rich, saturated tone reminiscent of an overcooked Mesa triple-rec, and with a detuned or 7-string guitar, epic, sweeping soundscapes reminiscent of later Deftones albums can be yours without massively expensive equipment (or a spectacular cannabis habit). Turn the treble up (very, very slightly, you don't want to frighten the horses) and add a little reverb and you're in Gary Moore/EVH territory, the super-saturated gain giving you massive sustain and huge harmonics, rewarding shred techniques and massive chords alike. Cut the bass a bit and you're into early Metallica thrash sounds.
It's not all good news sonically, though. This is one hell of a noisy pedal. Even with the guitar's volume at zero, the sound from your amp is not so much hiss as the sound of Niagra Falls in a thunderstorm. In a rehearsal studio situation, it's loud enough to drown out conversation. Should you be foolish enough to actually turn your guitar up, even with the strings muted, the hiss becomes a shrieking wail of uncontrollable feedback – the only way to achieve short, stabby chords is to time your chords with pressing the big round button o' doom with your foot so that the pedal is only on when the strings are vibrating. This is quite hard. A noise gate helps, but not a lot. On another note, unsurprisingly for a pedal with so much ear-smashing power, it eats batteries for breakfast, so get a power supply.
So, underneath all the cutesy 50's styling, this is a raging, rabid monster of a pedal that you don't so much play as desperately try to keep under control. It's (occasionally) wonderful sound is spoiled to a big extent by its raw, uncontrollable power and its infuriating habit of turning itself on when you plug a cable into its input (this pedal really needs a separate on/off switch. And a health warning. And a 2-mile exclusion zone). So, ironically for a company that makes pedals called Grilled Cheese, Corned Beef and BLT, they've overcooked this one a bit.
Verdict: 3/5
Boom shake the room.
Tuesday 30 September 2008
Review: Fender Mexican Telecaster
Fender Mexican Telecaster
Let’s face it, Telecasters have a severe image problem. Telecasters are not cool, they are not sexy, they are not hip. I know that you will at this point wave your arms and pull faces at me, giving a long list of top dudes from the most happenin’ bands on the planet who pack a Tele with attitude, but I don’t care. Think Telecaster and the image that comes into your head is not Tom Morello or Lee Glaze, but Francis Rossi, or, worse, Garth Brooks. Albert Collins, the man they dub “the Master of the Telecaster” was last cool round about the same time that the woolly mammoth died out. Telecasters are associated with tedious Country and Western, over-serious blues noodling, and bad ponytails. It is no co-incidence that Andy Summers plays a Telecaster. As cool and hip celebrity rock n' roll endorsements go, Andy Summers is right up there with Prince Phillip.
Of course, it is not Fender’s fault. Uncool people buy guitars just as much as cool people, and Fender have happily been handing them over to personality-free people making personality-free music for decades now (Travis and Coldplay have amassed about twelve thousand between them, apparently). They have even, particularly in the 70’s and 80’s, attempted to make ‘cool’ Telecasters, festooning them with whammy bars, lurid paint schemes, overcooked humbuckers, f-holes and pointy headstocks. They sold about four of them, because, as any fule no, adding cool bits to something that is not cool, just makes it embarrassing, like a Trabant with a spoiler, or a politician with a baseball cap. The cool and happenin’ dudes of the time, took one look, laughed heartily, and went back to their pointy Washburns and heroin addictions.
So the Telecaster has been pretty much unchanged since Wilma Flintstone looked at the prototype and said it looked ‘a bit last year’. Fender, having realised that they are doomed to churn out the same tedious square piece of wood for all eternity, quite sensibly outsourced much of the production to Mexico, so that they wouldn’t have to look at the damn things quite so much. The Mexicans managed to cut the production costs to the extent that you can now be spanking your own plank here in Blighty for as little as £300. Have they sacrificed quality? You might think that it’s not actually possible to get such a basic guitar design wrong, seeing as Telecaster wiring diagrams are available on the floor of Roman villas in mosaic form, but it can, with a great degree of effort, be achieved. Encore, for example, managed such a feat by fitting theirs with the very worst pickups in the entire universe, resulting in an instrument that squealed with feedback if it was so much left in the same room as an amplifier, during a power cut.
Sadly, it seems that Fender’s Mexican suppliers haven’t had that much imagination, and this instrument is solid and well built. The electrics are flawless, no bits are falling off, and everything fits together very well. This example is in fascinating ‘Black’, and other vibrant colours available include ‘Blue’, ‘White’ and, for those that can stand the excitement, ‘Sunburst’.
Plug in and you are treated to the whole gamut of Telecaster tones, from “twangy” to “twangalicious” from two single-coil pickups that are free from noise and well-balanced. Your audience will be pleased to note, as their stomachs surge up through their spinal columns in attempt to strangle their ears, that your country pickin’ rendition of “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain” is delivered with crystal clarity and excellent string balance. And should you push the boat out for a rousing rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree”, and turn the gain on your amp up to an ear-splitting two-and-a-half, that the tone and character of the guitar (and sadly your own) pushes clearly through the overdrive.
The strings are a bit close together for my fat fingers, but the action is low yet buzz-free, implying neck geometry and fretwork of a very high standard. Make no mistake about it, this is a quality instrument, and considering that is costs less than ‘cheap’ imitation designs from the likes of Tokai and Fernandes, whilst being of at least equal if not superior quality, it represents remarkable value for money. Therefore if you’re going to commit credibility suicide, or if you regularly wear a cowboy hat without irony, you’re best off going for an original, at least at this price. I’ve played an American-built Tele before (I was drunk and it wasn’t mine, ok?) and I honestly can’t say that it was significantly better than this, certainly not enough to justify paying almost three times the price. It would be a great guitar for the studio, partly for its crystal-clear tone and versatility, but mostly because that way no-one will see you play it.
So do you still want to buy a Telecaster? Consider the following facts:
1.Ryan Peake, rhythm guitarist in Nickleback, plays a Telecaster.
2.Ryan Peake is even less cool than Chad Kroeger.
3.Chad Kroeger looks like a gargoyle trying to swallow a squirrel.
Ryan Peake (in common with many things, including the majority of mummified corpses), is less ugly than Chad Kroeger. Chad, however, plays that most fashionable of instruments, a PRS. Therefore, Ryan’s relative lack of coolness must be down to his choice of guitar, implying that playing a Telecaster is about as good for your social stature as organising a Gary Glitter benefit gig.
So yes, this is a quality guitar with character. Sadly the character is that of the assistant manager of the Swindon branch of Endsleigh insurance.
Verdict 4/5
A great guitar that will lose friends and alienate people.
Let’s face it, Telecasters have a severe image problem. Telecasters are not cool, they are not sexy, they are not hip. I know that you will at this point wave your arms and pull faces at me, giving a long list of top dudes from the most happenin’ bands on the planet who pack a Tele with attitude, but I don’t care. Think Telecaster and the image that comes into your head is not Tom Morello or Lee Glaze, but Francis Rossi, or, worse, Garth Brooks. Albert Collins, the man they dub “the Master of the Telecaster” was last cool round about the same time that the woolly mammoth died out. Telecasters are associated with tedious Country and Western, over-serious blues noodling, and bad ponytails. It is no co-incidence that Andy Summers plays a Telecaster. As cool and hip celebrity rock n' roll endorsements go, Andy Summers is right up there with Prince Phillip.
Of course, it is not Fender’s fault. Uncool people buy guitars just as much as cool people, and Fender have happily been handing them over to personality-free people making personality-free music for decades now (Travis and Coldplay have amassed about twelve thousand between them, apparently). They have even, particularly in the 70’s and 80’s, attempted to make ‘cool’ Telecasters, festooning them with whammy bars, lurid paint schemes, overcooked humbuckers, f-holes and pointy headstocks. They sold about four of them, because, as any fule no, adding cool bits to something that is not cool, just makes it embarrassing, like a Trabant with a spoiler, or a politician with a baseball cap. The cool and happenin’ dudes of the time, took one look, laughed heartily, and went back to their pointy Washburns and heroin addictions.
So the Telecaster has been pretty much unchanged since Wilma Flintstone looked at the prototype and said it looked ‘a bit last year’. Fender, having realised that they are doomed to churn out the same tedious square piece of wood for all eternity, quite sensibly outsourced much of the production to Mexico, so that they wouldn’t have to look at the damn things quite so much. The Mexicans managed to cut the production costs to the extent that you can now be spanking your own plank here in Blighty for as little as £300. Have they sacrificed quality? You might think that it’s not actually possible to get such a basic guitar design wrong, seeing as Telecaster wiring diagrams are available on the floor of Roman villas in mosaic form, but it can, with a great degree of effort, be achieved. Encore, for example, managed such a feat by fitting theirs with the very worst pickups in the entire universe, resulting in an instrument that squealed with feedback if it was so much left in the same room as an amplifier, during a power cut.
Sadly, it seems that Fender’s Mexican suppliers haven’t had that much imagination, and this instrument is solid and well built. The electrics are flawless, no bits are falling off, and everything fits together very well. This example is in fascinating ‘Black’, and other vibrant colours available include ‘Blue’, ‘White’ and, for those that can stand the excitement, ‘Sunburst’.
Plug in and you are treated to the whole gamut of Telecaster tones, from “twangy” to “twangalicious” from two single-coil pickups that are free from noise and well-balanced. Your audience will be pleased to note, as their stomachs surge up through their spinal columns in attempt to strangle their ears, that your country pickin’ rendition of “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain” is delivered with crystal clarity and excellent string balance. And should you push the boat out for a rousing rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree”, and turn the gain on your amp up to an ear-splitting two-and-a-half, that the tone and character of the guitar (and sadly your own) pushes clearly through the overdrive.
The strings are a bit close together for my fat fingers, but the action is low yet buzz-free, implying neck geometry and fretwork of a very high standard. Make no mistake about it, this is a quality instrument, and considering that is costs less than ‘cheap’ imitation designs from the likes of Tokai and Fernandes, whilst being of at least equal if not superior quality, it represents remarkable value for money. Therefore if you’re going to commit credibility suicide, or if you regularly wear a cowboy hat without irony, you’re best off going for an original, at least at this price. I’ve played an American-built Tele before (I was drunk and it wasn’t mine, ok?) and I honestly can’t say that it was significantly better than this, certainly not enough to justify paying almost three times the price. It would be a great guitar for the studio, partly for its crystal-clear tone and versatility, but mostly because that way no-one will see you play it.
So do you still want to buy a Telecaster? Consider the following facts:
1.Ryan Peake, rhythm guitarist in Nickleback, plays a Telecaster.
2.Ryan Peake is even less cool than Chad Kroeger.
3.Chad Kroeger looks like a gargoyle trying to swallow a squirrel.
Ryan Peake (in common with many things, including the majority of mummified corpses), is less ugly than Chad Kroeger. Chad, however, plays that most fashionable of instruments, a PRS. Therefore, Ryan’s relative lack of coolness must be down to his choice of guitar, implying that playing a Telecaster is about as good for your social stature as organising a Gary Glitter benefit gig.
So yes, this is a quality guitar with character. Sadly the character is that of the assistant manager of the Swindon branch of Endsleigh insurance.
Verdict 4/5
A great guitar that will lose friends and alienate people.
Review: Line6 Variax 600
Do you remember, back in 2002 or so, when the Variax came out? Every magazine put it on its front cover, whole issues were devoted to relentlessly brown-nosing Line6, it was universally hailed as the Future of the Guitar™. We, the buying public, were told that if we did not all go out immediately buy this marvellous piece of technology, the stereotype held by all ‘serious’ guitar people (ones who write for magazines), that all guitarists are conservative luddites who want our guitars to look and play the same way they did when Noah was making a nice little earner selling Stratocasters hewn out of offcuts, would be forever proven true and that the government would have to force people to buy them under pain of imprisonment so that we could all march on to musical heaven.
Which of course was nonsense. Guitarists, as well as other musicians, are always willing to embrace new designs or technology if it’s any good. Amp modellers, transistor-amps, locking trems, peizo pickups and wireless systems were all rapidly adopted by amateurs and professionals alike, either because they were cheaper or more practical than existing options or let you make a new and interesting sound – Line6's own POD was a massive success as it made practicing, recording and even performing, much easier and cheaper. Guitarists love to push the boundaries, of sound, overall volume and acceptable behaviour, but they’ll only turn to something new if it’s any good. Which brings me to the Variax.
Well, six years down the line, I think it’s safe to say that, comrades, the revolution has been postponed. I have never seen a professional musician use one live – the closest I came was seeing a session musician backing a DJ on Jools Holland’s show using the bass version. They’re not, even with new and improved models featuring such radical new ideas as a tremolo arm and a slightly more heterosexual design, exactly flying off the shelves, and have at the most a niche market. Tellingly, no other manufacturer has attempted to produce a rival, even Yamaha, whose massive financial resources and track record in peizo systems, sampling and synthesisers would make them ideally placed to take on that market.
For those of you who this has passed by (and, to the shock of the guitar journos, that may be more than a handful of amnesiacs and recovered coma victims), the Variax is a ‘modelling’ guitar. By means of a few switches and a dial on the guitar, you can ‘call up’ any one of 25 different simulated guitars, with various pickup switching options as well. Models on offer range from Teles and Strats to resonators, acoustics, and even a sitar. So, it's a bit like a keyboard that can be a trumpet, piano or oboe depending on which button you press, you know, like in the 80's, except that it's like only offering 25 kinds of piano and maybe (gasp) a harpsichord.
But to listen to the music press at the time, it was the beginning of a whole new paradigm. With thousands of pounds worth of guitars available at the flick of a switch on an instrument costing just £700, we were all going to burn our oh-so-yesterday Les Pauls and Rickenbackers, because this was the only guitar we’d ever need. Any parallel between this and Line6’s marketing blurb, or between the content of the magazines that came out at the time and what would have happened if the mags just let Line6 write the entire issue for them while they went down the pub instead, is, of course, purely in the eye of the beholder.
A lot of guitar ‘experts’ were made to look pretty silly. A great deal of guitarists, me included, wandered down to their local guitar shop to see what all the fuss was about, played one, though “nah”, and carried on with whatever they happened to be doing. The ‘experts’ were left scratching their heads, either wondering why or castigating the guitar-playing public for failing to appreciate the genius of Line6’s marketing department, sorry, the guitar. So why didn’t it perform commercially the way they said it would?
For a start, as guitarists rapidly discovered, playing one made you look like an absolute tool. Few convincing revolutions look like a 25-year-old Danelectro design left out in the rain. Line6 had obviously decided that a ‘neutral’ look would be best, so that they could sell it to everyone. Of course, that resulted in no-one liking the design, which was uninspired and limp. Truly revolutionary guitars break new ground in design. The Strat and Les Paul, to name but two, were design classics as much as great guitars to play and listen to. The Variax looks as if it was designed by a washing machine salesman. Now I’m the first to rant against shallowness and putting image before music, but this is showbusiness, and looks are very much part of the package. Would Slash be such a legend if he had a short back and sides and wore a suit? Of course not. Now picture him playing a Variax. The problem suddenly comes into focus…
Nor will a Variax make you sound like Slash, either. Partly because Slash is way better than you, but also because you can dial in the right Les Paul and the right amp settings into your POD, but you’ll still be playing a Variax. Part of the Les Paul’s sound comes from its relatively high action, responsive fretboard and massive body sustain, and the Variax has none of these. A Les Paul sounds different from a Strat partly because it has different sound dynamics, but also because players play it differently, due to its shape, size, neck dimensions, weight and the way it responds when you play it. Whatever the knobs on the Variax tell you you’re playing, your hands tell you you’re still playing a cheap Strat, which is what the Variax feels like, and that will affect the way you play, and therefore how you sound. Slash playing a Variax wouldn’t sound like Slash playing a Les Paul, he’d sound like Slash playing a Variax that sounds like a Les Paul. And then he’d hunt down and murder anyone who had photographs of him doing it.
It seems that the geeks at Line6 were so obsessed with their modelling and clever software that they forgot they were making a guitar. This is why the music journos missed the point as well. Most of them are descended from bedroom noodlers. You know the type. Know every scale, study the theory, can disassemble and reassemble a guitar in 5 minutes flat, but lack a creative bone in their bodies and have never played in a band. I knew some at university who were technically stunning, but couldn’t even play standing up. They were often maths and engineering students, with mathematical minds that could recreate anything, learn any scale, but not break out of their own comfort zone into something new. (Apropos of nothing, they tended to like Dream Theater.) To people like this, I’m sure the Variax was very appealing – they could recreate more things, imitate more things, and the fact that they looked like a berk was irrelevant because no-one was watching. The ones who went professional became session musicians, or, more tellingly, guitar journalists.
I’m not saying for an instant that the Variax doesn’t do what it says on the tin. The sounds, by and large, sound right (except the 12-string and sitar, which are almost unlistenable), and it offers a lot of different tones, although there's nothing on offer with active pickups, or any baritones. I’m sure that if you’re in your home studio, recording advertising jingles or whatever, a Variax offers you tremendous flexibility to produce a lot of different sounds that suit whatever it is you want to record. But for anyone playing in front of actual human brings, it’s very different. Especially at the rock/metal end of the spectrum, most gigs are so loud and the sound quality so bad that any subtlety in tone is entirely lost on the audience. If you saw Zakk Wylde playing a Variax, you wouldn’t think “wow, that sounds like a Les Paul”, you’d think “Wow, I wonder what criminal organisation are holding his family hostage and forcing him to play something that makes him look like such a dweeb?”, and notice that he can’t shred because of the Variax’s middle-of-the road setup, 22 weedy frets and cheap-feeling neck.
There are other problems too, like the fact that the software can’t cope with alternative tunings and you have to pay a whole load of a lot more for the privilege of a rubbish whammy bar, but the big problem here is one of philosophy. All the Variax does is imitate that which has already come before. The truly revolutionary instruments, and I just don’t mean guitars, were those that could let you make a sound that you could never make before. Think of the truly revolutionary guitarists, the great innovators – Hendrix, Van Halen, May, Morello, Bellamy. Aside from pushing the boundaries of the guitar’s sound into uncharted territory, they all either built their own instruments or used conventional ones in a way no-one had done before. They couldn’t have done that with a Variax – it actually relies on you playing within the limits of conventional playing and technique in order to function.
The Variax could not be the future because all it did was imitate the past. It didn’t do something new, it just did something old in a way that was cheaper, but not as good, as how it could be done before. The technology and the opportunity exist today to create new sounds and ways to use them. Much as keyboard synthesisers did in the 80’s, guitar manufacturers can look at this technology not as a way of saying “how can we make this guitar sound like another one” but “how can we make this guitar sound like one that doesn’t exist?” Guitar synths have a terrible reputation gained in the 80’s, when they were unwieldy, unreliable and ludicrously expensive. But that isn’t the case now, and I think that the truly creative companies will make great strides in this direction.
So, the Variax failed to take over the world, not because guitarists didn’t want to innovate, but rather because they did.
Verdict 3/5
Your revolution is a joke.
Which of course was nonsense. Guitarists, as well as other musicians, are always willing to embrace new designs or technology if it’s any good. Amp modellers, transistor-amps, locking trems, peizo pickups and wireless systems were all rapidly adopted by amateurs and professionals alike, either because they were cheaper or more practical than existing options or let you make a new and interesting sound – Line6's own POD was a massive success as it made practicing, recording and even performing, much easier and cheaper. Guitarists love to push the boundaries, of sound, overall volume and acceptable behaviour, but they’ll only turn to something new if it’s any good. Which brings me to the Variax.
Well, six years down the line, I think it’s safe to say that, comrades, the revolution has been postponed. I have never seen a professional musician use one live – the closest I came was seeing a session musician backing a DJ on Jools Holland’s show using the bass version. They’re not, even with new and improved models featuring such radical new ideas as a tremolo arm and a slightly more heterosexual design, exactly flying off the shelves, and have at the most a niche market. Tellingly, no other manufacturer has attempted to produce a rival, even Yamaha, whose massive financial resources and track record in peizo systems, sampling and synthesisers would make them ideally placed to take on that market.
For those of you who this has passed by (and, to the shock of the guitar journos, that may be more than a handful of amnesiacs and recovered coma victims), the Variax is a ‘modelling’ guitar. By means of a few switches and a dial on the guitar, you can ‘call up’ any one of 25 different simulated guitars, with various pickup switching options as well. Models on offer range from Teles and Strats to resonators, acoustics, and even a sitar. So, it's a bit like a keyboard that can be a trumpet, piano or oboe depending on which button you press, you know, like in the 80's, except that it's like only offering 25 kinds of piano and maybe (gasp) a harpsichord.
But to listen to the music press at the time, it was the beginning of a whole new paradigm. With thousands of pounds worth of guitars available at the flick of a switch on an instrument costing just £700, we were all going to burn our oh-so-yesterday Les Pauls and Rickenbackers, because this was the only guitar we’d ever need. Any parallel between this and Line6’s marketing blurb, or between the content of the magazines that came out at the time and what would have happened if the mags just let Line6 write the entire issue for them while they went down the pub instead, is, of course, purely in the eye of the beholder.
A lot of guitar ‘experts’ were made to look pretty silly. A great deal of guitarists, me included, wandered down to their local guitar shop to see what all the fuss was about, played one, though “nah”, and carried on with whatever they happened to be doing. The ‘experts’ were left scratching their heads, either wondering why or castigating the guitar-playing public for failing to appreciate the genius of Line6’s marketing department, sorry, the guitar. So why didn’t it perform commercially the way they said it would?
For a start, as guitarists rapidly discovered, playing one made you look like an absolute tool. Few convincing revolutions look like a 25-year-old Danelectro design left out in the rain. Line6 had obviously decided that a ‘neutral’ look would be best, so that they could sell it to everyone. Of course, that resulted in no-one liking the design, which was uninspired and limp. Truly revolutionary guitars break new ground in design. The Strat and Les Paul, to name but two, were design classics as much as great guitars to play and listen to. The Variax looks as if it was designed by a washing machine salesman. Now I’m the first to rant against shallowness and putting image before music, but this is showbusiness, and looks are very much part of the package. Would Slash be such a legend if he had a short back and sides and wore a suit? Of course not. Now picture him playing a Variax. The problem suddenly comes into focus…
Nor will a Variax make you sound like Slash, either. Partly because Slash is way better than you, but also because you can dial in the right Les Paul and the right amp settings into your POD, but you’ll still be playing a Variax. Part of the Les Paul’s sound comes from its relatively high action, responsive fretboard and massive body sustain, and the Variax has none of these. A Les Paul sounds different from a Strat partly because it has different sound dynamics, but also because players play it differently, due to its shape, size, neck dimensions, weight and the way it responds when you play it. Whatever the knobs on the Variax tell you you’re playing, your hands tell you you’re still playing a cheap Strat, which is what the Variax feels like, and that will affect the way you play, and therefore how you sound. Slash playing a Variax wouldn’t sound like Slash playing a Les Paul, he’d sound like Slash playing a Variax that sounds like a Les Paul. And then he’d hunt down and murder anyone who had photographs of him doing it.
It seems that the geeks at Line6 were so obsessed with their modelling and clever software that they forgot they were making a guitar. This is why the music journos missed the point as well. Most of them are descended from bedroom noodlers. You know the type. Know every scale, study the theory, can disassemble and reassemble a guitar in 5 minutes flat, but lack a creative bone in their bodies and have never played in a band. I knew some at university who were technically stunning, but couldn’t even play standing up. They were often maths and engineering students, with mathematical minds that could recreate anything, learn any scale, but not break out of their own comfort zone into something new. (Apropos of nothing, they tended to like Dream Theater.) To people like this, I’m sure the Variax was very appealing – they could recreate more things, imitate more things, and the fact that they looked like a berk was irrelevant because no-one was watching. The ones who went professional became session musicians, or, more tellingly, guitar journalists.
I’m not saying for an instant that the Variax doesn’t do what it says on the tin. The sounds, by and large, sound right (except the 12-string and sitar, which are almost unlistenable), and it offers a lot of different tones, although there's nothing on offer with active pickups, or any baritones. I’m sure that if you’re in your home studio, recording advertising jingles or whatever, a Variax offers you tremendous flexibility to produce a lot of different sounds that suit whatever it is you want to record. But for anyone playing in front of actual human brings, it’s very different. Especially at the rock/metal end of the spectrum, most gigs are so loud and the sound quality so bad that any subtlety in tone is entirely lost on the audience. If you saw Zakk Wylde playing a Variax, you wouldn’t think “wow, that sounds like a Les Paul”, you’d think “Wow, I wonder what criminal organisation are holding his family hostage and forcing him to play something that makes him look like such a dweeb?”, and notice that he can’t shred because of the Variax’s middle-of-the road setup, 22 weedy frets and cheap-feeling neck.
There are other problems too, like the fact that the software can’t cope with alternative tunings and you have to pay a whole load of a lot more for the privilege of a rubbish whammy bar, but the big problem here is one of philosophy. All the Variax does is imitate that which has already come before. The truly revolutionary instruments, and I just don’t mean guitars, were those that could let you make a sound that you could never make before. Think of the truly revolutionary guitarists, the great innovators – Hendrix, Van Halen, May, Morello, Bellamy. Aside from pushing the boundaries of the guitar’s sound into uncharted territory, they all either built their own instruments or used conventional ones in a way no-one had done before. They couldn’t have done that with a Variax – it actually relies on you playing within the limits of conventional playing and technique in order to function.
The Variax could not be the future because all it did was imitate the past. It didn’t do something new, it just did something old in a way that was cheaper, but not as good, as how it could be done before. The technology and the opportunity exist today to create new sounds and ways to use them. Much as keyboard synthesisers did in the 80’s, guitar manufacturers can look at this technology not as a way of saying “how can we make this guitar sound like another one” but “how can we make this guitar sound like one that doesn’t exist?” Guitar synths have a terrible reputation gained in the 80’s, when they were unwieldy, unreliable and ludicrously expensive. But that isn’t the case now, and I think that the truly creative companies will make great strides in this direction.
So, the Variax failed to take over the world, not because guitarists didn’t want to innovate, but rather because they did.
Verdict 3/5
Your revolution is a joke.
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