Coffee Talk
You look at it and I bet the first thing you think is, “That’s one of those ridiculous heavy metal guitars from the 80s.” I bet most of y’all think it was designed by metalheads for metalheads too, right? Well, guess what - you’re fuckin wrong. Gibson designed this thing in 1958! This is Don Draper shit, not Dimebag Darrell shit. The design is totally mid-century modern, maybe even googie. Look at it again now. See that reachy angular shit? If this thing were a house, Jackie Treehorn would live in it.
But so as I was saying, I did not want one of these. A few years ago I was in another music store phase. That’s the kind of phase in which, for whatever reason, once a week or so I go into retail music stores and fondle the gear, chat the creatures up, things like that. I didn’t even have any kind of aim to buy anything at that time. But one day at Music Unlimited in San Leandro, I looked up at the wall and saw this natural finish Explorer and thought “ha ha metal guitar - I have to play it.” Like it was going to be funny. Well, I wasn’t laughing when my fingers touched the thing and four new songs came flying out! It sounded fantastic. It felt fantastic. And it wasn’t even a Gibson - it was an Epiphone (Gibson’s made-somewhere-un-American downmarket brand). I’m not a Gibson guy, so with Gibson-like guitars I’m not susceptible to the same kind of snobismo I have about Fender-like guitars. Still, I don’t ever just buy a guitar on a whim, because all guitars are expensive. So I kept coming back and playing the thing, looking at it online, watching the video of “11 o’clock tick tock.” Until a couple months had gone by and I’d satisfied myself that it wasn’t just a whim, went down there and slapped the money down.
Even though I don’t play it a ton, I have not regretted buying this guitar at all. I didn’t really like the pickups it came with, which are some kind of really dark-sounding retro Gibson PAFs. This all-Korina guitar is actually pretty bright, and those pickups weren’t doing it justice at all. So I put a Seymour Duncan pearly gates in the bridge and a Jazz Model SH-2 in the neck. I had to get gold pickup covers and fit them to keep the look the same. I fucked up the hole that the volume pot sticks through by overdrilling it. Oh well. Anyway, here is an example of The Coffee Table in action with the original pickups - in the luxuriously / self-indulgently long second solo (starts at 2:24) in The Bruises Of Unknown Origin’s runaway hit Charles Glympse.
XOXO
~Chuck G
Creamsicles Are For Licking
I’ve neglected my blog, but now I’m back. Lots has changed for me, in many ways. Even in the guitar ways. Well, especially in the guitar ways! Guitar change is just a function of time for me, and it has been a while, right? But man, I’ve got something taking shape right now that’s gonna kick your balls off! (Venom reference, if you missed that) What I have in the works is a semi-official mutant and, uncharacteristically for one of mine, it’s actually being done beautifully. All the deets are coming soon.
In the meantime, I thought I’d warm this space up with a quick update on The Creamsicle. This is my beloved Jazzmaster mutant. See the previous post for details on this guitar’s genesis. Last time we saw this one, it was in dire need of a neck, its second MIJ neck having warped. Well, you know what I decided? I decided that rosewood necks suck and I don’t like em. And I’m never gonna put another rosewood neck on a Fender guitar again!
That’s the negative way of looking at things. On the positive side, I just adore the “hot rod vintage” neck that I put on the EJ Strat. Experiencing a braineurysm one day, I took it off the Strat and put it on the Creamsicle. It fit. Oh, it fit really nicely. So I got another one of those hot rod vintage necks for the Strat and now here we are with the gorgeous maple-necked Creamsicle that I think is better than any Jazzmaster I’ve ever played..
It even matches the Orange cabinet. The black pickup covers and knobs were my 5-year-old boy’s idea. Can’t argue with that - it looks very cool, I think. It plays extremely well too, the 9.5” radius and medium jumbo frets being a big improvement over the vintage style 7.25” and thin frets, in my book.
The EJ Strat with the same neck demonstrates that playability improvements could still be made - the Strat has better action & sustain because it has a better bridge. But I think this Creamsicle is really in the sweet spot of playability vs. character, and I don’t want to change a thing about it. I find myself playing & recording with it more often than with the smoother Strat, especially for the main track of a tune, where I think it’s important to have a unique sound.
With their two-piece bridge and tailpiece thing, Jazzmasters have something that most solid body guitars don’t - that reverby, resonant length of string behind the bridge that adds so much character, uniqueness, and unpredictability. The vintage Jazzmaster hardware and dimensions are problematic because the tailpiece is so far back that the angle of attack of the string on the bridge is really low. With the resulting low tension over the bridge saddles, this makes for some sustain limitations and causes the strings to buzz sometimes and to jump out of the saddles with really hard playing, especially when you still have the original Jazzmaster-style grooved bridge. Over the years I’ve learned to solve those problems, mostly, either by filing deeper grooves into the Jazzmaster bridge, or, as in the case with the Creamsicle, by using a vintage Mustang bridge which is the same as the Jazzmaster bridge except for the saddles. I also wrap the posts of the bridge with electrical tape so it doesn’t float so much in its postholes.
Fender makes some new versions of the Jazzmaster, called “Player’s Jazzmaster” that take some of the pain out of the arrangement by moving the tailpiece up toward the bridge. They also use Gibson tune-o-matic bridges. I’ve played a couple of these and I get it, but I like mine better. I think you lose some of the character and a lot of the sympathetic reverb when you shorten that length of string. And my modded Mustang bridge is just as good for me as a tune-o-matic.
Some people do what Robert Smith of The Cure did with his Jazzmaster when he played one. He added a brass buzz-stop thingy which sat in between the bridge and tailpiece and forced the strings down hard against the bridge in order to kill the reverb and to increase the angle of attack. No question, his guitar sounded cool. But I still think one loses something in taming this beast.
Anyway, I love my Creamsicle and that’s that. Stay tuned for more on the next project, which I think is even cooler!
XO
Dickey
