Music Production Info

Come along to the Queen’s Head in Bristol (junction of Royate Hill and Fishponds Road) this Saturday for some jolly Rock’n'Roll, a raffle and a fine BBQ. Free entry, very cheap drinks prices. What’s not to like?

Sharing written music can be an absolute pain. Physically person-to-person you could use photocopies, or, at a push, copy the stuff in manuscript. Neither option is really ideal. Over the web things are little better – scan the the music as some form of image file, with all the problems that will present its end user, or find some way of representing it in ASCII.

Things aren’t a whole lot better if you’re just trying to get a paper record of something. You could get yourself some music notating software and save a huge amount of grief – what you might not save, of course, are money and the imposition of a substantial learning curve.

Enter Power Tab Editor. It’s freeware, so it’ll cost you nothing to use it, and it’s simple to learn, so you can spend your time getting some work done rather than sitting reading helpfiles and tutorials for weeks. It’s aimed at guitarists, though, so would-be Mozarts will need to look elsewhere…

Power Tab Editor has a functional and uncluttered interface.
As the name implies, this is a Tab editor. You enter your music onto a Tab stave and the standard music notation stave above is auto-populated, pitches following the tuning you have previously defined for the tab (absolutely great if you use loads of altered tunings but need standard notation that other instrumentalists may need to be able to read). Note lengths are edited on the standard staff. As you might expect, you can define key and time signatures, etc, indicate odd groupings, add expression marks and so forth. You also have access to the whole usual range of guitar technique indications – slurs, bends, slides etc.

The printed output from Power Tab Editor 1.7 is fantastic – clear and very professional. If you want to share stuff over the web then just send the file, the recipient will need a Power Tab reader (or the editing software itself) but these are free, so there’s no problem there. Most of the Tab repository sites use Power Tab as one of their standard formats, btw.

This would be a fantastic tool for teachers, I have to say, but frankly just about any guitarist will have a use for this program. It’s free, easy to install and use and you know you want it.

You can get it here.

Here’s an interesting instrument, and one that may seem uncannily familiar to regular trawlers of the “Guitars For Sale” parts of EBay and other internet sales sites. Alden are a range of far-eastern built guitars distributed by Cranes, a huge, well-known and (as far as I’m aware, certainly) well-respected music shop in Cardiff.

A quick Google will inform you that: “Alden guitars are the result of a collaboration between UK guitar guru Alan Entwhistle and one of Korea’s leading guitar companies. Alan has been involved in guitar design since the early 60’s and his wealth of experience is showcased perfectly in the Alden range. Alden guitars are inspired by classic instruments of the last 5 decades though thanks to Alan’s creative design input none could be even remotely described as “copies” All feature top quality hardware, Entwhistle designed pickups, premium materials, and superb construction supervised by the man himself!”

However, as I mentioned above, eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a not-insubstantial similarity between this guitar (and various other Alden models) and the offerings of a number of other “makers”, notably Jay Turser – take a look here for example and note the headstock motif, which is identical to that on the Alden jazzers. What we would appear to be dealing with, then, are off-the-shelf basic designs tweaked a bit hardware-wise to suit particular distributors. The Alden does feature some unique and rather groovy Art Deco-style pickups for example.

To the best of my knowledge, these rather cool pickup (covers) are unique to the Alden range.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong, or indeed new, about this approach to marketing instruments – just think of all those catalogue-branded Stellas, Harmonys, Danelectros and so on out there for example. But there is a problem in that it’s not always clear what it is you’re dealing with. Is this Alden really an embodiment of one British guru’s experience and design expertise? No, I don’t think it is and I *do* think it’s more than a little misleading to advertise it as such.

It would be great to be able to judge each individual guitar on earth on its own merits but this would clearly be an impossible task even if we could leave aside all the subjectivity that we know will come into the equation. From a practical point of view, we need pigeon holes to put things in. If someone tells me “it’d be great for a £500 guitar, but at £750 it’s a rip off” I’ve got some idea what I’m going to be looking at and the standards by which I should be judging it. Meaningful judgements aren’t going to be relative only to the very best, because that way anything but the very best is going to be “second rate” and that sort of rating system wouldn’t help anyone.

Some rather lovely faux-abalone purfling sets off the very pretty top nicely.

The central issue is one of context. Whilst it may well be true that to some extent you’re paying for the name on a “name” guitar you’re also buying into history and a company you can understand and research. It’s a little like the difference between buying any other generic vs branded goods, be they pharmaceuticals or breakfast cereals. So here we have a contextless jazz guitar or uncertain origin. What to make of it?

Well it’s solidly built and well finished *for an inexpensive instrument*. The fretboard wood might be anything, but does its job just fine, though the fretting is best described as “adequate”. The truss rod cover is functional but badly fitted, there are a couple of minor blemishes in the finish. The rather groovy multi-adjustable and lockable bridge has roller-shaped sadles which suggest a bigsby had been anticipated, but the absense of said device doesn’t render the bridge any less effective. The allen-key locking of the sadle positions and the bridge height are excellent features, I think. The pickups and switch gear work fine and a range of suitably jazzy tones is forthcoming.

How it plays is, somewhat unsurprisingly, dependent upon your string choice. “Proper” jazz benefits from telegraph wires here, as you might expect. What you might not expect, though, is just how much fun a bit of Rock’n'Roll or Jump Blues can be with a set of .10s on there. All round, it’s a flexible, enjoyable box and big on the “grin factor”. But it’s *not* an ES-175, nor indeed anyway near.

I’ve really enjoyed owning and playing this guitar and if I lost it and needed a replacement I’d be more than happy to buy another at the right price. But what is the right price? I think Cranes were selling these new for between £250 and £299 – the former is about reasonable, the latter a good bit too much, I think. Personally I’d think a tad under the £200 mark for a new one would be fair. This one’ll be on EBay shortly, so take a look and see what it makes…

A little piece of British Rock’n'Roll history, the Congress was the first guitar of a number of great players, none greater, perhaps, than the man who epitomises early British Rock guitar, Hank Marvin. It was the cheapest in Hofner’s arch-top range at the time, its more expensive siblings being the Senator and the President. Quite why the UK got these US-themed names whilst identical models were available in the States with only numerical names isn’t clear.

The guitar we’re taking a look at here is one I’ve had for a few years now and which I thought it’d be nice to record a few details about for posterity before I – somewhat reluctantly, I have to say – sell it.

This particular example, serial number 2290, is a fairly early one and probably dates from 1954. For an inexpensive guitar that’s over half-a-century old it’s in remarkably good condition, though it has plenty of mojo-tastic playing wear.

It’s an archtop acoustic, with a fairly small (14 1/2″ across the lower bout) but relatively deep (sides are 3 3/8″, and the curve of the top obviously adds to that) body. Possibly because of the relatively small body, the 24″ scale length seems rather longer than it actually is. The neck could probably double as a baseball bat, it’s *really* chunky by modern standards though not unduly unusual for instruments of its age, and joins the body at the 12th fret. The neck has no truss rod. The back of the guitar is flat. In versions not much later than this you’ll find the neck joining the body at the 14th fret and an arched back, but a truss rod didn’t make an appearance until 1960.

The photo above shows a classic piece of Hofner eccentricity – a lovely carved rosewood bridge with a matching faux-tortoiseshell pickguard attached with… a nail! It’s nailed at the neck end, too, though the attachment to the side of the body is a somewhat more conventional bracket-and-screw affair.

The Hofner logo is, rather oddly, stamped on the top of the guitar adjacent to the bridge, and the model name and serial number are hand-written on the label within the body of the instrument. In later versions of the Congress the logo moved about somewhat: to the upper bout around 1956/57 (note that there is little consistency in things Hofner, so finding something you hadn’t expected on an instrument doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something fishy about it) before finally migrating to the headstock around 1959.

The finish on the guitar is simply gorgeous, the colour helped no doubt by a fairly lengthy aging process, and has proven to be remarkably hardy. The three-on-a-strip tuners work fine (well, as well as they ever did); on my particular example the sixth string’s tuner button has at some point been replaced with a similar but somewhat whiter one. The nut (only a string guide really, like many European guitars this one has a zero fret) is perhaps a bit shallow-cut and aggressive sixth string bends will pull the string out. I suspect this may not have been an issue likely to have been foreseen by the guitar’s builders, to be fair.

It’s great fun to play, although hard work once you venture past the third position. Dead cool with a slide, though, it really sings! At the end of the day this is a 50+ year old budget guitar and its worth is more in its historical interest than its function as a working instrument. But in the comfort of your woodshed it’s just an absolute joy to noodle with. And that, my friends, is what it’s all about.

I’m not entirely convinced by the boutique crowd’s obsession with the Fuzz Face. I’ve owned a few of them over the years and have never exactly been bowled over by the things. I suppose there’s the “rarity value” of the germanium transistors used in the originals and now in the more exotic (read “expensive”) boutique clones, but I don’t recall the germanium ones I’ve heard sounding particularly awesome – indeed, part of the problem with germanium transistors is their inconsistency example-to-example and their tendency to behave differently (and even stop working entirely) as their temperature changes, rendering them exceedingly unreliable as a live tool. At least silicon examples tended towards consistency and were prone actually to work. And they *still* sounded like cheap fuzz boxes.

However, there’s no denying that the “cheap fuzz box sound” has its uses (even if it’s just the guilty pleasure of wigging out with one in the privacy of one’s own woodshed). But the little chaps are more than a little expensive these days, particularly when you consider what’s actually in them. What better a project for the regular rainy days we’ve been getting, then, than building one’s own?

There are no shortage of “how to build your own effects pedal” articles on the web. I’m not intending for this to be such an article. This series of posts will be from the perspective of an interested novice – me – researching the project, getting the bits and making the thing. More of an electronic travelogue, really.

The journey begins with me looking for the design I’m going to build. After a fair bit of Googling I’ve settled on the “Pelusa Face”, which I found on the excellent TonePad site. Stage one of my plan is just to get the PCB made. There are a whole host of ways of going about this, I’m going for the most basic I can. If I get into this then maybe later I’ll chance spending some money, right now “as cheaply as possible” is the rule.

The first stage essestials now sit on my desk, the hardware freshly purchased from my local branch of Maplins. Here we go!

UPDATE: Well I’ve now got a PCB I think I can use. I drew the design on by hand (taking, as you may be able to tell, a few liberties with the shape of the tracks) and then drilled the holes with a Dremmel and a 1mm metal bit. I reckon I’ve just about got away with this, but on a more complex circuit I suspect a tower drill would be a must.

It’s not a work of art, that’s for sure. Perhaps it’ll look a tad groovier when it’s populated. Next task is to order the electronic bits, and then we can see.

Here’s a couple of many people’s least favourite aspects of practicing in one small and rather attractive – in a typical boss way – package. Does it ease the chore of tuning, or add fun to your daily scale practice?

The Boss TU-80 is a pretty cunning piece of kit. In its tuner mode you can select between “Chromatic” (tuning by any of the 12 steps in the chromatic scale), “Guitar” (tune by string name) and “Bass” (also tune by string name). It’ll happily cope with 7 string guitars, 6 string basses and flat tunings, too. In metronome mode you can select rhythm style, beat and tempo – I’ve found this functionality to be *really* useful, I have to say.

Input is via standard quarter-inch jack, or you can use the built in mic for acoustic instruments. There is an additional quarter-inch jack for output, so you can use the device inline, where it will operate in true bypass mode. All jolly good.

Problems? Well, yes, a couple. The metronome isn’t particularly loud, and you can’t output it via the output jack. I appreciate the occasions you’d be likely to want to shove the metronome through your amp live will be next to nil, but Boss might have considered letting the output double as a headphone jack, perhaps, so you could hear the thing over anything other than an acoustic. On the subject of acoustics, the internal mic isn’t insanely sensitive, so may be a pain in noisy conditions.

Overall? It’s a very handy piece of kit. Personally I’d view it as a home practice tool that you can also get to double as a stage tuner in a push but I don’t doubt that other people will be more than happy to keep one in their gigbag. It’s not exactly going to take up a lot of space! All-in-all, a good-value, well-made product from a respected manufacturer. You can’t go far wrong with that.

A capo is an essential? For everyone who’d agree that yes, one really should at least be lurking in your case there’ll probably be a dozen players who’ll say the things are the tool of the devil and that you should learn to play properly. There are, of course, arguments in favour of both views but I think we’ve now moved far enough from the “Play In A Day” learning aids available in my youth that we can see the capo for the potential it has to expand our playing rather than viewing it as a means of never learning a non-open chord.

For the acoustic player in particular, especially I suspect ones with a penchant for non-standard tunings, the capo really is a must unless you’re going to confine yourself to forever playing alone.

Capo technology has moved along, too, since the “Play In A Day” days, so you’re no longer condemned to using one of those clothes-peg-and-elastic jobs that always seemed better suited to making running repairs to combine harvesters than adorning the neck of your prized guitar. The Shubb shown here is one of a range of three full capos, the company also producing a couple of partial capos. There are plenty of other manufacturers out there, too, so it’s not as if you’re short of choice.

The Deluxe Shubb differs from its siblings in using a roller and track mechanism (rather than a point-head) which is designed to offer a somewhat smoother action. I can’t vouch for it’s being smoother than the others, but it certainly *is* smooth to use. Adjustment to suit a particular neck takes seconds and then a lever action securely attaches the thing to your guitar with no adverse affect on your tuning or your instrument itself. It’s tolerant of a wide range of neck/fingerboard profiles and should work well with anything you’re realistically likely to ask it to and is surprisingly unobtrusive in use. It does the job, and does it well. You can get replacement pads for it too, should you need them.

I really like this little widget and, whilst I’ll be the first to admit I rarely use it, I always carry it about with me and I do expect it’ll be put into service at this weekend’s birthday camp-fire sing-a-long.

I’m happy to recommend the Shubb as a part of anyone’s kit, particulary for electric rock/blues players where it’s likely to provide all you ever want or need from a capo. The adventurous might well want to take a look at some of the more exotic stuff out there – I have to say partial capos do sound like they’ve got considerable creative potential – you’ll even find ones you can move with one hand whilst still playing. Someone is no doubt going to build a career around that particular feature – who knows, it might even be you!