How to get Jimi Hendrix guitar tone
Hendrix tone is basically about three things. Fuzz, octave and an envelope filter (which you know as wah-wah or just wah).
The stuff you need to get Hendrix tone is below (both for cheap and expensive ways), however you should keep reading after that stuff because there are certain things you need to know.
Expensive way
Dunlop JH-OC1 Jimi Hendrix Octavio - This is combination fuzz/octave pedal.
Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Signature Wah JH1D - A wah pedal that supposedly uses the original 1960s design when it was made by the Thomas Organ Company back in the day.
Cheap (as in WAY cheaper) way
Joyo JF-12 Ultimate Octava - A mean, green (literally) machine. Fuzz/Octave pedal. I guarantee you will love this thing, and love the price too because it's cheap but awesome at the same time.
VOX V847A Wah Pedal - I specifically recommend the VOX because it has more of a "growly" envelope that's actually much easier to deal with. And it just looks cooler besides that.
Things to know about getting Hendrix tone
Okay, here's the stuff most players don't take into consideration but is all applicable.
Hendrix used very light strings, had a very light touch and used very "clacky" picks, as in Fender 351 Celluloid style picks.
The mistake most players make is that they bang strings hard, thinking that's the way to get Hendrix tone. Wrong. There are tons of videos of Hendrix playing. Watch them. Hendrix always played light. Rarely were the strings banged hard.
Light strings is what made that super-twangy sound you heard on Hendrix recordings. It's also the reason why Hendrix was out-of-tune so often.
As far as EQ settings on an amp are concerned, all you have to know is to simply turn everything up to 10. It's not like Hendrix was a smart guy when it came to this stuff. All Hendrix did was crank everything to 10, and for softer parts, the volume of the guitar was simply turned down. And yes, that's all there is to it. The only knob that wasn't on 10 all the time was master volume, and that was only turned down so Hendrix wouldn't literally blow up his amp.
Now concerning the Strats he used, bear in mind that Stratocasters of the time did not have a 5-way pickup selector, because that didn't happen until the late 1970s which was long after Hendrix's death.
Hendrix did not have a main guitar because he was constantly destroying them, so new Strats were used quite often.
This basically means that to get Hendrix tone out of a Strat, you get the gear I mentioned above and purposely use a Strat either on pickup position 3 or 5 and nothing else.
What guitar do you need to get? A Squier Classic Vibe Stratocaster 60s. You do NOT need a Fender. That Classic Vibe has the super-spanky single-coil pickups with proper staggered pole pieces and AlNiCo (which means aluminum, nickel, cobalt) magnets in them, meaning they're bright as hell, and that's exactly what Hendrix used.
Fuzz, octave, wah, a Strat with the appropriate pickups and knowing the basics on how Hendrix tone works is all you need. After that, just learn the riffs Hendrix used (which in all honesty is not that difficult) and you've basically got it.
Squier Vintage Modified Jazzmaster Review
The Squier Vintage Modified Jazzmaster is the best Jazzmaster money can buy right now, even more so than a Fender version. Why? Because it's the most true to what a "real Jazzmaster" is supposed to be without paying thousands of dollars or anywhere close to that.
A lot of dancing around, but few that hit the mark
The original design of the Jazzmaster is something most players don't like, mainly concerning the bridge, vibrato and electronics. As such, both Fender and Squier have several Jazzmaster models that stray far away from tradition.
A few examples:
The Squier Jazzmaster Special has no vibrato, no rhythm circuit and uses concentric volume/tone knobs.
The Fender Classic Player Jazzmaster Special is close to the original, but the bridge is replaced by an Adjust-O-Matic.
The Fender American Special Jazzmaster has no vibrato system at all, and the "swoop" JAZZMASTER logo on the headstock is totally wrong.
Basically put, both Fender and Squier dance around the original Jazzmaster design quite a bit. Currently, there are only 3 models that are true to the original. The Squier Vintage Modified Jazzmaster, Fender American Vintage '65 Jazzmaster and Fender 1964 Closet Classic Jazzmaster. That's it. All other models don't follow the original.
When you want as-close-to-original with the exception of a modern "C" slim oval neck and modern frets, you get the Squier Vintage Modified version. If you want an absolute original Jazzmaster design, you get the American Vintage '65.
And yes, that basically means if you buy the Squier Vintage Modified, really like it and want to stay with that design, there are only two Fender models above it that can accommodate...
...and it's for this reason I say the Squier Vintage Modified is in fact the absolute best Jazzmaster for the money right now.
Trust Leo's original design and good things will happen
The things people hate about the original Jazzmaster design is the string ring, the buzzy bridge, the buzzy neck, the vibrato system and the way the electronics work.
Or to put it another way, most players love the look and feel of the guitar, but hate almost everything else about it. Fender understands this all too well, and that's why there are so many different Jazzmaster models that stray outside the original design.
An original-design Jazzmaster is quirky as hell, and I don't deny that. But those quirks are what make the guitar so wonderful.
As I say in the above video, a Jazz is not "Telecaster easy". If you want the easiest possible electric guitar to play where you can just bang away on it and not care, you play a Telecaster. Any Telecaster. Whether it's the lowest-priced Squier Affinity model, the high-priced Select Telecaster or any model in between, a Tele is a Tele, and it's stupidly easy-to-play. No vibrato to deal with, a rock-solid bridge setup, and you can literally bang those strings as hard as you can and the Tele can handle it with no problem at all.
A Jazz is not an easy guitar, because there's a lot going on with it. You have to play it differently, the electronics are a lot more complicated and there is a learning curve with the guitar. A big one.
But for many, once you go Jazz, you never go back. The guitar was designed to be insanely comfortable to play, and it is. The offset-waist body shape molds right to you, and having the neck just slightly further away makes such an amazing difference.
I said before in a previous blog that I'm an "offset convert", and I totally am. To me, Strats and Teles just seem so inferior compared to a Jazzmaster now. It's not that Strats and Teles are bad guitars, because they're not, but I can totally understand why Leo Fender pushed the Jazz as the premium top-of-the-line Fender model at one point. The Jazz really is superior, if you know how to wield one properly.
An original-design Jazzmaster is not a guitar I recommend, but I love it anyway
The entire reason I don't recommend the original-design Jazzmaster is because today's modern guitar player wants something "automatic", as in a guitar they can just pick up and play that has little to no learning curve at all.
It's like I said, if you want easy, play a Telecaster. Or if the Tele shape doesn't agree with you, play a Stratocaster, which is slightly more complicated because of the 3-pickup layout and tremolo system, but not by much.
The complicated nature of an original-design Jazzmaster is not why I love it. I love it because it's insanely comfortable to play, and I can get sounds out of it that Strats and Teles simply cannot do.
Even if you took a Strat or Tele and stuffed in those big Jazzmaster pickups somehow, it still wouldn't be the same. Similar, yes, but not the same.
I'm very, very happy there was an inexpensive Squier Jazzmaster that stayed true to the original design, because it's my #1 axe. Great guitar.
How to build a metal guitar
Building a metal guitar is an easy thing, and it can be done inexpensively. Or said more plainly, it can be done real cheap. As in under $200 cheap.
A metal guitar is basically defined as a guitar with a 24-fret neck and two humbucker pickups that "looks metal".
Here is the quick way to get a metal guitar for cheap. All it requires is the purchase of one guitar, one bridge pickup, one neck pickup and one set of tuners.
Dean Vendetta XM - this guitar is as far as I can tell the lowest-priced 24-fret electric you can buy. It has a nice dark look to it with black hardware that has the "metal look". Also, the controls are set back from the pickups, meaning if you swing your arm wide a lot when playing, you won't accidentally hit the volume knob, pickup selector or tone knob at all.
Powered by Lace humbucker for bridge and for neck - yes, you do have to buy two pickups. One for bridge, one for neck. But fortunately, they're both cheap. Installation is easy, and it comes with the pickup rings.
3x3 set of locking tuners - with tuners, you either have inline (6 "in a row", such as on most Fender and Squier models) or 3x3 (3 on one side of the headstock, 3 on the other side). The Dean Vendetta is a 3x3 style, and the above set adds in the capability to lock the strings and also provides a tension adjustment screw on top of the tuner button.
Copper Shielding - with cheap electrics, you usually see the most cost-cutting when it comes to electronics. On some cheap electrics there is barely any shielding at all. What the shielding does is diminish electric interference noise. All you have to do is when you do your pickup swap, line the pickup cavity area with shielding before putting in the new pickups. It's really, really easy.
In the end, all of this is under $200. And for the money you get a genuinely good metal guitar that looks good, sounds good and performs well. And because it's so cheap, if you bang it around and ding it up a bit, you really won't care. Believe me, it's nice having a guitar where you don't mind if you get a ding or a scratch on it while thrashing it around.
Why you should buy a Martin D-45 dreadnought acoustic
Something I don't do often is talk about expensive guitars. The Martin D-45 dreadnought acoustic is a very expensive guitar. Is it worth it to buy one? Yes it is.
Before I get into why it's worth it, there are certain guitar brands where if I had the money, I would put down the cash to buy and not think twice about it. Brands like Gretsch, G&L, Epiphone (as in the upper-end Epiphone like the Broadway model), and so on. I may talk about those brands later. But for now I'm talking about Martin.
When people talk about "the D", they're usually talking about a Martin D-45.
What makes the D so special? What is it about the D that's so desirable?
The best way I can describe a D is that it is "the sound" of what a natural acoustic is supposed to sound like. It more or less defined the country-and-western acoustic tone, and later on defined the acoustic you hear on any movie soundtrack that's worth listening to that features an acoustic guitar.
The D is a gentleman's guitar. It is not something meant to be played nor even touched by pimple-faced metalhead kids that don't understand what a D is all about. To appreciate a D takes a man who understands the value of a properly made acoustic that just sings whenever you play it.
Do you have to be an expert player to wield a D? Not at all, and that's part of the beauty of it. The size and shape feels 100% comfortable, and the sound projection makes anything you play on it sound amazing, even if it's just your standard campfire song style chords.
As a collector's piece...
As a collector's piece, a D appreciates in value very quickly. If there was ever a no-brainer investment instrument, the D is literally a can't-go-wrong purchase. If you buy one today, it's pretty much guaranteed it will be worth more in the future. A lot more.
What does owning a D say about you?
It says you've arrived. You've saved up your money and want something that's a real show-stopper of a guitar. That's the D.
Proper guitar players know how to spot a D instantly. It's not a flashy guitar, nor is it meant to be. The D is simply a 100% proper acoustic, front to back, top to bottom.
There are very few guitars where I say "whoa" when I see one. The D-45 is one of them.
Why is a D-45 so expensive?
Mainly because it's made just like Martin used to make them in the pre-war era.
You've heard the old saying "they don't build 'em like they used to". Well, Martin does build D-45s exactly like they used to, very much on purpose so it's as authentic as they could possibly construct them. That's a good thing.
As crazy as this sounds, I honestly don't believe the price is too high for it. I think it is appropriately priced for what it is.
Some guitars are priced way too high for what they are. But not the D-45. You will get exactly what you expect from it, which is a perfect-playing, perfect-sounding acoustic guitar.
Is the D-45 good for stage?
No. The D is meant to be privately owned and appreciated that way.
If you want a proper acoustic stage guitar, the Yamaha A-Series is the much better choice. Looks great, has a proper electric-acoustic setup with modeling, and gets the job done in fine style. Great for stage.
If on the other hand you want cheap-and-good, again, it's Yamaha with their APX500II model. Not as good or ritzy-looking as the A-Series, but gets the job done nicely.
Now if you wanted a Martin acoustic that's proper for stage use, that would be the D-35. That one can withstand stage environments a whole lot better.
"Why buy an expensive D-45 if I can't play it on stage?"
If you asked yourself this, you're missing the point of owning a D in the first place.
Owning a D-45 is not about bringing it on stage and performing with it. It is about owning one of the best proper acoustic guitars money can buy.
There are men out there who get to a point in life where they want to buy "that one really good guitar" and have the money to spend, but honestly don't know what guitar to spend it on. You would be surprised how often this happens.
For those men out there that want a gentleman's guitar where you really get what you pay for, you want a D-45. If you've got the money, get one now, because you only live once.
'dookie' from green day turns 20, and the 1990s sucked
Dookie was released on 1 February 1994, so yes, that means the album is officially 20 years old...
...but that doesn't mean it was anything special, because it wasn't. The album was nothing but 1970s "pop punk" wrapped in a 1990s flavor. This is not to say the album was bad, because it wasn't. It is, just like I said, not anything special.
The 1990s for the most part sucked. I know because I lived through it.
From a musician's point of view, there is one very important thing to know about the '90s. It was the last decade of The Old World way of "making it" as a musician.
I'll talk more about that in a moment.
Popular music of the '90s wasn't good. Remember, we're talking about the decade where the most popular music was from Michael Bolton, Wilson Philips, Ace of Base, Celine Dion, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin to name a few.
And oh yeah, the stupid Macarena. That was a '90s thing. A lot of people forget that one. On purpose.
1990s style was... bad.
You can really see this in a very-'90s movie, Clerks. Half the guys I knew back in the '90s looked like the Dante and Randal characters.
The big thing at the time however was "looking garage". To achieve that look you wore flannel, combined that with ripped jeans, torn-up sneakers or boots, let your hair get greasy, and yeah, that was pretty much it. I distinctly remember people questioning why the look-like-a-bum-who-lives-in-a-garage look was the in thing back then. Nobody ever quite found out why.
To look garage for girls, it basically meant to look like a girly dude. Instead of the big hair of the 80s, flatten it down to the skull, put some bad coloring in there, don't wear makeup at all, wear anything denim to make your ass look like a sofa cushion, show no curves at all.
Looking garage was basically an excuse for everyone not to care what they looked like at all, and that's why it was embraced so much. It was okay to look like a lazy bum then because it was, strangely enough, a legitimate style.
From the musician's point of view...
The '90s was the last decade of The Old World way of "making it", or trying to. This basically meant you had to get your band together, spend a ton of money getting a CD recorded, spend a ton of money getting those CDs replicated, getting an agent, playing gigs wherever you could and whoring yourself out to any record label that would listen to you in the hopes you would "get signed" and become a paid act.
In the late '90s however, internet killed all that.
People found out about file sharing as a way to get music for free, and did. Nobody wanted to pay for CDs anymore, and didn't.
There are guys who used to be in bands in the '90s that to this day are still bitter about what happened when internet file sharing hit the scene. It's totally understandable, because some bands spent thousands if not tens of thousands on recording and disc duplication, only to end up with boxes of CDs that nobody wanted to buy because they'd rather download it for free off the internet.
Guitar stores and guitar companies were not prepared for the sudden interest in vintage
Nobody saw this one coming.
It was in the '90s that a bunch of guitar players developed a sudden interest in vintage Fender guitars. Yes, Fender specifically.
When people saw Kurt Cobain playing his Jaguar or Mustang, most players had never even seen one before. Or if they did, they never paid any mind to it because it was a "dorky" guitar. Well, now all of a sudden it wasn't dorky because Nirvana was on top of the charts.
Other grunge bands brought back huge interest in the Stratocaster. While the Strat never truly died out at any point in time, there was a sudden surge of interest in them because all those grunge dudes broke out their old Strats from the '60s and '70s.
This completely blindsided the guitar companies and stores because all of them were committed to making and selling only the latest and greatest stuff - but now nobody wanted any of it.
Several guitar companies folded because of this, as did many guitar stores. Imagine having $25,000 worth of stock and nobody to sell it to. That happened a lot because many companies and stores just couldn't adapt, and ended up going out of business.
What do I pine for from the '90s, if anything?
I really struggle to think of anything that I miss from the '90s. To me, that decade just seems like a span of time where nothing really significant happened, except for internet of course.
I'm not saying the decade was bad, but more like blah. It was just kinda.. there. And then it was over. Well, not without mass-wide Y2K hysteria right at the end (what a joke that was).
The only thing I can say I truly miss about the '90s is that it was still cheap to live in America during that time. Even though the country was whacked with a recession early in the decade, gas was still cheap and the cost of living was still relatively affordable even in the tiny town I was living in.
I don't particularly remember anyone really complaining about how much things cost in the '90s. The jobs were there, the wages decent and the cost of living was something manageable.
The big thing is that I don't remember anyone being afraid, as in afraid of what the future might bring. Today, my generation has absolutely no idea what's going on anymore. In the '90s, we had an idea of what to expect in the future. But now? Nobody has a clue. But it's not our fault. Like I said, we had an idea of what to expect. But all that changed. For the worse.
And the real scary part? The younger generation expects us to fix the messes with this country that we didn't even cause.
Well, won't that be an interesting project, eh?
The '90s, while boring and blah for the most part, were at least stable, predictable and you knew what to expect, somewhat. At least that somewhat was better than having no clue what's going on, which is the case today.
Even though the '90s sucked, it's a suck that many wish would come back because boring, plain and stable is a lot easier to deal with than the wild, unpredictable and unstable crapola we deal with now.