Rich's Sound - Single Coil Strut

This is what may be the first in a series of posts on how I get my specific guitar sound. I receive many questions on the subject, so hopefully this will answer a few of them.

In this installment, I'm going to talk about why I prefer a single coil pickup over a humbucker.

To begin, I'm not opposed to humbuckers and in fact own a guitar with humbuckers in it, so I don't want you to think "Rich never plays guitars with humbuckers in them", because I do. You don't see me playing a humbucker-equipped guitar often simply because I prefer the single coil sound. If you happen to play a guitar with one or more humbucker pickups in it, I'm not telling you humbuckers are "bad". I'm just saying that the single coil sound is what I prefer.

What I appreciate most about single coil pickups is the brightness of the sound. Humbuckers by nature have more midrange tone in them and to me sound "flat" because of it compared to a single.

A Stratocaster guitar in SSS configuration allows me to use every setting on the guitar whereas I can't do that with a humbucker, or at least not easily. In an HH configuration I'm usually limited to two settings that I can make work for me, that being bridge-only or neck-only with the middle setting (bridge+neck) being altogether worthless concerning my specific sound. In an HSS configuration I can only use 3 settings. Bridge, middle+neck and neck because the H combined with the S doesn't do anything for me.

For guitars with humbuckers that have a split-coil option, I run into the same problem. My Schecter C-1 Classic even though HH does in fact have a 5-way "mega switch" selector from the factory that splits the coils into singles to get 5 tones, but again, of those 5 I can only use three that actually work for me.

Singles on their own using wide spacing is the "natural" way, so to speak, that a Stratocaster guitar works. The single coil pickup defines the personality of the Stratocaster guitar as far as I'm concerned.

Again, I'm not saying that humbuckers are bad, because they're not. But a lot of the sound you hear from my playing is a direct result of single coil pickups. Yes, they're bright, clacky and twangy, but that's the way I prefer them.

720k

I never really used floppy disks that much, and only did because I had to and not because I wanted to. And man did it tick me off when they went bad, which happened a lot. Back in the day there was this WWF wrestling game I had for my Commodore 64. It was expensive and I really, really liked playing it. It was two 5.25-inch floppies and then one day the second disk went bad, even though I oh-so-carefully took great care of the disks and properly put them away after each use. I was not happy. Just about all of my other memories with floppies are exactly like the one I just described. The floppy was just notoriously unreliable. It wasn't a matter of if they would fail but when.

I have a 720k disk I have in my possession. One of three, actually. They're for my Alesis Datadisk which I no longer use. When I bought the thing, the eBay seller was nice enough to provide a 10-pack of double-density disks with it. Why DD disks? Because the Alesis can't use high-density. All that would happen if you chucked a 1.44MB disk into the Alesis is that it would format it at 720k because for whatever reason, Alesis didn't use a high-density floppy drive in the Datadisk.

I wondered if those 720k floppies were still usable, so I attempted to format them. I discovered you can't format a 720k floppy in Windows XP or any Windows beyond that unless you use FORMAT from the command line a very specific way, which is:

FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9

That formats 80 tracks with 9 sectors per track, and the floppy is at that point usable; you can copy files over to it and whatnot.

Why did I bother doing this? a) just to see if I could, and b) they wouldn't be usable in my Win7 box otherwise since that OS cannot format a 720k floppy.

Do I plan on using them? No. In fact the only reason I have a floppy drive in my computer box is because the case doesn't have a cover for the floppy bay. If I didn't have a floppy drive in there, it would just be a big dust-inviting hole.

Come to think of it, I should replace it with a card reader.

EDIT: Bought a card reader. 17 bucks, shipping included. Will arrive before the end of the week. Time to kick that floppy drive to the curb. :)

B movies from the 80s

There are three B movies from the 1980s that as far as I'm concerned stand out more than any other. H.O.T.S. (1979, not 80s but close enough), Screwballs (1983) and Porky's (1982). All three of these epitomize what raunchy sex humor is supposed to be in a B movie.

I consider the best of the three Screwballs, because that movie is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny in several places. The best part as far as laughs go is the bowling scene, no question. Also it should be said that concerning the storyline, as ridiculous as it is, you actually really get into it. It's a high school movie, but the jock, rich kid, prep, fat kid and nerd all band together to go after this one girl. This does not happen in high school flicks because there are usually lines drawn between the cliques. Not in Screwballs. The pretty girl is actually the 'bad guy' here. What happens at the end is satisfying - and not for the obvious reason. You'll have to see it to know what I'm talking about.

Another thing about Screwballs is that the comedy in the movie is genuinely well done. Director Rafal Zielinski did know a thing or two about timing (in comedy, timing is everything), the writing was done in a way that was easy to follow where you really want to know how everything turns out, and the over-the-top characters (like the librarian) are just plain goofy-awesome.

As far as H.O.T.S. and Porky's go, eh.. yeah, they have their moments but they're not easy to sit through.

Something to note is that internet adult video ruined the B movie industry completely. The entire reason to watch these flicks was to have a good laugh and see boobs. Mostly boobs. That was it. When internet adult video happened, B movies died a very quick death, never came back and never will. Guys could now see boobs in seconds just with a few clicks of a mouse, so why bother with the movie?

A kid today would probably question why guys watched these movies back in the day at all. The answer is really simple. It was a way to rent a soft adult flick without being overly obvious about it. Guys could actually discuss these movies in public and wax on about the comedy scenes without being labeled perverts. Try talking about a real adult movie like that. You can't. Parents also let us watch movies like this because there was no outright sex in them. Boobs everywhere? Yes, but acceptable.

And by the way, any one of the three movies, as bad as they are, are far more entertaining than any real adult movie you could watch because they're actual movies. That much is true.

That same kid would probably watch these movies and say, "Oh, that's just like American Pie!" No, no no.. American Pie and other movies of the ilk got (as in outright stole in some instances) their ideas from 80s B movies originally.

the firm

The Firm is a flick I'm surprised I haven't written about before. I've watched it at least 4 or 5 times.

I honestly don't remember where I saw this movie first, but I can tell you it wasn't in the theater. It was either on TV or something I saw in the movie rental store that looked interesting. I did know this movie was a lawyer flick and there are times I like those kind of films because they have a very traditional movie-making style to them. Usually they have zero special effects, a very earthy soundtrack (as this one does, no question), and wholly rely on the story itself to push the movie along. In other words, no magical superpower whiz-bang thing saves the day at the end of the third act. Plot points must be established for the movie to hold together else it will completely fall apart and quickly. Fortunately the story here is decent enough to keep you interested.

The Firm is a lawyer movie released June 1993, and like all lawyer movies, the mob is involved albeit only very briefly. Think of it as a 2.5-hour long episode of Law & Order.

Cruise in his typical style overacts like crazy in this movie and has basically zero chemistry with Jeanne Tripplehorn who played his wife. Jeanne, by the way, is unbelievably hot, or at least she was in this movie - but her and Cruise just aren't believable as an on-screen married couple. Just doesn't work. However every other actor, which included Ed Harris, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, Wilford Brimley and Gene Hackman to name a few - did awesome. They pick up the slack where Cruise and Tripplehorn couldn't cut the mustard.

A note about Brimley: He's a bad guy in this movie, and wow did he pull it off. You totally believe the character he plays is an evil dude.

What totally destroys this movie is the fact the story hinges upon technology limitations of the day in several places, but the one that will make you laugh out loud is this:

There's a point when a fax is sent to Bad-Guy-Brimley's headquarters containing really important information. This fax prints out on thermal paper (the "curly" kind, remember that?). It just so happens that it's the last piece of paper in the machine. It falls out (where's the paper tray?), curls up and rolls under the stand the machine is on.

Later on, while Bad-Guy-Brimley is in Bad-Guy-Headquarters, he notices the fax machine is beeping loudly and literally says:

What the hell's the matter with you guys? This thing's out of paper!

Then he notices the rolled-up fax under the machine. Now the story can continue.

Yes, this really happens, and bear in mind this is supposed to be a really tense scene in the movie - but today it's just laughable at best.

This really got my curiosity going because I was certain plain-paper faxing existed at the time. Turns out it did. Canon introduced the first plain-paper facsimile machine in 1987 - but this movie is telling me that a multi-million-dollar law firm in the early 1990s couldn't afford one? I don't think so.

In other words, a fax machine's thermal paper idiosyncrasies is an actual plot device in The Firm. Very cheesy.

There are also several instances in this movie where paper and faxing play really important moments in moving the story along.

Given that in the early 1990s the fastest way to send a photo across a great distance was by fax and that there was no other way to do it faster, the machines do get a fair amount of screen time.

What's even crazier is that in the movie, a fax sent from Memphis Tennessee to the Cayman Islands. In the early 1990s that probably would have cost close to 10 dollars in long-distance fees just to send that one fax. It was probably sent at 9600bps or lower. Today the same thing could be done via email or by just snapping a full-color high-resolution photo on a phone, and have it be there in seconds.

With today's modern tech - even the cheap stuff - there's no way the story being told in The Firm would hold up at all. That thermal paper goof? Never would have happened in today's world as it would have been nothing more than a text message. The photo? Would have been sent by email or phone as I said above.

Was there text messaging in the early 1990s? Yes, but no matter how much cash you had, you couldn't get it. The first-ever SMS message was sent in the UK in 1992 and the first commercial SMS in Sweden in 1993. It wasn't until late 90s where people here in the US were using it regularly, so it was not an option at the time The Firm was made. Yes, you do see cell phones being used in the movie, but only for voice because that's all that was available at the time.

I still like The Firm as it is a good movie. From box office sales worldwide, it made a ton of money. But when watching it now, I can't help but chuckle whenever I see the walrus complaining about his fax machine being out of paper.

banana squier, day 142

On February 1, 2011 I bought a new Arctic White Squier Bullet Strat - the second Squier I've ever owned.

After a month of owning it, the lower 12th fret dot inlay sunk into the neck. That was fixed under warranty repair. Since then the only real issue has been the pickup selector is a bit scratchy going from selection to selection, and that's because it's a cheap guitar. I can either have this fixed under warranty, or I can attempt a new switch install myself. I may opt to do it myself because I really want to learn how to do this stuff, and in reality it's not hard to do. The wiring diagram for my Bullet Strat is very simple in design and almost impossible to screw up. The hard part is using a soldering iron, as I have almost no experience with one, but it's not like it takes days to learn how to solder. More like minutes. I'd just buy a spool of cheap wire and do a few test solders to make sure I get it right, then go for it from there with the real thing. The switch itself incidentally is 12 bucks. Cheap upgrade and a good one at that.

If I have good luck with the switch replacement, I might actually buy another and replace the one on my red Squier, because that one is in really bad shape - but there's a problem as there is no wiring diagram available for my '89. However my red Squier does have the same pickup settings as Banana does.

Unless a Deluxe model, all Squier Strats are set up in such a way where first position is volume-only, with tone control only available to positions 2, 3, 4 and 5. My '89 is like this as is Banana. Given that '89 and Banana are identical in this respect, the 5-way switch should be wired the exact same way on both; there's no reason it shouldn't be as the configurations are the same. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. If when I get into the '89 and the selector connections are all different, I'll have to make do and just do my best to repair it instead of replace.

Anyway, Banana at this point is what I consider to be broken in. I'm at the point where I prefer playing her over any other guitar I own. She sings the way I want her to now and I'm used to her quirky dynamics. She will be the primary guitar I used on my upcoming release - no doubt about that. Yes I will be using the '89 and my '93 USA-made blue Strat as well (just because), but the bulk of the guitar work will be done on Banana.

I don't know if I'll be doing my hardware crapola with Banana before or after recording. Technically I don't need to at this point, so I'll probably just record first, upgrade hardware later.