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.
don't be a hoarder
Those who have been following me a while know I've been through a few guitars since 2010. Quite a few of them, actually.
But how many guitars do I actually keep? Not many. Right now I have six, with four in working condition. The working axes are the 2010 Squier Bullet Strat, 2012 Squier Jazzmaster, 1989 Squier II Stratocaster and 2005 Yamaha RBX170 bass guitar. The two inoperable guitars that are literally in pieces are the 1993 American Standard Stratocaster and the 2012 Squier Bullet HH.
I don't play the '89 Squier II. That one is just kept in a case and stored away because it is my very first guitar, and that's the reason I keep it.
As for the '93 Strat, that was an 18th birthday present from my late father, which is why I still have it. I will at some point buy another neck for it since the existing one has a popped truss rod and is therefore unplayable. But being that's not a high priority, it can wait.
The guitar I absolutely don't need and will eventually sell off in parts is the Bullet HH. Why haven't I yet? Laziness. But I will get rid of it somewhere down the line and decrease my guitar stable from 6 to 5.
As for every other guitar you have ever seen me own either in photos or in video, those are all gone. Every one of them. They were either sold or traded out.
The two guitars I play regularly are the Jazzmaster and the bass. And you can't even count the bass as being played regularly because I only use that when I need to lay down a bass track. Otherwise it sits on the stand and routinely gets a layer of dust on it from not being used. But being it does serve a purpose for when I do require bass tracks to be played, I keep it for that reason.
A lot of guys hoard guitars
Guitar hoarders all say the same thing. "I'm a collector." And of course they will talk about how they're "investing" in certain guitars, even though most guitars hold next to nothing for resale value.
Over a period of a few years, that guy, the guitar hoarder, will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 25 guitars. And out of that stable, maybe 3 to 5 will be in good, playable condition. The rest will be all junk. Some will need new frets, or replacement electronics, or new tuners or new hardware, etc. There's always going to be something about that "investment" that's wrong with it.
A lot of guys hoard guitars in search of something they will never find
Big-time guitar hoarders will keep buying guitars thinking they'll find "the one" that will be the magical instrument with the "golden tone" and make them the player they always wanted to be.
That won't happen, because most of the time guitar hoarders keep buying the same guitar over and over again.
Take the Fender Stratocaster or the Gibson Les Paul for example. There are guys out there who own several if not many of these guitars. They just keep buying the same thing, over and over, but never seem to locate that one special Strat or Paul that really has what they're looking for. Close, but never on the mark, so to speak.
The reason why the hoarder is never able to acquire a guitar that's "just right" is because the guitar is simply not suited for them and never will be.
It takes a bit of explanation to describe what this means.
Let's say for the moment you hate strawberries. Always have and always will. Would you continue to buy strawberries until you found one that tasted good? Of course not. You'd stop eating strawberries and go eat another fruit instead.
Guitars are the same way. If a cheap version of a guitar doesn't feel right, the expensive version of that same guitar with the same shape will not feel any better. It might sound a little different, but it's still going to not feel right. And no matter how many times you keep buying the same guitar with the same shape over and over, it will never feel right.
I'll put this in even simpler terms.
If you've been buying Strat after Strat after Strat and can never find one that suits you, stop buying Strats. Try a Telecaster instead. Or maybe something different like a Squier Jaguar or Fender Marauder. Try something totally different than what you've been playing.
If you've been buying Les Paul after Les Paul after Les Paul and can never find one you really like, stop buying Les Pauls. Try a Flying V. Try an Epiphone Explorer. Maybe even try a semi-hollow like the Gibson ES-335 or the Epiphone Dot.
Stores like Guitar Center and Sam Ash have a 30-day money back guarantee. This means if you buy a guitar and don't like it for whatever reason, you can bring it back and get a refund. You can "try before you buy" by utilizing that store policy.
Having one guitar that perfectly suits you is a million times better than owning a bunch of guitars that don't
Guitar hoarders will keep buying the same guitar over and over and never find "the one."
Smarter players try different things until they find a shape and style of guitar that suits them just right.
I went through a lot of guitars in my search for "the one" that suits me best. And as it turns out, that happened to be the Jazzmaster. That guitar is something I wouldn't have even thought of touching before. But I saw one (a few, actually) in Sam Ash, tried it, bought it, and now it's the axe I play most because it's so unbelievably comfortable. For me, anyway.
If you're hoarding guitars now, sell the hoard. Just get rid of it, even if you sell at a loss. Get whatever you can for it and just unload all that crap out of your home.
After that, try new guitars you never would have thought of trying before. Chances are pretty good your "one" will be something totally different from what you're playing now. When you find it - and you will as long as you keep an open mind - you'll be a much happier player because the quest for "that guitar" will be over. Once you discover what really works for you, you'll be a much happier player.
it's okay to be a bedroom guitarist
There are a lot of kids across the world who got a guitar as a present for Christmas, many with the dreams of being the next big rock star.
A lot of these kids will eventually realize that trying to become a rock star is too much work, and that's it is better just to be a "bedroom guitarist" instead...
...and that is 100% okay.
It is way easier to be a bedroom guitarist compared to being in a band
Being in a band is cool because of the whole band vibe thing and being able to play in a group and all that. But being a bedroom guitar player is way easier.
When doing the bedroom guitar thing, you can record whatever you want, whenever you want, in any style you want and then post over to Bandcamp, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or all of those all at once. And you don't need anyone's permission to do it. You don't need approval of your other band members or any of that nonsense because it's just you doing your thing.
As far as how easy it can be, all you need is one guitar and an R8. The R8 has every single possible guitar effect you could think of, and built-in microphones that you can sing or yell into for vocal stuff. The R8 also has a basic drum machine in it too. When I say that all you need is one guitar and an R8, I mean that literally. Absolutely nothing else is required to record with. When finished with a recording session, just pop out the SD card or connect a USB cable, copy over the master WAV and upload wherever you want or place in a video.
Not in a band? That's okay
Funny but true: You will probably be much more of a success as a bedroom guitar player than you ever would be in a band.
It is totally possible to become internationally known just by posting one song to YouTube. All it takes is just getting the song done, putting it out there and see what happens. Maybe nothing will happen. Or maybe everything will happen. You won't know unless you try.