Roland GR-500 Synth-Guitar 1977
The introduction of the Moog Guitar at this past summer’s 2008 NAMM brought to attention of previous attempts to making guitars more synth-like. The Moog Guitar Company didn’t create a guitar synth, per se, but with its features like the voltage-controlled filter and continuous sustain, it’s a prodigy of the Roland GR-500.
The Roland GR-500 was introduced in 1977, which was actually a guitar synth system, with a comparison of an Ibanez-made Les Paul-style electric guitar/controller and a synthesizer design with more than 40 switches, knobs and controls. The Roland used a separate floor unit device, the PC50 footswitch. This unit allowed users to create and select from three different preset sounds. In that era, before MIDI, the GR-500’s components joined together with a bulky 24-pin cable about the diameter of a “garden hose”.
The instrument itself was an impressive looking guitar, with a beautiful honeyburst finish and an extensive knob-encumbered control panel on the top (like Les Paul) and bottom right (like Ibanez) that gave full-control over the synth unit’s four sections: Guitar, Poly-Esemble, Bass and solo-synth section called “Melody”. The guitar had a single humbucker pickup for standard guitar sounds and a hexaphonic pickup that allowed the synth-guitar to track the pitch of each string note with a fair degree of accuracy. In addition, magnets installed within the body allowed the guitar to produce everlasting sustain on demand, though all this added significantly to the instrument’s weight.
So what did the Roland GR-500 sound like? It’s reported that the Poly-Ensemble could produce convincing bowed string sounds, bass tones were effortless, and the synth’s “Melody” section gave guitarists total control over the synth’s components, allowing a complete range of tones, noises and, of course, effects.
The End Line
Roland’s GR-500 is not only unique, but rare, especially complete systems (see: PC50 footswitch and 24-pin cable), which is unfortunate. Without a synth unit and the cable to connect it, the GR-500 guitar is just a guitar.
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Gibson Goldtone GA-30RVS
October 27, 2008 by Chazders · Leave a Comment
While Gibson is known primarily for making fine guitars, their amplifiers predate any Fender or Marshall amp by at least a decade. The company’s excellent tube amp offerings dried up in the Sixties, but with any luck, the introduction of the 1999 Goldtone series would hopefully be the beginning of putting Gibson amps back on the map. Read more
Gibson Les Paul Exotic Smartwood
Houses, railroads, toothpicks, popsicle sticks, telephone poles, books, bookshelves, magazines and guitars—what do they have in common? You guessed it, boys and girls: they’re all made of wood and wood-based products. Read more
PRS McCarty Korina – a Sound to Remember
October 8, 2008 by Chazders · Leave a Comment
White Korina wood, also known as African limba, provides a thick solid tone much like mahogany. Korina wood is also the same high-quality wood used for many of the early [Gibson] Flying Vs and Explorers that now demand such high dollar. Notably, a Korina wood Ibanez Destroyer guitar had played a large part in Eddie Van Halen’s legendary “brown” sound. A nice piece of lightweight wood, like the ones used to construct the Korina McCarty guitars, provides renowned dimensionality and depth, screaming highs, rich rounded mids, thick lows while providing vocal-like velvety warmth backed with tremendous sustain.
The Korina McCarty’s body is carved from sold slab of Korina wood, as is the 22-fret thick-wide neck. For those who have not played the liked PRS carved neck, it’s a beefy C shape that’s positioned into the 25-scale body. The chrome-covered McCarty humbuckers are similar to the highly commended humbuckers in the standard McCartys, and a Duncan-wound soap-bar is offered as an option for those who want something a little more unique. Vintage style tuners and a fixed aluminum bridge add a touch of sparkle to the Korina McCarty’s highs.
Like the PRS Mira, the PRS Korina McCarty confirms that a guitar doesn’t need a maple top to sound excellent. The Korina produces all of mahogany’s warmth with more definition in the bass and a more dynamic response. The well-defined midrange harmonics are also dazzling—2nd-,3rd- and 4th-fret harmonics pop clearly from this McCarty, even with a clean amp setting. When needed, treble response can be sharp but not piercing. It’s a sound enthusiast call “refined” because the pronounced highs and loose lows are balanced to create a bolstering prominent midrange.
The PRS McCarty’s highly developed and defined tone just sings, but through an amp that has plentiful gain, it could be likened to Santana’s heavier sounds or when you turn up the gain or turn the treble down and comp out some cool jazz lines. Korina McCarty does every style well, rock, jazz, country, etc… The sound to remember.
PRS Korina McCarty Guitar.
prsguitars.com
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Gibson’s Robot Guitar Wins Award
October 5, 2008 by Chazders · Leave a Comment
Hail the Gibson Robot Guitar! The Gibson Robot Guitar was awarded with the prestigious “Best Music Hardware Award” at the BT Digital Music Awards 2008. The BT Digital Music Awards now in its 7th year was held at the Roundhouse in London on Wednesday October 1st.
The Gibson Robot guitar is the world’s first electric guitar with robotic technology and beat stiff competition from the Motorola ROKR E8 and Ripserver. The Best Music Hardware Award in association with Stuff Magazine was decided upon by a panel of prominent industry judges. The Gibson Robot Guitar was sighted for its innovation, style, usability and price point among additional features.
The Gibson Robot Guitar is known for eliminating tuning problems for guitarists. The Robot Guitar automatically tunes to standard A440 tuning. In addition, it allows players to access six programmed tuning presets at the push of a button. The Gibson Robot intonates seconds after string changes, truss rod adjustments or change in weather conditions. Ultimately, with the locking tuner, single string changes or changing the entire set of strings is an automated luxury.
The annual Digital Music Awards were presented by TV’s Fearne Cotton and Rufus Hound and was filmed for ITV2. Bands performing in between the awards included Sugababes, Ida Maria, British Sea Power, Sam Beeton, Fightstar and Iglu & Hartly.
Thirteen of the 20 awards given were voted for online and the remaining seven by a panel of industry experts.
Gibson Robots official website: http://www.gibson.com/robotguitar/
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Washburn P3 and DLX Guitars with Buzz Feiten Tuning System
September 15, 2008 by Chazders · Leave a Comment
For all the advancements made in guitar design, one thing has remained essentially the same: try as you might, you can never get the damned things in perfect tune. If an open E chord sounds great, chances are a barred A will sound decidedly less so. Blame it on Pythagoras. Back around 500 B.C., the Greek philosopher and mathematician developed a formula, albeit an imperfect one, for tuning stringed instruments. His formula was popular—so popular, in fact, that it’s still in use today. Which is why your guitar relies on a design that’s about 2,500 years old. Read more
Van Halen’s Third Peavey Wolfgang Special
September 14, 2008 by Chazders · Leave a Comment
As Van Halen is such a mentored guitarist, it seems appropriate to review the third Edward Van Halen signature guitar (the second made by Peavey) a classic in the axe-mania public.
For those readers unfamiliar with the Eddie guitar saga, here is a brief recapitulation. In the early Nineties, the Van man teamed up with the Ernie Ball/Music Man company to create the Edward Van Halen Signature Model, an excellent—if extremely pricey—instrument that featured a uniquely contoured birdseye maple neck, a vaguely Telecaster-shaped, maple capped basswood body, a Floyd Rose tremolo and two specially designed DiMarzio pickups that were mounted directly to the guitar’s body to increase resonance and sustain.
Van Halen then parted ways with Music Man and struck a deal with Peavey, the Mississippi-based company that had already done him right with their 5150 line of signature amps. The alliance soon bore fruit in the form of the Wolfgang guitar, named after the guitarist’s son. This carved-top, more ergonomically contoured double-cut-away instrument sported similar materials and construction to the Music Man’s but featured new Peavey-designed pickups. This instrument, too, was pricey.
This brings us to the Wolfgang Special guitar, an extremely cool, lower-priced version of the aforementioned Wolfgang. While made in the same factory as the higher-ticket models, this instrument forgoes binding and a maple top in order to reduce costs, but otherwise features the same graphite-reinforced neck, and high-quality electronics and hardware as the other Wolfgang guitars. Ironically, the reasonably priced instrument, with its no-frills design, is probably closest in spirit and construction to Ed’s original Frankenstein axe, which was made entirely of parts that were heavy on the tone and light on the frills.
Thankfully, tone is what this guitar is all about. Each guitar’s body is constructed of basswood carefully selected to adhere to specific weight and grain tolerances. The two custom-wound Peavey pickups are mounted directly to the body, and the controls—a single master volume and a pickup selector mounted on the top bout—are kept to a bare minimum in order to reduce the amount of electric meandering the guitar’s signal has to travel through.
Run through a cranked 1973 Marshall Super Lead, the Wolfgang Special produced pure vintage Van Halen tone. Mucho ballsy, super chunky yet amazingly clear. The test model boasted a wonderfully musical top end and tight, well-defined lows. Rolling back the volume knob produced any range of tasty in-between tones that retain their integrity and definition even at the lowest whisper settings. Both of the guitar’s pickups seemed ideally voiced for their respective roles. The bridge had a midrangy toothiness reminiscent of the best old Gibson P.A.F.s; the neck was full and round, yet clear and open. Like a single-coil P-90 on steroids, it excels at clean tones and Hendrix-inspired whammy bar excesses.
And with this instrument’s rock-solid Floyd Rose-licensed tremolo. You can dive bomb all day without having to come up to tune. And thanks to an ingenious device of Ed’s invention, the low E string can be dropped a whole step to D simply by pulling a little lever that rests unobtrusively below the bridge’s fine tuners. It’s instant “Unchained” or Alice In Chains, depending on what your musical bag is.
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Gibson Firebird Guitar Born 1963
September 6, 2008 by Chazders · 4 Comments
Continued on from “Birth of the Les Paul”
The Gibson Firebird guitar and bass, which came along in 1963, were among Ted McCarty’s final triumphs for Gibson. Read more
Les Paul’s “LOG” Guitar, Circa 1939 - Birth of the Les Paul
Continued from: Les Paul’s journey to Gibson Guitars in 1951
Les Paul’s “LOG” Guitar, circa 1939 is the guitar that came to bear Les Paul’s name. Seeking to develop an up-market alternative to the plain, slab-body Telecaster, Ted McCarty [another towering figure in the early development for the electric guitar] came up with the idea of building a solidbody guitar with a carved maple top or “body cap.” He knew that the Fender factory didn’t have the machinery to do this kind of work. In 1950, McCarty brought this guitar to Les Paul, who approved the design, feeling it was right in line with what he’d been trying to achieve. He reportedly said to his wife and musical partner, Mary Ford, “They’re getting too close to us, Mary. I think we better sign up with them.”
So great were Gibson’s reservations about getting into the newfangland solidbody electric guitar market that the company at one point considered leaving its name off the guitar and just putting Les Paul’s name on. But they plucked up their courage, and in 1952 the first Gibson Les Paul model appeared on the market. It was very similar to the Les Pauls that are around today, with a few key differences. For one, it had a trapeze-style tailpiece. This was a source of some contention between Les Paul and the Gibson company: Gibson wrapped the strings under the tailpiece’s crossbar in order to achieve lower action; Les wanted the strings wound over the crossbar so he could better execute the palm muting technique that became important element of his playing style in the Fifties.
Ted McCarty finally settled the dispute by developing the stop tailpiece, which replaced the trapeze on Les Pauls in 1953. Two years later, McCarty introduced another refinement: the Tune-O-Matic bridge. Both the stop tailpiece and Tune-O-Matic bridge have been staples of electric design ever since.
In 1957, the Les Paul’s original P-90 pickups were replaced by a brand-new invention from a man named Seth Lover. The humbucking pickup featured two coils wound together to cancel out the hum that single-coil pickups generate under fluorescent lighting and in other dodgy electromagnetic circumstances. The humbuckers produced a bass-heavy, “dark” tone which combined with Les Paul’s heavy mahogany and maple body wood and traditional dovetail neck joint to create a distinctly rich tone that would come to be identifiable as “the Gibson sound.”
In the years that followed, Ted McCarty sought to broaden and diversify the essential Gibson aesthetic. Working with a local artist, he developed three revolutionary guitars—the Flying V, the Explorer and the ultra-rare Moderne. Both the Flying V and the Explorer debuted in 1957 (the Moderne apparently never developed past the prototype stage). With their radical angular lines, these instruments were a bit too wild for the late Fifties. Although they didn’t sell well on their initial release, they returned with a vengeance latter in the rock era.
McCarty went in a completely different direction with the Gibson ES-335, the guitar that pioneered the concept of the semi-hollowbody electric. The thin-line body has much less depth than a conventional archtop, which seems bulky in comparison. This significantly reduced the potential for feedback that has always hounded full-sized electric hollowbodies. McCarty also came up with the idea of having a solid block of maple running down beneath the pickups. (The Log revisted!) The result was an instrument—also still very much in use today—that combined many of the best properties of solidbody and hollowbody guitars.
Read more: The Gibson Firebird Guitar and Bass. *coming soon G-V
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Les Paul’s journey to Gibson Guitars in 1951
September 3, 2008 by Chazders · 2 Comments
Around the same time that George Beauchamp and the other early electric guitar pioneers were active in southern California, a guitarist and radio personality named Les Paul was in Hollywood working out his own vision of what the electric guitar should be. Born Lester Polfus, he became an established guitarist in the Thirties, performing country music under the names Red Hot Red and, later Rhubarb Red, and jazz as Les Paul. In 1939, Paul began to put together what he called “The Log,” a four-by-four length of solid pine to which he attached a Gibson neck, homemade pickups, a crudely fashioned bridge and vibrato tailpiece. Like many other innovators of the guitar, Paul wanted to eliminate the uneven harmonic response produced by an amplified hollowbody guitar. Although he sawed an Epiphone hollowbody in half and attached the two sides of his four-by-four block of pine, this was more for aesthetic than acoustic reasons—to make the thing look like a real guitar. This supremely quirky instrument, now enshrined in Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame, is another sacred relic of the electric guitar’s evolution, the product of an inveterate tinkerer and one of the century’s most original musical inventors. Paul also pioneered multitrack recording and anticipated the home recording boom by a good 30 years.
Paul used the Log on recordings he and his trio made with Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters and others. But when he brought the instrument to Gibson’s headquarters in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1941, they laughed at him. “I took the Log to Gibson and I spent 10 years trying to convince them that this was the way to go,” recollects Les. “But it wasn’t easy. If it wasn’t for Leo Fender, I don’t think that ever would have come off. Leo saw more in it that Gibson did.”
True enough. A venerable company, with origins tracing back to the 19th century, Gibson had taken a conservative, classicist approach to the electric guitar, producing electric archtop hollowbodies like the ES-150, which was introduced in 1936 and adopted by jazz players like Charlie Christian. Other “old school” manufacturers like Epiphone, Harmony and Kay had taken a similar tack. But with the huge success of the Fender Telecaster in the early Fifties, Gibson decided to “go California” and get in on the solidbody market. Suddenly Les Paul’s Log didn’t seem like such a crazy idea. “Better go get that kid with the broomstick,” someone at Gibson is purported to have said.
The man who made it happen was Ted McCarty. A shrewd businessman with a good eye for design and a flair for building teams of like-minded visionaries, McCarty is another towering figure in the early development of the electric guitar. Originally a buyer for Wurlitzer, McCarty joined Gibson on 1948, and in 1950 he was made president of the company. It was McCarty who oversaw the design of Les Paul’s “LOG” Guitar. http://www.gibson.com/
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