rock guitar Archives

In praise of: Guitars with ‘too many’ frets

Recently I was doing the rounds, looking through the websites of various guitar companies to do a bit of daydreaming/window shopping and to see if there’s anything new that I’ve missed (hey, there’s no shame in it). I noticed a stunning new model on the Jackson site – a sparkly blue series-production version of the rare 27-fret Soloist, previously a Custom Shop model which they’re trying out as their first ever production model with more than 24 frets. This is good news.

I suppose I’m giving away my roots as a metal/shred enthusiast by professing my love for guitars with more than 24 frets, but humour me – while many people can’t see a single viable use for such a thing, this is My Blog and I can. The extra frets can be great for soloing (even if you might need to bung your fretting hand in a pencil sharpener to hit them with any precision) but what’s even better is having the extra deep cutaway to reach the 19th to 24th frets easier than on a normal 24-fret guitar. Being able to precisely place tapped harmonics is fun too.

Let me show you something ridiculous, which I used to own:

Taste and restraint? Never heard of ‘er…

This is my old Ibanez RG550XH, a limited-run model which was available in black and a couple of different sparkly finishes a few years ago. I had an absolute blast with this guitar, I still think back to it every now and then and wonder if I should look for another one – I sold it to pay for the James Tyler, so it needed to happen, but I do have a craving for some 30-fret action in my life again. It was dirt cheap, and played great. I pretty much used the bridge pickup exclusively, it had an active neck pickup ‘simulation’ which I never really bothered with if I’m honest. Reactions-wise, it received a mixture of amazement, amusement and, perhaps most frequently, bemusement. If I got another one, I’d try to hunt down a blue example and probably give it a mirror scratchplate with just a single humbucker.

Rock and f’n roll.

Other guitars are available though, so let’s have a look at some of the stuff you can get hold of if the thought of having your range extended upwards is getting you excited.

If you’re prepared to splash the cash, there are any number of 27-fret Caparison models out there, the bolt-on neck Horus being perhaps the best known, the very high-end thru-neck TAT being the poshest, and there have been a few signature artist models with 27 frets as well. But the one I’m going to share, which I covet the most, is the now-discontinued Apple Horn Jazz, the fixed-bridge variant of Swedish madman Mattias Eklundh’s signature guitar. This, and one of Caparison’s Brocken baritones, would be a formidable pairing for recording some metal guitars…

This EC29 has a crackle finish and a grab handle too. Because why not? [Photo credit: Reverb]

Way back in the late 80s, the era of excess which I rather wish I’d been there for, Washburn were making a whole line of guitars with crazily extended fretboards, the excellent Stephen’s Extended Cutaway (still used on Nuno Bettencourt’s N4s) being the unique selling point. There was the rare bolt-on EC26 – name corresponding to the number of frets – but even cooler is the thru-neck EC29. Or, if that just isn’t excessive enough for you, why not delete the neck pickup (because there simply isn’t space) and have a full three octaves? The EC36 is truly ridiculous. You might see it as a shark-jump moment for the 80s superstrat craze, I prefer to view it as a glorious folly for true connoisseurs.

Hamer more than dabbled in extra frets in the 80s too. The relatively plentiful, bolt-on Californian superstrat design boasted a healthy 27 frets, but cooler still was the very, very limited-run, hand-made Virtuoso model, a delightfully well-resolved double-cutaway, set-neck shape with, again, a dog-bothering 36 frets. A few years ago, the *ahem* colourful character that was the late Ed Roman offered a recreation of the Virtuoso model through his custom shop, although how many of those exist is unclear. I gather that ‘real’ Virtuoso models (Virtuosi?) are very rare too. Perhaps even in the 1980s, there wasn’t THAT much call for 36 frets. Many of them had Floyd Rose bridges, although some appear to exist with fixed bridges – including this phenomenally tasty-looking apple green example on the right. I always love a nice shiny green guitar, especially when it gives you enough range to transcend human hearing altogether…

Did you know PRS made a few 27-fret guitars in the early days? The hand-made Sorcerer’s Apprentice dates from the pre-factory era and there are, as far as I know, only a handful in existence. It was based on the equal-cutaway shape, a la the Santana model, and appeared to have three P-90s, the back two of which are jammed together to, presumably, give a humbucker sound. There was even a 12-string example, a glorious symbol of excess if ever there was one. I’d love to see this model brought back – I doubt it’ll happen, but a man can dream.

Yes, it’s really stupid – but you still want it a bit, don’t you? Not in matt black though. [Photo credit: Reverb]

Logic dictates I should save the most excessive til last – I thought we’d have a job finding something crazier than the Washburn or the Hamer, but then a long-buried memory resurfaced… allow me to introduce the Gary Kramer Turbulence. This delta wing-shaped weapon was available, of course, with 29 frets (for the weak-willed and prudish among us), or with a full complement of 36 frets – either with a fixed bridge or a Floyd Rose. And seven strings, if you wanted. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

Don’t try and tell me these don’t ROCK.

Is it a ‘bird? – 1978 Aria Pro II MK-1600

I love an old, late 70s B.C. Rich, don’t you? Those crazy shapes, those fancy neck-through building techniques, those mad kitchen-sink banks of switches… while they’ve settled into predominantly catering for extreme metallers since the late 80s, those desirable old hand-built models still stand as a testament to the class and genuine innovation BCR displayed when they were still a small shop in Los Angeles.

Of those early shapes, the Mockingbird is hands-down the coolest. The Bich is probably too much, the Eagle is possibly too little, but the Mock in its original form is still absolutely jaw-dropping today. Well… not quite its original form, perhaps – the earliest examples had a shorter bottom horn and the top point shifted upwards, and those “shorthorn” models look a bit gawky and weird now. But the re-designed model? You can definitely see how it became such an icon, most notably in the hands of one curly-haired young fella in a top hat…

There is a price to pay for that iconic status nowadays though – and that price, if you can even find one in the UK, is probably somewhere well north of £3k. But fear not – if you want an old Mockingbird, I recently discovered that there is another way… well, if you’re prepared to spend some time on the chase.

All that’s missing is a control for making coffee.

Browsing eBay one day (how dangerous can that be? pfffft) I spotted a rare ‘bird indeed – a near-enough exact, Japanese-built copy of an early Mockingbird, indeed hailing from the exact period in which the Mockingbird first appeared, the late 1970s.

The headstock displayed a classic seventies Japanese ‘lawsuit guitar’ trait – the logo designed to be JUST different enough from what it’s copying. A stylised mother-of-pearl ‘P’ inlay instead of the ‘R’ on a handcrafted Rich… that ‘P’ marks it out as an Aria Pro II, and the seller advertised it as having been built in 1978 (though he later added it may have been 1977 instead). As for the rest of the guitar… well, you’d have to be a *serious* nerd to really tell it apart from a kosher USA Mockingbird. Even the classic B.C. Rich “cloud” inlays have been copied wholesale. There’s only one noticeable difference – it gives away a single micro-switch from the smorgasbord of controls. That’s it.

That and the fact it was £750, rather than the thick end of four grand.

Seriously – what crazy value for money this seems, when it genuinely is pretty much the next-best thing to an original Mock. It even has the same pickups – vintage, early DiMarzio Dual Sounds, superbly 70s-sounding high output four-conductor humbuckers which are absolutely amazing. The guitar rings really nicely, despite appearing to be made from about 800 different pieces of maple – lots of pancake layering going on in this, which is possibly the only other clue as to its relative cheapness.

Wiring-wise… how long have you got? The controls:

Master volume (closest to bridge pickup)

3-way pickup selector

Preamp volume (with preamp on/off micro switch next to it)

Master tone

Master coil-split micro switch

Master phase-reversal micro switch

6-way varitone (the chickenhead knob)

You want to see the inside of the control cavity… it looks like the wiring loom of a Mercedes S-class. I may swap the black plastic cover for a transparent one to amuse house guests.

The varitone is next to useless, as is the preamp (I’ve taken the battery out and I’m wondering about changing the micro switch out for a non-latching one so I can use it as a kill switch…) But what with the splitter and phase switches, you still have a hell of a lot of sounds on tap. For a big old hunk of maple, it isn’t actually too heavy (9 lb?), and it plays great – notwithstanding the ergonomic… difficulty, shall we say, of the Mockingbird shape. That Medieval axe of a top horn is quite a bugger when you’re sitting down. You definitely suspect it was designed to look cool first, and be ergonomic second… scratch that – fourteenth or fifteenth. As a side note, it started out with black pickup rings but those have now been swapped for cream ones, as were more often seen on period B.C. Riches…

It’s been a long post, I know, but hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading about it. I thought it was worth doing since there seems to be so little information about these particular Aria models. Few people seem to even know they exist – not even my dad, an avowed nerd for rare-groove 70s and 80s Japanese guitars. Worth mentioning, too, that it seems Greco also built some copies of early BCR models at around the same time as this Aria was built. Those are also very rare, and due to the possibly more prestigious Greco brand name they’re a bit more expensive – though still nowhere near the price of a 70s Rich.

I’ve always, always wanted an old Mockingbird, and while this guitar is technically a ‘mock-Mockingbird’, it’s absolutely scratched that itch for me. Like all the best 70s Japanese copy guitars, it doesn’t leave me feeling short-changed in the slightest.

ANOTHER belated new guitar day – Jackson DK2M

We’ve all been there, surely – the most tempting guitars appear, seemingly as a taunt from above, at the exact time we can least afford them. My James Tyler – initially I found it as I was in the middle of paying for my Blackmachine, and it slipped away, only to re-enter my life due to pure good fortune (of which more another time). My Tele – I found it when I’d been going through a dry spell in paid gigs, and was not best placed to buy yet another guitar effectively on impulse. And, because I never learn, the story continues.

My local music shop has developed a rather interesting rotation of new and used guitars in recent years, and none interested me more than a certain pointy headstock I saw poking out upon a visit not long ago. I recognised this guitar instantly as a Jackson DK2M, and not the current model either – the version built from around 2006 to 2010 in the old Japanese factory where Jackson built the Pro series, among other things, until operations moved to other countries with cheaper manufacturing.

This would be a lot of guitar for twice the money.

I’d always loved this particular model – my imagination captured way back in my early teens when I spied a review of it in a magazine. The high-contrast black sharkfin inlays and logo on the pale maple fretboard looked unbelievably badass to young me, and the image stayed lodged in my brain. The guitar in the magazine was white, one of the best colours for this model, but the example before me in the shop had another particular thing going for it – it was black. A black, two-humbucker, 24-fret superstrat with a maple fretboard is an aesthetic that is significant to me, because it reminds me of the old ESP M-II that Ben Tovey of Rise To Remain, an early guitar hero of mine who became my guitar teacher when I was fifteen, used to use on stages all over the world.

Anyway – I’ve always thought these guitars were exceptional value. When they were new, they came in hard cases and had proper Seymour Duncan pickups, a not-awful locking bridge and, of course, were made in Japan, but sold for only about 500 sheets. And used, values have remained temptingly affordable – surely they can’t stay this cheap for long.

But for now, the residual values are feeble enough that I’ve managed to become the proud new custodian of a properly awesome, vibey, flamboyant superstrat of a type I’d wanted to rock out on for years. It is currently set up in drop C and being used for all sorts of shred and metal stuff. The Duncans sound great, although may be swapped out in time, and the neck is truly astonishing – every Jackson I play has a superb neck and this is no exception.

Honestly – Japanese Jacksons are still a bargain. Get one now, before everyone realises.

EDIT 11.6.2020 – Here’s a video – some talking and some playing from me.

Album review: Beau Bowen – ‘The Great Anticlimax’

Well, this is quite an entrance from Beau Bowen – but that wasn’t a surprise to me. He first came to my particular notice when I caught him as Paul Gilbert’s support act in September last year. He absolutely floored me – walked out in a red sequinned jumpsuit, with a battered Burgundy Mist Strat, and proceeded to burn through a set of planet-sized riffs, stunning melodies and guitar solos that left my jaw dropped long after he’d left the stage. He could have passed for a time-travelling 70s glam rock icon – but with the addition of guitar chops that could go toe-to-toe with some of the best modern rock players.

Since then, I’ve been keenly anticipating his debut album, and The Great Anticlimax has proven to be anything but an accurate name. To borrow a well-worn cliche, there are in fact more eureka moments on this single album than in many bands’ entire discographies. The title track opens proceedings, in a manner that befits Bowen’s captivating stage presence. A grandiose, near six-minute monster which sets the tone for everything that is to follow – imagine something like Elton John using his powers for evil. The huge wall of sound which forms the middle section of this track is the defining moment on the entire album for me. Said middle section follows the first of this album’s quotient of truly astonishing guitar solos – wait for the mad Yngwie-esque run at the end…

Image is the property of Beau Bowen and other rights holders.

The rest of the album’s run time is a blur of magnificent noise – we hear piano-tinged classical influence, stomping Led Zeppelin influence, modern, fuzz-drenched heavy rock in spades too, and all overlaid with glittering glam-rock attitude. Fans of Queen and Queens of the Stone Age alike will all be able to find much to enjoy here.

Bowen’s voice is arresting – he has shades of Bowie, shades of the aforementioned Elton John, perhaps a touch of peak-era Ozzy Osbourne. His vocal delivery complements the tone of the music absolutely perfectly, and really adds to the album’s supercharged 70s rock credentials. As for his guitar work – well, suffice to say this is a player you need to be paying attention to. He quotes Jeff Beck as a major influence, and that comes as no surprise when you listen to his delivery – there is the same expressiveness, the same elegant melodicism. There is also the same level of gleeful assault on the venerable Strat vibrato arm, although Bowen’s use of it often seems far more aggressive – in his hands, it is a device used to make squalling, psychedelic, apocalyptic noise as much as it is a tool for nuanced expression. Whether achieved with the bar or with his fingers, his vibrato is particularly stunning, not to mention distinctive in sound. And let’s not beat about the bush – he can shred like an absolute demon as well. The focus is very often on Bowen’s playing, there are lots of solos and all of them are face-melters. He is one of my favourite guitarists to appear in recent times.

The album is not very long – only about half an hour, with seven full-length tracks and two minute-long intervals around the middle of the run time, which are a cool inclusion and genuinely add to the swirling psychedelia that runs as a common thread through these songs. The jumps between quiet, low-key atmospherics and wailing wall of sound, then back again, sometimes happen so suddenly as to be disconcerting, though the overall effect is still one of a very carefully put-together collection of complex, multi-layered songs. The chord progressions and lyrics alike are always skilfully written, and the orchestration of the various parts is superb. A particularly good example of this is the second-to-last track, ‘Universe in Reverse’, the opening strains of which are achingly beautiful in both their composition and their arrangement. But then we drop into a swaggering, heavy riff and bridge section which skilfully outlines the tense, ominous chord progression. And to cap it all, we are treated to a full two minutes of screaming guitar solo – this one is particularly brilliant and may well be the best one on the album.

It is tough to find fault with this album, it really is. It transports the listener to an alternate universe in which it is still 1973 – save for the fact that a mid-80s Yngwie Malmsteen would be proud of some of the classically-tinged shred wizardry on display in the solos. For me, as a man who enjoys beautifully-written, retro-flavoured rock music, and also as someone who is powerless to resist a big ol’ slab of brilliantly executed lead guitar, this album really hits the spot. Watch out for Beau Bowen – my guess is that we’re going to be seeing his face a lot more.

Players You Should Know 2: Steve Lynch

I love hair metal – I often find myself wishing I could’ve been born thirty years earlier, in Los Angeles, so I might have been able to join a band and make a huge amount of money from shredding, wearing tight clothes and having a lot of hair. But there would have been a notable downside of being involved in that scene – the cold, gut-wrenching dread of knowing that one day, my band might end up sharing a bill with Autograph, and I would therefore leave myself vulnerable to being totally upstaged by their astonishing guitarist, Steve Lynch.

Steve Lynch doesn’t seem to get the attention that many of his contemporaries do, possibly because Autograph never quite had the success of Motley Crue, Poison, Ratt and so on. That’s despite having a bunch of good tunes too. But if you want to hear a guitarist who could shred with precious few equals on the Sunset Strip, with not a single duff solo in his entire back catalogue, here’s your man. Oh, and he’s no relation to George, if you were wondering. Everyone assumes I mean George Lynch when I’m talking about Steve. I’m sick of people “correcting” me like some human equivalent of Google’s smug “did you mean…?” function. SHUT UP! WATCH STEVE!

Really, you need to watch him as much as you need to listen to him. I was introduced to his playing, unexpectedly, by hearing Autograph’s biggest hit ‘Turn Up the Radio’ on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and being so mesmerised by the solo that I was actually compelled to stop the pixellated Lamborghini Countach clone that I’d stolen – and put on hold my requirement to go and extort money from a strip club owner, or something.

I heard a whole string of classically-inspired tapped arpeggios, the sort of post-Van Halen rock guitar idea that was everywhere in the mid-80s, but somehow a cut above. Further research led me to YouTube, whereupon I found a whole load of clips of Lynch, hairsprayed to the nines, demonstrating his own solos on his 80s instructional video The Two-Handed Guitarist. This title is no exaggeration, as his soloing makes more inventive use of both hands than just about anyone else who was recording at the time.

Forget your EVH-spec arpeggios with a single right-hand finger. Lynch’s solos almost always involve all eight fingers somewhere – whether crossing strings to create devilishly complex arpeggiated sequences which sound more like keyboard parts than guitar, or throwing in a load of picking-hand fingers across one string in a manner that is still rarely matched to this day. And of course, many of the other common 80s tricks are in there – take a drink every time you hear a dive bomb on a harmonic…

There are also lots of fantastic, not to mention challenging, picking-based ideas throughout his lead playing – the solo from Autograph’s ‘Crazy World’ being a notable example. Lynch certainly has a keen melodic ear but, perhaps unsurprisingly, his solos are hard to get right – his licks are often quite left-field in terms of the positioning required to play them, and that’s before even considering his astonishing tapping technique. Naturally, on the second Autograph album, That’s the Stuff, Lynch gets a minute-long unaccompanied solo spot, ‘Hammerhead’, which makes Eddie Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’ sound about as technically challenging as ‘Seven Nation Army’.

Autograph reformed and brought a new album out not long ago, but Lynch had already been keeping himself busy through the post-hair metal days with numerous other bands and solo projects, and now also devotes a large amount of time to teaching. He’s used various guitars over the years, although the one I associate with him is the awesome custom-painted Jackson used in The Two-Handed Guitarist video. I once saw something purporting to be one of his old guitars for sale online, a V-shaped Carvin with his usual choice of Kahler vibrato, and even the same “EKG” graphic (which is on most or all of his old guitars, and looks inarguably badass). I wish I’d bought it somehow. I’m quite sure it would have made me sound and play just like him…

Where to start:

Autograph – ‘Turn Up the Radio’ from Sign In Please (1984)

Autograph – ‘That’s the Stuff’ from That’s the Stuff (1985) – plus the video of Steve playing it!

Autograph – ‘Crazy World’ from That’s the Stuff (1985) – there’s a playthrough of this too.

Autograph – ‘Loud and Clear’ from Loud and Clear (1987) – and this!

Autograph – ‘She Never Looked That Good For Me’ from Loud and Clear (1987)

Top 5: ‘70s rock guitar solos

Don’t worry, it’s not another of those copy-and-paste lists of the exact same tracks you’ve seen a million times before. Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, Eruption, Comfortably Numb and Bohemian Rhapsody are all banned. Because we can do better.

So, in no particular order:

–

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – ‘California’, from Watch (1978)

This utterly jaw-dropping solo from Dave Flett comes in at 1:50. When was the last time you heard a guitar scream like that?

–

UFO – ‘Only You Can Rock Me’, from Obsession (1978)

A long-time favourite of mine at 2:10, this is Michael Schenker at his most beautifully melodic. Not a note out of place, and the fact it was most likely delivered on a white Flying V only makes it cooler.

–

Patto – ‘See You at the Dance Tonight’ from Hold Your Fire (1971)

Ollie Halsall, ripping shit up in a genuinely unprecedented manner, from 1:40. He’s such an interesting and little-discussed player, there’ll be a whole article devoted to him on here at some point. For now, have your jaw dropped by this:

–

Queen – ‘Somebody to Love’, from A Day at the Races (1976)

Well, there had to be some Brian May on here somewhere – this, two minutes in, is undoubtedly some of his finest work. Again, never a note out of place and just perfectly phrased.

–

Meat Loaf – ‘Bat Out of Hell’, from Bat Out of Hell (1976)

Todd Rundgren did this bloody thing in one take. It’s about six minutes into the original track but I think it’s best if you watch Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman’s recollections of how he did it. It’s absolutely staggering, and yet another reason to love Todd Rundgren.

–

Honourable mentions – there are so many I wish I could fit in, even beyond these extra five:

Eddie Money – ‘Two Tickets to Paradise’, played by Jimmy Lyon (1977)
Boston – ‘Foreplay/Long Time’, played by Barry Goodreau (1976)
Mahogany Rush – ‘Tryin’ Anyway’, played by Frank Marino (1975)
Thin Lizzy – ‘Waiting For an Alibi’, played by Gary Moore and Scott Gorham (1978)
Toto – ‘Hold the Line’, played by Steve Lukather (1978)

Players You Should Know 1: Ian Thornley

Ian Thornley is amazing. Best known as the frontman, primary songwriter and lead guitarist for the Canadian/American rock band Big Wreck, he has been releasing material since the late 90s and if you’re into modern rock guitar, he’s someone you just NEED to be paying attention to.

A friend introduced me to Big Wreck’s music a couple of years ago – the track “Ladylike”, from their 2001 album The Pleasure and the Greed was the first I heard. It had a really awesome main riff which cycled round insistently, driving everything along, and I was impressed by Ian’s voice too, but thought I had the measure of it after a minute or two – a moderately handy rock guitarist with a good set of lungs on him. But then… a blazing solo, after the second chorus. Far from your standard late-90s post grunge fare – I wasn’t expecting it at all, and I was instantly very curious to hear more from this band, and see if that solo was a fluke…

Reader, it was not.

I delved into Big Wreck at full speed – looking back to their first album, which contains two of their biggest hits, but actually finding more of interest in their recent material. Their 2012 comeback album Albatross is heavy on killer guitar parts, but the one that took me most by surprise, to the point of laughing out loud in sheer incredulity, is the solo in “A Million Days”, in which Thornley doesn’t so much turn up the heat as just let a firework off, indoors. He channels Steve Morse, reeling off blazing-fast chromatic runs and wide, dramatic-sounding bends, and I was stunned. The rest of the album contains yet more of note, and the follow-up Ghosts is even better, if anything – the title track on that album contains a faintly “SRV on Let’s Dance” solo which has to be heard to be believed. Helps, of course, that the rest of the band are killer – as is the songwriting.

Thornley’s playing is quite fusion-inflected, but also incorporates a large amount of classic rock and blues influence, and he can shred with the very best too – I can confirm this after spending a very tiring and physically-taxing couple of days working out his ridiculous lead break at the close of “I Digress”. But here’s the kicker – that astonishing lead playing is just one facet of his musicality. He’s a mean slide player too, for example. He has a whole bunch of tasty riffs and rhythm parts to his name, and is given to working with a multitude of dropped, baritone or even open tunings – the aforementioned “Ladylike” is in open Db minor, for example. And then there’s his voice… if you like Chris Cornell, or perhaps Richie Kotzen, then Thornley’s voice will appeal – particularly in the early days of Big Wreck, Soundgarden comparisons were made frequently.

As for his guitar tone… well, it’s fantastic. One of my favourite examples is the enormous, thick and room-filling rhythm sound from new track “Voices”, on which the guitars are tuned all the way down to a low Ab – to considerable effect. Thornley has used a wide array of different gear over his career so far, but most recently he’s been using Suhr guitars and amps.

Recent albums, including their very latest, the newly released … but for the sun, have shown no let-up in Thornley’s astonishing guitar and vocal prowess, and he is undoubtedly a player who should be on any rock guitarist’s radar.

Where to start:

Big Wreck – “Ghosts” from Ghosts (2014)

Big Wreck – “Albatross” from Albatross (2012)

Big Wreck – “I Digress” from Ghosts (2014)

Big Wreck – “War Baby” from Ghosts (2014)

Big Wreck – “Voices” from … but for the sun (2019)