You know, I never thought a headline here would have ‘naked’ in it, but the world is an unpredictable place. Testament to that, the woman who accused Yngwie Malmsteen of being a sexual sadist now works as one professionally.
Amber Dawn Malmsteen (nee Landin), Yngwie’s wife from 1993 to 1998, has resurfaced in an online classifieds ad, seeking sex slaves in the Phoenix, AZ, area for “humiliation and degradation scenarios.” Photos from the ad, showing a trim but vaguely threatening Amber in a variety of fetish wear, are on the next page and are not safe for work! (She’s topless).
It’s hard to reconcile the imposing, masculine Amber Dawn of today, who likes to be known as Mistress Seven, with the tiny mosquito woman we caught occasional and brief glimpses of on Malmsteen DVDs, peeking out timidly from a little white powdered face amidst a giant hairsprayed mane of teased black hair, her double-zero sized body vacuum packed into a double-zero sized black dress, never daring to speak. Part of the change in demeanor can be explained: Amber told the Phoenix New Times that while she works as a dominatrix during the day, she likes to play submissive at home.
“I kick around people daily, and the last thing in the world I want is to be like that at home. I submit to certain guys like putty. My turn-ons are blood, pain and the extreme. I get a rush out of being hurt, though most guys don’t want to hurt me. You don’t have to twist my arm or pull teeth to get me to do stuff.”
Amber Dawn, for whom the instrumental track of the same name on Malmsteen’s Magnum Opus (1995) was written, married Yngwie in a Swedish castle on December 26, 1993 — which was four months after a SWAT team had rescued her from, her mother alleged, a crazed Yngwie holding her hostage with a shotgun at his Miami home. It was on TV. You might remember seeing the Maestro being arrested in his bathrobe. Amber says they used a lot of cocaine. Yeah. They were divorced in April, 1998.
The mother, by the way, was no saint, and used to lead her underage daughter around the rock clubs circuit, modeling underwear. Today, at 36, for the right price you can have Malmsteen’s ex-wife stand on your balls. America!
Thanks to Magic & Mayhem of the Yngwie Malmsteen Forum, who dug up the pics.
I am between picks at the moment. In plectral limbo. Plectorially adrift. It’s not a comfortable place to be. You can’t sort of settle into playing when you don’t have a go-to guitar pick. You can’t melt into a solo when you’re thinking, however peripherally, how would this sound or feel with this or that pick? How would the attack differ? Would the tricky bits be easier?
I miss the conviction of youth. As an annoying little greasy kid in music college, I knew, not thought, knew Jazz III picks were the best:
Or those other little Dunlop picks which were the same size and shape as the Jazz III but thinner and made out of Tortex, if that’s even a real thing:
I could simply play best with them, and so all others were useless. But plectra seem to have life cycles. I use one design for years, then one day it seems wrong. I thought this would be a sensible time to show you what I did last time this happened; last time I was between picks. When I tried to craft The Ultimate Guitar Pick.
The Ultimate Guitar Pick
Adherence to the credo ‘whatever Malmsteen does is probably best’ has caused me trouble more than once in my life, such as the time I dispensed with alternate picking (which I was okay at) and legato (which I played intuitively and fluidly) for economy picking that I eventually had to go through a morally depleting reboot of my technique to forget, so that I might again play with something approaching an even meter.
It also happened with picks. I figured, okay, Yngwie picks like a demon, unleashing his fury in great cascades of tumbling, glistening notes — he must have the best pick!
These are Malmsteen picks. The ones he plays, and flings from the stage every eight seconds, are white, with his signature on, but these are the same in all other respects. Dunlop, 1.5 mm thick, made of shiny Delrin, which is a nice memorable commercial word for polyoxymethylene. The forlorn lilac pigment is made from the crushed dreams of Malmsteen fans, following the sharp post-millennial decline of their hero’s writing, record production, and management. Crushed dreams are lilac.
The Malmsteen picks indeed sound great, with a nice squeaky attack, and that stiff shiny Delrin just rolls off the strings, adding a ton of harmonics as it goes. But I am shit with them. Despite forcing myself to use them because they ‘must be the best’, I had to eventually admit that they were too big and fat and were making me clumsy and imprecise.
So I over-thought it, as I do. Too big? Unwieldy? What if I took the took the lovely sound and glossy material of the Yngwie pick and gave it the legendary profile of the Jazz III that had suited me so well?! I got to cutting and filing and comparing and filing more, whittling away all evening, until I staggered, half mad, from my office, obsession playing at the corners of my eyes, and proclaimed, following a clap of thunder, “it’s alive!”
Do you see? There, in the middle. They said it couldn’t be done*, yet I achieved it! Is this genius or what? It turns out to be very much or what.
Not That Ultimate After All
Crafting a mini Malmsteen guitar pick was meant to provide the nimble control of the Jazz III but in a better-sounding, better-wearing material, with the glassy rounded Yngwie tip. The tone would be the same, but I’d be able to play properly with it. It doesn’t work, though. The stiff, thick Delrin has no give, and so when you cut half the pick off — the big, wide, stabilizing end — what’s left just gets pushed around between the soft, giving pads of forefinger and thumb at every contact with the strings. It’s a bit like trying to play with a penny, given the rigidity and slippery round point. Crap.
Still, we’ve learned something about pick design. Small, hard picks seem to need to be sharp-pointed. Something to do with reduced contact with the strings so the pick isn’t simply pushed around. Or, like the lesser-spotted Jazz II, they can be kinda rounded, but made out of soft nylon and not as thick, so the point can bend a little while the part in your grip remains stable. Knowledge. Now I can get a job at Dunlop, and create The Ultimate Ultimate Guitar Pick. Which might even be vaguely playable.
*Nobody said this.
When Gibson sued Fernandes for trademark infringement, dilution, and unfair competition for selling Les Paul copies in Japan (under the Burny brand), the Tokyo High Court ruled, on February 24, 2000, in favor of Fernandes, finding that the form of the Les Paul had become, by this point, generic. Intellectual property law is not the sexiest of subjects, but the committed are invited to read the court’s decision (and some helpful commentary) in this PDF. It’s worth it, really. If only to read a stiff, sober Japanese legal account of rock and roll, which “allows musical expression in a lively manner,” and how this genre made possible the electric guitar solo, driving the instrument’s iconic status (and thus sales). If reams of legal waffle, even about electric guitars, cannot appeal, then the salient results of the case are these:
- Gibson waited too long to complain, as over 30 brands had been cranking out Les Paul copies in Japan for more than 20 years before they got around to having a moan in 1993.
- Consumers, the court says, can tell the difference between Gibson and domestic brands — they are not being hoodwinked into thinking they’re buying a Gibson just because it’s the same shape as a Les Paul, as Gibson alleged.
- Amid so many unchallenged copies, Gibson’s design became recognized as a standard, general template for electric guitars, and the Gibson Les Paul is not seen as the source of this but simply as one implementation of it among versions from dozens of manufacturers.
This history explains why stunning, dead-on copies of Les Pauls continue to be made and sold in Japan, and not of course in the US, where Gibson maintains its copyright and will kill you with knives and acid if you produce an LP copy. If you seek that classic Les Paul configuration of woods, cut and controls, but balk at Gibson’s blue moon quality control that makes finding a good one a random event, or its absurd why does that zip code have a dollar sign pricing, then you want to look at the Les Pauls of Japan, past and present.
Greco, Orville, Burny, Tokai… there are many beloved, high grade versions. The Edwards line, by ESP, is not the most forensically accurate of the lot — although it is closer to a ’59 than Gibson now makes — but their quality has made them the most prominent models currently produced, relatively easy to obtain for guitars not legally for sale in the US, and let’s be clear: Westerners snapping these up love them ecstatically. Every Edwards Les Paul discussion thread is packed with Gibson players who’ll put their Eddies up against anything short of a Historic, and always holds a handful of lifetimers who’ve sold up their ‘real’ Les Pauls after finding Edwards, citing comparable playability and tone that made having an extra $2,500 tied up in each Gibson seem needless.
These are challenging guitars. Do you care about tone, feel and quality alone, or do you also care about a name? How about origin?
The Physical
The Edwards E-LP-98LTS I have here, an ’08 if the serial number is to be believed, is based, like most Edwards Les Pauls, on a ’59, widely appreciated as the zenith of Les Paul production. It certainly looks lovely, with a beautiful deep top carve, perfect open-book headstock, and period accurate details such as body binding that does not obscure the cheeky little peek-a-boo from the maple cap in the horn’s cutaway, which for some reason is reassuring to see. Something to do with knowing that big slab of maple is there, doing its job. The behemoth mahogany back appears to be true mahogany, swietenia macrophylla, not a cousin and, incredibly, is one solid glorious piece.
And really, how pretty is the burst? This is their Vintage Honey Burst top, on a bookmatched flamed maple veneer (more on this in the next section), much richer than the example on the Edwards website, and it reminds me, with its warm orange hues, of marmalade more than honey. Months later I still find myself gazing at it, taking in the lovely whiskey tones that occur at the transition from the amber center to the orange edges. And I’m not a person who cares about tops in an overdone, weekend-guitars-for-lawyers way.
You also get a ’59 neck profile, beloved for its just-right balance between the fatter ’50s necks and slim ’60s profiles, and one construction bonus purists tend to get caught up on which cannot be seen from the outside: long neck tenon. This means the part of the neck buried in the body goes right back under the pickup cavity for a very secure marriage between the two and, some will debate, better transfer of tone and sustain. This hidden design is no longer followed by Gibson, and overlooked by several of the replicas, so it stands out on paper as an attractive feature of the Edwards Les Paul.
Because owning a factory fresh ’59 feels unnatural, the E-LP-98LTS (like the model it replaced, the 90LTS) incorporates a number of features to help it seem gracefully aged. All the plastic’s cream instead of white; the neck and body binding is treated with a tasteful amber; the GOTOH tuning keys are that dull vintage mint green; the bone nut’s not all showroom shiny; even the pickup selector switch is waxy orange-brown like an old fuse; the Edwards logo is a synthetic mother of pearl with a well-chosen golden tint. The metal, too, has been chosen to keep the guitar from appearing jarringly new, with nickel pickup covers in a subdued, brushed finish that not only stops them looking Cadillac shiny now, but ages more rapidly for later. These two year old covers could already pass for 15.
The execution hasn’t gone quite as well for the pleasantly chunky bridge and tailpiece, both GOTOH parts. When brand new these have a subdued, vintage matte vibe to fit with the rest of the guitar, but it’s just a quick cover up, a thin coating on top of regular shiny hardware. The result: as the matte finish wears off through use, revealing gleaming chrome, the Edwards may sport the only hardware to paradoxically appear newer the older it gets!
Adding to the vintage aesthetic is a layer of nitrocellulose on top of the poly finish. The LT in LTS stands for Lacquer Taste, and that’s all you get, a taste! A poly finish with a spritz of nitro on top obviously does nothing to imbue the guitar with easy breathing vintage tone, but it’s enough to give a 50s replica a nice muted appearance instead of the glassy, boiled candy look you get with modern poly goop. [Incidentally, look at this great guide on mylespaul.com about making poly finishes appear much more agreeable and nitro-like.]
The only questionable design choice is the truss rod cover, a steam iron shape which isn’t even close to the Gibson bell. Replacements can be gotten cheap if this bugs you; the headstock will even take a full Gibson Les Paul headstock veneer if you just can’t make peace with being seen with a non-Gibbo LP. A great guitar is a great guitar. It could say “Pajamas” on the end for all I care.
Quality
Edwards don’t cost a whole lot, especially for what you’re getting on paper, and so waiting for mine to arrive I couldn’t fight off concerns that it would feel weird in some way; cheap, or just wrong. But it’s heavy, solid, tightly assembled. The routing is surgically clean. The frets are smoothly finished on the ends and feel good. Inlays, spotless. The hardware’s heavy and strong. The thing feels formidable, like a battle axe.
What can we pick on? The rosewood is a little dry, a little light? I’ve found the same grade on Standards and Classics. Some people like to change out the pickup selector washer for a true Gibson. Several swap the ceramic caps for vintage spec ones. That truss rod cover. Cheap upgrades, one and all.
ESP has saved some money in one feature you are powerless to upgrade: the flamed maple top. It is real, and beautiful, and bookmatched, but it is still a veneer, with plain maple making up the rest of the cap beneath. I can’t see this having any effect beyond knowing it’s there (I always get pissed at furniture companies trying to fool us with less and less detectable veneers over their junk reconstituted wood) but this and the mostly-poly finish do deviate from old Gibson spec, so it’s worth knowing.
I’ve seen purists take issue with the binding stain continuing up onto the nut, but this rubs off with a little work if you’re really that picky, my God.
Unplugged
Edwards Les Pauls are famously, profoundly, almost suspiciously resonant guitars, and I’ve no option but to add to this mystique here. A chord or two immediately declared the E-LP-98LTS as the loudest of any unplugged electric guitar I’d played, save for hollow semi-acoustics. The sound is similar to playing a guitar while coupling it to a much larger piece of wood, say by touching it against a table. (Is it just me who does this?)
Why “almost suspiciously resonant,” though, with italics and everything? Because such great resonance puts people in mind of chambering, or hollowing out guitar bodies, to compensate for the burdensome weight of mahogany, an evil practice that Gibson’s been involved in since 2006 and certainly not something we want near a 1959 replica. No doubt about it, there is a woody, acoustic type plink to the broad unamplified tone, but ESP spokesmen in Japan have clearly stated the Edwards are neither chambered (practically hollow, like current Gibsons) nor weight-relieved (missing several round plugs from the mahogany, a less extreme method used on Gibsons for 30 years) and that they just choose good woods. And you have to eviscerate yourself if you lie about business there, so think about that.
It’s so resonant that in fact the neck pickup vibrates sympathetically, or something under it does, which is a shame, but I’ve little doubt it’d be a quick fix if I got in there instead of just playing the thing.
Amped
Whatever the secret of the absurd resonance, whether chambers or woods or design, it translates to sweet, lingering sustain when electrified. On and on it goes, letting you play around meaningfully with the end of notes; allowing a bend to moan softly back down to pitch, say, or sliding up and down a 3rd from the last note in a phrase after you’ve let it linger. The same magic (or trick) eliminates dead spots, too. You get an equal woody breadth and sustain from every area of the neck, which is just plain unusual.
Music comes off the Edwards in dollops: thick, creamy, rich, like cookie batter off a wooden spoon, especially when served by the stock Seymour Duncan ’59 in the neck position. One of my favorite pickups, well suited here, the ’59 sounds like it has enough width to do justice to what’s coming out of the wood.
Edwards installs a JB pickup in the bridge position, a baffling choice to many of us with its fatiguing upper midrange, a sort of Celestion V30 in pickup form. Consider that I, a lazy, dilatory person, was moved to swap this out within a week, and you’ll have an idea how poor a fit the JB is. I replaced it with an Alnico II Pro, which you can read all about in that review. Suffice to say: much better. If you’re aware of Appetite for Destruction you’ll know the Alnico II Pro has a happy history making killer tones in ’50s Les Paul replicas (yes, Slash’s Appetite guitar was a replica, too).
In The End
An instrument that offers so much at this price asks only if you can accept it. I just wanted a mahogany/maple guitar for that tone, and a Les Paul soon emerged as the simplest option. I was prepared to buy a Gibson, but wasn’t impressed by what I found. Starting optimistically with a Studio, it felt like a cheap Indonesian toy; a $3,500 Standard was better, but still felt nothing like its price tag. Gibson fans will tell you they had to try 30-50 Les Pauls out to find a keeper; everyone acknowledges there is a Quality Control problem at Gibson. The Edwards — read the reports — are, in that stereotypical Japanese way, very consistent. You can order one and know that it will be right. There’s less romance in that, and in the idea of a replica in general, so it’s a question of how much you want to punish yourself in reverence of name and origin.
In the endless discussion thread about Edwards guitars on The Gear Page forum, a user called _pete_ responded thoughtfully to the assertion that the only real Les Paul is a Gibson:
I used to feel that way. I’ve owned a number of Gibsons but they never really were all that I hoped they would be. One day I realized that the Gibsons of today are copies too. They’re copies of the real LPs, SGs, and 335s of the ’50s and early ’60s.
The stuff they make today is built by different people, in a different factory, in a different city & state, with different machines, and built to different specs. How is that any different than Navigator, Edwards, Tokai, Bacchus, Greco, or Burny?
Compare the weight, feel, top carve, neck angle, and materials of a ’50s LP to today’s Gibson LP. They aren’t even close. The high end Tokais and Navigators are closer. No, today’s Gibson is just another company cranking out copies. I prefer to pay less for the same product. I’m not hung up on the name that’s CNC’d into the headstock.
Video Evidence/Clips
This is all I have right now, a little blues on the neck pickup, with the color balance all wrong, from a webcam right into YouTube. Not good enough. I will work on some clips. Caveat: as mentioned, I am lazy.
Update Aug 25, 2010: Not that lazy! Here’s a better demo, with a few different tones, a proper camera, and the cab mic’ed up.
Internet Hotlinks! ¬_¬
The epic Edwards thread at The Gear Page. Enormous, informative. Recommended. (Don’t be confused by the prices early in the thread; they’ve risen quite a bit since then.)
That thread on dulling poly finish guitars (such as Epiphones or the Edwards E-LP-92SD.)
The official Edwards site is Japanese, but the specs are readable.
The Gibson vs. Fernandes court case (PDF).
Doing things backwards is a theme for me, which is why I got one of Seymour Duncan’s Alnico II Pro humbuckers months before buying a guitar to put it in. I knew I wanted a slice of that early G’N'R crunch, with its nickel ashtray clang and explosion of blues harp harmonics, and I knew the pickup would be best served by a thick mahogany body with a maple cap, the kind of guitar I’d never owned. Recently I found a good example and set about swapping out its bridge pickup with the Alnico II, which Seymour Duncan designates APH-1b.
This I did with mostly new gear, having tired of the finicky, sweat-inducing hassle of my dreadful $15 Radio Shack soldering iron and attendant make-do accessories.
- Clear safety glasses from Walmart’s gun section, my last soldering attempt having sent a glob of molten metal to land, harmlessly thank god, onto my eyelid when a freshly desoldered wire sprang free. Unhurt but considering myself warned, I tried sunglasses. Too dark. Duh.
- Wire strippers from Lowe’s. They had a much larger selection than Home Depot. Quite why for so long I’ve been stripping each tiny wire by hand, gingerly cutting around the insulation with a knife, which takes AGES, I don’t know. This thing is a dream. The thin wires in four-conductor pickups seem to be 24 AWG; if you’re going to buy one of these strippers make sure it can cut that small, as not all can.
- Weller soldering iron, predictably sold to me by the dude in Home Depot as, “the Cadillac of soldering irons.” I doubt this: I’ve seen variable wattage ones online for $300; this was $30. But it’s certainly an improvement on the primitive hot nail Radio Shack sold me, particularly in the way it doesn’t just keep heating up infinitely over the course of a job until it’s frying connections, and in how you can hold it much nearer the tip to control it more like a pen.
Output Worries
Like I’m sure many people have, I had a set of concerns about the Alnico II Pro that I couldn’t find easy answers to, among them:
- How weak is its output?
- Will I need a pedal to use it without a Caswell amp?
- Can I play metal with it?
- Is its bass as wimpy as I’ve heard?
Happily, the answer to most of these is good news. Up until the time I plugged in and switched on, I was prepared for the thing to be utter weaksauce in the output department. Its numbers are frightening after all — 7.85k! — and so I knew it might have to come right back out if it whimpered away like an old single coil. No need. This thing is raging. You could even say aggressive, although of course not hard-edged like a ceramic. Even on my amp, which is not overly saturated, the pickup is nowhere close to requiring a boost to get as much rich overdrive as you’d want. In fact I found myself winding the gain back a couple of notches to let its detail ring through. I believe that covers points 1 and 2. Points 3 and 4 we’ll get to as we discuss…
Tone
The characteristic tone is a two parter. First you have a classic rock clang. A great big, windmilling, blaring clear clang, shouting but warm. This must be where the word “Kerrang!” came from. Open, PAF-like, ringing out for all the world, it is utterly impossible not to sink into a few sour-faced AC/DC riffs when this ’bucker first wakes up your amplifier. Doesn’t matter your technique level. You want to hear open D, G and C, and you want to hear them again. Crunchy, clear. There’s a thin-but-not-too-thin clarity, detail that brasher pickups miss; sweet in the top, but not before some angry little upper mids make their point.
There’s usually some attendant hype that follows the Alnico II Pro about how its weak magnet makes for less string-pull and consequently more sustain. This seems to hold true. It just keeps going, as the overtones bob and weave. But then it is attached to an immovable mahogany coffee table with a neck.
As you up the gain beyond plexi levels, on top you find that wild, unpredictable swirl of harmonics that made Appetite just a tiny bit scary at the same time as great. It’s a bitching rock club in Hollywood, but you don’t know exactly where you are and you overheard something about a knife. What am I talking about? It’s a pickup. There’s a really nice squawk to chords, riffs and double-stops, a sort of natural wah at the beckon call of your hands depending on how you hit the strings. It roars and talks and clanks.
In my opinion, you can play metal with this pickup. It’s not a loose, muffled, vintage tone; it’s fiery, chromed, snarly. Imagine you could plug in a Zippo. A Zippo fueled with whiskey. It’s like that. However it’s not a wall-of-guitars pickup, and although it covers a lot of ground, in this area it’s probably confined to what I must regrettably call classic metal. These aren’t Blackouts, after all. The bass is lean, as you might have heard, but it’s not loose. Just less chug-chug-chug, more chip-chip-chip. It certainly handles the gain and sustain.
This stigma surrounding bottom end performance that follows the Alnico II Pro, and its overall balance, is well addressed with a few pole piece tweaks. Lying completely level after the install, the pickup had a great preference for the B string. Every chord, every arpeggio, it would leap out, drowning out its neighbors. The A string it also seemed to favor, while the bottom E was soft and a bit lost, without enough edge or definition. A subtle raise of the pole pieces under the strings that were being shouted down evened things out into a balanced, addictive crunch, with just the right openness and spread, and the low E started really talking, giving up those sleazy riffs that are the A2Pro’s birthright.
Downsides? Depends on your application. With both pickups on and their volumes rolled back, the Alnico II Pro did not mix as subtly and sweetly with the neck pickup (a ’59 here) as the Seymour Duncan JB it replaced, but at full crank, where I am most of the time, the JB was awful and moany and indistinct, which is why it was replaced within a week. On its own, too, performance of the A2P with the volume pot backed off narrows to become too middy for my tastes. A 50s wiring mod and non-ceramic caps may alleviate the fatiguing elements of that sound.
I may have to try that, because at full whack this humbucker has a textured, addictive character that just spills harmonics. A lot of people install the Alnico II Pro as a neck pickup, because they’re thinking one thing: Sweet Child O’ Mine tone. That’s fair. It’s a grail tone. We’d all like to have it. But don’t overlook it as a bridge pickup; it has plenty to give, despite its wee numbers on paper.
Audio Clip
I mainly use the Alnico II Pro for rhythm guitar. Here is a woefully inadequate clip of that, played through my Splawn into English Greenbacks, with only one track and no EQ or other fiddling done in GarageBand.
a2pro clip (mp3)
Updates
June 21, 2010: Simply lowering the treble side of the pickup, leaving the pole pieces set as described, mellowed the hard mid focus I was hearing from the Alnico II Pro with the volume pot rolled off, and simultaneously stopped these frequencies from overpowering the neck pickup when mixed, too, offering a lot more options in how to employ the pickup as you play. It doesn’t simply need to be on its own with the volume on 10, doing that ’86 rhythm tone. I have regained a beautiful blend of neck and bridge together, one of my favorite Les Paul tones; I love to build a solo by starting with both pickups on, rolled back to 3 or 4, bring them up to 10 after a few phrases for that despairing Mark Knopfler kind of Brothers In Arms tone, and finally switch to either bridge or neck alone as the solo peaks. With this versatility I am out of reservations about the Alnico II Pro.
Despite his vivid, self-assured style and wonderkid credentials, Blues Saraceno was never the most famous 90s guitar hero. Next to the Ibanez family of just-about household names like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Paul Gilbert, artists even non-musicians would play in their cars, he occupied an unmistakably distinct second tier of recognition cohabited by players such as Greg Howe, Tony MacAlpine, Richie Kotzen et al. Today he’s a session man and soundtrack producer, absent from the spotlit stage of guitar-for-guitar’s-sake and present behind the curtain, operating the paddles and levers, engaged in the much more sensible, if less adoring business, of making money.
Combined, these facts explain why no one knows about Saraceno’s short-lived series of signature guitars — and don’t you go telling them — and why they can be had so cheaply. They don’t explain how quite so many variations were produced of this unknown guitar for this niche artist’s signature line in such a short time.
The Samick TV Twenty and Radio Ten models designed by Blues Saraceno appear in at least nine colors, not including the now highly-saught plaid finishes that were Blues’ trademark; with Floyd Rose tremolos; with vintage style tremolos; and with, most baffling to me, two types of fixed bridge: through-the-body style and tune-o-matic Gibson style; with humbuckers front and back, or in hum-single-single configuration; with one volume pot, or with volume and tone pots.
Bewitched by the guitar’s form when seeing a friend (Paul of Dragon Eye Morrison) play his custom made replica, I’d been searching for a good one, which for me meant fixed bridge, for months, when last Christmas came around. Under the tree was a comically guitar-shaped present, containing, to my genuine surprise, the shiny red TV Twenty my wife had sneakily bought online from a pawn shop — where a great many of these tend to show up.
The Physical
The short, stubby alder body, apparently three pieces if held to the light, gives us a guitar as unique as Saraceno’s touch and tone, based, you might imagine, on the top half of a Telecaster and the lower half of a Jazzmaster, yet looking, in whole, unlike either, with a cute, MusicMan-like appeal.
Not everyone is so taken. Comments posted on my Christmas morning Facebook pictures include, “Is that the new guitar for Guitar Hero?” and, “Is that a real one? No offense, but it kinda looks like a 3/4 size one to me,” as well as, “That is a fucking ugly guitar. LOL.”
Its kooky appearance works for me, as does the deceptively small size — when you’re 5’6″, little bodies are welcome. The scale length is indeed full size, 25.5″ from bridge to nut, just like a Strat and longer of course than a Les Paul. And it hasn’t been shaped this way just for oddball looks. The top horn, if it is even a horn, full and uncut for more wood, mass, sustain; the bottom cutaway created plainly for unrestricted fret access, offering a near-straight open edge up past the very top fret.
Attached to this by a lovely, bass guitar-reminiscent recessed heel, is the fattest neck I’ve played, a feature I worried would hamper the TV Twenty, up until I got my own, grasped that maple club and rung it like a cheerleader’s neck. My phobia was, I now remembered, fostered in the infancy of my playing, when I owned both a twelve-year-old’s hands and Joe Satriani’s Surfing With The Alien, and quite reasonably nurtured concern over how the two would possibly match up. In a grown up’s hands, it turns out, a beefy neck is a good thing, providing a rugged, substantial base on which to do your thing, and does not, as it might have seemed, handicap the player all the way back to pentatonic prisoner.
Hardware is solid Gotoh, both bridge and tuners, so no upgrade needed there, although the tuners are all identical, from a six-in-a-row set, rather than the three regular and three reversed keys you would normally find on a three-a-side headstock. This is part of what gives the guitar its strange little offset head, and all it means in practice is that the three unwound strings tune the opposite way than intuition suggests they should. This took me a while to get used to, partly because the guitar stays in tune admirably and needs adjusted less.
Unplugged
It’s worth hearing any guitar unplugged, to find out what you’ve got to work with naturally, before getting into electronics. Its popular woods – alder body, maple neck – make comparison with a Stratocaster easy. There are many applicable adjectives, but “bigger” is the simplest one to describe the Samick’s unplugged sound versus a Strat I had on hand. There’s none of the twang and snap; everything rings out louder and bolder.
How It’s Made
I’ve been a guitar racist for some time. I’ve a house full of Japanese and American guitars, and that’s all. In my experience Korean models were creaky, dead and felt like knockoffs, the big names on the headstocks meaningless in the absence of authenticity and mojo. Korean guitars are usually the same shape as the iconic guitars they mimic under license, but that’s where similarities end. Whether it’s Blues’ design, the involvement of Valley Arts, Samick’s build quality, or a combination of these, the TV Twenty I received does not feel like a Korean guitar. It’s solid, stable, toneful, and downright lovable in the way a soulless copy never is. (Mine does not say “Made in Korea” on the back of the neck just above the heel as it should, but this was perhaps not consistent throughout production.)
There are a few concessions that betray its inexpensive origin. Though I cleaned the thing thoroughly, including the fretboard and frets themselves, whenever I play for a long time my fingers turn grey, suggesting that the fret wire, which is a nice fat domed type, may be of low quality. But then again, the guitar is 15 years old and has no discernible fret wear. The headstock is two piece, which is to say, the neck and 95% of the head are all one big piece, with an extra half-inch sliver added beyond the high E tuning key to complete the shape. Much more expensive Ibanez and even Gibsons have this too, and it’s almost undetectable. No, the only area of build quality it’s fair to take issue with is that, while the pickup routing is spot on, the holes drilled within those routes are all off center, leaving the three pickups nestled off to one side. Not much trouble for the two single-sized humbuckers in the neck and middle positions with their continuous rails, but the bridge humbucker, with its normal pole pieces, suffers misalignment with the top strings, enough to make the high E quieter unless you jack up the pickup on that side.
Amped
That big and bold thing the TV Twenty does acoustically carries right over to the amplified world. I expected at a bare minimum to have to swap the stock “Duncan Designed” pickups out for the real things, but the guitar sounds frankly enormous with these; authoritative and round in the neck position, the choice most reminiscent of Saraceno’s giant 90s tone, and sweetly crunchy in the bridge. That full size bucker is warm, overwrapped PAF-ish, probably on the higher end of medium output, sweet enough to stop leads sounding thin but subdued just enough to let the strings do the singing with rhythms. The tone knob pulls up to split this pickup, opening up that warm top end with a lot more treble and scratch for a surprisingly different, but usable, tone.
In The End
Due in part to its unusually big neck, solid construction, and unexpectedly competitive pickups, the Samick TV Twenty has a thick, audacious sound in a cute little package that bears the curves of thoughtful, distinctive design. It’s an easy guitar to lose yourself in, dig in, get a groove going, cut loose. And it’s so different in looks and feel, I’m less likely to default to my standard harmonic minor safety licks upon its beefy frets, which can only be healthy. It immediately became my #1 guitar, of 14, all costing more, some ten times as much. Even substantial Strat necks felt thin afterwards; going back to Ibanez necks was like playing on Graham crackers. The value is crazy due to the low profiles of Samick and Saraceno, absurd actually, and with all of it together I can see why those of us that discover these go a bit dippy sometimes and start collecting them like Happy Meal toys. Just check that pickup alignment if taking the plunge; though if you are brave and own a drill, it should be easily correctable.
Video Evidence
I recently used this guitar in a YouTube video. Take a look. YouTube isn’t the ideal venue to judge tone, but you can, I think, hear how fat and non-Stratty the TV Twenty is here.
Update Aug 8, 2010: There’s also this video, which for seven months I’ve kept set to private on YouTube because of my many embarrassing mistakes whenever anything tricky is meant to happen, but today decided to free from the shame bag being as the tone is so good. I think that’s why I never deleted it. This is straight into the amp, as above, no pedals.
On my travels I bumped into an article from Premier Guitar magazine, The Psychology of Tone.
Though not, at this stage (this is the first of three parts) hugely revelatory, it’s worthy in its attempt to provide psychological explanations for our endless, never-quite-satisfied tone quest; why it’s more in our heads than our gear.
The psychologist interviewed for the piece is also a guitar player.
At the end of the series I suspect we will be left with something feel-good and agreeable, along the lines of ‘the journey is the destination,’ but as the first step in taking this discussion out of the NOS tubes, magic windings and coded paper cones, and into our noggins — the true end of the tone chain — it’s certainly worth having a look.
A set of pickups wound by Yngwie Malmsteen on a post-NAMM visit to Seymour Duncan have been placed on eBay by the company, with the proceeds going to charity.
These three true single coils are not to be confused with Yngwie’s new signature pickup, the YJM Fury, announced two weeks ago. The charity pickups will not be hum-canceling, but the Maestro did dip them in wax to save you from squealing microphonics. Cheers, Yng!
The charity chosen to receive the profits from the sale of these undeniably mojo-filled pickups is Doctors Without Borders, currently working in Haiti to treat the area’s earthquake victims.
Seymour Duncan had previously uploaded a YouTube video of Yngwie making the pickups at the factory, which you can see below. Lots of dangerous dangly jewelry around those winding machines, Mr. Malmsteen! Health and safety departments the world over would not be pleased. I am, however: doing something valuable and unique to raise money for charity is a great way to start your term at Duncan. You could have just signed a few pickguards, but these are special.
Though I feel my amp is at its potent, smoldering best lately, I am a human man, and make it my business to find dissatisfaction wherever contentment looms. I’d begun thinking some element was a little masked under all that warm, crunchy, modded-Plexi magic (I’m mostly playing 1st Gear with the gain maxxed on a Splawn Competition head.) A couple days ago when I picked out the intro to ‘Bigfoot’ by Alcatrazz (TAB) it just wasn’t jumping out enough, the notes getting muddled on their journey, and when thinking about how to open up the sound in a more holistic way than aggressive EQ tweaks, I remembered some experimenting I’d done a year ago, wiring the speakers of my 2×12 cab differently to affect the sound.
Guitarists don’t talk about it much, and the majority probably don’t give it a second thought, perhaps buying sealed cabinets and never knowing what the wires are doing inside, but the choice of parallel or series speaker wiring does make a difference to your guitar tone.
On my road to find out what the established differences were last year, before actually getting in there and moving wires around, I ran into a passage on the subject in a book on Google Books called The Guitar Amp Handbook. The author explained simply what I needed to know: parallel is tighter due to increased damping; series is looser.
And it’s true.
I opted, back then, for series, desperate as I was to do anything to ease the forever tense muscles of the super tight Splawn and buy myself a spongier, more forgiving tone. In 22 years I’ve never played an amp that sounds as good as a Splawn, but they can be merciless on the player.
I’ve since learned to control the amp better, attenuating it to allow the master volume to come up into the friendly zone, where it gets easier to play, sounds warmer, and just bleeds harmonic richness. The series wiring, I reasoned, may no longer be necessary, and could be combining to muddy up my tone and response, so I got in there one night recently and changed it back to parallel, the standard wiring for modern 2×12 cabs. Then… back to series, back to parallel, series again, back and forth several times (thank God for quick release clips and open back cabs), playing largely the same riffs and solos at the same volume, paying attention to what was happening tonally.
Parallel felt less gainy or saturated than series, making it a mite tougher to play, though it was definitely, as hoped, more open, more detailed. Notes seemed less round and warm, but attained a clearer crunch in chords, riffs and double-stops that was addictive, the bass becoming less boomy and fat, feeling more tightly attached to the fingers.
I focussed on this last area specifically while swapping the wiring back and forth, because bottom end is something I have trouble getting right. Palm-muted neck pickup stuff on the low E around the 12th-15th frets was less floor shaking in parallel, more separate and distinct. Fast neck pickup playing lower down the neck, such as thundering around the bottom end of an A Minor scale, had more openness than series wiring provided; I could hear the pleasant scratch of the pick attack clearer on top of the notes, a la good Yngwie.
Less uncontrolled bloom to the bass and more damping in parallel equals less warmth, though, a little less grease in the cogs of your playing, demanding more work than the intuitive and easy series set up, which felt more fluid and offered seemingly endless sustain. Hard things to give up, but cleaning off the mud could make it worthwhile, depending on your approach and sensitivity to such things. I felt I could throw myself recklessly and passionately into my playing in series, whereas parallel took more concentration but emerged clearer from the speakers.
Ultimately, I opted again for series wiring, for the time being. It just felt more natural and expressive. I realize I’m giving away some clarity and zing for that liquid sustain and warm growl, but everything is a compromise. Broadly, parallel wiring was better for rhythm while series was better for leads, and I couldn’t help feeling that playing two 2×12 cabinets simultaneously, one wired each way, would be the perfect blend, but that may not be the case…
Contrary to the explanation in The Guitar Amp Handbook and elsewhere, it’s possible the difference you hear is not actually due to parallel or series wiring itself, but the point at which the amplifier’s output transformer is tapped (which has to change at the same time). For example: my two 8 Ohm speakers connected in series present a 16 Ohm load to the amp, so the control on the back is set to 16 Ohms; the same two 8 Ohm speakers connected in parallel equate to a 4 Ohm load, and so 4 Ohms is selected. This taps the output transformer at a different stage in its circuit, and some people tell us this is what we’re hearing — how our amps sound when their OTs are tapped at various stages — rather than the cabinet wiring that necessitates it.
It’s probably a bit of both. Speaker genius Ted Weber described the effects of parallel and series speaker wiring on his Q&A page (upsettingly without an index; find the question from Gerald C. Lopez, about one third down the page), but made sure to point out the myriad other factors at play.
It’s interesting to note that Ted said of the series option:
Many players prefer the series connection, as it gives them a more textured tone, enhanced breakup, and overall a more desirable tone for guitar work.
Weird, then, that series is not the default wiring of 2×12 or 4×12 cabinets. Oh yes, 4×12 people can play this game, too. Everything here about the tonal differences between parallel and series wiring also applies to 4×12 cabs, though the wiring itself is more complex, and the effects are sometimes said to be subtler. ‘Series/parallel’ will give you the warmer, looser effect we’ve talked about, and is how vintage Marshall 4x12s were wired up. ‘Parallel/series’ will give you the tighter, zingier crunch — this is how 4×12 Marshall cabs are wired today. See page 225 in the Desktop Reference of Hip Vintage Guitar Amps (scroll down to Marshall).
Wiring diagrams are all over the web, but I like to refer to Celestion’s. Look there if you are planning to make any changes. Remember to photograph or otherwise document your original wiring first!
So there we go: a largely unacknowledged, free, easy and reversible way to alter our tone, however subtly. Guitarists will talk endlessly about the tiniest attributes of tubes, controls, wires, woods, magnets, cloths, metals, paints, but rarely mention speaker wiring. Maybe we can add a new question to preface the pedantry: What are you — series or parallel?
Gawp! A week ahead of Winter NAMM 2010, a page has gone live on the Seymour Duncan website presenting Yngwie Malmsteen’s new pickup — his first with the company, after 25 years with its only major rival, DiMarzio.
Rumors began spreading in late 2009 that Yngwie had split with Staten Island-based DiMarzio, and indeed he fell off the endorser list at the company’s site. But it wasn’t until his new album, High Impact, landed in December that his ship jumping was confirmed: in the liner notes, the Maestro thanks the usual suspects like Fender and Marshall, but, for the first time ever, Seymour Duncan. No word on his stacked humbucker supplier (and funky animal print cliplock strap supplier) of a quarter century, DiMarzio.
The new pickup, titled the STK-S10 YJM Fury, certainly looks similar to his signature DiMarzio model, with an off-white cover, vintage-staggered pole pieces, and Seymour Duncan’s ice cube icon, which denotes low output. We can assume an overdrive pedal will still be required.
No one knows how it sounds yet, because no one has one. The product doesn’t yet feature on SD’s Tone Chart page, so we don’t know its DC Resistance numbers, or basic bass-middle-treble coloring. But Seymour Duncan wastes no time in its blurb dishing out a face slap to its rival, having secured the biggest name in shred. “When Yngwie J. Malmsteen set out on a quest to bring his tone to a higher level,” they say, “he turned to Seymour Duncan.” You can actually see them sneer, if you read that while squinting your eyes.
Lastly, it’s mentioned that the STK-S10 YJM Fury, which is available in bridge and neck versions, is “the same pickup that Fender installs in their YJM Strat guitars,” so that deal is already signed up too, it seems, leaving no embarrassing loopholes. DiMarzio is truly out.
We die-hard fans, who have heard Yngwie’s tone worsen, and seen his complacency strengthen, for ten years, should be happy that something, anything, is changing in his perennial setup. DiMarzio pickups were never the problem, of course — lift any classic album brimming with give-your-right-nut, holy grail Yngwie tone, and you’ll be listening to their stacked humbuckers, most likely the HS-3, which, after all, are the pickups in The Duck, for God’s sake. (They sure sound grand on my Yngwie Strats.) But all the same, there’s a slim chance this move is not just about money, royalties, disputes, support; that the big guy has realized his sound has gotten stale, and is taking steps to shake things up, reconfigure the chain.
If such a pause for thought means that next he questions whether the G12T-75 might not be the best speaker available, or that simply maxxing out both dials on his DOD overdrive might be murdering rather than strengthening his guitar tone, then I’m all for it.
What I’m not all for are those stenciled silver initials on the new pickup. Chee-zee!
Christmas Lights, Pick Roar Style
It doesn’t always have to be exhaustive and frankly-in-need-of-editing yammering about tone, technique and speakers, does it? Sometimes, especially at Christmas, the twinkly season, it could just be some pretty lights. Such as those seen here, where I light-painted, light-doodled or, as X-Factor sponsors Talk Talk would have it, “bright danced” my way around my guitar and amp.
The technique involves setting a digital camera to a long exposure, turning out the lights, triggering the shutter, then darting around the room with a light of some kind, “painting” in the air where you want bright lines to appear. Mini Maglites work well, as do the little LED keychains used here. I also recommend a tripod, some patience, and keen night vision.
The guitar is an ’88 Ibanez Jem 777 DY that I’ve had since college.