Plus Guitar Stuff

Thought I should remind everyone that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are on the way: September 8 and September 18, respectively. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year (one of them, anyway), and Yom Kippur is the day of atonement.

The “Days of Teshuvah” started on August 11. This is a time when Jews reflect on their sins and turn from them. They believe God determines their fate (“inscribing” it) on Rosh Hashanah, and he “seals” it on Yom Kippur. Then they’re stuck with it for the coming year. The High Holy Days or “Days of Awe” run from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.

It’s a good time to repent and resolve to do better. Christians aren’t subject to the entire Jewish law, but when is a change of heart a bad thing? And it serves to show respect and solidarity. Many mainstream churches are contemptuous of Israel and the Jews. It can’t hurt to set yourself apart from them.

I have been invited to visit my friends at the Messianic synagogue for their High Holy Days stuff. I am trying to get the other Armorbearers to go.

I got a number of comments about guitar amps. Right now, I’m trying out a Fender Super Champ XD. This is a 5-watt tube amp with some newfangled effects built in. It plays well at low volumes, and the effects are not bad. It’s a keeper. It’s loud enough to gig with, and even if the effects are not the best available, they’re very good, and they serve as a cheap and convenient introduction to the world of effects. And if you combine this thing with a channel-switching pedal and a distortion pedal, you can probably leave your other pedals at home.

It also simulates the sounds of certain classic amps. That’s a great feature.

I should have gotten this thing on day one, but I didn’t know what I was doing. The Vox is very nice, however, and so is the Bugera 5V I got.

I am considering getting one or two more Japanese Les Pauls. I am learning that no matter how versatile a guitar is, it’s a pain to use the same instrument for everything. It’s easier to have different guitars for different sounds, and there are enough Japanese bargains out there to make this an economically feasible idea. I would like to get one with single-coil pickups, and I’d like to put Bigsbys on all of them.

I may as well confess: I bought a “History” brand Les Paul. This is a magnificent Fujigen instrument with a bookmatched top. I got an insane price. Some crazy person bought it in 2005 and kept it in a closet in Japan and didn’t even take the film off the pickups or pot and switch covers. It’s not “like new.” It’s “NEW.”

Japanese guitar prices are going up, so this is the year to buy. Although the upcoming Obama Depression may change that.

I ought to go play some high-end Gibsons. As it stands, I think the Japanese guitars are probably better. Not “nearly as good” or “acceptable,” but better. The workmanship is perfect, they use excellent materials, and Gibson taught them how to do everything, so there are no trade secrets or patent issues to keep the Japanese in second place. I’ve shown my two Japanese instruments to good guitarists, and one of these guys wanted to buy one of them, so my impressions seem to be right. But I haven’t touched a real Gibson, other than my Blueshawk, in a long time, so I may be wrong.

I seriously doubt it. A Les Paul is just a board and a neck. If the action, intonation, and pickups are good, what could be bad?

It’s sad that American quality control is so bad.

I’ve been checking out Japanese Yahoo auctions. The problem with this is that you have to find a deal so good you don’t mind adding around $225 to the price, for service fees and shipping. The deals do exist, though.

I found a truly astounding instrument on one site. It’s a History brand clone of the Gibson ES295. That’s a hollow gold top guitar with P90s and a Bigsby. Thank God, someone bought this guitar the day I decided to inquire, because otherwise, I would have had a major temptation issue.

I don’t feel bad about buying nice used guitars, because it’s like buying stock. The money doesn’t vanish. You can get it back, often with a decent profit. New guitars aren’t too bad, if they’re well-known brands. Accessories and amps, you usually get hammered on. But not always. Sometimes they get discontinued, and then everybody goes nuts trying to buy old ones.

I figure it will be a waste of time trying to get a good deal on a Japanese instrument a year from now. Party while you can.

Original Music at Last

I got a nice guitar breakthrough yesterday. I finally found time to start working on my own music.

And what do I mean by “my music”? Of course, I am referring to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Honey Bee.”

I realize I did not write this song. But the transcription I have poops out after the intro, moving into a long section where all you do is whack a couple of strings once in a while, as the vocalist sings. I did not buy a pile of guitars and 4 amps so I could be a vocalist. I want to PLAY. So I’m filling in the missing stuff.

It looks like the cheap Crate amp I got years ago will be useful. It was moldering next to an old PC for years. It’s solid state, and it’s not what you would call a prize, but it’s perfect for working on tablature. I park it by the couch, and I sit there with a guitar, playing at low volume while I work. You don’t need perfect tone to do this, and a cheap solid state amp is a big convenience. I don’t have to use pedals. I just flip the “on” switch and go.

I have to wonder if I should look at a decent solid state amp. I love my tube amps, but I can’t say I’ve given solid state a fair shake. The Crate is bottom-end junk. It’s not a good sample.

Here’s something funny: if you listen to tube amp samples while shopping, you’re almost always listening to digital recordings played through solid state electronics. Think about it. Imagine you go to a manufacturer’s website, and you listen to an MP3 sample. The sample is digital, and you’re listening through your PC’s solid state audio system made with super-cheap Chinese components. How can the sample sound good, if solid state kills tone?

There are two things I like about solid state amps. First, they last forever, with no maintenance, no matter what you do to them. Second, you don’t have to turn them up to get the best sound. They’re also cheap; so I guess that’s three things.

I have two tube amps, and they attenuate down to 1/4 and 1/10 of a watt, and I still can’t turn them up much, because the sound would crack the plaster in the walls. With solid state amps, the sound seems pretty much the same all over the volume dial.

A long time ago, I went to Guitar Center, and some salesman played a cheap Fender solid state amp (the word “Bronco” sticks in my mind), and he insisted the obsession with tubes was stupid. I have to admit, the amp sounded great. But he was playing very distorted stuff, and he was all excited about “crunch.” The amp had all sorts of “crunch,” but I don’t recall whether it had warmth and presence, which are the tube-amp qualities I like.

Even if tubes are important, how much can they matter in the output stage? I have a solid state stereo which reproduces tube sounds (and the human voice and every other sound) just fine. Seems to me that a tube preamp stage ought to dominate a solid state power stage. Maybe I’m wrong. There are amps out there that have tube preamps and solid state output transistors, though. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the stuff related to headroom and clipping comes mostly from the power stage.

Whatever the situation is at the moment, if solid state amps don’t sound as good as tubes right now, they definitely will in a few years. Technology improves constantly, and there is no physical reason why we can’t make perfect solid state amps. I’ve read dubious arguments about digital and solid state products creating “square” or “jagged” sound waves or “odd harmonics.” The proof is in the sound, though, and as far as I can tell, my solid state stereo has no problem reproducing tube sounds so well they are indistinguishable from what you would hear sitting next to a guitar amp.

You can Google around and find listening tests and articles by amp designers suggesting that the tube craze is mostly hype, and that tubes don’t really sound better in blind tests, so I think I should check out some solid-state amps once I really get it together. Maybe they won’t do the job, but maybe they will, and a solid state or hybrid amp would save me a lot of aggravation. Maybe I should look at a Fender Super Champ XD.

I’m pretty excited about writing my own variations and tunes, because it will help me get to know the instrument and amps and effects from the inside out, and it will lead to the development of a signature sound (for better or worse).

This is going to work out. Pretty cool. Allow me to reference Psalm 37:4 yet again.

Maybe Rock Really is the Devil’s Music

Found some creepy information on The Guitar Grimoire, and I thought I would pass it on. The Guitar Grimoire is a series of books and DVDs intended to teach guitar technique.

The DVDs that are supposed to go with the books feature a guy who calls himself “Adam Kadmon.” He wears a wizard costume and is surrounded by occult symbols. He is apparently trying to come off like a sorcerer or something.

I looked up “Adam Kadmon,” and it’s not a real name. It’s the name of a supernatural being found in Kabbalah, which is Jewish occultism.

Here’s some of what I read about Adam Kadmon:

In the Kabbalah, the Primordial Man is spoken of as Adam Kadmon, and, in the Lurianic Kabbalah this symbol becomes a pivotal notion linking God, Man, and the World. Adam Kadmon, as the first being to emerge from the infinite Godhead, Ein-sof, is essentially indistinguishable from the deity, yet at the same time his body is said to both emanate and constitute the world. Man, having been created in God’s image, is said by the Kabbalists to be comprised of the very same cosmic elements, the sefirot, which comprise the “body” of Adam Kadmon. The symbol of Adam Kadmon expresses the idea that the cosmos itself has both a soul and body very much like that of man, and that the world too is garbed in the interest, value and Eros which is normally thought to be the exclusive province of humankind.

I think I’ll stick with Fretboard Logic.

I wonder how people claiming to be Jews can believe things that contradict the Torah.

Fruition

Last week was fantastic.

For the last few years, I’ve been dealing with a nagging problem. My primary approach to solving it has been supernatural. I have chosen to hold off on using some earthly weapons I have at my disposal. God has been completely faithful; last week he gave me a big victory, in pretty much the way I asked for it. Maybe I’ll write about it eventually.

I’m having lots of fun with the guitar. My arm pain went away when I started using dumbbells to exercise my forearms. Last week, I noticed I was bending the .73mm Dunlop pick I was using, along an axis from the tip to the back, and I realized I was getting too strong for it, so I upgraded to a .88mm pick. Now I’m playing louder and clearer, because the pick is stiffer. I’m not completely ready for the heavier pick, but I can’t go back to the thin one, and I know I will get stronger during the coming month.

My left hand is also getting better. Notes I could not fret well in the past are sounding clearer. I suppose it will be another couple of months before I really feel strong.

I suspect that the dumbbells are improving my hand strength, not just my forearm strength. Maybe forearm workouts are a good idea for guitarists, generally.

The Burny Les Paul I bought is turning out to be a wonderful investment. I got a little help with the electronics (guitarist from my church advised me), and now I am able to use a Fat Sandwich pedal to get a B.B. King tone you would not believe. I actually wrote down all the settings so I could repeat it. You can convert your amp, guitar, and electronic settings to numbers in order to record them in a compact notation. Figured that out on my own.

The neck on my Chinese Epiphone is actually slightly better than the one on the Burny, but that’s probably a truss rod thing.

I think I’m going to stick with nines and tens (strings) for the foreseeable future. The Burny has DR Pure Blues nines on it, and the tone is pure bliss, and it’s easy to play. I have some problems feeling the strings with the pick sometimes because they’re so thin, but I think I can overcome that. I am able to get three distinct notes out of a single bend, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that with heavier strings. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think it’s a strength issue. I think it’s just the nature of heavy strings. They don’t seem to increase in pitch as much for the same degree of bending.

I really wanted to get a Japanese Les Paul and put single-coil pickups on it, but I can’t stand to take the humbuckers off my Burny. They’re amazing. So what do I do? I guess I’ll have to get a second Burny eventually. What if I like the pickups on that one? Hope that doesn’t happen. Every so often, one turns up with P90s already installed. Maybe that’s the best bet.

I am ready to take the next step in my Fretboard Logic studies. I have the “CAGED” thing pretty well under control, although I can’t make an A-type chord above the seventh fret. It’s impossible for me to line up three fingers between two frets that high up. I assume the answer is to do a sloppy second bar with the ring finger. I can’t believe a human hand exists which can get three fingers into that space.

I have to start writing original variations and tunes. I have been determined to learn to impersonate recordings accurately, because this is a sure way to build good technique, but I have to do my own thing, too. I already have the tab paper. I should get a tab-editing program.

It’s difficult to write tab, because you have to put down the guitar pick and pick up a pen, and it breaks the concentration. I may start writing it with my left hand. It doesn’t have to be pretty the first time around. I can fix it later.

I still think about my upcoming major guitar purchase. It’s slated for January. Right now, I’m strongly considering a Heritage H555 with single coils. But I may have to put the decision off until I really know what I want.

I may try out high-end guitars and discover that vintage Japanese guitars are as good or better. If that happens, there is no way I’m going to drop a pile on an American-made money sink. When you own a tool that costs too much, you tend to treat it like a sick baby, and you don’t get proper use from it. I am not afraid to risk the destruction of an $800 Japanese guitar, but I would be very nervous about putting a new Heritage on an airplane.

It should not be a surprise that the Japanese make great electric solidbody guitars. Japan is considered to be the home of the finest carpentry in the world. The strange thing is that their acoustics (and most of their pianos) are so bad. I guess it makes sense. A Les Paul is just a neck and a board, so if you make them fit together right, you should get a great sound. Copying the sound of a complicated hollow box would surely require more familiarity with American culture and the American sound.

Even semi-hollow electrics do not require perfect resonating chambers, so presumably, Japanese ES copies are also good.

Les Paul himself used to play a guitar that was actually a board. To be precise, it was a four-by-four with a neck. He called it “the Log.” It upset people, so he glued parts from an archtop to it, to make it look like a guitar. It’s in a museum now.

It may sound insane, but solidbody guitars would probably be good woodworking projects for me. The bodies would be a joke. Just cut, rout, and sand. The only hard part would be making a neck and headstock and setting the neck correctly. You can actually buy necks already made, if you get in trouble.

God gives us the desires of our hearts, according to Psalm 37. I am here to tell you it’s true. I am killing the electric guitar, and I am cooking better than I ever did, and I have wonderful friends. I have great tools, I’m thin, and I even have a pickup truck! I guess God has to be careful about rewarding us when we are not serving him. Once we’re back on track, his blessings will not corrupt us, so he can be more liberal.

If you want God to bless you, crucify your flesh so your evil desires don’t rule you. That makes you a fit candidate for blessing.

Things are going great, and I’m even meeting amazing Christian women. I keep pointing this out: non-Christian women, as a group, are a never-ending torrent of disappointment and conflict. They are neurotic and chronically unhappy. They expect men to solve all their problems. They blame us for everything that goes wrong. They think bickering and put-downs are the proper way to demonstrate their worthiness of respect. They are draining. They expect sex no later than the third date, and if they’re in their baby-crazy years, there is a good chance they’ll defeat contraception in order to trap you. It’s extremely difficult to find a non-Christian woman who interests me enough to make me risk the pain.

Christian women are completely different. The problem with Christian women is that I want to take ALL of them home. How do you choose? They’re pleasant to be around. They’re encouraging. They’re polite. They listen. They understand that a mate is not a competitor. They’re not princesses who have been raised to believe their overpriced weddings are the focal events of all creation. It’s hard to believe they’re for real. It’s such a beautiful thing, dealing with women who don’t put you on trial and make you walk on eggs. I can’t get used to it. I know it’s real. It’s like moving from Miami to Texas, where the people were so nice to me. It seems surreal, but it’s genuine, and I can trust it.

God will change your life so you can trust happiness.

Tonight I’m making Champagne chicken for 15 people at church. Boy, are they in for a shock. This stuff is incredible. I will not pretend to be modest. They think my pizza and cheesecake are good. They don’t know what they’re in for.

Who Does He Think He Isn’t?

I don’t publish comments on old posts, so I deleted this one which appeared yesterday, but I am reproducing it here for a reason. It comes from someone calling himself or herself “Sane”:

What about all the babies that have died this summer because they were left unattended in hot cars? Maybe your angels could have saved a few babies instead of murdering Assyrians?

Let’s assume your god really does exist (he doesn’t, of course). Why would you worship someone who creates tiny little helpless babies, only to let them (or worse, MAKE them) die in a hot car, or in any number of other horrible ways? What kind of a sick, twisted being would do that? What kind of a sick individual would WORSHIP someone who does that?

Instead of waiting around for help to come, try to get yourself out of the situation. In the meantime, help out others who need it, and maybe you’ll be lucky and they’ll return the favor someday. If you wait for your god to help, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

I don’t want to get heavily involved in the obvious responses to these ancient arguments, apart from noting: 1) I wait for God to help all the time, and he comes through over and over, 2) I do help others, because you can’t have the Father if you don’t love your fellow man, 3) atheists should wonder why they are so furious at a person they claim is nonexistent, and 4) the fact that you disapprove of God’s behavior does not mean he doesn’t exist.

Here’s what I have to offer. Sane, tell me about a problem you have. It has to be something a Christian God would be willing to fix; it can’t be something like, “Dope is too expensive in my neighborhood.” I’ll have people pray about it. If God fixes the problem within seven days from the time I post the request, let me direct you to some good resources where you can learn more about him. If not, go on your way.

Everybody get behind this in prayer, if you will.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Life seems to get better every day. God answers one prayer after another. Where did we get the idea that Christianity was about obeying rules or being good or going to heaven sixty years in the future? It’s about self-actualization here on earth, seeing your dreams come true moment by moment, with God at your side. Heaven, as the movie title says, can wait.

My involvement with my church keeps growing deeper. I can’t walk through the place without talking to five or six friends along the way. People stop me to compliment me on the food I cook. I talk guitar with the musicians. It’s fantastic.

Today I’m going to our monthly volunteer meeting. We have 700 volunteers, so we get together and try to get more organized. I’m not involved in the music ministry, but I’m going to show my “new” Japanese Resuporu (Les Paul!) to one of the guys. It will be great to get his input on it.

I still have no respect for Japanese acoustics, but the quality of my $500 Burny has convinced me that Japanese electrics are superior to American electrics. I’m sure you can spend $4000 and get an American guitar that is somewhat better, but then you can also spend $2000 and get a top-notch Japanese guitar that beats the $4000 job. Japanese guitars will always be a better deal, because the people at Gibson have gone completely insane. They charge so much, anyone in the world can undercut them. I wonder why American Fenders are still fairly reasonable.

I have had some frustration with the electric guitar, trying to lean how to play slowly. In bluegrass, there are no long notes on the guitar, so if you hit the string at all, you’ve hit it right. When I work on B.B. King music, however, I have to play a lot of long notes, and a lot of them involve shaping the notes as they sound, moving the pitch up and down. This takes skill, patience, and concentration. At first, I wondered if I would ever get it to work, but as with so many musical issues, it turns out the problems magically go away with practice, even when I’m not consciously working on them.

I bought a Fat Sandwich distortion pedal. I was disappointed when I tried it with the Burny Les Paul. It seemed like the distortion was very intense, no matter how the pedal was adjusted. Then I tried it with my other guitars, and the problem went away. I guess I’m getting lesson on pickups. Apparently, some pickups distort easier than others. The Japanese L8000 humbuckers in the Burny must be considerably hotter than the Texas Specials in my Strat, because they blow the Fat Sandwich up regardless of what I do. Oddly, I don’t have this problem with my Ibanez Tube Screamer.

Maybe the Fat Sandwich was a bad move, but I’ve listened to samples over the web, and I know some people have gotten wonderful sounds from it.

I’m considering going to Haiti at the end of the month. We are still doing missions. I was involved in doing the press releases right after the earthquake, but I was never told how we could get to Haiti. I assumed the church was contacting people and asking them to go, because of their special skills. It turns out anyone who is willing to spend over a grand to go can do it. I wish I had gone in January. I didn’t know it was possible.

I’d like to go, but man…Haiti in AUGUST? That almost sounds like a metaphor for hell. The weather report says Haiti is going to be about six degrees hotter than Miami this week. That means a lot, when it’s 90° here.

One of my friends has gone at least once, and she’s going this time. She’s urging me to go. She said you have to wear some kind of electrical thing to keep mosquitoes away, and you have to bring a fan to put by your bed, otherwise you can forget about sleep. There is no air-conditioning. And she said something about wearing sandals in the shower to keep the parasites off your feet.

Okay.

What about the cabanas and pina coladas? What about those? I haven’t heard anything about the important stuff yet.

In all seriousness, I am wondering if it’s a good idea. I have all sorts of unusual skills, but I don’t have a single one they need. I am not a medical professional. I am not a builder or a mechanic. I am not an engineer. I can sue people for them, I guess, if they can find a way to do it in a Florida court.

Maybe I should just send them the money and stay here.

If I go to Haiti, what do I do for a guitar? There is no way on earth I am going to lose a week of practice. You can do that with many instruments, but with the guitar, one week off means six weeks of rehab. Forget that. No way, no how.

I guess the intelligent thing would be to take an acoustic. Maybe the cheesy Tacoma Papoose I never use. The action is a horror, but I suppose that will keep my fingers working.

Some day I may get an electric travel guitar. They’re about two feet long, and they have no headstocks. The amps are internal, and they have headphone jacks. On the other hand, I have two Asian guitars I didn’t pay a lot for. Maybe this is a good use for them.

I am trying out a Bugera amp that attenuates down to 1/10 of a watt. I did not know this amp existed when I got my 1/4-watt Vox. This amp has five advantages. 1. It plays at lower levels. 2. It has reverb. 3. It has a headphone jack. 4. It costs half as much. 5. It has a gain control. I think the Vox sounds better, but that may be because I’m not sure how to work the Bugera. Anyway, it’s a good cheap practice amp, and you can use it without pedals.

I plan to resume playing ZZ Top. I had some moral concerns, but without going into details, after prayer and so on, I have come to the tentative conclusion that it’s okay to practice the dirty songs in private, just for technique. Maybe I’m wrong. I won’t play them in church, even for practice, and I would not take part in a performance where the lyrics would be sung. We’ll see what happens.

I better get over to Guitar Center. I have to buy a case.

Electric Bliss

This morning, the phone kept ringing while I was doing my morning prayer regimen. Drove me nuts. I finally answered it, and it was Mike. He was going crazy, brainstorming about my new smoker idea, which is this: drill a hole in a Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven and pump in smoke from an external box containing flaming wood.

He pointed something out. You can’t slow-cook stuff in a Showtime oven. The burner has a fixed heat setting, and it’s either on or off all the time.

I hadn’t been concerned about this. The Showtime oven makes nice, tender meat, so I figured I’d be content with using it the same way I do now, but he has a point. Slow-cooking is better.

Here is my answer. Cut a hole in the back of the oven and insert a smoker heating element with a thermostat. You can set the temperature and walk off and not worry about it. Or as Chairman Ron says, “Set it…and forget it.”

This will be a thing of great beauty. Think about it. You make a smoke box from a propane tank, some scrap steel, and a conduit elbow. You plumb it into the side of the oven. You put the smoker heating element in the bottom. You cram your meat in there and smoke it over low heat while using the “No Heat Rotation” setting on the Showtime. Then when you’re ready to eat, you turn the Showtime to “Normal Rotation” and brown the meat.

I felt we should put a hole in the top of the oven and mount a smoke pipe, but that’s just pimpage. The smoke will go in and out just fine if you leave the door cracked.

This could make some really brutal ribs or pork butts or chickens. And it’s cheap. You can get the ovens for $50 on Craigslist. The smoker element runs about the same price. If you spent $150 on this thing, you would be at the upper limit of the price range, and a smart person could do it for a hundred and ten.

Mike was highly disturbed by the prospect of building one of these things. I’m not sure he slept last night. I can tell he’s not going to have any peace until we give this a try.

In other news, my secondhand Japanese Les Paul clone has been delivered and put to work, and it’s amazing. It screams quality, or maybe it’s actually screaming “BANZAI” and it just sounds like “quality.” Using this neck is like dancing on greased glass. The humbuckers (probably Japanese L8000s) have a thick, sweet, almost nasal sound which is addictive. Apart from the dings and scrapes, the fit and finish are perfect. And I suspect the previous owner almost never played it. The finish on the bridge is going, but there is no fret wear. Maybe he just held it in his hands while he danced in his underwear. A lot of guys do that, when they find out how hard it is to actually learn to play.

There are two disappointing things about the guitar. First, it was advertised as a “long tenon” model, which means the neck is supposedly attached the way the better Gibsons had theirs attached. But the tenon is a weird type that has a screw in it. It appears to be very long and solid, but it’s not standard Gibson engineering. Someone has suggested to me that a clever Japanese instrument maker used screws to hold necks in while the glue was soft, so they could be adjusted a little before becoming completely solid. The Matsumoku factory is known for this method.

Second thing: there is a dime-sized mashed place on the edge of the guitar, in back, up high. The binding is a little mooshed, and some wood is showing. This was not clearly indicated in the photos. My luthier says he can make it prettier, but with a polymer-finish guitar, there is a limit to the magic. I just want it cleared up to the point where it doesn’t pain me to see it every time I grab the guitar.

I tried to put a Bigsby on the guitar, using a Vibramate mounting kit. Problem: you have to use a strap pin to hold the mount on, and the strap pin on my guitar is slightly off-center. So another job for the luthier. I would not be afraid to drill a new hole, but I’m going to have to fill a hole and then drill another one right next to it, and that might conceivably require a little knowledge and skill, and I have neither.

I am missing ZZ Top very badly, and this is especially true now that I have a new guitar to mess with. I’m working on SRV’s “Honey Bee” and B.B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen” instead. I’m making good progress. I don’t know if it’s the slippery neck or what, but the up-the-neck intro to “Honey Bee” is not giving me problems. I’m also impressed by the weepy, mournful tone the guitar gives me on “Sweet Sixteen.” Oddly, I prefer it with the Tube Screamer on and the bridge pickup selected.

It looks like Japanese Les Paul clones are great instruments. I don’t know if this thing is as good as a real Les Paul Custom, but it’s so good, I don’t care, and it cost one fifth as much. If I break it or someone steals it, who cares? I’ll Ebay another one. And I’m not afraid to modify it.

You can get new ones. Fernandes still makes Burny guitars, and the top two Les Paul models are still made in Japan. You’ll pay about a thousand to get one in your hands. You won’t be able to try it out first, however.

I don’t know why the Japanese make such beautiful electric guitars and such crappy acoustic instruments, but I’m not complaining.

I love my Chinese Epiphone Riviera, but I’m not so stupid I can’t see the difference in quality between the Riviera and the Les Paul. The necks are equally well set up, but there is something friendlier about the wood on the Burny, and it makes a real difference when I play. I can’t really say why, but the body on the Burny just looks better. The finish just seems classier and less flashy.

I’m wondering if I can have the fretboard on the Epiphone buffed or otherwise treated so it feels a little more like the Burny. And I’ll say one more thing: I would love to see what a Burny ES335 clone is like.

I think I made a mistake when I bought my Vox AC4TV amp. This is a magnificent machine; it has a nice tube sound, and it attenuates to 1/4 watt, so you can make it sound nice without rattling the walls. When I bought it, I looked for other attenuated amps, but I couldn’t find any this quiet. Now I’ve learned about the Bugera V5. This thing goes down to 1/10 watt, and it’s half the price of the Vox. Good info, if you’re currently shopping.

I’m wondering how they do the attenuation. Maybe it’s just a big resistor. If so, I should be able to put a bigger resistor in the Vox. But the Bugera is so cheap, I have to wonder if there is any point.

I’m going to get a Way Huge Fat Sandwich distortion pedal. Maybe I’m stupid, but they sound great in demo videos. I like my Tube Screamer, but how can you resist something called a “Fat Sandwich”?

Time to crank up the amp. Hope I can quit before my fingers get too sore.

Office Space for the Lord of the Flies

I’m back. Not that I went anywhere.

Things are going well here. Guitar practice is moving right along. Church gets better and better. My friendships there keep getting stronger.

Yesterday I decided to give up working on a piece I really enjoyed. I was learning a ZZ Top tune which has a dirty title and suggestive lyrics. I figured it was okay, because I was only interested in the melody and the guitar skills, but I changed my mind.

Last week a kid came to church while I was working as an Armorbearer, and he had a joke T-shirt on, and the front of it featured the F-word, with the “u” replaced by an asterisk. I was mortified. Before I could think about it, I went up to him and asked if he had anything else he could put on. I was afraid he would give people the wrong idea about our church, and that God and the people above me in the church would be upset with me if they saw him.

I told him the shirt was inappropriate and disrespectful, and the solution we came to was exile to the overflow room, a long room to the side of the sanctuary. I got in touch with my superiors about it, and their take was that was should not run anyone off over a T-shirt, but that we should not hesitate to confront church regulars who wore offensive clothing. The regulars know better.

It seems to me that working on a dirty song is a little like wearing that T-shirt. Like the church, I’m supposed to be God’s house. I shouldn’t let garbage in through the front door.

I still have some tendinitis, and I wonder if the delay in healing has anything to do with what I chose to do with my abilities.

I have quit working on the piece, and now I’m looking for something else. It’s sad, really, because the guitar work in that tune is a joy to play, even though the song itself is fairly weak.

I started working on Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Honey Bee” last night, but I discovered that Billy Gibbons has something Stevie Ray lacks. Oh well.

I enjoy working on B.B. King, but it turns out there are subtleties in his style that make it harder than ZZ Top. The timing is more varied. I learned that ZZ Top is surprisingly like souped-up bluegrass, which has 8 beats over and over, but B.B. King does whatever he wants, because he’s not as concerned with a driving rhythm.

I also learned that blues/rock has the same basic feel as bluegrass. Maybe a person who has the innards to play one type of Southern music should be able to play them all.

I’ll be looking for more stuff to work on.

I took a look at “Sharp-Dressed Man,” which has interesting guitar work, but it requires a chorus pedal. I don’t even know what that does.

I haven’t received the used Japanese Les Paul clone I Ebayed. The guy was really slow about shipping it. So much for Japanese efficiency. And I still don’t have my Blueshawk. I think the repair guy has adopted it.

I’m trying nines on one of my guitars. I may stick with them. I like the feel of tens, but it’s hard to turn down the expressiveness you get from nines, and the tone seems just as good. It seems like the electronics make up so much of the sound, the strings aren’t all that important.

I plan to have vibratos on all my guitars. So far, I’ve only used vibrato for one lick in one song, but that was enough to convince me that I needed this extra tool. It turns any song into a soundtrack for a Quentin Tarantino movie.

I have a sense that anyone who plays electric blues should be familiar with four types of guitars: Strats, Telecasters, Les Pauls, and thinline Gibsons. Maybe I’m wrong, but this seems to be a good basic vocabulary. I plan to get all those bases covered before the big day comes and I go all-out and get a top-notch instrument.

A friend of mine recommends Heritage guitars. The world’s biggest dealer is within driving distance. I have heard things about their quality control, but then I have also heard that the biggest Heritage knocker is a dealer who got ejected from their sales network, and that the quality control is actually very good. I don’t think it can be any worse than Gibson, which is getting whipped by its Chinese siblings at Epiphone.

I got a prayer request last night from reader Ruth, and I am passing it on. I hope you will take it seriously.

Steve,
I have a niece who has been extremely overweight for years. Two years ago she had the big stomach surgery to help her. That helped with her weight but she has still be a victim of increasingly worse migraines. She has been in and out of hospitals time and time again.
Currently she has been in a hospital for 10 days, on cortisone to help wean her from the many different drugs they have her on.
Today she went to the chapel to pray and was attacked by the devil, her words. The security guard helped her back to her room, he seems to be Christian and understanding. She also has a good Christian nurse with her.
My sisters and I think she has been the victim of a demon for many years, maybe more than one. With your understanding of what this is, you seem to be one to also ask to pray for her.
She has been a good Christian wife, mother and grandmother, now. We just pray she will be well and able to enjoy the grandchildren, children and very faithful husband.
Thanks for your prayers, please pass this on to your prayer partners.
Ruth H.

By the way, it will be 4 weeks tomorrow since my knee surgery and I am doing very well. Not to say there is not pain and discomfort but I am healing, walking without my cane in the house, and slowly getting back to normal. Prayers are still appreciated, however.

If you could throw in a few words for my friend Dave, I would appreciate it. He came out of the closet after his mom died, and his life is pretty tough. He used to be very hostile to God, but lately he has been more open.

Hope I’ll be able to post a good report on my guitar progress before long.

Why Does my Guitar Smell Like Squid?

God just won’t let up.

This weekend, I was slated to go to my prayer group on Saturday morning, followed by Saturday evening church. The following day, I was to cook during the first two services and then serve as an Armorbearer during the third, and then I was to serve as an Armorbearer at our mass baptism at Hollywood Beach.

On Friday night, a youth minister called and asked if I could help on Saturday with a barbecue. I agreed, but I had to cut out the prayer group and Saturday evening church. I managed to arrange all that.

I have been considering getting a new Epiphone Les Paul ’56 Reissue with P90 pickups, and I figured I might go by the Hallandale Beach Guitar Center on the way home, since it was very close to the park.

On Saturday, I got ready to head up to Greynolds Park. This is a public park in North Miami. My school took me there a few times when I was a kid. I believe my last visit had been 37 years earlier, at my sixth grade picnic.

I had a call from Mike on my cell phone, and my GPS would not find Greynolds Park, so I called Mike while I was driving and asked him to get the address off of his computer.

Mike and I grew up across the street from each other, and we both knew Greynolds Park, even though I did not recall the way to get to it.

We started talking about old times. I enjoyed that. Outside of my family, Mike is my only link to my childhood.

Miami has no hills to speak of, but there is an artificial one at the park. I guess it’s fifteen feet high. On the top, there’s a little castle made from coral rock. I seem to recall a big peace sign carved into the grass below it; maybe that was there back in the Seventies, when I last saw the place.

When kids visit the castle, they like to go to the top of the hill, lie down, and roll to the bottom.

I remembered the castle as a big structure, but when I saw it out of my truck window, I realized it was about fifteen feet across! I told Mike that if I tried to roll down the hill, it would be about two rolls.

I got to talk to him about church and his family, and I think it was a productive conversation.

The kids showed up, and I helped a pastor and his mom grill burgers, wings, hot dogs, and sausages. There was football and volleyball, and we had a great time.

At the end of the day, I got in the truck and tried to decide whether I had enough energy to look at a guitar. I decided to go ahead. I took a couple of wrong turns on the way, though, so I was maybe five minutes later than I should have been.

I got to guitar center, and they didn’t have a ’56 Reissue. While I was looking at the guitars on the wall, I heard a voice say, “Steve!” I turned around, and I saw Miguel and Joe, two guitarists from church. Miguel was looking at a Gibson Les Paul.

Total coincidence, right? Of course.

We talked guitars for a while, and they gave me some great information. I told them the reason I had come, and Joe said he and Miguel had just come from a place that had a ’56 Reissue! In fact, Joe had handed it to Miguel, even though they weren’t shopping for a guitar that cheap.

Now I know where to find it, if I want to see it!

Again, coincidence. Surely.

If you can believe that, your irrational, stubborn faith in coincidence is considerably greater than the faith it takes to be a Christian.

That night, I got an unexpected call from my aunt. Kentucky is condemning a piece of land my family owns, and my cousin is handling the legal issues. My aunt said the mediation was scheduled for today! She said they had deliberately kept it quiet (which is a major breach of professionalism for a lawyer), in order to prevent the family from getting wound up and causing problems. She said we had to come up with a price. She said I would have to be available today to take calls, and she said she would try to get me information on Sunday, which meant no church and no beach baptism.

I was pretty annoyed, but I kept thinking of something I had learned: when people do things that are completely abnormal, there is often a supernatural reason. Maybe God was in this.

Anyway, a while back, another relative tried to get control of this issue, and that relative made up a selling price which I will call “x,” and the state rejected it as ridiculous, offering something more like 0.6x. On Saturday, my aunt started telling me about recent comparable sales, from other people whose land had been condemned. Suddenly, we were talking about 3-4x! I couldn’t understand it. It made no sense, given the information we had had earlier in the year.

The same state official who refused to pay x and demanded a trial has been giving other people extravagant sums. The comps come from deals she worked on.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s very odd.

Speaking of guitars, I found a nice Japanese Les Paul clone on Ebay, and I won the auction. I am paying Chinese-Epiphone money for a Gibson-quality vintage Les Paul Custom. We’ll see if it’s any good. I plan to put a Bigsby on it, and I’ll probably take out the humbuckers and put in single-coil pickups made to fit a humbucker mount. I wouldn’t want to diddle around too much with a valuable Gibson, but for this kind of money, the Japanese guitar is a great candidate for modification.

I found out you can use a mount called a Vibramate to put a Bigsby on a guitar without drilling, so I’m going to go that route at first, to see if I like it. I’m pretty sure I’ll want to keep the Bigsby, however, because I love the one on my Epiphone.

This should be a good cheap way to learn about quality Les Pauls.

Practice is going great. I no longer have problems getting along with electric guitars. I am starting to understand how liberating amps and effects can be. I just need to settle on an arsenal of instruments and equipment.

The Chinese Epiphone continues to bring me joy. I’m getting some very good sounds out of it. I’m starting to remember things about the characteristics of different electric guitars. For one thing, the Riviera (wide, like an ES-335) has great, masculine-sounding bass, which is something I missed when I tried out a smaller ES-336 a few years back.

I had soreness in my right elbow, but I started using a thinner pick, and suddenly I’m getting much better, and I can’t believe the improvement in control. I guess I should have realized that playing bluegrass on thirteens with a 1.0-mm pick was not a great idea, for someone who had been slacking for years. I’ll have to build back up.

Billy Gibbons is my favorite guitarist. I know Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnny Winter are considerably higher on the technique food chain, but when it comes to music that is just plain fun to listen to, he’s as good as it gets. That’s very important. In music, charisma is more important than pure ability. It’s why so many supremely capable Asian classical pianists fail to draw audiences. No one cares how brilliant you are, if you bore them.

I see it this way: Johnny Winter is to Stevie Ray Vaughan as Art Tatum is to Oscar Peterson. Billy Gibbons fits in on the next level.

It’s funny that my favorite blues guitarists are white. Oddly, all three of them sing the blues well or extremely well. Usually this is where white blues artists eat it.

If you don’t think ZZ Top is blues, listen to “La Grange” and then listen to “Boogie Chillun,” by John Lee Hooker.

That’s all I got.

Guitar Fun

I can’t say enough about Hal Leonard’s Play-Along guitar instruction books. I am still working on B.B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen,” and I’m thrilled at the way the book and the software make hardcore practice possible.

I don’t believe in wimpy music practice. If a lick is giving you trouble, you don’t practice it three times and then roll over and pick up the cable remote. You practice it dozens or hundreds of times. If the sound you make when you practice doesn’t drive other people insane, you’re not doing it right. You’re not supposed to PLAY. Practice is WORK.

I hate it when people want to listen when I practice. They always complain. “Can’t you play something that sounds good?” NO, I can’t. GET OUT. That’s my attitude. I don’t show up at your office and ask you to make me sandwiches and pie.

With the Slow Downer software that comes with the book, I can put a short part of a song on a repeating loop and practice it until I can’t take any more. It’s fantastic.

By the way, Audacity freeware will do the same thing. It won’t remove the guitar from the music, but it will do looping and speed and pitch changes easier than Slow Downer.

I can’t quit looking at guitars. I am going to have to get control of this. Covetousness wastes time and money. And it will be another couple of months before I really know what I want from a guitar.

I’ve found some interesting stuff out there. Gibson’s Japanese affiliates used to make guitars under a different name, and the quality is probably better than the US instruments. You can save a lot of money and get a neat collector piece by buying one of these things. The factories made the same guitars under other labels, too. Look for Greco, Burny, Edwards, and Tokai, among others. You can still get a new Edwards for a grand, and it will probably be better than a $3500 Gibson. How can you resist a thing like that? Smoother action, better fit and finish, same design, same quality materials, and if you’re determined to spend the full Gibson price, you can have a luthier trick out your Japanese beauty until nothing the Gibson Custom Shop makes is worthy to be on the same stage with it.

A company called XOX makes electric guitars from carbon fiber. They have better sustain than wooden guitars, and they don’t warp or crack, so they’re nearly maintenance-free. A company called Rainsong makes top-quality carbon acoustic guitars which have the same durability and stability advantages.

I love Gibson guitars, but the quality control has always been bad, and they are overpriced by a factor of at least two. I have been reluctant to try Asian instruments because of the poor quality of Japanese Martin clones. Nothing sounds worse than a Yamaha acoustic. But my Chinese Epiphone Riviera continues to amaze me. I think it’s probably much easier to make a good electric guitar, because so much depends on the electronics, and because you don’t have to worry so much about creating a perfect thin-shelled resonating cavity. I still don’t trust Asian acoustics, but my experience proves you can get a good electric guitar for almost nothing.

I think I can resist the temptation to try a $500 Epiphone Les Paul with P90s. But I’m not positive.

I’m still planning to get myself a really good electric for Elvis’s birthday. Currently, the Taylor T3B heads the list, but that could change at any minute.

I found a beautiful Gibson ES-125TDC online. There are still a lot of good ones out there, in excellent condition after forty years. This is the guitar George Thorogood uses. I’d love to get one and have a luthier fix all the Gibson glitches. One nice thing about buying a lightly used guitar right is that you can’t lose much money. In fact, you are nearly certain to make money on it, at least in numerical (not inflation-corrected) terms. My old J200 is worth maybe five times what I paid for it.

B.B. King is going well. It turns out playing the blues is very easy. Bluegrass makes both of my hands hurt, and it puts big calluses on my fingers, and it makes my elbow sore, but rock and blues music generally take much less speed, strength, and skill. There are new things I’m learning, but trust me, going from bluegrass to basic blues or basic rock is a joke, and going the other way would be like learning a whole new instrument. So bluegrass has turned out to be great preparation. And it’s not going to be hard to come up with original blues stuff. While I work on imitating the CD, I find that I don’t always like what B.B. does, so I throw in my own ideas, and they sound great.

I like the slow pace of the blues, because it gives me time to think about technique and shape the notes. As a bluegrass player, I am unable to force myself to accept sloppy playing, so I will not be happy unless I can play cleanly. Because the blues is slow, I can really polish up my technique and work on the subtleties.

The Riviera has a fantastic sound when you go up the neck and play slowly. I don’t know how it could sound or play any better. You get a lot for five hundred bucks these days.

I learned something surprising. I’m pretty sure about this. I put elevens on my Riviera because big strings sound better. Now when I try to follow the CD, I find that there are notes the guitar will not play. Apparently, when you bend a nine as far as you can, the pitch is higher than the pitch you get when you bend an eleven all the way. It’s not a question of strength. I can use two fingers to overcome the higher tension of the thicker string, and I can bend it to the limit, and it still doesn’t make the sound B.B. King’s string makes. So I may have to go down to tens.

I don’t know how much it matters. With an acoustic guitar, the strings determine how good the instrument sounds. With an electric guitar, you can fake up a good tone regardless of the string gauge. It’s cheating, but then so is using an amp.

My memory seems to be much better than it was back when I got frustrated with the piano. A few weeks back, I got the feeling that God was restoring my musical memory, and it seems to be true. I hope I can get it to work with the piano. Then I’ll be all set.

I’m wondering if I can start playing with some people from church. Suddenly, I know several excellent musicians. It would be great to see an improvement in worship music. People are playing a lot of good stuff these days, but the old songs are still the best, far and away. “Amazing Grace” is over two hundred years old, for example. Get on the web and check the publication dates of your favorite songs. You’ll see what I mean. We need people to start making music so good, it gets played on secular radio. We’ve had crossovers before, and we should be doing it all the time.

If you’re a musician, here is a tip. If your electronic tuner is more than a couple of years old, go to Guitar Center and get a $20 Korg. I got one because my Qwik Tune (fine tuner in its day) was slow and unreliable. The Korg is extremely sensitive and very fast, and it doesn’t limit you to E, A, D, G, B, and high E. You can tune your guitar any way you want. You can even use it for vocals.

I guess I’ll throw the Qwik Tune out. It’s not worth keeping or giving away. The batteries are big and expensive, and it doesn’t work well. Why would I keep it, when the 9-volt batteries cost 20% of the price of a new Korg that comes with fresh AAAs? Technological progress is funny; it generates antiques that are almost completely worthless.

My dreams are coming true. Hope yours are, too.

I Have This Situation Under Control

I have had some misgivings about studying ZZ Top in order to learn the blues. Some of their best stuff is not all that clean. “La Grange” is about a whorehouse. If that’s not bad enough, I’ve been working on “Tube Snake Boogie.”

While the songs are not optimal material, I did learn one thing from studying them: Hal Leonard’s Play-Along instruction books rock.

These books feature licensed material by popular artists, and the licks (supposedly) are accurately transcribed. A long time ago, I tried to learn some SRV stuff with a different book, and I’m just about positive the transcriptions were not merely wrong, but sometimes impossible to play. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has this problem, because these days, a lot of books are advertised as “recorded versions,” so people will know they’re not getting garbage somebody made up.

The Play-Along books come with CDs that have demo tracks plus tracks with the guitar removed. They give you software, too, so you can play the tracks any way you want. Fast. Slow. Whatever. You can loop stuff, too.

Today I blew the massive sum of $14.95 on the B.B. King book, and it’s fantastic. I’m working on “Sweet Sixteen.”

I’m learning some interesting stuff about B.B. King. Judging from the sounds he makes, he sometimes mutes strings with his pick. I know of no other way to produce the clipped notes he makes. You pick the string, bend it, and then bring the pick back and stop the vibration while the string is still bent.

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but it works. The book doesn’t explain it; this is just me talking.

I thought the pickups on my Chinese Epiphone Riviera were not hot enough, but now that I’m doing this B.B. King stuff, they sound wonderful. Maybe I still don’t know how to work the amp. I think I’m cheating it by keeping the volume so low.

The guitar is still great.

I looked at one this morning, at the Hallandale Guitar Center. I think I got lucky with mine, because the one they had didn’t look as good. It had some revolting ripples where the neck joined the soundboard. Mine is not perfect in this area, but it’s way better than the other one.

I’m really looking forward to getting my Blueshawk back. Now that the electric guitar is finally working out for me, I want to see what it can do. The public rejected this guitar, but almost everyone who actually played one loved it.

Found another good deal on a resonator instrument.

I’ve been trying to learn some acoustic blues. I finally downloaded some lessons from a guy called Catfish Keith. His playing is wonderful. Unfortunately, he sounds pretty white when he sings. Anyway, as soon as I started working on one of his songs, I noticed one of the notes was just plain missing. I may be wrong about this, but it looks like his tablature is wrong.

This kind of thing irks me. When I wrote my cookbook, I made sure it worked. I only know of one recipe error in the whole thing, and it’s pretty obvious, so it’s not likely to hurt anyone. I don’t know why people who publish tablature can’t be more careful.

Check him out on Youtube.

I better get back to practicing. I have to leave before long. I made another Tower of Babel cake for church, and I have to bake garlic rolls for the Saturday night youth thing. That cake is a wonder.

Check out those Play-Along books. They’re a big help.

Who Are You People?

I haven’t updated in a while. What can I tell you? Life intrudes.

I seem to get more involved in church all the time, and music is also a factor. And increasingly, my Internet activities are directed toward the church these days. I set up a private forum for our Armorbearers, and I’m the administrator. We also have email accounts under our domain name.

It’s great to have a website where all the talk is centered around God, and we don’t have to worry about trolls and boors getting in. It has improved our communication tremendously. We don’t have a lot of time to get together when we’re not serving at church, so the forum allows us to get to know each other and brainstorm.

I would say “fellowship,” but that word always grates on my nerves. It makes hanging out sound like a chore. Like something you need lessons to do. And I don’t like using nouns as verbs. No one says, “My wife and I relationshipped last night.”

Jargon has a way of alienating people, and that’s the last thing Christians want to do. We’re trying to sell people the best product in existence. We don’t want to turn them off unnecessarily.

Music is going better and better. The Chinese guitar is still making me happy, although I am starting to realize the pickups are not great. I set my Strat up with elevens, and it feels wonderful and sounds great, but the same strings don’t sound as “hot” on the Riviera. I might go crazy and buy some Lollars eventually. I’m not the first one to be disappointed in this guitar’s pickups.

It’s exciting to be getting to the point where I can tell good pickups from bad ones.

The Strat has Fender Texas Special pickups, and they sound wonderful. I don’t know whether the American Roadhouse Strat was popular when it came out, but it’s awfully similar to the SRV clone they put out, and that guitar was supposed to sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan’s.

I almost bought a resonator guitar. I found a fantastic Ebay deal. Luckily for me, I got outsniped. Otherwise it would be on the way.

Why do I want a resonator guitar? Because I want to take my banjo skills and apply them to the guitar. You can do this with an electric guitar, but it seems more natural with a resonator guitar. I already have the picks; I even have an old blues book. Fingerpicks can do things a flatpick can’t do, and vice-versa. There is no point in limiting myself when I already have the fundamental training.

It turns out there is a good music store in Naples. I guess that’s two hours away. They sell National Guitars. Maybe when I get a few blues numbers working, I’ll head out there and see what they have. I like the wood-body sound. They make a big guitar called the El Trovador, and the sound is wonderful. Another model, the Estralita, is also easy on the ear. There is no point in trying to find a good music store in Miami. This city is allergic to sophistication and culture. Like I always say, we don’t even have LATIN culture. If Andres Segovia lived here, he would have to work at Burger King. This is a city of Fender Squiers and cheap electric pianos.

Another discovery: Beard Guitars. They make great resonator models. They lean toward the Dobro, however. I’ve never been a big bluegrass Dobro fan. Purists would hang me for saying this, but bluegrass uses short notes, and that doesn’t work with a Dobro. Why buy an instrument with tremendous sustain, when every song you play is made up of eighth notes?

Check out this video. It shows what a Dobro can do if you don’t clip the notes.

I’ve seen some of that guy’s other videos, and he’s not a virtuoso, so presumably, he is only beginning to tap the instrument’s potential here.

To me, sustain means versatility. You can play short notes on a Dobro, but you can’t play long notes on a banjo.

I still have my old flamenco guitar. Maybe it would be a good choice for learning acoustic blues, until I’m good enough to know what to upgrade to.

I need to start writing new music down. I’m keeping up with bluegrass, mainly for the exercise, and it’s extremely easy to write tablature for it. Sometimes a new arrangement will go shooting through my head, and it’s like having a subway train go by six inches in front of my face. I have to write this stuff down.

I don’t know how often I’ll blog from now on. It’s great to be out of the political snakepit.

God’s Own Cake and the Devil’s Music

I took the Tower of Babel cake to church to get rid of it. It was a great success. Now they want more. I have piles of bananas scattered on the kitchen counter, fresh from the trees in my yard. I guess I’ll freeze what I can’t cook immediately and put the rest in cakes.

My nam wa banana tree finally produced. The bananas are very nice. They’re finger-sized bananas, but they’re not like the lemony guineos we always have in the markets in Miami. They’re very sweet, and they have a smooth texture. It’s a little like banana ice cream.

God keeps working in my life. Last week I led some of the armorbearers on the first Armorbearer Freedom Fast, and Mike joined in. Some of us were fasting to beat gluttony. I was fasting in support of the others. Mike called and said he went to a restaurant after the fast and ordered a kid’s portion. He couldn’t face a regular-size meal. In the past, it has always been hard for Mike to face regular-sized meals, but that was because they were too small. His new attitude is incredible.

I worked at church on Sunday, and when I left at nearly 4 p.m., I hadn’t eaten anything except a piece of cake. I didn’t want more food, but I made myself stop at Five Guys. I got a bacon cheeseburger, Cajun fries, and a large Coke. I ate two thirds of the burger and a third of the fries. I drank half of the Coke. I threw everything else out. I didn’t want it. Today I went to breakfast with my dad, and I left a fourth of my nova bagel on the plate. Not bad. My Armorbearer friend who was fasting because of his weight said he tried to eat something he usually enjoys, and it made him sick, so he couldn’t do it.

Fasting works. My pants and belts do not lie. We are getting supernatural results. And my dad is witnessing all of it, which is also great. One day, we’ll get him.

Church continues to amaze me. I keep meeting extraordinary people there. One of the new Armorbearers is a drummer. His name is Travis. I started talking to him yesterday. I asked him if the drums were his only instruments. He said he played TWELVE, and he listed them. And he said he played them WELL, so apparently it’s not like Prince, who claims he can play forty but probably includes instruments that made noises because he accidentally sat on them in the studio.

I know everyone thinks Prince is a genius. When I see him do something that indicates talent, I will agree. So far, all I’ve seen are weak pop tunes. And he holds a purple guitar sometimes. Wait. I think it’s white. Anyway, I haven’t heard any solos yet.

Travis got a full scholarship to college, based on his ability. That’s what he does now. He said it was largely based on his sight-reading skills. He actually knows who my trombone-virtuoso cousin is, which is astonishing.

So now we have two professional musicians in the group, and they’re not three-chord wonders or rappers. They are real musicians.

The other musician, Zachary, is trying to find a hundred-watt tube amp he can afford. He said he would consider building one, if he had the skills. I used to build temperature and current controls for diode lasers in college, and I have a ton of tools. He sent me links to some sites that have amp plans. Interesting.

One of the guys bought a Bushmaster AR-15. He brought it in for us to look at. We were handing it around and admiring it in a back room. I said, “You know, church has CHANGED since I was a kid.” That cracked Travis up.

My music is going really well. The bluegrass is coming up to speed. My left hand has only had five weeks to get strong, and that’s not enough. When I use a capo (makes fretting easier), I get a taste of what my playing will be like in another month or two. I plan to continue playing bluegrass, simply because it’s great for my technique and it’s wasteful to throw away a whole genre you’ve already learned.

I was suffering with online blues lessons, but I couldn’t take it any more. I got a ZZ Top book, and I started working on “Tube Snake Boogie.” I realize this is not good music for a Christian to work on, but hear me out. The guitar stuff is all blues-based, and it’s HOT. It will get me into electric blues via the side door, and it will help me get familiar with my instruments and amps. I don’t plan to sing this filth in the sanctuary.

I struggled for a week, but today I got it working. I put new strings on my flamenco guitar (like a classical guitar, with a cutaway and a different sound), and I started using it for practice. This is much easier on me than my dreadnought and heavy hollowbody. It allows me to practice pretty painlessly. I actually got through the first page and a half.

I may get hollered at for saying it, but so far, as I expected, this stuff is a complete joke compared to bluegrass. True, you have to go up the neck more, but so what? I’m using elevens, and the guitar’s action is very light. I’m playing at half the speed of bluegrass (or less), the strings are kinder to my hands, and the licks are child’s play. The only real problems are getting used to playing over pickups and coping with the light strings. When you’re used to blasting thirteens at maybe eight notes a second, you can barely feel elevens.

When I used to try to play Stevie Ray Vaughan material, it was difficult, but then he played very fast, and he didn’t cheat by using his left hand to play the notes. He did it just like a bluegrass guitarist.

I’ve noticed that some rock guitarists play runs that seem very fast, but their right hands aren’t keeping up with the notes. Evidently, you can effectively double your speed by hammering on and pulling off and bending the strings with your left hand, between right-hand notes. I wonder how many of these guys could cope with bluegrass. I know some of them have been there; Steve Morse does both styles.

I had a feeling this would turn out to be easy, simply because I know the kind of people who play rock. They are not known for being industrious. Rock guitar isn’t about artistry and sacrifice. It’s about looking cool and attracting shallow women so you can fornicate. That’s what got Pete Townshend started. I know there must be many rock guitarists who woodshed all the time and aren’t afraid of difficult material, but a lot of this stuff appears to be based on using two fingers, the way you might when you’re stoned in the back of a tour bus. And everyone loves nines, and I don’t think that’s totally based on professionalism. It just might have something to do with lack of character, in some cases.

When you play an electric guitar, the gadgetry does a whole lot of the work. It’s pretty cushy compared to killing yourself to get music out of an acoustic.

I look forward to getting a grip on this form of music, and then I want to do a reverse Ray Charles. I want to use bluesy sounds to make music for God. I know you’re supposed to go the other way, ripping off gospel and using it to play secular music. I don’t see why I can’t turn the tables.

I’m glad I held onto that flamenco guitar.

Tisha B’Av is about to start, so if you’re fasting in sympathy with Israel and the Jews, it’s time to get on it.

Life is wonderful.

Fast Over

This morning, my church’s Armorbearers ended a two-day fast. I wrote about it earlier.

Man, do I feel better. Some people say they feel closer to God during a fast. I feel farther away. I get a headache. I feel depressed. It’s pretty bad. I always look forward to the renewed sensation of his presence that comes when I finally eat.

Last night, I felt a powerful sensation of faith as I ended the day in prayer, but that’s not the same as feeling God’s presence. Imagine you’re in prison. This is the difference between a visit and receiving a care package. The care package is great, but you still want the visit.

I hope this fast accomplished things. The person who got it going is a fellow AB with a bad weight problem. I would really like to see him get free. I would like to see the others get free, too, and I would like a renewal of my own weight-loss miracle, as well as better discipline to handle things like lust and covetousness.

The fast was not fun. On the first day, I noticed it was hard to practice the guitar because my hands were weak. On the second day, I decided to skip practice. My arm was sore anyway, so it needed the rest. I had a nutritious Pop Tart breakfast today, but I am still not 100%.

Through an interesting set of circumstances, I learned about a great Christian singer yesterday. Her name is Grace Williams. I won’t bother you with the details, but I came across her on TV, and it turned out I had an unopened Grace Williams CD in my house, so I played it.

It’s wonderful stuff. As music per se, I would not call it great art, but as music intended to help you get in touch with God, it’s first-rate. It’s what Enya might have done, had she been a Christian.

Grace Williams says she startled her family by praying and singing in tongues at a very early age, and she says this is the “new song” the Bible mentions prophetically. I was startled. I have had the same idea run through my mind. Ever since our church’s Rendezvous conference a while back, I have had the ability to sing in the Spirit. It’s very strange. When I’m at church, I just open my mouth, and I automatically get harmony. Very helpful, since I can never learn all the words to the songs they play. It brings a powerful sense of peace and God’s presence.

Here is what Psalm 40 says:

1 I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.

2 He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.

3 And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.

We tend to dash right by language like that, assuming it’s just intended to be flowery and poetic, but it has to have a real meaning. God does not flap his lips just to hear his head roar. His word does not return to him void. Every word means something. If the Psalms say there is a new song that will convert people and make them believers, it has to be true, and I very much doubt that David was referring to the Psalms themselves. Nobody every listened to Psalm 40 and “feared” because of it and “trusted in the Lord.” It’s a fine psalm, but it’s not that fine. If God led David to say this about Psalm 40, God exaggerated, and he does not do that.

I’m assuming David wrote this psalm, because he wrote so many. I don’t know that he wrote this one. Whoever it was, God spoke through him.

The rabbi of a nearby Messianic synagogue wants to go shooting with us and get our help in forming an armorbearer squad. Pretty cool. Hope that happens in a week or two.

Life is good. I can’t wait for lunch.

God Restores

I got two prayer requests this weekend. First, Heather:

Mom had to have an MRI because they think there is a mass on her hip(she’s been in terrible pain for several months now). I pray it’s benign. Could you please pray that whatever it is, is benign?

Also could you pray for Mike and Kelly Bowling (singing group The Bowlings)? They were in a tour bus wreck in Charlotte NC yesterday (on their way to spread the love of the Lord with a singing gig). He is the brother in law to my cousin Kim. Mike is from here in London, he had to be air-lifted to the hospital. Kelly and Mike are in the hospital.

Also my mom’s cousin Tim’s son Dennis Blevins has just been diagnosed with a brain tumor. It is not known whether it is cancerous or not. And we are praying that it is not.

Second, reader Tim:

Please pray for my wife Rhonda who had complications following childbirth (twins) on the 2nd of July. She has fluid build up in lungs and body and needs it to drain away.

Sorry for not blogging more. I have been very busy with church, and I set up an Internet forum for our Armorbearers, so a lot of my online energy has been redirected.

I let Manlygrub.com expire. I was not promoting the cookbook, since it’s not the kind of material I want to be known for in the future. Thanks, everyone who bought a copy or participated in the forum.

Music practice is going incredibly well. One of the reasons I gave up music is that my memory seemed to be fading. Over the last two weeks, however, I’ve found that things have been coming back to me, just as I felt they would before I got started. Maybe God was speaking to me. I never state, without doubt, that God spoke to me, because I’m reluctant to risk giving him credit for stupid ideas that actually came from me. If I ever say God spoke to me, you better believe I had a vision or something. I have seen too many idiots claim God told them things that were pure nonsense. If God wants me to tell people he spoke to me, he better let me hear a voice.

Last night I was playing the guitar when suddenly, I tore off a lick I forgot maybe fifteen years ago. I used to find it impossible to play well, but last night, it came out pretty good. Not perfect, but about as well as I ever played it, which is not what you would expect after two weeks of practice. If I’m playing it this well now, it means I’m going to be playing it extremely well in a month, when my hands are nearly awake.

I made a new friend of the young man who played the blues at church a couple weeks back. He’s an Armorbearer now. We talk guitar all the time. He suggested putting thirteens on my new Chinese blues machine, and yesterday, I found a set at Guitar Center. The only ones they had were D’Addario XLs. I use D’Addario Phosphor Bronze mediums on my bluegrass guitars, so I have no reason to complain about D’Addario.

The sound of the guitar is vastly improved. That makes sense. Acoustic guitars sound like crap when light strings are used. Light strings are a compromise. No one really expects them to sound good. They exist to make playing easier. They’re great for teenage kids who pick up the guitar three times a month so they can play badly while stoned. If light strings sounded good, medium and heavy strings would not exist. Who would tear up his fingers for no good reason?

I may end up dropping down to elevens some day; I will see how it goes. With electronic fakery, you can improve the sound of light strings, so it may be that thirteens are overkill. For an acoustic, light strings are just plain bad. They’re fine if all you do is strum a Japanese acoustic with a warped neck while singing Dan Fogelberg tunes and sweating estrogen, but if you really play the instrument, they’re sad. Vocalists who like to hold unmiked guitars while performing can get away with bad strings and cheap guitars. It’s different when the instrument has to be heard.

I had to lower the bridge a little because the increased string tension increased the height of the action, but I didn’t lower it enough to ruin the sound. A lot of guitarists don’t realize a high action sounds better, but it’s true. If you lower the action as much as possible, the guitar’s sound will get so dull it’s not worth playing. I think this is why a good neck is important. My Taylor’s neck is perfect, so I can get a very good action while not ruining the tone.

I still can’t believe how good the Chinese Epiphone is. The action is very good. The sound is very good. It looks beautiful. Seems like the perfect choice for a beater. Good enough to play well, but not too good to take on the road. I was looking into new pickups, but now that I see how good strings change the tone, I am no longer shopping.

Here’s something nutty. I bought strap locks for the new guitar, plus a really pimptastic strap (much gaudier than I wanted), and when I put the strap on, I realized I didn’t need the locks.

Americans can’t make a guitar that will hold onto a strap; it’s just too hard for us. It’s an engineering mystery. After a hundred years, we still can’t get it right. I guess all the good guitar-button engineers in America got snapped up by NASA.

The Chinese put big buttons on my Epiphone, solving the problem instantly. No drilling. No gadgets. I can’t even take the strap off after I practice. I should buy Epiphone buttons for my other guitars. Buttons that don’t work are a disgrace. Guitars should have giant warning stickers, letting buyers know they’re about to drop their expensive instruments on the floor.

Don’t forget Heather and Tim.

Four-Minute Vacation

Genesis 12:3: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”

Here is the proof:

Flerb

Here is today’s fun guitar news.

I realized I had to get a few effects. You can’t just play the guitar through an amp. Oh, no. You have to have reverb, plus maybe a wah pedal and an overdrive. I got a wonderful inexpensive tube amp, but it has no reverb, and even though it can be limited to 1/4 watt, it’s a little hard to drive it with enough power to get good distortion. So I’ve been shopping and fiddling around.

I ended up with a Pedaltrain pedalboard. This is a thing you attach pedals and a power supply to. It lies on the ground, and you work the pedals with your feet. You’ve seen guitar players use them.

I am not in love with my old Blues Driver pedal (which I think I killed today anyway), so I started looking for new and relatively cheap replacements. I loved the way the Boss Super Overdrive sounded on Youtube, but the Guitar Center kid convinced me I really needed an Ibanez Tube Screamer, so I decided to give it a shot. I also loved the way the Boss Fender FRV-1 sounded on Youtube. But the Guitar Center kid convinced me I needed a Holy Grail. So I got one. I also got a Voodoo power supply.

I came home, fiddled with the pedals, decided they were okay, and put them and the power supply on the board.

I wanted a tiny board, because I don’t plan on collecting a large number of pedals. But Guitar Center had an outrageous deal on a PT1, which is a middle-sized Pedaltrain only Guitar Center sells. So that’s what I got.

I’m fairly sure I destroyed the Blues Driver by using the wrong power cord. I believe I reversed the polarity, frying something or other. But I never liked that pedal anyway.

The Epiphone Riviera continues to please, although I have started to agree with online reviewers who say the pickups lack brightness. Should I return it to the store or get new pickups? Not sure. It’s so cheap, I hate to get rid of it. It seems to be a great guitar to take with me if I play elsewhere, because it’s nearly disposable. Maybe new pickups would be a good investment.

The bluegrass is going EXTREMELY well. I had forgotten how good I used to be. It’s a shame I’m not a big bluegrass fan. I can really make a flattop quack in pain. When you play bluegrass, you have to use a big, obnoxious guitar and heavy strings, and you have to dominate the instrument and essentially torture it to force good sound out of it. I can do that. The good players really work the instrument. Ordinary players will just let it lope. That kills the passion and compresses the dynamics. You have to beat the guitar to death.

I am blessed with two phenomenal flattops. Right now, I’m using my old Taylor 710. It’s like a Martin D35, but when I bought it, I compared it to a Martin, and it was vastly superior. It has tons of bass, a piercing, ringing, sweet treble, and an incredible action, and it’s extremely responsive. If Martin has ever made a guitar with a decent action, I have not tried it.

Some people pick on Taylors, claiming they’re overrated, and that they’re slapped together in giant factories where no one cares how they sound. Whatever. Mine has Mr. Taylor’s signature on it, and the serial number is under 7,000, so maybe they made them better when mine rolled out. It’s great, regardless of what other Taylors are like. And the sound keeps improving as it ages.

While I was shopping for pedals, I heard a thing called a Fat Sandwich, made by Way Huge. I thought it sounded tremendous. When I get to the point where I understand pedals, I may try one.

I wish my fingers would harden up already. I begin every day’s practice on the wimpy strings of an electric guitar, and that’s no strain, but when I move to the dreadnought, I get about twenty minutes of playing before the pain sets in. And while I am now strong enough to play well with a 0.88-mm Dunlop pick, I lack endurance. I want to upgrade to the 1.0-mm pick as soon as I can.

It’s a blast to make real music again. I’m looking forward to the day when I can do it on the electric guitars as well as the Taylor. Right now, the contrast is horrendous.

Get Down, Get Down

What on earth is going on in Al Gore’s head?

Conservatives all said he was nuts back in 2000, when he tried to run George Bush off the debate platform. Are we being proven right today?

The massage story is horrendous. It suggests the man has completely lost his mind. The lust, I can understand. The alleged whining and groping and the “second chakra” reference sound symptomatic of heavy-duty mental illness.

Maybe none of it is true.

I don’t know how to react to the story. Christians are not supposed to listen to gossip, and we are not supposed to pass it on. But is it gossip when it involves a major political figure who has power over our lives?

It occurred to me yesterday that no matter how wacky we accuse the left of being, we nearly always turn out to be understating the case. This is literally true. On the other hand, a Republican was forced out of office for going to a sex club with his own wife, and another was crucified for saying the nonsense word “macaca.” It’s like we view Republican sins with a microscope (and Photoshop and audio dubbing and LSD, if necessary), but when the offender is liberal, we turn the microscope around so everything shrinks down to nothing.

Gore is now claiming he’s innocent. Maybe he is. But the accuser says she has a certain type of physical evidence which is irrefutible and impossible to fake. What will he say if she turns out to be telling the truth? Lies have a lot of power, but there are some problems they can’t fix. He lied about the polar bears and all that other environmental stuff, and he protected his lies by shutting out the press. You can’t shut a grand jury out. You can’t tell a prosecutor you’re not taking calls.

Some public figures get so full of themselves, they essentially force the press to go after them. Like John Wayne Gacy taunting the cops. The press will work very hard to protect a liberal, but eventually, they get fed up. It becomes a matter of pride with them. They start to feel used. Then you end up with Tom Fiedler waiting in the bushes to catch Gary Hart and Donna Rice. Or the John Edwards story. To a liberal politician, the press is like a forgiving parole officer. Sooner or later, they get out the cuffs and slap you down.

If the press gives up and realizes it has to eat Al Gore, things could get very messy. There is so much candy in the pinata, it will be raining for years. When you’re on top, no one will touch you, but once you fall, everyone has a dime to drop on you. All the cheesy things Gore has done over the decades will fall on him like the bail of a rat trap.

It is a sorry spectacle. Of course, we should pray he gets right with God and gets past this.

Things are going well here. Guitar practice is going great, and I am learning about amps and effects. I’ve decided to keep my cheap Chinese Epiphone, and I’m considering getting a pedalboard.

I’m frustrated by the left-hand work. I’m studying Fretboard Logic, and I’m studying the electric blues, and I’m getting into all kinds of stretches I never had to do when playing bluegrass. The progress is actually pretty fast, but because I have to have the stretches and bars down before I can really accomplish anything, I sometimes feel like I’m stuck in hardening cement. Thank God, the flatpicking is going quicker.

I’m starting to wonder if the blues is appropriate for worship music. I’m beginning to believe it is. Satan took sex, which is very close to God’s heart, and he turned it into something God’s people tend to malign. Maybe he did the same thing with blue notes and rhythm. The word “blues,” itself, is a deception. Blues music tends to be extremely upbeat and joyful, but because of the name and some of the lyrics, people think of it as depressing music. Go to a B.B. King concert and see if you see anyone sad in the crowd. WAKE UP. Labels don’t create reality. You could call it “pineapple-flavored music,” but it wouldn’t make it true.

I heard a blues worship tune in my head this morning. I may write it down. It would pep things up between bland tunes where people wave their arms and murmur “You are good oh how good wow you are good” over and over.

Sure Looks Like It

I just got done with guitar practice.

I still can’t believe the quality of the Epiphone Riviera I bought. The action is better than my Fender’s or my Gibson’s, and the sound is wonderful. God bless the Chinese.

I’m having pain in my right elbow. Evidently, at my advanced age, you can’t just jump to a 1.0-mm Dunlop pick after years of doing nothing. So I’m using a 0.8-mm pick until I feel better. Oddly, my left hand, which I have truly abused, feels fine.

Today I had a big breakthrough. I’m still working on the movable bar chords in Fretboard Fundamentals. Up through yesterday, I could only practice them for about a minute before running around the room screaming in pain (perhaps I exaggerate). Today I’m up to two and a half minutes, and I was able to stand practicing ten minutes, with short breaks!

Yesterday I started working on Fred Sokolow’s Rockabilly Guitar lessons (online), and I thought there was no way I could do what he was asking. But today I’m making the stretch between the first and fifth frets fairly well. This is a huge jump for one day. It gives me hope.

I wish I knew what kind of strings to put on the Riviera. I bought DR brand strings, but I only got them because the kid at Guitar Center likes them. I got 9s because that’s what people say you should use when you play the blues, but it’s hard for me to accept light strings, because my bluegrass experience showed me that the heavier strings are, the better they sound. I got the DRs for the Blueshawk and the Strat, but I haven’t put them on yet. Maybe I could get away with 11s on the Riviera. I believe it has a shorter scale than the Blueshawk, so heavier strings should be easier to get away with.

If I keep up with this, eventually I’ll need a real guitar. Maybe I can make the Strat or the Blueshawk work, but my experience with the Riviera has me thinking about a serious hollow-body guitar with a Bigsby and single-coil pickups. I made myself a promise. Six months from the day I started practicing, I will buy myself an electric guitar that SMOKES. Maybe something crazy like a Collings. Why not? New Gibsons are so expensive, there is no reason not to look at obscure high-end guitars.

A vintage instrument might be a good buy, but I would only want one that had been kept in a closet. I don’t trust guitars that have been played a lot, because they’re more likely to have hidden botched repairs, and they’re more likely to be fakes. Besides, I’m pretty sure the instruments they make now are the best they’ve ever been. That’s true of acoustics, so why shouldn’t it be true of electrics?

Here’s something weird. Today I remembered how to play an entire bluegrass song, and I have no idea what the name is. “Salt” something or other, I think. I’m not sure.

Off to church. On Saturday, CeCe Winans and Papa San are having a concert at our church, and I’m going to be working as an Armorbearer. Nutty, huh? Tonight we’re hosting a band from Australia.

Life rocks.

On Second Thought, Don’t

I can no longer keep up with the good stuff God does in my life. I just don’t have time to blog it all.

On Saturday, I cooked for our church’s Rhythms Lounge event. Young people come to the cafe and perform. Some play music, some recite, and others sing. This weekend, we had a guest performer: Zach Freeman, the son of two of our pastors. He plays guitar and sings.

What a show we had. We have a regular house band composed of church members; oddly, it’s not the same band that plays during worship. They jammed with Zach for maybe an hour. We heard a lot of blues and even a long funk session.

I can’t describe the quality of the playing. I had no idea these kids were this good. They were so tight, you would think they had been playing together for years.

Zach started off with his Strat and some effects, and he created an ambience you could almost swim in. I wish we had recorded it. Ordinarily I’m not a big fan of reverb and sustain pedals, but he used them to draw us into a world that did not exist before he started playing.

When the other players got going, we heard bass licks that started and stopped the show at will. The keyboard player, who claimed he couldn’t play blues, performed gymnastics that had everyone gasping. When it was over, the whole crowd started yelling and crying out. A friend of mine leaned over and said, “They’re praising God in Creole.”

I couldn’t ask for a better end to my first week of renewed guitar practice.

It gets even weirder. I have a new guitar! For a long time, I’ve wanted a thinline Gibson guitar with single-coil pickups and a Bigsby, but doubting that I would use it, I never gave in to temptation. This week I started reading up on Epiphone guitars. This is Gibson’s Asian line. Ordinarily, I won’t go near an Asian instrument; Japanese dreadnoughts sound like cigar boxes and have actions that tear up your hands. But I kept reading reviews, and I thought to myself, “If I get one of these things, I have 30 days to try it out, and if it works, it will be a fantastic asset, and the price will be so low, even if I get a better instrument later, I’ll be able to drag this one when I travel without worrying about what happens to it.”

I drove down US1 to buy some bird seed, and I was praying in the Spirit while I drove (good way to redeem the time), and I started thinking about Guitar Center. I felt I couldn’t stop myself, so I decided to go with it. I went in and found an Epiphone Riviera on the wall. I still didn’t intend to buy it. I asked the salesman a few questions, looked it over, and told him I would take it. I felt like I had to do it. I think he nearly fainted. I didn’t even ask to play it. There was no point.

This guitar was made in China. They get spotty reviews that go in two directions. Some instruments are written off as junk. Other buyers say they can’t understand how Epiphone can sell such gorgeous instruments at this price point. It looks like I’m in the latter group. This thing is virtually flawless. It sounds good. It plays well. So far, I’ve only been able to find one tiny imperfection in it. And it cost about 13% of what a new Gibson would cost. I could put a thousand dollars’ worth of upgrades into it and still be way ahead.

I don’t know what the story is. Maybe it was God. Maybe I just like shiny new stuff too much. But I try to walk by faith, and this felt like God’s urging, so I didn’t want to screw it up.

On Saturday, the music materials I ordered arrived. I got a copy of Tony Rice Guitar, plus Dan Crary’s Flatpicker’s Guide, plus a giant tablature book called The Big Slab of Tab. I used to play things from these books, many years ago. Back then, I had some trouble with a little bit of the Tony Rice stuff, but as I noted the other day, my practice habits were completely wrong. Fifteen minutes a day.

I got these books because I feel that God is restoring my life and undoing past failures (and also because I owed Tony Rice a royalty).

I’ve been working on the tunes, and it’s crazy, but there is a big long Tony Rice lick I could never conquer in the past, and after two days, I nearly have it beat. I figure I should be able to play coherently, with the correct super-heavy Dunlop pick, within a week. Maybe I’ll upload an MP3 when that happens.

To get back to church, I cooked for the first two services yesterday, and then I served as an Armorbearer at the last service, and I attended a meeting at which we welcomed four new ABs. Guess who one of them is? Zach Freeman. He goes to college in another state, but he’ll be here all summer. I spoke up and informed him of the rule that ABs have to give each other free guitar lessons, and he said, “I GOT you.” Ha!

I keep meeting remarkable people at my church, semi-ghetto though it may be. The background of the people is totally unrelated to their potential and the contents of their hearts. Some are from the neighborhood, which is pretty depressed. Some are from areas that are more affluent. But there are incredible human beings there, from all sorts of different areas.

When I met Zach on Saturday, I was looking forward to meeting a young man everyone admired so much, but he treated ME like a celebrity. He kept talking about my cheesecake and how great it was. I’m just the guy in the kitchen. He, not me, was the talk of the church. It’s wild, how God raises up powerful people and keeps them humble. With his help, an camel really can go through the eye of a needle.

I may have to make him pay off on that lesson thing, although when he sees how hopeless I am, he may wish he had kept silent.

Another new AB has a wonderful trait we needed badly: he’s Cuban. That means he can FISH. And we need that, if we are going to keep angling for my dad. We talked about dolphin fishing, and he told me a few things even I didn’t know. So I’m hoping we can get him on the boat in a few days. He’s also a professional photographer, so maybe we can preserve a few images.

We don’t get very many Cubans in our church. Strange. I know a bunch of Puerto Ricans, though. God tends to recruit from the bottom of society, and Cubans are at the top.

Today I got up, hoping to rest after a busy weekend, and what did I see on Drudge’s page? The Supreme Court has INCORPORATED THE SECOND AMENDMENT. At least, that’s my understanding of it. I don’t think I’m exaggerating, but I haven’t read the opinion. I’m sure liberal judges and lawyers will do their best to interpret incorporation out of the decision. Anyway, Wayne LaPierre says firearms bans can no longer be enforced anywhere in the US. This is gigantic news. God has worked a real wonder.

For a long time, I’ve believed God was going to preserve and expand our gun rights, even as our government pushed farther and farther in the directions of sexual perversion, anti-Semitism, military weakness, weak boarders, and socialism. It looks like I was hearing from God, and not from my own limited mind.

An evil time is coming. When it does, people will remember the Jewish names Madoff, Stearns, Goldman, Sachs, Bernanke, Emanuel, Frank, and Geithner. I think these names will be used to justify a wave of anti-Semitic barbarism. In that day, Christians and Jews who have armed themselves, bought rural land, and learned how to use tools will be way ahead of the game. I strongly suspect God is getting us ready. This decision will certainly help.

What will God do next? I can’t even guess. The spectacle is exhausting me.

King of the Closet

Yesterday I had a major guitar breakthrough. I think I connected with an amp and electric guitar.

I already had two amps. One is a Fender Blues Jr. (tubes) and the other is a cheapo solid-state Crate. The Crate is just unforgivable; I only got it because it gave me some hope of getting distortion at low volumes. The Blues Jr. sounds fine but doesn’t do much until you turn it up (or maybe I don’t know how to use it).

I picked up a Vox AC4TV (tubes), and I cranked the power down to 1/4 watt, which is 1/60 of what the Blues Jr. consumes. It didn’t sound all that great. I had the tone control up pretty high, because I thought this would fuzz up the tone, and I had the volume control very low, because…silly me…I thought this would reduce the volume.

I decided to try it the other way around. The amp only has two sound controls, so it’s not like I had a big choice. I turned the volume way up and turned the tone way down. What did I get? Neat fuzzy distortion, like Otis Rush. Actually, it’s more like his voice than his guitar. It sounded wonderful. I couldn’t put the guitar down.

A long time ago, when I was shopping for an electric guitar, I found an ES355 (or was it an ES330?) which had a similar sound. This is the sound I like.

Don’t try to help me understand why “volume” means “tone” and “tone” means “volume.” I don’t care. It works.

“COINCIDENTALLY,” I’ll be cooking for my church’s Saturday-night Rhythms Lounge event tomorrow, and guess who the guest is? Zachary Freeman. He’s a jazz and blues guitarist. His mom is a pastor at the church. Pretty cool. I haven’t heard him, but people at church rave about him.

IT’S COINCIDENCE! DARWIN! DARWIN! SOCIALISM! VIVA CHE! OBAMA WILL SAVE US!

Whatever. You believe what you want. I’m going to stay connected to the power supply.

My miracle weight loss is continuing. I put on a few pounds while I worked on desserts for my church, and I also discovered Five Guys, so I have been concerned. Today I weighed myself, and it appears that the weight loss is progressing again. Fantastic. Only God could do this. I don’t diet; I’m not gifted with perfect willpower. I’m just not a fat person any more. It’s as if I had been born to be thin. I hope I knock off ten more pounds, so none of my pants will be able to intimidate me. I wore my super-thin black jeans to church on Wednesday. I still need to lose an inch to make them comfortable. I bought them for riding motorcycles; grease and dirt don’t show up much on black jeans.

I got to the range yesterday and chronographed some 10mm ammunition. I don’t have the results before me, but it looks like 12 grains of No. 7 powder will give me good results, and 12.5 might be ideal. At 12 grains, I get 1200 fps, and I want 1250. One disappointment: my Wolf primers seem hard. Two out of twenty failed to go off on the first try. This is fine for target practice, but for self-defense, I’m going to need something like Federal. I am told Federal primers are the softest.

The primers and cases looked okay after firing.

The gun shoots great. My accuracy was affected by the way I had to contort myself to fire through the chronograph, but I shot more than well enough to splatter an assailant’s brains. The recoil tires my hand a little, though, so I think the gun would tend to lose accuracy after a dozen or two dozen rounds. Not enough to matter in a self-defense situation, but it would be annoying in practice sessions.

The consistency of the handloads (especially the low-powered target rounds) was very good. I plan to load defensive rounds one at a time, for total confidence, but for routine target shooting, I think I can rely on my powder measure.

I also tried my Bill Springfield AR trigger. It’s better than the stock trigger, which is not exactly a surprise. I’m not sure I love it, though. Still seems a little balky.

I had to buy cheesy PMC .308 ammo, because I left my Radway Green at home. I don’t know how good PMC rifle ammuntion is, but their pistol ammunition is the worst I’ve tried.

Yesterday, I was shooting into an area the size of a baseball at 100 yards. Acceptable under the circumstances, but I would like to do better. A range officer who shoots .308 says reloading is the only answer. If I start reloading, I think it will be time to consider a .260 Remington upper, which was my real goal anyway. Maybe the .308 upper was a mistake. It looks like I can’t do precision shooting with cheap ammo, so the money I save may be a hollow blessing. Still, if times get really hard, cheap ammo in large quantities may be a real asset, and I can’t get that in .260.

The Leupold scope is a dream come true. I don’t even understand all the knobs yet. The field of view is gorgeous, and everything is sharp.

Speaking of hard times, a man named Hank Kunneman appeared on Sid Roth’s show yesterday, claiming to be a prophet. He said God had showed up a couple of things. First, the next couple of years will be pretty rough, and it will seem like Obama is doing very poorly. Second, God intends to reverse some of the bad legislation Obama has signed, and he intends to change the Supreme Court.

He reminded us to pray for our leaders, and he was right about that. I think Obama is an embarrassment and an obstacle to God’s work, but I have resolved to pray, daily, that God will change his heart and the hearts of our other leaders. The Bible tells us we have a duty to pray for our leaders, so I’m going to stay on it. I also pray that God will take down leaders who refuse to change, replacing them with godly men. So I’m covered either way!

I hate to say it, but I feel bad for Obama. I believe he is in for a long stretch of humiliation, and if he doesn’t get right with God and the Jews, there probably won’t be any end to it. Remember Nebuchadnezzar, wandering around on all fours, eating grass.

I don’t know if Hank Kunneman is the real thing or not, so caveat emptor.

I’m out.