Gig At St James Wine Vault Bath

Did a fun little gig on Tuesday at the St James Wine Vaults in Bath, once again backing Ed Cesar doing some solo acoustic gigs. Quite an interesting night, from a personal point of view it wasn’t the best I’ve played due to a real lack of practice of the songs and a few slight changes to them about 2 minutes before the gig and a real problem for the first half of the set with the monitors not working so not being able to hear a thing. That said it was fun and a little dissapointing that as the night got on a fair bit of the crowd had left, but it was an acoustic night on a Tuesday night not in the centre of town, so I can’t complain.

I enjoyed some of the other people playing, in particular Simon Allen, who did a fun set on the night and really engaged the crowd. His EP is worth a listen to, he gave me a copy free – so thanks Simon, if you have a few quid buy it and check out “Shooting Star” – I think it’s a really really good simple song. He doesn’t do himself favours by not putting any of his strongest songs (in my opinion) on his myspace page so don’t judge on that (or do if you like them).

More positives the Taylor now sounds fantastic live, a little play with the EQ and the right selection of cable and it really is a great sounding acoustic when plugged in as well as unplugged. I think there are some photos on facebook and myspace of the gig, I’ve not seen them yet

Gig at the Porter Celler Bar

Played an impromptu acoustic gig last night at the Porter Celler Bar last night with Ed Ceasar from the Dusty Stars band and some of his friends. quite a lot of fun, we had about an hours practice before hand and then just played the gig. It was a support act for a Bath band called “CuteLoony“. Turned out quite well and some nice comments of randoms. Quite nice to be playing out and about again but playing simple songs with easy parts, not having to come up and polish clever/complex parts to fit in with a band or fill out a sound. Nice to sit down and play the songs and not worry about making the guitar parts good – just play the songs. Few awkward moments playing, the monitor in front of me failed about 2 seconds after we started and for such a small venue I’m shocked how little I could hear without it, had to play a good portition of the set watching other peoples hands/movements, mostly due to not knowing the songs %100 and not being able to hear where we where up to.

Nice evening, few drinks and met some new people, plus it was nice to give the Taylor a run out, it’s been getting rusty sat on the shelf not being played.  I’ll see if anyone has any photos, but I don’t think they have.

The Helicaster is born. Are you scared ?

my own guitar design project “17 Guitars” had it’s first official release created last week. 001BA was created. Ok, so this isn’t exactly a design revolution, but it is something special to me. Firstly it was a test model for a new truss rod design, the truss rod design worked great, but the hassle needed to make and install it wasn’t worth the effort it saved for adjustments. The second concept was a paint idea I wanted to work on. The idea came from wanting a telecaster with a mini-bucker pickup in the neck position. I’ve got tele’s and that fantastic telecaster twang is amazing, however I wanted a middle ground between a full on humbucker P90 style sound and a telecaster neck twang. Fender do a model with a mini-bucker in the bridge, however it’s not cheap and it’s very limited in options. It only comes in butterscotch, which I’ve got two teles in butterscotch already, and it only comes with a maple neck, and I wanted a rosewood neck. My option was a return to the Fender custom shop, or use it as a test bed for my truss rod design. I chose the latter. I put a Seymor Duncan mini-bucker in the bridge and had a rosewood neck made from a telecaster design but with my truss rod implementation in. The paint job was the idea that inspired the name helicaster. The idea was to have a dark wood body, which I chose a mid alder wood for, not as dark as I would have liked but I couldn’t go as dark as I wanted due to how hot the mini-bucker is.

Tremble at the Helicaster

The paint job was supposed to be a red base coat, with a black top coat and a nitrocellulose layer. The guitar was then supposed to be relic’d leaving the red as a fade to wood finish (Helicaster because of the black and blood red colours.) This didn’t quite work out as I couldn’t separate the black and red solid enough so the red has turned into an outline between the wood and the black finish. It looks cool, but not quite the look I originally planned. An added bonus is the red base coat has bled through into the wood body so has gentley stained and coloured the wood. When light shines on the guitar there is a red glow to the wood, while not effecting the actual obvious colour of the wood, it’s quite good. The guitar plays better than I could have imagined and %99 of the credit for this must go to my guitar tech Andy Manners at Vintage and Rare Guitars who is just first rate in terms of skill and first rate in knowing my personal setup. The sound is superb I can get a great hot sound from this telecaster, really fat and warm, %90 of a pure humbucker, but because I’ve use 250K pots on this, I can roll off the volume and take it back to a standard telecaster sound but with a little more bottom end, which is fanastic. The bridge pickup is a Bare Knuckles pickup called “The Boss” which again is a slightly warmer telecaster standard bridge pickup. I’ll take a moment to praise Tim from Bare Knuckles picksup who is just amazing at working with his customers, I first worked with Tim when he did a custom wound set of pickups for Fender Strat, called MD1. His attention to detail and knowledge to help you find the tone you’re after is second to none. Overall the Helicaster is a great sucess and plays fantastic and sounds superb, it has a few deviations and changes from the orginal design that where forced upon me, but this is all part of the learning process. Now, I’ve got to write a song with it to do it justice, I think I have one in the making already.