Neck pickup is Dean’s Nostalgia:
Magnet Alnico 5
DC Resistance 7.8K
Bridge is Dean’s Vinnie Moore Shredhead:
Magnet Alnico 5
DC Resistance 12K

Start simply first, then add the frilly bits.

So many guitarists work on technique these days, and I am no exception. I mean, the mechanics of playing- flying up and down the fretboard at faster and faster speeds. It is a young (mostly male) thing, no different than the runner trying to be the fastest or the weightlifter going with a few more pounds.
However, concentrating all of your practice time on just getting faster misses the point. Not every song is fast (that gets boring), and it ignores the tone of the notes created.
The tone is the thing for me. There are some seriously fast players out there, known and unknown. After listening to many of the mp3s and seeing tons of videos, I realized that most of them ignore the obvious: is this a sound that anyone would want to hear?
Believe me, I love making irritating noises as much as any other musician. But a guitarist who just makes irritating noises probably won’t work much, and drawing from such a shallow sonic pool, will repeat him/herself quickly.
Tone is subjective, but identifying when a musician ignores it is not. Everyone has bad days/bad gigs…with unfamiliar gear or some gear that is acting up. But if a musician is consistent in their lack of attention to tone, it shows.
Now, I know not everyone can afford the latest boutique amps and overdrives (either can I: I am a musician after all). But it starts with a guitar and an amp. If you can’t get a clean sound to be fretted cleanly, all the distortion in the world won’t cover it up. The process starts with one single note, and then two.

Gear selection is a big subject: most people buy what their heroes have, in hopes it can help them sound just like their heroes. This works as we are learning, but the failure is to not break off of that course and find our own sounds.

Now is one of the most exciting times to be a guitarist: we have multieffects, programmable amps, and guitars that stay in tune without us doing anything. Problem is that most guitarists buy these and have no idea what they do. The idea of reading a manual is an impossible task, and understanding just one parameter (like setting the ‘sustain’ on a compressor- we want a lot, right?) sends the technophobic guitarist reeling and dismissing the good ol’ amp and cable approach. Nothing wrong with that, since lots of guitarists do fine that way. But arriving there because you can’t or won’t read the manual of the expensive device just bought is sort of..silly.

So the tone search is a lifetime one, for the guitarist. It isn’t like we never get there, but we constantly evolve. And it is fun. The goal is to sing to others in our own voice, because we have something to say. And what our own voice sounds like makes them want to listen. Hopefully.

This isn’t the way I use loops though. While this idea might be fine for a 1 man band situation, or rehearsing ideas, it is the live manipulation of the loop which starts the creative process for me.

Record some sound, add more to it, slice it up into pieces while playing live over the loop, fade and repeat.

I need loopers at least capable of fading the loops with a foot pedal. Sadly, many manufacturers of looping devices just see looping as an afterthought for many devices. That, or, they focus on the ‘backing track’ idea, where you are jamming over static loops.

I need a little more control than that. Ideally, you can have a ‘feedback’ control on any looper. This allows the original loop to fade slowly while new material is played over it. The whole loop morphs into something new as we listen- which is a lot more interesting than listening to static loops.

I use an Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro for this, which was the king of commercially available loopers, even before the current crop of looping pedals came out. The Echoplex allows you to record, reverse, slow down, sync, fade, multiply and split loops like nothing else currently out there. It is really an instrument in itself. I use this for all performances that are exclusively looping, since the manipulation of the recorded sound can be as subtle or as jarring as I want. The huge fault of the Echoplex is that it isn’t stereo…so for stereo use, you need 2.

For other looping shows, I sometimes use a Line6 DL4. This green delay pedal is a fantasic basic looper, which allows expression pedal control over the loop volume, so I can fade the loops manually while playing live material overtop. I have owned the Line6 M13 as well, which duplicates the functionality of the DL4 and adds a bunch of effects as well. Since another project I am in uses in ear monitors though, I had to sell my M13 for a Line6 POD HD500 which includes all the effects of the M13 with added amp modeling.

Sadly, they didn’t add any kind of expression pedal control to the HD500′s looper volume (even though it was in the DL4 and M13) so  I can’t recommend it as a live looping device for the looping musician. This continues to be a source of frustration, but I have been told it will be addressed in a firmware update. We’ll see.

I also own a Boss RC2, which is great for working out ideas, but doesn’t work for me as a live looping device because there is no way to fade the loop using your feet.

Gradually I hope to move to using a computer-based system, using the VST Mobius, which is a very powerful looper. My initial experiments with Mobius were very positive, as it is like having 8 stereo Echoplex Pros.

Below is a simple acoustic guitar loop, with the Line6 DL4.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7M2y_THbI

The other idea of this band is that I would use musicians that could trust without having to rehearse. Since booking a show without any kind of set list and a sound that varys from show to show is a hard sell to most clubs, we play much smaller places for very little money. So I can’t expect people to get together to rehearse (which I hate doing) before hand- they just have to come ready to play.

This is the hard part. Sometimes making stuff up for a few hours is hard. You have to practice being creative. Once 10 minutes goes by, most musicians don’t know what to play. Some play variations of those first 10 minutes. Others listen, react, lead, follow and dig deeper. These are the types of musicians I look for.

This band has taken a break from performing, due to my committments to Julie Black’s band and my acoustic music. I have recently resurrected the band though with a handful of shows at a local coffeehouse. The shows so far have started off a little shakey, while we all get an idea of what we sound like. Many of the musicians have not met before the show, but so far, there has been a willingness to create, which in the end, is all I ask for.

It is funny to me, though…some people I ask to come on out are really unsure of what to do, and once the show is over, they can’t wait to do it again. It is pretty freeing to improvise as a musician, especially with no ties of what it is supposed to sound like. I don’t give the musicians much instruction while playing, except sometimes I might specify a particular tonal center. Take D minor for instance. We can play in any D minor based key, which includes any chords in the key of D minor and it’s relatives, like D harmonic or melodic minor, D dorian or phrygian, etc…you get the idea. I will say, if a musician doesn’t know their instrument, or at least where the notes are and several minor and major based scales and modes, it can be frustrating for them as well as the other musicians.

But when it works, which currently, is about 30% of the time… it rocks, baby. It will get higher as we all get more comfortable and we take on bigger shows and more stable lineups.

It is a weird concept, but it works. It would be awesome to find an improvising vocalist at some point too. I am not adverse to vocals, but again, I don’t want it tied to any type of genre, like blues or jazz or rap. The more we play, the more musicians we meet, so I am sure the lineup will grow as the music does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaxssQ0F9yA

I love all 3 of the apps he offers, and I recommend them all. They are perfect for falling asleep (they include a sleep timer- yay!), or just on in the background when you read or work.

Bloom
This is so hard for me to describe, so I will repeat some of the description from their website:

“Part instrument, part composition and part artwork, Bloom’s innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen. A generative music player takes over when Bloom is left idle, creating an infinite selection of compositions and their accompanying visualizations.”

Trope
This is my favorite, because it is like artwork as well as a music generator. You draw on the screen, it makes music from your shapes, and it never repeats. From the website:

“Darker in tone, Trope immerses users in endlessly evolving soundscapes created by tracing abstract shapes onto the screen, varying the tone with each movement.”

Air

This is essentially some sort of ambient piano and voice music generator, although I tend to mix out the voice sometimes- it is limited to just a few notes. This is an interactive app as well that allows you to conduct the music, in a way. This would probably sound really awesome with multiple players playing at once, but it works well on its own, too:

“Air features four ‘Conduct’ modes, which let the user control the composition by tapping different areas on the display, and three ‘Listen’ modes, which provide a choice of arrangement. For those fortunate enough to have access to multiple iPhones and speakers, an option has been provided to spread the composition over several playerss.”

Read more about Brian Eno’s generative music apps here.