Well, I've just posted a few pics of my guitars and made a slide show with them... And that brought a few thoughts to my mind. Guitars, Guitars, Guitars. For any jazz guitarist (well, for any guitarist, that is), be him/her professional or amateur, the quest for tone is a bit like the quest of the Holy Grail. So many of us spend more time thinking about gear, testing guitars, setting them up, changing strings gauge, going from flatwound to roundwound, swapping pick ups etc.. than we do spend time thinking about the music we use that gear for.

Well, to be honest, it seems to be (slightly) less so with jazz guitarists than with guitarists of other denominations. Yet, we tend to be a very conservative lot and to stick to our cherished, beautiful (and damn expensive) arch-topped jazz boxes. However, THE perfect tone for such or such tune might well be attained using a very different kind of gear. I began thinking about that when watching a video with Ulf Wakenius and Pat Metheny... The "solid body" sound was Pat's (and he used a big fat jazz-box) while Ulf had the "typical woody jazz" sound, and used his Aria Les Paul...

Then, I realized that for the last few weeks I've been mostly using my goldtop Les Paul with the P90 pickups, hardly a typical jazz guitar, yet I do love the tones I get from this beauty and they compliment perfectly some jazz tunes (like the "whispering" on my player).

So what's the point of those seemingly pointless ravings ? Well its twofold.
First, gear is great and so and so, but hey, our tone resides more in the way we set it up, use it, and, ultimately, in our fingers (and heads)... So we might want to stop thinking of tone in terms of the things we use to get it and to think more of what it really is and how we might achieve this through inflexions of our playing techniques (picking somewhere else, picking differently, using a different vibrato...) and settings of the gear we have...

The second point is that we may very well get a "better" tone using some things that are not supposed to be adapted. Like maybe a POD, for a given tune, will work better than a boutique tube amp... or a cheap Danelectro might do the job and bring interesting vibes a vintage Gibson would not... So let's open our minds, guitar wise, and (easier said than done, I know) let's try to be less bloody conservative when it comes to gear...

Keep on jazzin' in a free world !

Well, my new gold top guitar, with its P90 pickups is here... And I love it... So as to show it a bit, before recording anything serious with it, I made a quick video... It's an impro on "Ornithology" (and the guitar is golden, hence the name ;) )

Gold Bird



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My first guitar with P90... And I love these pickups. They've got the roundess and beautiful bottom end of good humbuckers but with tighter response and much less fat. Great jazz sounds... one can make a LP sound almost "acoustic" with them...

Arrrggh, I just realised how bad the video format of myspace treats my sound... This sounds quite crappy compared even to the dailymotion version... Peuh, I'll make some real music with that beauty soon, so you'll get to hear its real sound soon...

Jordu



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