Transformation: Red Telecaster to White.

3/18/13

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The most remarkable thing about Keith Hiebner, the thing that commanded my attention the most upon meeting him, was his intense willingness to tweak and get something right. I noticed this as I was checking out pictures of guitars that he has made and sold. He talked in depth about the finishes, the laquer, the paint jobs, the hardware, everything. I was incredibly impressed with him, enough to drop off my beloved red Fender Telecaster for him to re-finish. Trust is a sacred thing.

Originally, when I asked Keith to do work on the guitar, I asked him to do a polyurethane finish, which is the finish that most guitars come with these days. Keith told me flat out he would charge me more for that, mostly because he hasn't had any experience with it. However, he offered to do a nitrocellulose laquer instead, and I'm glad I took him up on it. Naitro laquers, in my opinion, are clearly superior to polyurethane.

Briefly, vintage guitars tend to have nitrocellulose laquers because Leo Fender, the original owner of Fender guitars, stole the idea from car manufacturers. Leo was into making solid, affordable guitars in just the same way as car manufacturers were making cars. That ethos naturally extended to using the same laquer: Nitrocellulose. Nitro laquers, as a result, became all the rage in guitar manufacturing. That's not to say that it was easy to do a nitro finish; Keith told me that my guitar's finish would need about a month to dry, and I imagine that the old guitar companies ran into the same issue. It wasn't until at least a couple of decades later that guitar manufacturers started putting polyurethane finishes on guitars. It made sense at that time because polyurethane-finished guitars were now protected from scratches, and could better handle the wear and tear of use. It was a thicker finish, and polyurethane kept guitars in better "looking" condition. That, and it took less time to dry.

Guitar afficianados eventually caught up to the effects of polyurethane. They noticed that it tended to choke the sound of the guitar. Though this is not always the case, polyurethane finishes tend to hold the wood inside of itself, if that makes any sense. The finish is often so think that the guitar cannot vibrate quite as sympathetically with the strings. Nitrocellulose, as difficult and as temperamental as it is to apply, is quite fairly agreed to be the superior laquer, as the sound of the guitar is preserved. Good vibrations, indeed.

My Telecaster had a polyurethane finish, and a thick one. Though I very much loved the guitar as it was, I was curious what would happen when the poly was gone. Moreover, I had dreamed of having this guitar painted white for quite a while. I love the look of guitars that are barren of any fancy, bright colors. For me, it's a love of form and beauty of display; I like the look of guitars that are unadorned, simple, and direct. Keith Hiebner made that happen for me, and he was kind enough to send me photos of the process. Here goes nothing:

The Transformation of the Red Telecaster into a White Telecaster

Here's my red Telecaster before Keith worked on it:

Keither started by stripping all of the paint and the polyurethane from the guitar. He was surprised to discover two different varnishes on the guitar. You can see both for yourself:

He had to sand down the entire guitar, and in doing so, took about a pound and a half off of the overall weight. We found out that the guitar was made from six pieces of alder:

After sanding it down came the primer:

Next, the white paint:

Keith, being the good guy that he is, put on some new strings when he put the entire guitar back together. Here's the final:

When Keith brought the guitar back to my office, the tone had changed immensely. A good test of a guitar's sound is if it's pleasing to the ear when unplugged. In case you are wondering, it sounded great. After we plugged it into my amp, I was just completely overwhelmed. It had quite a bit more clarity, and the sound could be described as buttery. A few weeks later, I plugged the guitar into my usual pedal setup, in combination with some extremely expensive cables (they make such a difference). Again, the response was incredible.

Keep in mind that the only thing that changed was the paint job and the finish. We didn't change the pickups. It was crazy! The sound is now punchy and defined. It's an entirely new guitar.

My Recommendation

If you have a guitar that you love enough to have refinished, I couldn't possibly recommend Keith Hiebner enough. If you have the dough, my suggestion is to look into buying one of his custom guitars, too. Rest assured, you will get yourself a quality guitar. Keith is really into guitars, and half the fun of hanging out with him is hearing him talk about them. I certainly learned a lot.

Check Out Keith Hiebner's Website Here

The Rite of Spring at Austin Ballet, February 16th and 17th

2/16/13

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For those who are not familiar with Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, it's time. I'm probably sounding too much like a fanboy, but I love this ballet. And, FYI, Austin Ballet is putting on a performance of The Rite of Spring, tonight and tomorrow (2-16-13 and 2-17-13).

The Rite of Spring that Austin Ballet will be doing tonight is choregraphed by Steven Mills. I am highly, highly recommending you go see this performance if you live in Austin. You will not see this again anytime soon. The Rite of Spring is an incredibly difficult piece for an orchestra to play as it is, and it's unbelievably rare to see it performed as a ballet.

In short, don't miss this performance at Austin Ballet.

The videos below are from the original coreography by Nijinsky, which is nothing short of incredible and miraculous. This is what Punk Rock was like in 1913; the premiere of The Rite of Spring caused a riot. A riot!

How to Use a Capo

1/29/13

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Not bad. I like videos like these, even if they are basic:

The Casual Routine for Practicing Guitar: A Case Study

1/28/13

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The German Band
The German Band, Courtesy of The Library of Congress


Practicing guitar need not be so intense, especially for a beginner. Why can't it be more casual, or practical? It should be easy to fit in one's schedule. It should never over-burdon our excitement to learn something new. Right?

The idea behind The Casual Routine for Practicing Guitar, which I wrote about in my last blog post, is to make practicing guitar (or any instrument) as easy as breathing. Beginners should treat practicing as a chance to build their hunger to learn more, and not merely as a means for getting better at guitar. This blog post will go over a small, and fairly unscientific, example of the Casual Practice Routine in action. First, here's a recap of the routine:

Spend only two minutes at the guitar, and do it accidentally. Do not plan or schedule your practice time; simply pick up the guitar and take a break. Next, try to practice something challenging. This casual routine needs to be filled with practicing, not playing. Use the short break to get better at guitar, to invest in it. Later on, you'll get to enjoy playing it while seeing the fruits of your labor.

Let's say that you took two or three guitar breaks in a day. If you played something challenging each time, your skill has grown from the amount of times you repeated the same sill, not from how much time you spent at it. That's an insanely important point! It's not the quantity of minutes we spend practicing, it's the quantity of guitar breaks we take that matters. The more repetitions, aka picking the guitar up and putting it down after two minutes, the better.

Finally, you must walk away from the guitar without accomplishing anything. That's it. Does this routine get results? It did for me.

The Practice Test

I've tried the Casual Practice Routine on myself, and it works.

First, I picked a skill that is very difficult for me: The Major7#5 arpeggio. I've never been a fan of arpeggios, which is probably why I never became a shred guitarist, or felt comfortable using them to solo over old jazz standards. But, I was intrigued of the challenge, and interested to see if it did anything to change my playing.

Next, I structured my schedule to be more casual-practice friendly. Since I've been at my computer almost non-stop the past couple of weeks, I structured a routine that included a guitar break every nine minutes. My routine went like this:

  1. Work on Computer: 9 Minutes
  2. Practice Arpeggios: 5 Minutes

Each time I went through the cycle, I stopped short of completely mastering the arpeggio. And yes, that was frustrating. I felt upset that I had to quit! However, every time I went back to the guitar, my synapses slowly remembered the correct sequences. Each time, the patterns of the arpeggio emerged just a tad clearer. I saw myself mastering the arpeggio on guitar, and I did it by barely trying to "practice."

Now, due to the amount of repetition, I can say that the Major7#5 arpeggio is baked in and part of my skill set. Woot!

Let's review how I did it:

  1. I kept my guitar closeby
  2. I picked it up every nine minutes (this worked for me. You don't have to be as regimented)
  3. I played something extremely challenging
  4. I put the guitar back down without proof of accomplishing anything at all.

I did this anywhere from three to five times a day for about a week. The repetition and sheer amount of guitar breaks allowed me to learn that arpeggio, and eventually it became part of my bag of tricks. Bam!

What the Casual Routine for Practicing Guitar Achieves

Although it may seem like you haven't mastered anything by the end of that quick break on guitar, you have undoubtably made yourself better at the instrument. Better yet, my belief is that you've done so in a tenth of the time it takes most other people. Think of all the people sweating and putting in an hour a day for practice... Wow, you've got them beat!

The other thing is that you just mightily invested in your enjoyment of the guitar. The skill you just worked on got stronger. It has been added to your growing arsenal of tricks on the guitar! The more skills that you have at your disposal, the more you tend to enjoy guitar and immerse yourself in it. The best part is that it didn't take very much time or energy for you to get to a higher skill level.

Small sacrifices of time are worth it for the long-term enjoyment of guitar. If it helps, think of that time as a small investment. The skills we need to grow for the enjoyment of the guitar desperately deserves a small yet potent investment.

Tiny breaks, small sacrifices, huge benefits.

The Casual Routine for Practicing Guitar

1/14/13

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There's no reason why beginners to guitar need to spend an hour a day or more at practicing guitar. A half hour is too much, and despite the advice that Tim Ferriss gives, ten minutes is still far too much.

I am firm in my belief: five minutes of practice is awesome. Why?

It's simple: beginners have a wonderful zeal to learn. Picking up the guitar for the very first time is marked by the novelty of the new, the interest in the initial, the energy to eat up everything about guitar. If the the over-zealous learner end up over-practicing, he may burn up all of his beginners luck, very quickly. I've seen this happen quite a bit.

Practice regimes that take more than five minutes per day do not stoke the fires of interest, curiosity, and good, hard work. In fact, they burn that energy up so fast that the beginner gives up prematurely. The question is: how does a beginner build momentum on guitar?

The answer: do short, unplanned, two-minute-long bursts of casual practice on guitar, at least two times a day.

The Casual Routine for Practicing Guitar

The Casual Routine for Practicing Guitar looks like this:

  1. Put your guitar on a guitar stand.
  2. Leave it in an area without foot traffic, but easily within eyesight.
  3. Take a quick guitar break when you are either (a) bored, or (b) sick of what you are doing.
  4. Play something challenging.
  5. Put the guitar down after two minutes, without accomplishing anything at all.

In other words, pick up that guitar, and play something that challenges you for two minutes, put it down unsatisfied, and then go back to what you were working on. That's it.

Leaving Business Unfinished?

At first, the Casual Routine for Practicing Guitar looks suspiciously like slacking off. The idea seems crazy, but it's not. Some of you might say to yourselves, "Really? I thought I was supposed to get an hour in a day of practice, and now only two minutes, and then just walk away?" Others might be upset about leaving the guitar without accomplishing anything, like "I thought I started to learn guitar to have fun, and now I just have to cut myself off?"

Yes, and stick to it. Playing and practicing guitar are two separate things. When you leave the guitar dissatisfied after practicing, you are baking in the fine motor control, muscle memory, and the synapses that need repetition to form. This puts you in the realm of skill and habit. The more of a habit you form, the sharper your skills get. The sharper your skills get, the more you can play and enjoy the guitar (away from practicing it). You will get better at guitar without even trying.

In other words, by limiting the time you spend practicing, and by accepting that you will not accomplish much in two minutes, you are building momentum. This is the kind of motion that builds on any burst of energy to learn, and doesn't dare deplete it. Do you want to keep on playing the instrument, enjoying it as new discoveries are made on it? You need to build that energy, and not expend it all in one gasp.

My New Barre Chord Book

I hope you don't mind a short plug. My new book, Barre Chords: The Complete DiY Guide is the result of many months of research into the vexing topic of barre chords. Ultimately, I designed and wrote this book to help any guitar enthusiast learn the most popular barre chords in the easiest possible way.

It's going to be released one week from today!

Barre Chords: The Complete DiY Guide

The Loophole Around Skill or Technique

12/17/12

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Is skill always the most important thing to shoot for when you are learning guitar?

My view is that not everyone needs it. That idea popped in my head from watching some pretty great bands creep out of Omaha, Nebraska in the late 90's. The best band on that roster, one that I am still a fan of, is Bright Eyes.

Bright Eyes came as a bit of a surprise to me. Here was a guy who created outlandish music that was unbelievably creative and potent. He also didn't really know how to play guitar. It was paralyzing at first! It was as if all the work I was doing on my guitar was nullified by Conor Oberst's great ability to write songs that didn't seem to follow many of the rules I was patiently learning.

Sooner or later, however, it hit me:

Conor Oberst had oodles of songs that needed to be written, and they couldn't wait for him to patiently become a good guitarist. He needed to express something, and didn't stop to think about being a "good" guitarist in order to do that. He just jumped in.

Not everyone is like that, brimming over the edge with songs, dying to create music. Most people who play guitar are satisfied playing other people's songs, and I think this is perfectly okay. However, these people cannot skip out on learning skill and technique as easily, and lessons too. While Conor Oberst may have been able to circumvent guitar technique because he just needed to write, the majority of people who play guitar, those of us who are satisfied just playing and passing the time, need skill so that we can play along and enjoy guitar. Skill becomes integral to our enjoyment.

In short, skill is important to enjoy the guitar unless you have a million songs in you dying to be written. This is a topic I will discuss in more detail next week.

RE-POST: Jack White vs Manuel Barrueco (Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus)

12/10/12

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I cracked up when I saw this post. I had to release it again. Enjoy!

Dave Wirth

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Jack White vs Manuel Barrueco (Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus)

The guitarist's left hand does half the work of playing guitar, or 1/8th the work if the person is a giant octopus. To be fair, a giant octopus can't play guitar. Neither can the Sharktopus. But the Sharktopus doesn't need a guitar to be awesome. It is awesome, obviously.

I digress.

It does us guitarists a lot of good to be selective about how we approach fingering the chords or melodies we play. Some folks, like Jack White for example, look at their fingering in a get-it-done-as-fast-as-possible-so-I-can-express-this-feeling-now kind of way. Classical guitarists, like Manuel Barrueco for example, take a bit more elegant and thoughtful approach to fingering so that they may convey subtlety. Neither approach is superior. Both of these two, very different, guitarists arrive at the top of the same mountain: Music.

The Hierarchy of Elegant Classical Guitar Fingering

In a nutshell, most classical guitarists I have met on my journey have taken a very elegant, thoughtful, and systematic look at their left hand fingerings. This makes sense. Subtlety of rhythm, melody, feeling and emotion cannot be achieved without a somewhat careful investigation of their left hand work. It's a puzzle to them. The question is consciously asked: "How can I make this fingering so easy so that I can really open up and play this music in a recital?" There is a three tiered hierarchy of fingering systems that helps classical guitarists achieve this elegance.

  1. Anchoring. Anchoring a finger between two chords is the simplest way to create an elegant transition. For example, a very common way to use an anchor finger is to play the D chord and the G chord in a progression. Try keeping your third finger anchored on the third fret of the B string and move between the chords. It works.
  2. Guiding. Guide fingers are pretty cool too. When your finger stays on one string but travels to a different fret, it helps to connect the chord and/or melody. This blog post can help you out immensely in learning how to utilize guide fingers.
  3. Jumping. Lease favorite of all of these options is to just jump from one position to another. There is nothing grounding one's fingers to the guitar.



Jack White Just Wants to Have Fun

Jack White, of the White Stripes among others, has a different approach. His approach is to just do it and put zero thought to it. Yes, it could be helpful to engineer fingerings. Yes, it could be easier to manage fingerings with more detail. But the point is not to look at the guitar as a puzzle to be figured out. It is to use the guitar as a megaphone, and megaphones are more like a sledgehammer than a scalpel.

The fingering style reflects the music that Jack White plays. It's almost as if his idea of playing guitar is more akin to, "Get this done so I can play, now." It works, has worked, and will work for anyone who really pushes the concept. Furthermore, Jack White's approach means he doesn't get dragged down in details, thereby avoiding the obfuscation of playing music in the first place. Not bad.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

Who wins at the end of the day? Manuel Barrueco or Jack White? Mega Shark or Giant Octopus? Neither.

Depending upon my mood, I could just as easily listen to Manuel Barrueco's fantastic transcription of Albeniz's Suite Hispanola in the same hour as Icky Thump.

The trick is how to utilize either approach for whatever situation you are in. If you are looking for subtlety and nuance in your creative musical expression, try experimenting with using the classical guitar fingering hierarchy to create an elegant fingering. If you are looking for an intense display of emotion and feeling, try bashing your guitar around and get the job done as fast as possible. If you are looking to be feared in all the ocean of guitarists, threaten all the shred guitarists in Guitar Center and tell them never to turn their amps up again in the presence of the Sharktopus.

Five Minutes of Practice

12/6/12

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I have un unshakable belief: five minutes to practice guitar if you are just starting to learn is just about perfect.

If I need to say it a thousand more times, I will. If you are beginning guitar, you do not need to practice an hour a day. You do not need to practice a half hour a day. Just five minutes. Why?

For one thing, it's important to be casually interested in any new pursuit at first. It's nice to allow any new interest to grow organically, as we get better at it. For another, playing guitar is very much about escaping reality. That concentrated five minutes will help you get that in a small dosage. I think guitar can be pretty addictive after time passes, once a person reaches the point where two hours can go by and he or she didn't notice it. Best of all, five minutes is not hard to commit to, even when what you are practicing isn't easy (and let's face it, learning to play guitar from scratch isn't a cakewalk).

There are teachers who believe that practicing an hour a day is necessary for any beginning student, but I firmly disagree. What if you just want to have fun, and learn guitar in a non-stressful way?

Five minutes. Five good concentrated minutes. That's all you'll need.

The Mastering Process, and How Robert Johnson Became Click-Free

11/26/12

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What is mastering? Mastering is the final step before any recording is ready for for aural consumption.

For example, if you decided to record a record, first you'd lay down the tracks in a studio. This can be done in a lot of formats, but most common is one-at-a-time. After you are finished laying down the individual tracks, it's time to mix it all together. This means condensing all of the individual parts together into two tracks, a left and a right for a stereo mix (or one track if you were the Beatles and you are making a record that's monophonic). The mixdown is also a chance to make the record sound as good as it can in that particular studio.

After the mixdown, the album is still not quite ready. There's still room for improvement, so to speak. The mastering process makes any mixdown sound as palatable on as many different devices as possible. That means that good mastering will make any album sound awesome whether it's being listened to on the baddest stereo system available, or the cheapest boom-box hoisted on the shoulders of a man still living out the glory days of the 80's. In either case, good mastering is crucial.

Once again, the recording process goes like this:

1. Record your album
2. Get the album mixed
3. Get the album mastered
4. Release it!

As technology gets better, and (to be fair) as recording companies understand that releasing older albums in their catalog can sometimes be as good for nostalgia as it is for the piggy bank, more and more records can get the same high definition mastering that is standard, nowadays. This was the case for the somewhat recent remastering of Robert Johnson's legendary blues recordings.

I ought to point out that mastering wasn't really all that bad back then. I have a huge fondness for static and crackle of vinyl records, and there are growing multitudes of folks out there who feel the same. Robert Johnson's recordings, however, were riddled with them. The record company who owns the recordings felt that it was time to re-master, and re-release, Johnson's materials for general consumption, this time without the static. Now, his recordings are mostly snap, crackle, and pop free.

Get your Robert Johnson on, sans Rice Krispies:

The Myriad Ways of Infinite Sustain: Moog, Ebow, and Jimi Hendrix

11/20/12

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The Moog Guitar

For anyone who is familiar with Moog, it's legacy, it's distinctive palette of sound, you probably aren't surprised about how great the Moog Guitar really is.

When you strike a string on a regular guitar, the sound will eventually disappear. Why? No sound lasts forever, as plucking a regular guitar won't normally create a positive feedback loop.

There are basically four parts to a sound: attack, decay, sustain, release. From what it looks like in the videos below, each of the strings on a Moog guitar has infinite sustain, with no release at all (if the user wishes it so). Moog has somehow made each of the strings sustain notes almost like a violin can (with less effort too).

For a mere $3,000, the Moog Guitar can be all yours:




The Ebow

A similar effect can be achieved with an Ebow, or Electronic Bow. This is a cheaper alternative to the Moog Guitar, and it sounds similar enough. Since I'm a fan of kids playing guitar, here's a kid playing around with an Ebow:




Jimi Hendrix's Feedback

I really like this page's description of a positive feedback loop:

In either case a positive feedback loop left to itself can lead only to the destruction of the system, through explosion or through the blocking of all its functions. The wild behavior of positive loops - a veritable death wish - must be controlled by negative loops. This control is essential for a system to maintain itself in the course of time.

I can't necessarily vouch for what a positive feedback loop is, or whether a guitar plugged into a loud amp making a screeching noise counts as one, but I must say that it sounds pretty awesome when in the right hands. Jimi Hendrix for example? Yeah. Awesome: