Maui is Nice In September

We just returned from a week there. Was a great time as we convinced our adult (24 and 27) kids to tag along. Not too tough to convince as we paid for it all, but nonetheless at that age they are busy and time off work is a premium to be savored. I'm not your travel dude but here are some Maui comments:

Mama's Fish House - perhaps the best restaurant on Maui. You will pay for it.

Roy's - Not as expensive as Mama's but also very nice. Not quite the ambiance or service.

Hyatt Regency Hotel Pool - Still the best pool on Maui.

Hyatt Regency Hotel Restaurants - too expensive - didn't try them - the breakfast buffet was included in our package and excellent - but not worth the $27 bucks it would have cost. I can't eat that much in the morning to make it worthwhile.

Fish in the Ocean While Snorkeling - Not as many as there were 10 years ago, but still beautiful. Kapalua Bay is the place to go to see fish easily.

Maui Ocean Center Aquarium - Beautiful exhibits and not to be missed.

Maui County Fair - If you are lucky enough to be there during the 3 days its on, the food was dirt cheap and great, and there was some good entertainment. (I don't know about you, but after spending $575 for a party of 6 at Mama's fish house it was refreshing to feed everyone for pocket change.)

Onyx Forge Custom Jag S

A new guitar in the collection has arrived. You can read the details here C25 Onyx

And you can hear it in this video:




This is currently my favorite guitar. I put 11s on it which is more beefy than the usual 10s. I think its the ideal "Nashville" and "SRV" axe.

New Old Guitars

I assume you are familiar with the Fender Custom Shop "Relic" guitars? Maybe not. Well they build a new guitar using an old design and materials, then grunge it up by wearing off the paint, scratching it, sandblasting the metal parts, rusting it, and other things. Now it looks old and beat up. That is supposed to be cool. Like if you inherited your pop's old guitar. Or you played it everyday for 10 years in grungy bars. As if you were SRV or Billy Gibbons or Willy Wonka or something.

How ridiculous is that. If you can play, nobody gives a rats ass if your guitar is old or new. I suppose some morons think people would see their guitar and think wow he's been playing forever, he must be good. Or wow that's a vintage Fender, how cool. It sounds so great. What a bunch of crap. And they charge a ridiculous premium for these things.

So if you see some guy playing a beater guitar don't pay any attention. If he sounds good, that's just wonderful, but its not because of his beater guitar, that he possibly paid triple for and bought last week.

Plastic Coated Guitars

Why do guitar makers use a poly finish?

It lasts longer. It wears better. It doesn't crack. It doesn't annoy the AQMD or the feds because of VOC emissions. Its cheaper to manufacture. It doesn't affect the tone at all. It looks better.

Do you know which ones of the above are true?

Well some of this is obviously true. As far as what is not obvious, or clearly a matter of opinion, I beg you to figure it out for yourself.

In my opinion, a nitrocellulose lacquer finish can look and sound better than poly. A near natural or light oil finish might be the best of all for tone. Actually no finish at all might be the best for tone. Of course the tone is really subtle, but from my experience a heavy finish kind of kills the wood resonance. Nitro has a chance to be lighter. It seems more organic (actually its like liquid wood). Of course the guitars I have experienced the nitro finish on are either recent customs, vintage guitars, or vintage re-issues, so a lot of what I am hearing could be in other things in the guitar. I also have one poly guitar that sounds pretty darn good, but I am guessing it would sound even better with a nitro finish.

Of two tele's I have, the nitro one sounds better, of course it has a lot of mechanical differences as well, so its hard to nail down.

I think a good nitro finish looks better. Its not as clear, it yellows with age, it looks "vintage". Of course a cracked faded or yellowed finish can look sucky too. So can a nitro finish on a guitar that cracks up because you opened the case it the winter after having it the back of your car. Oops.

So just remember when somebody says there are no real tone differences between nitro and poly, I think they are completely wrong. But it takes more than nitro to make a guitar sound good.

So where did you ride your bike?

(click to see more detail)

People often ask me that question, when we go to the Singletrack Lodge. This is where we ride. It's a dirt trail and today (once I got off the short road portion) I was entirely alone except for the birds and squirrels. Needless to say, when alone I ride extra slowly and carefully, because cellphone coverage is limited, and its a LONG walk out. The weather today was great, scattered thunderstorms kept the temp down around 70, while down the hill in the desert it was well over 110, and in fact even 93 at the beach. Another day in paradise.

Let Them be Boys - GarageBand Track of the Day

Hey, I entered one of my better tunes in a GarageBand contest to get some feedback, and got Track of the Day. I guess there wasn't much competition today, but I'll take it! The reviews are helpful on this one, its only a demo with a couple hours of work, so this will help with a remix. The drums in particular need to be redone, and I'm looking forward to doing that. Hope you enjoy it.

lyrics to a song - first demo track:

<- Click to listen to this song

they say there was a problem with that boy
he just didnt seem to do the things we like a boy to do

there seemed to be a problem at school
but things were too slow boring and uncool

who wouldn't rather mess and play around
when theres so much of life outside on the playground

but the teacher labled him as A D D and his momma
gave him some pills and put him in front of the TV

and now we wonder why he cant be part of society
and now hes a living in a correctional facility

take them outside and let them howl at the moon
don't treat them like a problem or they will end up in the zoo

not everyone can live a life behind a desk
sometimes a boy just needs some space to be his best

isnt a little discipline is better than a pill
why label him a reject and make them want to kill

a child's frustration with ordinary life
can be misdirected into the street and a knife

be smarter than the labelers and help them find a way
to teach us to innovate and live for better days

take them outside and let them howl at the moon
don't treat them like a problem or they will end up in the zoo

Click Hear to Listen to the Song

My Favorite Training Ride

Hi, recently I got a Garmin Edge 205 bike GPS. Its a thingy that tracks your ride and then you can download where you went and map it out, including the elevation changes. Also you can use it to compete against your prior rides etc. You can google it and figure out the details if you want. But the point of this is that we do a ride for training and its a tough one. Its located at Crystal Cove state park and we do some loops around this course (pics below). According to the fitness GPS we burn about 1400 calories, which does not sound like much until you try to burn off that many on an excercise gear in your favorite fitness center. On this particular ride we did it in about an hour and 50 mins. (excluding about the 10 minutes in between a few hills I rested to wait for my training partner). My record for this is 1:47, but I think anything under 2 hours is a great workout result.

If you ever want to try this, meet us at the parking lot most Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 7:30 AM. Bring lots of water, spare tubes, and a pump. And if you are really slow, you might be on your own, because for the most part we need to get on with our day. Don't worry about getting ahead of us, if you are that good, have at it. As we are old farts (53 and 59) you young-uns can kick our butts - but unless you are used to this kind of riding you will be surprised at the difficulty in keeping up.

The route is looping - clockwise from the left, at the survey point we double back through the crossroads and do that little inner loop, back up to the crossroads, then back down the center, up to I think I can, back to the survey point again, then double back the starting route to total out almost 20 miles. We end up passing the crossroads 4 times, so there are lots of shorter (and longer) variations.

(click to see better detail: - sorry html programming bores me)


Here is the hill profile, (click to see better detail)

Zachary Guitar Pedal

Update - August 16, 2007:

I have been spending a lot of time with this pedal. It seems to be ridiculous to say it, but it is brilliant. It is the best investment in gear I have made since I purchased a '69 Tele for $150 when I was 17. (damn I wished I was smart enough to have kept it) This pedal is so musical. (I will keep this.) Of course it is brutal in revealing your warts as a player, and the tone shortcomings of your guitars and amps, but it is also insanely rewarding when it uncovers the harmonics of your best gear and the skill you have as a player. After redoing the setup on my Tele, it is sweet through this pedal. I think a couple of my other pedals are going on e-bay in a couple of more weeks if I don't use them. This one takes the cake.

Note - my previous post of August 11 - five days previous:

Occasionally, one runs across something that lives up to its maker's hype. This is one of those things. Of course the hype here is over the top, and quite honestly I'm not sure how much better than some other units I have tried this really is, but in my opinion this IS the best guitar pedal available now for the kind of sound I like.

Here is a link to clip of me fooling around with this pedal. Part of it actually is musical and includes a chunk of a song, but mostly its a tone demo.



Expect to hear it in the mix of some of my upcoming tunes.

Am I plugging this guy's pedal? Well I suppose. I like to see good things get the attention they deserve. Also, if you check it out this might in fact be something that enhances my credibility as a person who is has knowledge about getting good guitar tone. And, we will see over time about getting rid of the other pedals. If I end up not using them for quite a while, that's exactly what I might end up doing.

A couple of other overdrive pedals I use include the Fulltone OCD, Barber Burn Unit and the Xotic AC Booster. I think the Zach pedal can replace the Fulltone and Barber, but the AC Booster is kind of in a class by itself for the sound it makes. The Fulltone, in some ways I prefer to the Zachary pedal because it produces a good grind that you can hide in a bit more easily than the Zachary pedal. The Zachary pedal is more transparent and up front, and brings forth both your excellence and flaws. It has a wider freqency footprint, and for some kinds of music, the OCD might be easier to deal EQ wise with in the mix.

To be fair about how good this pedal is, I don't think I would have bothered with the Barber or OCD if I had the Zachary first.

Telecaster Shootout

Scroll down to get right at the video if you are not interested in the text..

Well, as I mentioned I suffer from Guitar Aquisition Syndrome. My most recent attack concerned a '62 Custom Telecaster. Actually not a real '62 as these are out of my league (and honestly in my humble opinion are more valuable from rarity as opposed to utility or musical value). This guitar was recently built by Fender to almost identical specs to the original '62. It features vintage frets on a rosewood fingerboard, a nitro finish, 3 saddle bridge. Not specifically looking to buy a guitar, I played this one at a local shop and found it to be exceptionally nice from both a tone and cosmetic perspective. Forgetting that I already have a perfectly good Telecaster I bought it. Then I got home. I rewired the tone and switch - (the '62 had a dumb forward position with a dark neck setting and no split setting) I don't know anyone who actually uses one of these and leaves it that way. I didn't care much for the vintage 3 saddle bridge that had problems with string spacing and intonation, so I upgraded that to a Callaham compensated brass saddle bridge. Now I really like the tone, in fact I prefer it tone wise to my other Tele, except perhaps for the hum when using it really in a really high gain setting (which is not really a Tele thing anyway).

Well, what about the other Tele. It's still a really nice guitar, and better than the '62 in some ways for a couple reasons. It's an '06 American Deluxe Ash, with a nice thick maple neck, jumbo frets, and SCN pickups. Its a bit heavy. It stays in tune more easily and has almost no hum from the truly noiseless pickups.

Well I decided to play them back to back and decide which one sounds better. Here's a video if you'd like to post your opinion, I'd be interested.

A couple of notes. To be fair, the Deluxe has 9s, and while easier to bend, they don't have quite the tone of the 10s on the '62. But the Deluxe has jumbo frets and I just couldn't hear the Tele tone I was looking for (a bit of string slap and more twang) from 10s - the 9s did that. The '62 has vintage frets and I like that sound. I might try 9s on the '62 - but the 10s feel pretty good and sound nice.

The bridge swapout didn't change the dramatically - a bit smoother and more sustain - from what I can tell, but I do like the compensated saddles, and the string spacing from the original 62 bridge was bogus with the grooves and screws interfering with a straight string path. (I saved the bridge so when I resell the guitar I will have all the vintage pieces).

Are your guitar strings wrong?

Probably. If you are not using ZOG strings. (see link below)

I have to say that I am a believer and I am now using these strings. I have some spares, and at this point in time I will probably replace and order more. I will let you know how they hold up. Right now I like them better than Elixirs, but I don't think they will last nearly as long.

FYI I am using a 9 set on my Tele - its sounds Tele Spanky and surprised the hell out of me. I always thought 9s were wimpy and failed to understand the Tele Spank connection - thanks to the magic of the ZOGs (and the recommendation of their legendary inventor) I am now a believer that some guitars simply need a certain kind of strings. Silly me I am playing my Tele more than ever so there is something to it - no doubt. Also I put a 10 set on my Onyx Forge and like the improved tone especially overdriven.

Without a doubt I will change out strings on my other players but for the moment I'm not quite to throwing out otherwise fresh strings until I have a big gig or recording project to motivate me.

Sound wise they sound like D'Addarios which is what I now have several new unused sets of sitting around - I'll probably give them away.

With these strings I am finding more tone and a more natural playing style across the strings. The theory behind this string seems to feel correct.

Intersting the strings are NOT labeled as to gauge and there are no specs, but not to worry as they are so reasonably priced as to make it silly to search elsewhere or build your own sets. (Also I suspect perhaps some of the sizes are not off the shelf spec.)

http://www.zacharyguitars.com/Strings.htm

Watching the Indy 500 - at The Track

I suppose its all been said but I did enjoy seeing a legendary event. Believe me 500,000 or so people and a $1,600,000 prize makes it much more than cars going around in circles. Our trip back to Chicago included staying with my uncle who shared many life stories, a lot of fine cooking, and several fine beverages. His place at Lake Dalecarlia in Indiana is absolutely idyllic.

A Very Difficult Day on a Bicycle

Well I did it. The Breathless Agony. If you are looking for a physical challenge here it is. 7+ hours is a long time on a bike. And climbing mountains while you are doing it makes it even harder. This ride is like one of the difficult stages in the Tour de France. Which makes those pro racers seem even more amazing. I did this one day thing and it was really hard. These guys do similar stuff almost every day for a month. I had to work up to the task. Although I have been using bikes for fitness for the better part of 20 years, you need to notch it up to do this kind of a ride. I was up to five days a week between two and five hours per ride. Once you can do 70 or so miles on steep hills, you can probably do this 7 hour 114 miler. Actually this ride felt like three hard ordinary training rides back to back. After 80 miles or so the hard part is over and the last bit is almost all downhill. Not that you can ignore it because its on a winding road and you need to keep your wits. It was cold at the top at 8600 feet, but there are some refreshments and a bit of celebration. Then trying to keep warm in the wind chilled descent. Back under 6000 ft it was much more pleasant. Near the end there was a major headwind, but only a few miles to deal with it.

As much as I enjoyed earning the achivement, I can't say I'll ever do it again.

Click here to see the ride web site.

Roast Your Own Coffee

Remember when you discovered Starbucks and then ordinary coffee simply sucked. Well this is the same sea change at another level. Green (raw, unrosted) coffee is inexpensive and available in tremendous variety from a number online sources. Unlike starbucks where you might have 20 varieties of coffee, each roasted to Starbucks spec, you have a virtually unlimited number of choices to make regarding which beans, what blend, and how dark the roast.

If you are like me you like your coffee dark at times, and light but flavorful. And flavor you cannot imagine.

Good roasted coffee is decent maybe for 10 days to two weeks after roasting. Maybe longer if you seal it up and keep it in your freezer.

I hope you have as much fun with this as I do.

Onyx Forge Custom DC

This is one tone monster of a guitar. Custom built to my specs by Roy Bullis of Laguna Hills, CA.

This guitar features a mahogany body, quilt top, maple neck with ebony fingerboard. It has Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates humbucking pickups, and an LR Baggs piezo bridge. Coils on the pickups can be split and the piezo mixed. Instead of a switch, there is a blend pot for the pickups.

8 String Guitar

Saw this during my typical guitar web surf fest. I would love to play with it. Do I need one? Maybe.

http://www.zacharyguitars.com/040705pics.htm

Fender Stratocaster VG - Pretend Guitar Tone

Well I was at my local music retailer the other day, Jim's Music in Irvine. Great store BTW - nice guys and good pricing, mostly mainstream mass-market stuff, but they will set you up well.

I played with the Strat VG and it was exactly what I expected. It does what they say, but it left me with the same feeling I have about all digital modeling. Quite simply, it sounds and is fake.

The strat in N (normal) mode just uses the mag pickups and its a normal strat. Its a good one too, like the standard US strat. Great tone and action, quality. It is what you would expect.

Now in the modeled mode, where you pick a guitar (S-strat, T-tele, H-humbucker, A-acoustic) and a tuning (N-normal, D-drop D, 12-string, DADGAD, OpenG, Baritone-b) it just digitally fakes it. And that's where it loses me. The modeled Strat mode in normal tuning - back to back with the Normal (not modeled) strat - is simply weak. The highs are muted. The pick articulation details are lost (that's good for some clunkers I suppose). Same with the rest. My baritone guitar sounds better. A real 12 string is better. My Taylor acoustic is insanely better. My Tele is better. WTF go figure - they are all REAL!

But if you can't afford all those guitars, or need to change in the middle of the song, or if you play through a bunch of crappy digital modelers or effects anyway, you might actually love this guitar. It sure is convenient for the tuning stuff. But its certainly not the real deal.

Like I said, it does exactly what it is supposed to, and I'm impressed, but I don't need one.

The Eternal Search for Guitar Tone

How much time and money do we spend looking for new and better amps, pedals, guitars? Does it make us better musicians? I don't think so. Billy Gibbons (for example) could walk into guitar center and pick a low end Epiphone Les Paul off the rack and plug it into a Vox Valvetronix (nothing exceptional about either of these, I'm just using them to make a point here) and wail up a storm. And so could I, and lots of other guys. But its satisfying to have that extra edge on your riff. Something that sets you apart. Kind of like the taste of a really fine wine. Sure you can buy a decent wine at a good gourmet market, but to really enjoy, you need to research, taste, buy and cellar your own. Its subtle but satisfying.

I am going to share my discoveries about guitar tone here, and hope you enjoy. Feel free to comment and or add your own experience.

My Bicycle Distracts Me

I ride bikes. I have been doing this seriously for 25 years or so. Mostly on the dirt (that's for another post) on my mountain bike. I live in Laguna Beach, near what is probably one of world's best single park for riding a bike on dirt without getting lost, killed, or too far from good food and coffee.

A while back my buddy Stu who I ride with constantly convinced me to race in the Sea Otter Classic in Monterey. So we trained like mad and had a great time. Finding myself in relatively remarkable shape for a 52 year old, I decided to do something nuts. Saturday I am going to ride in the Breathless Agony (go ahead google it). So more training. The last week I rode 5 out of 7 days. A couple of 4 1/2 hour days. A couple of days with 70 miles and LOTS of hills.

I hope I'm ready. I'll fill you in.

Too Many Guitars

Yes, I collect guitars. I have too many. I want more. I like them. I play them. I suppose if I did nothing at all but play my guitars I would not be completely unhappy, but I find joy in interacting with my family and friends, and the rest of the world, so I seek to involve myself in that as well.

To the degree that one must also pay some debt to be allowed to exist in this, things like work, taxes, taking out the trash, shaving, and so on, are also things I must do, but I will spare you those details.

Expect to see a lot about my guitars and music here. And I also plan on talking about other things that make me happy.

Why is this Here?

Some of us have already figured out that there are too many blogs. But I have some things I would like to share, and honestly, some things that I have learned that I wish somone had shared with me so I did not have to figure them out for myself. So here is my 2 cents. If you find it valuable or entertaining, you are quite welcome. Your comments are welcome, and after discarding any unwelcome hate, I would be quite happy to learn from them as well.

Hope your day, and every day is going well. I for one, am through with constant cynicism, and look forward to finding the best I can in every day. Should I revert to dark humor or cynical commentary, please poke me and help me return to the light.