FPFL
Experienced
Listening to Joe Satriani's great audiobook "Strange Beautiful Music" had me thinking my own start with guitar playing. Admittedly I'm a bit younger than Joe, but not a kid at 48 today. Some lessons are timeless, as he talks about his hero Hendrix, his first gear, and his ideas about what "Good" sounded like. Joe was my Hendrix! He was "Not of this Earth" to me - pun intended for those that remember! : )
I realized my own journey had started with initial surprise and disappointment that guitar amps sounding little like the recordings I'd been listening to on the radio. (Do any of you have this memory? That first probably not great amp or the first music store experience where a big tube amp spat at you like an angry animal?)
This was when 80's FM radio was what streaming is today, the primary medium for folks to hear music. I was lucky to live in greater Boston with college and big rock channels all having experimental, off hours shows where you could hear people like Satriani before he broke with Surfing.
Buying music was expensive for a kid then! Instruments were insane amounts of money. All that said, I expected electric guitars to sound like the did on recordings. They only sorta did. Why? Keyboards sounded the same I noticed. Drums sounded better mixed (why are these cymbals so freaking loud? some things never change -smile- ) but mostly the same, guitars sounded regrettably different to me. This was vexing - and ironically the opposite of what some people now chase with amp in the room!
I learned to live with how amps sounded - often harsher and of course so very directional. I learned about "beaming" and how to deal with it. I learned the then still living blues hero SRV put heavy tape inside the grill cloth of his Fender amps! As a young player this made a ton of sense to me.
In time all the wrestling with gear became normal. I stopped thinking of it as disappointing. It simply was how it was. I next learned that an amp that sounded like crap on its own often sounded good in a mix, thus the attack and often harsh brightness of a real Marshall made sense in a live, loud band like I would soon be playing in.
Now we've come full circle. You can get "amp in the room" or mastered guitar sounds, you can practice with a metronome like I did, or mixes that are more polished than actual records from the 80s and 90s and everything in-between.
Does it make sense to still be obsessing over amp in the room? Maybe but not definitely. I don't care anymore. I was trending that way, and this cemented it for me. Its not b/c I can't have it, I already had it.
Ask yourself what Joe got me to think about. "What did I want when I started" versus what I learned to accept and what become normal. Maybe they aren't the same and 18 year old me would be slapping older me on the head today. : )
As always do what makes you happy, and make music!
I realized my own journey had started with initial surprise and disappointment that guitar amps sounding little like the recordings I'd been listening to on the radio. (Do any of you have this memory? That first probably not great amp or the first music store experience where a big tube amp spat at you like an angry animal?)
This was when 80's FM radio was what streaming is today, the primary medium for folks to hear music. I was lucky to live in greater Boston with college and big rock channels all having experimental, off hours shows where you could hear people like Satriani before he broke with Surfing.
Buying music was expensive for a kid then! Instruments were insane amounts of money. All that said, I expected electric guitars to sound like the did on recordings. They only sorta did. Why? Keyboards sounded the same I noticed. Drums sounded better mixed (why are these cymbals so freaking loud? some things never change -smile- ) but mostly the same, guitars sounded regrettably different to me. This was vexing - and ironically the opposite of what some people now chase with amp in the room!
I learned to live with how amps sounded - often harsher and of course so very directional. I learned about "beaming" and how to deal with it. I learned the then still living blues hero SRV put heavy tape inside the grill cloth of his Fender amps! As a young player this made a ton of sense to me.
In time all the wrestling with gear became normal. I stopped thinking of it as disappointing. It simply was how it was. I next learned that an amp that sounded like crap on its own often sounded good in a mix, thus the attack and often harsh brightness of a real Marshall made sense in a live, loud band like I would soon be playing in.
Now we've come full circle. You can get "amp in the room" or mastered guitar sounds, you can practice with a metronome like I did, or mixes that are more polished than actual records from the 80s and 90s and everything in-between.
Does it make sense to still be obsessing over amp in the room? Maybe but not definitely. I don't care anymore. I was trending that way, and this cemented it for me. Its not b/c I can't have it, I already had it.
Ask yourself what Joe got me to think about. "What did I want when I started" versus what I learned to accept and what become normal. Maybe they aren't the same and 18 year old me would be slapping older me on the head today. : )
As always do what makes you happy, and make music!
