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dhanners623

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dhanners623 last won the day on October 13 2023

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  1. I have difficulty with the overbroad assumption behind the question, “Why do Epiphones sound so bad?” Some do, some don’t. I know players who think that about Gibsons. Taylors. Even Martins. I had an Epiphone “IB’64” Texan that sounded pretty darn good. Didn’t sound like a vintage Texan, but I liked it. I accepted it for what it was. I’ve got a Farida OT-22, which is more or less copied from an LG-2. It sounds good, is well built, stays in tune and I’ve no reservation gigging with it. But does it sound like a vintage LG-2? No. Close, but for the $423 I paid for it, it is very nice. Some people have spent most of their playing lives playing the guitar equivalent of fast food. If you took them to a restaurant with Michelin stars, the subtleties and nuances of the tastes would be lost on them. That’s not a knock on them. I spent years playing budget guitars that, looking back, weren’t that good. What I tire of is people thinking their budget guitar sounds as good as — or even better — a pricier guitar. I’m a member of the Takamine and Sigma owner groups on Facebook (owned one of each decades ago) and I swear, at least three times a week, some Sigma owner posts photos of his guitar and says, “I’ve played D-28s and D-45s, and my Sigma sounds better.” No, it doesn’t. It may sound good. But sound better than a D-45? No way. And it’s not going to sound better than a D-28, either. If you have indeed played D-45s and D-28s that don’t sound as good as your Sigma, then you either played a rare bad one or you have no idea how a great guitar is supposed to sound. That said, I wouldn’t mind one of those Sigma 12-fret dreads….
  2. I live in fear of that…. But seriously, how many guitars does a person really need? I think of all the blues greats who made lasting music that has inspired generations, and they didn’t have rooms full of high-end guitars. They were lucky to get their hands on a Gibson and they made iconic music with Stellas and the like. Or other genres…. I wonder how many guitars Tony Rice actually owned. (I’m willing to bet he owned more Bulova Accutron watches than guitars….) Yeah, I know people can do what they want with their money, but jeez, when is enough enough? I like a nice guitar as much as the next player, but justifying the expense gets harder to do. So if I get a guitar, it has to be versatile and be able to do a bit of everything. I can only play one at a time. And 99% of the audience doesn’t care if you’re playing a Banner Gibson or a pre-war Martin or a Takamine or, God forbid, a Taylor.
  3. I dunno. I think people are overthinking the issue, again. Any guitar can be played fingerstyle or fingerpicked or what have you. What if you only have one guitar? Are their styles you’re not supposed to play because it’s the “wrong” guitar? Not everybody is fortunate enough (or obsessed enough) to own scads of guitars. I own four guitars and most days I think that’s three guitars too many.
  4. Everyone seems to want to define what “traditional” bluegrass is. The music Bill and Charlie played was bluegrass — it had that “high lonesome sound” that’s a prerequisite — even if the name didn’t come along until late ‘45 after Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined the band. So, yeah, thanks for that.
  5. The J-45’s relative scarcity in bluegrass has more to do with the didactic herd mentality of bluegrass musicians than with actual sound. Charlie Monroe was perfectly content to play Gibson slopes, and since he was present at the creation of bluegrass (accompanying brother Bill Monroe) then his choice of instruments can’t be discounted. Even Cleo Davis, who succeeded Charlie on guitar, played Gibson slopes. By the time Lester Flatt joined the band in ‘46, Martins were in vogue. If Lester had played a J-45, people today would consider a D-18 or D-28 too boomy for bluegrass. There’s no reason a J-45 can’t be fingerpicked, and fingerpicked well. Are there “better” guitars for fingerpicking? Maybe. But you play what you got….
  6. J-45s always seemed ok for fingerpicking for me. I will say, though, that I find my J-35 is better at it than the two J-45s I used to own. To me, the J-35 is more versatile than the J-45, but that’s just me….
  7. The meme makes no sense. If you’re trying to reduce energy usage, it would seem acoustic guitars would be preferable to electrics. Then again, I guess some folks will dig up any excuse to belittle a young Swedish woman with autism who cares about the environment. I suppose if she were “rolling coal” in a diesel pickup and running Priuses off the road, folks would be cheering her on….
  8. Humor is often relative. Given the derision habitues of the forum have heaped upon relic’d guitars — and the people who buy them— one can never tell when a jape is afoot.
  9. Not sure anyone pays to have their new guitars look like that. Yeah, some may go for a level of “relic’ing,” but I’ve ever seen faux aging to that extent. If you have, maybe provide photos? That said, it seems the guitar came by its aging naturally. So if some “urban roots singer/songwriter” and “hobo stew” connoisseur buys it, will he/she not have a guitar that came by its wear naturally? And I’m still trying to figure out why people care what another player’s guitar looks like or how they spend their guitar money.
  10. I believe in lutherie it is referred to as a “loaded” top — a curvature is built into the top. At least that’s what they told me at St. Paul Guitar Repair, and they would certainly know. I’ve noticed it on my Gibsons.
  11. I had an early ‘60s LG-1. By the time I bought it (at Elderly’s in ‘92 or so) the plastic bridge had been professionally replaced with a wood one. I liked it — ladder bracing and all — but at the time, I didn’t really appreciate smaller-body guitars the way I do now. I traded it in in ‘95 or so for a ‘66 J-45. Of the guitars I’ve owned and gotten rid of (including an early ‘70s Martin D-35S with Brazilian rosewood) the LG-1 is the one I miss.
  12. I always meant to write this sooner, but didn’t. It is unfortunate that the OP couldn’t get into the book, because it is an excellent history not only of something that fascinates us — Gibson guitars — but about how life went on on the American homefront during wartime. John’s book is no small feat. I was a newspaper reporter for close to four decades and I can tell you that tracking down business and government records from the 1940s is hard work. Tracking down and interviewing the workers still living was also a big task, and John came up with innovative approaches for doing that. If you’re reading those remembrances and oral histories for slam-bang action or some great epiphany about Gibson then, yeah, you’re probably not going to be enthusiastic about their stories. But any historian will tell you the magic is in telling how normal people carried on in times of national stress. That is, in large part, why people love reading Shelby Foote or Howard Zinn. It is amazing to think that a bunch of women not formally schooled in lutherie turned out guitars that would one day become iconic and much sought-after because of their sound, which is what we mainly prize in guitars. Add to that the company’s sexist inability to admit women made up most of the factory and it is a great story. I mean, Jeezamae. Rosie the Riveter was building bombers that American airmen trusted with their lives, but musicians’ egos were too fragile to play a guitar built by Lucy the Luthier? I found it fascinating to learn that a trait many of the women shared was that they were good seamstresses. Surely the attention to detail required for sewing helped them build wonderful instruments. John covered a lot of ground and covered it well. It is narrow thinking to believe it’s a book only for guitar fanatics in general and Gibson fanatics in particular. It is also an interesting history of the how a corporation behaved during wartime, and the subterfuge it decided to employ to meet a demand.
  13. I dunno…. From the perspective of somebody who is retired, I think most guitars out there are “luxury” and I’ve accepted that my days of buying high-end instruments are over. (Unless I win the lottery, then I might splurge on a “‘34 Special” dread by Pre-War Guitars. But I don’t play the lottery.) I’m not sure I’m out much, though, because a) you can only play one guitar at a time and b) you can buy some very good instruments for not a lot of money these days. i currently have four guitars: a ‘16 J-35, a D-18 clone built for me in 2011 by Minneapolis luthier Kevin Schwab, a Farida OT-22 and a 1949 Stella H929. (The Stella is currently in the shop, being converted from a floating bridge to a pinned bridge.) I love the J-35 and the Schwab dearly, but when I’m honest, the OT-22 and the Stella are at present more fun to play. I bought the Farida from Elderly in 2019 for $423. When plugged in (I use a Baggs M1) it sounds great. Sounds really nice unplugged, too. It is well-built (in China) and hasn’t given me a moment’s trouble. Is it an LG-2? Nope. I just checked Sweetwater’s website and the cheapest LG-2 is $2,599. There is the consideration of buying American-made guitars, and three of mine fit that bill. And I console myself that plenty of Americans were involved in the OT-22; folks at Elderly helped design it and I’m sure union longshoremen unloaded it from the boat and loaded it into trucks driven by American truckers to Michigan. It was sold to me by an American salesperson and shipped to me via an American carrier. Play what you got….
  14. Great recording. All the parts fit. Nice AJ, too. Save for the depth of the body, is it kind of a tricked-out Roy Smeck?
  15. They’ve crossed over into the Jerry Douglas Plays-Faster-Than-I-Can-Hear realm….
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