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NAMM, Bob Weir, Humidity & a new case!

1/24/2016

Just a few random thoughts today as I wrap up my weekly lesson planning.

I’ve been following the dispatches from various sources at the big NAMM show (National Association of Musical Merchandisers) that wraps up today. I do wish I could attend that show at some point, if for no other reason than to hear some of pro staff demos that are a big part of the show. As you would expect I was especially interested in seeing what’s new from Martin and Taylor. Martin seems to be the winner in terms of interesting new guitars. Their -17 series looks very nice and I listened to a couple You Tube videos demonstrating their new line. It seems well thought out. You can also see the influence of guitarists wanting more in Martin’s line with cut-away bodies. That new cut-away OM-28 with enhanced electronics really caught my eye. The new John Lennon limited edition D-28 is a bit over the top in bling but it sure sounds nice, on the videos anyway.

Taylor has a few new models but nothing that made me drool. My guess is that they will keep issuing drool-worthy fall and spring limited edition models. Bob Taylor has never been one to sit still when it comes to innovations.

Although there weren’t a lot of online images, Eastman looks like it will continue to be the premier maker from China. They continue to bring out understated, elegant looking instruments but their pricing in the upper end is definitely bumping into Martin and Taylor territory. A few of my students play Eastman guitars and I have to say every one I’ve tried has been very impressive.

I also noted than many of the acoustic guitar makers, both here and abroad are jumping on the torrified or “aged” top bandwagon. I’ve only played a couple with this technology (both Martins) and I think the heat-curing process of the wood before it’s used in construction makes a lot of sense. And those Martins sounded excellent, exhibiting a mature sound that is what torrifiying is all about. Time will tell if the imports benefit from the process – or if they will hold together in the long run. Until recently anyway, many of the foreign makers were very good at imitating the cosmetics of premium American guitars but less successful in their results in terms of sound and longevity.

On a much more local note, I am doing what could be a dangerous experiment with humidification in my studio. The generally accepted number for relative humidity for acoustic guitar is about 45%, which is problematic in the winter around here. I do have a humidifier in my studio that I run every day, and also use sound hole humidifiers in all my guitars. The issue is sound. Drier guitars just sound better than ones that are heavily humidified and there is no question the ones I own sound better when they are somewhat dry. So I’m allowing the humidity in my studio to stay in the 35% range. It is a crapshoot, for sure. If I walk into my studio and find a crack in one of my Martins or my Taylor or Guild I will know I screwed up. But for now anyway, the benefit of excellent sound is clouding my judgment I guess. If something bad does happen I will report it here. Or not, because I will be too embarrassed (!).
The other night I watched the excellent documentary about Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, “The Other One.” I saw the Dead a couple times back in the 1970s and I have to confess I was never a huge fan but I totally respect their place in American music. It was a fascinating movie, well worth watching even if you’re not a Dead fan. It intersperses Bob’s comments and dialogue about the band, its history and most of all his friendship with Jerry Garcia with lots of archival footage. Musically speaking, the best past for me was the last five minutes or so which showed him in his home studio with another guitarist I did not recognize playing an acoustic version of one of his songs. It was great, very adventurous without the rambling, unfocused playing that characterizes some of his work. He also seems to be in a very good place, both physically and mentally and has a wonderful family who obviously loves and admires him. A true survivor of a time and place that claimed many. See it if you can.

I bit the bullet and ordered a new case to use on my upcoming annual trip to the Keys, a Hiscox Liteflite II. I breaks my cheap Yankee heart to pay full retail for my music toys but there didn’t seem to be any options. I have decided that I will check the guitar I decide to take (either a Martin or a Taylor) rather than take a lesser guitar as I have in the past (and been disappointed) or take a chance on getting a better guitar on board the plane with me. The Hiscox is supposed to be excellent. If I win the lottery between now and then I might spring for a Carlton, but my guess is that is not going to happen – ha. Again, I will report the results here. Or not.

Peace & good music,
Gene

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The March of Time

1/20/2016

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In my previous post I talked about the challenges of teaching younger students and things they have to overcome to succeed on the guitar. Today I want to address some of the issues older players deal with. I count myself in that group so this is not just observational!

As with most things physical in nature, playing the guitar doesn’t get any easier as we get older. It is very frustrating to have the will and understanding of what we want to do musically but our fingers just won’t respond to commands to the extent needed. I see this on almost a daily basis with some of my students and although sometimes we can laugh it off, occasionally a student will get very frustrated and even angry or depressed. I do my very best to offer both encouragement and every tip I can think of to mitigate those feelings.

Specifically, the biggest frustration seems to be with lack of clarity of sound. With men that often comes from having wide fingers that almost inevitably touch adjacent strings on their fretting hand and dampen the sound. Anyone who’s lucky enough to have fairly narrow fingers (as I do) has a better time of it but that doesn’t mean there’s no hope for a guy with “fat fingers.” Correct technique is absolutely vital, i.e., dropping the wrist, keeping the tip of the thumb parallel to the second (middle) finger, arching the fingers and using the tips only, unless you’re playing a barre chord with your first finger of course. Many men want to use their hand strength in a way that is more appropriate for holding a baseball bat or an axe. But it all comes from the downward pressure of the fingertips, not the upward pressure of the inside of the hand. That is a tough one for men understand and conquer, especially older men in my experience.

Women often display anther issue, which is overall strength, or a lack of. Without getting into a whole cultural argument of why this is, most women do not have the experience of pressing down as hard as they can with their finger tips as a man might whose every day job requires similar action. So while often times women have a better immediate understanding of the importance of arching the fingers and using tips only – they just can’t do it. In the beginning, anyway. It may take longer for a woman to build up this unfamiliar strength than a man and it doesn’t get any easier as our years advance. Plus – for all of us – it hurts!

Flexibility has to enter the equation. This is why many older women go to yoga classes (are you listening, guys?!) but unfortunately there aren’t too many yoga classes that focus on our hands, or none that I know about anyway. A few of my students have benefited from exercising their hands with a small, soft ball that can be squeezed and released. Some guitar shops and online retailers sell ones that are specifically designed for guitarists. I can’t testify to their effectiveness but I often recommend the purchase of a “Pinky” ball, which is a small, semi-soft foam ball used in kid’s sports. A tennis ball is sometimes mentioned but those things don’t have the proper amount of “give” and are probably not as effective as the others I mentioned. The beauty of this type of hand exercise for both strength and flexibility is that is inexpensive and can be done almost subconsciously as we watch TV. Try it!

But there is no denying some of the realities of aging. One of them may be arthritis. That is what finally ended my dad’s drumming (although he was able to play the guitar almost until the end of his life) and I am just beginning to notice hints of it in a couple of my fingers. This is scary, for sure. Fortunately, as I understand it, there are ever more effective medications available for arthritis. That is encouraging. For my part, a couple ibuprofens usually do the trick. Time will tell if that is the case in the years to come.

Another that I deal with and many others do too is Renaud’s Disease. The cause is definitive: exposure to cold. Renaud’s is not just simple numbness that disappears in a couple minutes. One or usually more of my fingers get totally numb for up to a half hour if I’m careless about exposure to air or water that is less than 40F degrees. I’ve tried all the well known remedies including shaking out my hands, doing a “windmill” rotation with my arms to increase the blood flow etc. but the only things that work for sure are making certain I avoid exposure and I’ve also begun using the small throw-away chemical hand warmers on a daily basis, keeping them in my pockets for immediate use as needed. But wait – there is another solution. Move to Florida. Or the Caribbean. OK, I’m working on that!

As I said in the beginning, these are things I see on almost daily basis. But I firmly believe that the march of time does NOT have to result in putting the guitar away. Look at jazz great Bucky Pizzarelli – he just turned 90 years of age and can still swing with the best of ‘em. I guess there needs to be some level of acceptance of what we are and where we can go. For my part, and this is no brag, it’s a fact, I’m playing better now than I ever have. Or maybe it’s just more satisfying.

Peace & good music,
Gene

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The GEMO Factor

1/14/2016

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Every once in a while I try to take a step back and look at my guitar teaching successes and failures. I think it’s really important to do this although the challenge is to find the balance between goals, expectations, motivations, and ego. For the purpose of this entry I’ll refer to those things as the GEMO Factor. All those things influence both my students and myself. Many, many variables are in play. That’s what makes the process both rewarding and sometimes frustrating for all concerned.

The first thing I have to never forget is that my students are with me because they want to be, not because the have to be. Usually, anyway. This may sound like a small thing but it’s incredibly important. Where things can get iffy is teaching youngsters. Quite naturally they compare guitar lessons to going to school, which is something they HAVE to do. If they are good students in school they will most likely succeed in their guitar lessons. In their minds, doing homework is naturally compared to practicing although the pay-off for working on a musical instrument is quite different than learning math facts and writing techniques. Most of the time there is not the straight line that a kid gets from doing his homework correctly when compared to practicing an instrument. It’s a curvy line at best, or more like peaks and valleys along the journey to a far away mountaintop. Less successful are kids who shirk homework and maybe have found a way to avoid it and still pass their tests. That type of kid will probably not succeed on an instrument, sad to say. Just wanting to play the guitar is the starting point but that alone is not enough.

I happen to have a student like that right now. I confess that it is very difficult for me to stay positive with her when she shows up week after week unprepared and quite obviously having never picked up her guitar at all between lessons. I’ve tried every trick I know to motivate her, reminding her over and over again that I do not expect perfection and neither should she but I do expect some evidence of effort made. My last resort with youngsters like her is to tell them as gently as possible that they are wasting their parent’s money if they are not going to practice. I used to add that they were also wasting my time but I came to realize that was an ego statement on my part and served no purpose so I bite my tongue on that one now! If that doesn’t work I will take the final step and speak to the parents, advising them that guitar lessons with me are probably not a good idea at this point. Being a parent myself, I realize there may be other factors that I know nothing about. This is why I never, ever display anger or displeasure to a young student who just won’t practice. I certainly don’t want to be lumped together with whatever it is that is causing stress I know nothing about. I want each and every one of my students to enjoy the learning experience regardless of their age.

When it comes to adults though, things can get quite a bit more complicated. Adjustments to my own GEMO Factor are going on all the time. This is vital because each student comes to me with a different mindset but getting back to my first point, without exception they are with me because they WANT to be. This why I spend a couple hours every weekend doing lesson planning for the following week for each individual student.

One of the biggest things I have to remind myself is to listen, not just to what the student is playing but also what they are saying. In my other life as the editor of a fishing magazine I knew a writer who taught me the value of that. He is a crusty guy, as salty as they come and he wears his views on just about everything right on his sleeve for all to see. But in casual conversation Charley also has the amazing gift of being able to listen intently to what the other person is saying. I hope I learned that skill from him. This gets to the “E” in my GEMO Factor. Although I have to assume a student is with me because he or she assumes I know way more about playing the guitar than they do I have to always read between the lines with what is said at the lesson. This helps me find the pace of an individual’s learning potential. Coming off as a hotshot guitar player (as sadly some local teachers are wont to do) with the Knowledge of the Ages to impart is just silly, in my view. I’ve seen the results of those types of student/teacher relationships and they are hardly ever good.

So the current state of affairs in my lessons appears to be….. pretty good. My schedule of available spots is almost always full and many of my students have been with me a long time, so I must be doing something right! However, I vow to never stop trying to see the big picture and teach accordingly.

Peace & good music,
Gene

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On guitar collecting

1/1/2016

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I think all of us go through a phase in our lives when collecting items gives us great joy. Youngsters often start with sports cards or perhaps coins or stamps. They are fun to peruse and lead to flights of imagination – where did that coin or stamp go before it came to me? How cool does my sports hero look in his uniform, close up?

We guitarists sometimes take the collecting thing to a whole different level. Begin by the fact that our guitars cost way more than (most!) coins, stamps or sports cards. So unless our pockets are extremely deep our guitar collecting is limited by personal economic realities. This is not always the case however. I’ve met a few guitarists who weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination but had a very impressive bunch of guitars. Usually though someone with lots of high-end guitars has the resources to feed their obsession. I met a guy recently who quite modestly described his collection of Martins and Gibsons but it was pretty obvious by his clothes and demeanor that he could afford to keep buying very nice instruments. Was I jealous? Ummm….yeah, you could say that!

He is one type of guitar collector: one who loves and appreciates relatively recent American made instruments and has no particular interest in “vintage” stuff. I respect that because I feel that we are in something of a golden age of guitar making right now. Even the average Martin, Taylor or Gibson coming off the assembly line today is in many ways a better instrument than some of what was made in the good old days. I’ve written about this before – just because a Martin made 50 years ago was made of Brazilian rosewood doesn’t necessarily make it a great sounding guitar. Because of the hand-made nature of the guitars of yesteryear compared to the more consistent nature of the manufacturing process today there was a lot of variation in both sound and quality of the guitars coming from the famous makers. Sure, there are gems from the old days, many of them, and they have price tags to match their rarity and wonderful sound. But there are some real dogs out there too.

The serious collectors of vintage guitars know this but often they look past the overall condition of their guitars (the latest way to describe a vintage instrument that has lived a rough and tumble life with battle scars to show is said to have “serious mojo” and this kind of cracks me up). Sometimes they even overlook guitars in their collections that have dull and lifeless sound because of the rarity of the instrument. OK, I get that I guess but if I play a vintage guitar that is just old and tired sounding I am never tempted to drain my bank account to acquire it. But that’s just me, I guess.

Even more curious is the recent phenomenon of collecting guitars (especially electrics) that were curiosities or beginner instruments back in the 1950s and 60s. About 20 years ago I had a young student who played electric guitar and was quite proud of his collection of strange stuff, guitars made by companies like Kay, Eco, Standell, Stella, and others. Now, I’m old enough to remember when these guitars sold for about $100, give or take, and that was precisely what they were worth. Many of them had a dizzying array of buttons, knobs and switches, many of which didn’t affect the sound much at all. But they sure did look cool! Problem was, the necks often had the profile of a baseball bat, the intonation was terrible, the tuners could not keep the guitar in tune, the bridges tended to break being made of cheap pot metal, and worst of all the pick-ups were prone to horrendous feedback (assuming you could stand the sound of them in the first place!) because they were essentially cheap microphones. I saw a music special with Elvis Costello a couple years ago and he was playing one of these types of guitars and at one point he actually held the guitar body up to his face and sang into the pick-up!

But there’s a hint of why those weird clunkers have suddenly risen from the dead. Some famous musicians are using them – so they must be good, right?! To a lesser degree this is happening with acoustics from the same era but thankfully most musicians come to their senses after buying a beat up old Kay or Silvertone and realize just why those things cost $50 in 1965. Old does NOT equate to good, most of the time. “Vintage” often just means just old, awful sounding and impossible to play these days, especially in places like Craigslist or Ebay.

OK, but you’re missing the point, Gene, I can almost hear you saying. Some people just collect guitars they LIKE for no logical reason at all. That young man with all those weird electrics bought them because they were (at that time) inexpensive and well, cool. And today I guarantee if he still has his collection it is worth three or four times what he paid for it twenty years ago.

Collect guitars based on your wants, needs and budget. Just know that there will always be another one in your future, maybe not something you were expecting. And keep in mind that wonderful quote I heard on one of the guitar forums a few years ago when one member was bemoaning a guitar that “got away.” One of the other members chimed in: Don’t worry, guitars are like buses in the city. If you miss one, another will come along in fifteen minutes!

Peace & good music,
Gene

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NAMM, Bob Weir, Humidity & a new case!

The March of Time

The GEMO Factor

On guitar collecting

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