Don't fret mate...or rather the reverse

Something I did not mention with the SG project was my choice of fret wire. For my own use I equip all my guitars with en-friggin-ormous frets…the widest and highest I can lay my paws on. I play blues rock and R and B and perform vicious string bends and wide fast vibrato….high frets allow me to ‘dig in’ under the string better. If was a jazzer or a regular player of complex ‘suspended pregnant eleventh half demented flattened wassername’ chords I would choose smaller lower wire as it would allow better intonation within a given chord shape and better open string to fretted string intonation…..As my technique has always been just on the creative side of brutal I stick to my ‘railway track’ frets!

SG gets a boner!

The single biggest cause of copy guitars and cheaper instruments in general not sounding as powerful as real Fenders or Gibsons is not weak pickups or duff wood, it this little beggar....


The humble and rather crap....cheap plastic nut. It sucks tone, stuffs up sustain and is as cool as a polyether anorak. I am going to replace this hunk of poo with a new nut made from a nice well aged bit of cow thigh bone. My supply of bone is our local pet shop. I buy a bone intended for fido, tantalise the cats with it for a while.....then boil the bejusus out of it for several hours..... leaving it to bleach out on our flat roof for a month or two.

Here I am cutting a blank from said bone.....music retailers will generously sell you a bone nut blank for six quid, I get about ten from a 99p bone!

Here I am using the old nut as a template to shape the new bone one, plus position and part cut the string slots. Some gutar repair men ponce about with graduated width nut slot files...I simply have a selection of junior hacksaw blades with some or all of the 'set' ground off of them. They do the same job and cost pence.
Here's the nut installed....
Note...the fret ends are still rough, the metallic blue is not cut back or clear coated...and in fact there's still loads to do. Will have fun choosing new hardware to replace the bust bits next week!

PLUG PLUG PLUG!

Here's a free plug for the place where I get most of my guitar hardware http://www.axesrus.com/
they've got loadsa stuff and deliver faster than a speeding fast thing.....

The SG

Shot the colour coat on the SG......in the parlance of the students in my place of work......well sweet innit....

Naughty...very very naughty!

The SG headstock is getting the Weasel once over...the victimised Vintage stringy-fixy-end has transmogrified into a relic 1960's Gibbo SG Special. I am making damn sure that there are elements on this guitar that scream fake in case I ever sell it...but this is a beware to all of you who buy guitars on Flea Bay, I can fake Gibbos and Fenders that you would never know didn't come from the good old US of A...don't fool yourself you could tell...you couldn't. I use 'the force' for good Luke...there are loads who can do what I do and will happily rip you off BEWARE!

Is it real or fake?

Sometimes there is a defining moment in your life….I had already had my brush with the 1970 IOW festival to whet my appetite to be a muso….It’s odd that fishing should lead to the other shaping event in my youth.

I fished in my early teens from the shore and from Sandown pier and I used to sneak of for a spot of underage drinking in the Blue Lagoon bars opposite the Pier while my folks thought I was casting my line upon the waters!

The Blue Lagoon was a real dive, occupying the floor above some seedy amusements and the floor below a dodgy nightclub called the Birdcage. It had a full length balcony covered in roaches and a largely leather clad biker clientèle but the music there was fantastic. The Mecanix played there regularly and their punk/pub rock versions of Whisky in the Jar and Cherry Red kept me riveted. I watched their guitarist like a hawk and modeled my emerging style on his. I started to devour LPs as fast as I could get them, and that was pretty fast. My parents dealt with a local cash and carry for their hardware business and it had a record section……I bought albums by the clash, the Vibrators, Dr Feelgood and just absorbed everything I could.

If anyone asks me my favorite guitar solo though after all those years it’s still Eric Bell's brilliant jewel in Whiskey in the Jar…..if you cover the song you play it as is, because you can’t improve on perfection…..even the mighty Metallica in their version, like the Mecanix all those years ago, leave the solo largely true to the original.

Eric Bell

My most embarrassing band: Loodaxe!

Finding a cool name for your band always used to be a problem. I remember drunken evenings after band practice back in the twilight of the seventies when we all dreamt of being the next Deep Purple and ‘breaking it’ big and we needed to find that ‘sweet’ name.

Colours seemed to figure large…..Silver Fox, Black Rose, Blue Pearl…..Barry’s Plastic Moon Hoppers….we thought of them all. The problem was that the singer with the band at the time, Dave the one eyed welder, wanted us called Bloodaxe…..ho hum….I still shudder at that. Mind you, he owned the PA and the van so Bloodaxe we became!

Our first major gig, in fact our first gig, was booked to be playing for Cowes (Isle of Wight) carnival, on Cowes seafront, on the back of a lorry. First of all they printed the flyers all wrong when they copied the band name off of Dave’s van…..The vinyl B had fallen off so all our pre-publicity had us listed as Loodaxe.

Come the day of the gig it poured with rain and we played nervously eying the rapidly filling canvas awning over our lorry bed. It finally gave way and our generator got swamped killing all the amps!

If I remember rightly I left the band shortly thereafter! Interestingly they soldiered on and under the singer’s influence blended the influences of heavy metal and Chaz and Dave to unbelievable effect…advertising themselves as exponents of rockney music and singing covers of Deep Purple and Sabbath in a gor-blimey accent!

'Ee's a got sum-oke on da waw-ter....aaaaaaand fire inna sky......ah!'