May 14th 2013 Lunch Report

Instead of time travelling like I did yesterday, today's Lunch Report will be totally linear, starting with getting up at 5:30, doing sit-ups, and changing strings on my Legacy. While the strings were off the guitar, I removed some of the plastic tubing around the pickup screws to get the new Seymour Duncan SSL-6 pickup closer to the strings to get it louder and drive my fuzz. Right now the neck pickup is way louder.

Lunch was Dominio's Pizza provided by the company for a lunch meeting…no free advertising for them.

After leaving work early (whereas normally I leave late) I drove into Tokyo for a job screening, followed by my first and only rehearsal with my the full band for Friday's gig. If that sounds crazy, I know and you're right. Even under normal circumstances, 3.5 hours is an unreasonable amount of time for learning 16 tunes in three hours. Circumstances were not usual, though. After losing about 15 minutes trying to diagnose a technical problem which turned out to be and old patch cable on my pedalboard, I learned the bass player's flight back from Korea was delayed...and then he went to the wrong studio. When he finally arrived, it turns out that he didn't really know the tunes. At this point, it was obvious that getting upset wasn't going to be productive. So I just smiled, and made the best of the time we had left. This means we won't be playing Too High, Have You Met Miss Jones? or Space Oddity on Friday but I didn't really want to play those anyway. And if we can extend the form sufficiently on the remaining 13, it means I can drop Fly Like an Eagle from the set, too.

I got home after 1am, so tired I almost fell asleep on the couch without finishing this Lunch Report, but fortunately I was more hungry than tired. So I made some instant noodles, just in time for the end of lunch-hour back home on the East Coast.

So let me ask you, how close are the pickups to the strings on your G&L? For years mine were flush with the pickguard because I saw that in a famous picture of Jimi's guitar, but not they're as close as I can get them without sounding weird.

And if you had to play a set of 12 covers THIS Friday, I'd like to know what would those songs be.

getting the pups too close to the strings have a lot of adverse affects. i set the bridge pup for optimum tone, and set the others to balance the volume properly.

as far as songs, i don't really care, i'll learn any 12 by friday. if up to me, i'll do cliffs of dover, trilogy sweet, tumeni notes, loner, to name a few.

That's tough, not a lot of time to work things out at all. I did a similar thing a couple of months ago when and it was a pretty similar story - the bass player didn't learn his parts properly, or he learnt them in the wrong key. We tackled some unusual material, mainly songs that the other guys didn't know, so it was a recipe for disaster. I've never felt so pathetic on stage as when we started "Pet Sounds", the Beach Boys instrumental. Imagine a 3 piece band playing this with the bass only hitting the occasional correct note and forgetting the structure completely, relying on me jog his memory. He bought a round of drinks afterwards to make up for it.
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as far as songs, i don't really care, i'll learn any 12 by friday. if up to me, i'll do cliffs of dover, trilogy sweet, tumeni notes, loner, to name a few.

You'd be better of learning "Gangnam Style". People ask for it all the f*&%ng time . Old blues stuff is the go. Take a song like "Baby Please Don't Go" - one chord, a damn cool riff, and easy to remember words. Are there any Japanese classics you could do? I'd love to hear what the Japanese pop scene of the '60s sounded like.

I set my pickups pretty close, maybe around 5mm at the bridge. That's where they sound best to me.

And if you had to play a set of 12 covers THIS Friday, I'd like to know what would those songs be.

I'd tune my guitar to open G, learn any Rolling Stones song from the last 40 years, then you'll immediately be able to play at least another 11 Stones songs with minimal effort.

As far as pickup position goes, my Legacy gets nice and loud with the pickups close to the strings, but it also brings out a trebley harshness. I've adjusted them back down again and am much happier. The neck p/u is just above the pickguard and the others are adjusted to match the output of the neck. Adjusting the bridge p/u away from the strings took away the annoying ice-pick effect and made it much more useable IMO.

other than my ASAT Classic , I have never really played with height much , my ASAT had the adjusting screws back out on 4 of the 6 strings , but I don't gig or anything like that so I have never needed to "get everything" from the guitar , with the adjusting screws backed out closer to the strings it had a "ring" to it

12 songs in a week ??? ... are you guy's nuts ?? ..... ha ha , it takes me about a month to learn a song all the way through , but I'm new to playing lead , I could chord jam a lot quicker

And if you had to play a set of 12 covers THIS Friday, I'd like to know what would those songs be.

I'd tune my guitar to open G, learn any Rolling Stones song from the last 40 years, then you'll immediately be able to play at least another 11 Stones songs with minimal effort.

thanks for the tip ...lol

I know it's probably a bad habit, but I set my PU's very close to the strings.

I remember in the Hellecasters, my ASAT Special's strings were so close to the strings that I had to put a small piece of electrical tape over my rear PU's bass strings so that the pressure from my R. hand resting on the bridge wouldn't send a clicking sound thru my amp whenever the low E would accidentally touch the PU pole piece. Ah - youthful folly...

That aside, I still set my PU's close to the strings to increase signal to noise. Not so much with my WR Z-3's (they're already pretty hot & very quiet), but with virtually every single coil guitar I own. Signal to noise.

My 2¢
Will

I do not have my pickups real close but adjust the bridge and then balance between them. I was adjusting my basses last night. The neck relief on both of them has changed recently. My L-2500 was starting to buzz a bit. Speaking of pickup height, the low B is sometimes weaker than the rest of the strings. Last night I did an experiment and I had two cabinets plugged in, a 15 cab and 2 10's. The high strings really come through in the 10 but the E and low B become much louder through the 15. I know guys who have adjusted the pickup to try and resolve that and it is just a function of speaker size. The 15 really handles the lows.

I was working on our set lists last night and I would suggest that you use some variety in you list of 12 songs. We are a cover band and variety is seems to make it a lot more interesting. -- Darwin

I do not have my pickups real close but adjust the bridge and then balance between them. I was adjusting my basses last night. The neck relief on both of them has changed recently. My L-2500 was starting to buzz a bit. Speaking of pickup height, the low B is sometimes weaker than the rest of the strings. Last night I did an experiment and I had two cabinets plugged in, a 15 cab and 2 10's. The high strings really come through in the 10 but the E and low B become much louder through the 15. I know guys who have adjusted the pickup to try and resolve that and it is just a function of speaker size. The 15 really handles the lows.

I was working on our set lists last night and I would suggest that you use some variety in you list of 12 songs. We are a cover band and variety is seems to make it a lot more interesting. -- Darwin

if you calculate the frequency length of the low b, you'll realize that the wave won't even fit in your room. the 10's don't go low enough in freq response as well. you also need 10x the power to have the low b at equal volume as the other strings. the speaker size has something to do with it, but excursion is a bigger factor. i doubt you are running the high excursion barefaced speakers though.


"When confronted with a statement that speaker diameter and tone / frequency response are independent the sceptic will ask, "Well why are PA subwoofers big speakers like 18" and why are hi-fi tweeters tiny 1" domes?" Good point, well presented!
The creation of loud fat bass

If you want to create high SPL low frequency output you have to move large quantities of air (this is termed Volume displacement or Vd). This requires a large cone area and high maximum cone excursion, which can be achieved in one of two ways - you can use a relatively small cone area but with greater cone excursion or vice versa. In the real world the best route is to have plenty of both. Let's assume that you can use 8", 10", 12", 15" or 18" woofers, that they all have 10mm Xmax and you need a total Vd of 4000cc. An 8" woofer is roughly 200 sq.cm, a 10" is 350 sq.cm, a 12" is 550 sq.cm, a 15" is 850 sq.cm, and an 18" is 1500 sq.cm. So you could use twenty 8"s, twelve 10"s, eight 12"s, five 15"s or three 18"s.

So the first thing we see is that unless each 18" costs more than six times as much as each 8" then it makes economic sense to go with the bigger driver. Furthermore, the larger the nominal diameter of the speaker then the easier it is to design a suspension system (that's the cone surround and the voice coil spiders) that can handle high excursion and remain linear, so in the real world within the proportional cost bracket the larger drivers are likely to have greater Xmax, which means that you need even more of the smaller drivers than their mere cone area suggests."

I tend to set the pickups a bit farther from the strings. Too close results in less sustain, generally.

As far as low B goes, most amps aren't reproducing it, and neither are most cabinets. So you get a neutered fundamental and mostly the overtones that suggest you are hearing it. 15s are not something I like that much, too loose on the go, the definition of 10s is much preferred by me. Most bass amps start tapering off around 35-40 hz or something like that, if I recall correctly. The gear just isn't designed with going that low in mind.