Open question for the more "experienced" folk.

[Leumas]

Here goes. I'm 29, my guitar experience starts in about 1993. I've always had light guage strings, easy tuners, straplocks, decent affordable amps, home recording gear, and a lot of other conveniences that the older crowd may not have had.

I'm always interested in hearing stories about how things used to be. I know we've got a bunch of people who started playing in the 60's here, and the 50's, maybe a few who started in the 40's....what was it like getting guitars, gear, etc. and what do you think is better or worse now about the complete "guitar experience?"

Thanks!

 

[monroe]

What are "easy tuners"?

 

[coldsteal2]

yea the first strings we had in the 60's were like
cables you built up huge caluses in no time
really had a hard time bending those old strings.
Then i happend to read in "Hit Parader" about the strings
the best guitarists were using "Slinkys" and things got
a whole lot better on guitar, luckily my first amp in a band was
a Fender bassman so i had good amps from the begining.

 

[lp_junkie]

I know personally having started playing in the 70's that the technical skill level of guitarists have gone up but the feeling has gone away there are few guitarists that absolutely blow me away like they did back in the late 70s and early 80's.

When I first got into home recording we were still using tape, either 2 in or the cassette porta studio types, but then it made you organize your work better to utilize the limited capabilities of the equipment. So I think that having started in analog and moving into the digital recording realm I get better sounds on the tracks initially and don't have to spend a lot of time "fixing it in the mix" so to speak.
I am a much better engineer and producer than I used to be, and now I do all my own sessions.

My equipment was always top notch, Marshall amps, Gibson guitars and now the Epis and MIJ guitars so my gear tastes have changed a little over the years but I still use a Les Paul as my main guitar.

I can remember when replacement parts were hard to find and expensive...............

 

[Leumas]

What are "easy tuners"?

The little battery powered tuners you can pick up for $20. I apologize for my vernacular. I actually only got one about 4 years ago, until then I tuned to an A note on a piano.

 

[AXE]

I was cool even back then

 

[lp_junkie]

Axe brave of you to post your Drivers License photo here.

 

[AXE]

Didn't need one. I had the original SUV.

The Ford Bronto ...

 

[Makeitstop]

My first 'good' electric guitar (a Fender Mustang) had flat-wounds on it when I got it. That led me to seek out other strings, because I hated the way they played and sounded. I found Fender Rock'N'Roll gauge strings.

That made a big difference.

I started really getting serious about guitar at about the time of Hendrix and Cream getting on the scene, and none of the amps we used had any type of pre-amp. There were fuzz boxes available, and that's what you had to use. I remember buying a fuzz tone kit from Lafayette Electronics and building it. I think it cost me 13 bucks. Later on I started using an LPB-1 power booster from Electro-Harmonix. They cost about 7 bucks new, and you could buy them made to plug into your amp, or into your guitar! I used the ones that plugged into the guitar - it looked like this:

Effects in general were scarce - you could get an Echoplex for delay, but they were kind of expensive. Choruses and flangers didn't exist at the time - 'flanging' was a term that described running the same program material on two tape decks, feeding them both to a mono signal, and applying gentle pressure to the 'flange' of a tape reel on one machine to create the flanging effect by throwing the competing signals out of phase. You couldn't do it live in any practical sense.

I look at my Line 6 PODs and sometimes think about when I bought my first flanger stomp box in the mid-70s. Effects, like everything else, have come a long way since then.

I prefer living in the future, personally.

- D

 

[SiriusAbbott]

I'm 45

started on "Black Diamond" barbedwire strings and picks as thin as paper
Spent a LOT of time in mom and pop music stores,they never had the good stuff (I didnt do Fender back then) so early on realized the used gear had the "voodoo" have spent the rest of my life in pawnshops,and at flea markets,swap meets,and garage sales
used Les Pauls were out of my price range generally @ $450-500 (1976)
so I bought the cheap stuff....Firebirds,and later Explorers
heard a rumor that Billy Gibbons used a Peso as a pick...so I tried a quarter
spent 6 months learning the intro to "Little Wing"
was at one point in teenage time concerned that carrying my heavy bastard of an Explorer in its HSC would damage my hand/wrist/arm
thought the Floyd Rose tremolo system deserved some kind of Nobel or scientific prize
I look at the stuff we have today and,well,other than the axes....its all Star Trek now baby

 

[Leumas]

This is great stuff guys, thanks. LPJ, I spent years cutting my teeth on a 4 track tape recorder, I'm by no means a pro, but it did give me a much greater understanding than if I had gone to digital first.

 

[Makeitstop]

This is great stuff guys, thanks. LPJ, I spent years cutting my teeth on a 4 track tape recorder, I'm by no means a pro, but it did give me a much greater understanding than if I had gone to digital first.

When I first started recording demos, a friend of mine had a sound-on-sound machine - meaning it was a stereo deck which let you record on one track, then hear playback of the left track while you recorded on the right. We then got a second deck, played back both sides of the sound-on-sound onto one track of the second deck, switched tapes to the SOS and recorded a third track. And so on.

Primitive, time-consuming and pretty confusing. I still have some of those demos, and the sheer thickness of sound on them still blows me away, even though the results were the definition of 'lo-fi.'

- D

 

[coldsteal2]

I'm 45

started on "Black Diamond" barbedwire strings and picks as thin as paper
Spent a LOT of time in mom and pop music stores,they never had the good stuff (I didnt do Fender back then) so early on realized the used gear had the "voodoo" have spent the rest of my life in pawnshops,and at flea markets,swap meets,and garage sales
used Les Pauls were out of my price range generally @ $450-500 (1976)
so I bought the cheap stuff....Firebirds,and later Explorers
heard a rumor that Billy Gibbons used a Peso as a pick...so I tried a quarter
spent 6 months learning the intro to "Little Wing"
was at one point in teenage time concerned that carrying my heavy bastard of an Explorer in its HSC would damage my hand/wrist/arm
thought the Floyd Rose tremolo system deserved some kind of Nobel or scientific prize
I look at the stuff we have today and,well,other than the axes....its all Star Trek now baby

Yep Black Diamond strings, they would make
great weapons for Mafia Hitmen hahaha

 

[Cookie-boy]

No gizzmo's. You witnessed talent in its rawest, undiluted state.

A guy would turn up to a small London venue with a Strat' and a VOX AC30, plug in and blow you away. Maybe a little distortion unit but that was that. I remember the WEM Copycat coming out! Fuck me.

I'm not blaming technology, I think it's awesome, but I think it has robbed a modern generation of "the feel". They're quick, fuck me they're lightening quick, but a Kossoff style player is not something they aspire to.

I remember being shown the first Roland effects pedals. We tried them before their release onto the UK market. We were using Coloursound gear at the time. Jumping jehosafats! They were like off another planet! The Phaser was light years ahead of anything else around.

 

[Jody]

My first amp was a "Peavey duce" (anyone remember those)
A tube combo with 2/12" speakers and built in phase.weighed a ton.
First guitar was a (before lawsuit) Hondo II Les paul Honetburst.
I used (crappy)G.H.S. boomers,broke them all the time..
But they were better than the "Fender bullets". Man those sucked..
And I still have my Electro-Harmonix Muff Fuzz...
I remember when the peg winders came out...

 

[Lyrica]

i grew up in a studio, in the late seventies. my dad started with an sm57 and a teac two track reel to reel. he migrated to a pioneer 8 track reel to reel and man i wonder how the hell anyone managed to do any decent splicing with that kind of machine.

anyway, when i started writing/recording in about '93 there were digital models available, but the 4 track cassette recorders were a lot cheaper. so we got this fostex and learned a lot about recording with that ping ponging to get more tracks, plugging into a home stereo two track cassette recorder to get the "mix' fond memories. of course i wouldn't trade my tascam 2488 digital portastudio for any of that lol. digital is just so much easier, and quicker. my 450$ unit can do more than my dad's whole 30k studio could.

of course, it's not the equipment that makes the music work

 

[DRF]

The old days were sparse...if you can't play on at least a 1970's higher tech level nowadays,your lazy. The resources now are obscene.

I used to look in guitar mag pics to see what chords the guitar heros fingers were making.

 

[hipofutura]

Back in the day I used to walk 10 miles to band practice, barefoot, in the snow, up hill both ways. In those days guitars were made of wood and men were made of iron.

Odd, how primitive things were 40 years ago and how improved they are now, yet we would give our left nut for guitars and amps from that era.

 

[Jody]

The old days were sparse...if you can't play on at least a 1970's higher tech level nowadays,your lazy. The resources now are obscene.

I used to look in guitar mag pics to see what chords the guitar heros fingers were making.

I did the same thing with the fingers.......
And to this day I can look at a live picture of Rhoads and tell you what song he's playing.............

 

[John Vasco]

I remember being shown the first Roland effects pedals. We tried them before their release onto the UK market. We were using Coloursound gear at the time. Jumping jehosafats! They were like off another planet! The Phaser was light years ahead of anything else around.

Right, ye bastard, Cookie-boy! To get that kind of advance use of a pedal, you musta been a big name in a big group. So answer the feckin' question: who are you? You have let your guard slip on this one. Fess up, bloke!