What first turned you on about Les Pauls?
They sound great period. The first time I saw somebody play one was Jimmy Page and then I heard Jeff Beck use one on Truth. Then, I heard someone play a Goldtop in a bar and I thought it was the sweetest sounding thing. Where do you find a guitar like that?
A couple years later that guy had to sell his equipment and offered me that very guitar for 300 bucks. It s the same one I use today. Now it has a Mighty Mouse on it. That was a bumper sticker I cut out and stuck on, then buried under 14 layers of lacquer. It s been there for 22 years now so it s not going anywhere.
So you still play your first Les Paul on-stage?
Yes, this is my Les Paul story. After I got a deal and had a chance to go on the road, I realized I had to get a second guitar in case I broke a string. So I went to a local shop that had some used and consignment guitars. They had a Goldtop that looked exactly like my first one and they were selling it for three-fitty. I bought it and had my two guitars.
Fast forward to 1978 and I m getting ready to go out on the road again and I m thinking, I use both of those guitars in the studio. What would happen if the equipment got destroyed or the truck got stolen or something.
Both of these guitars sound very, very similar, so I thought I could get just another back up and leave one of them at home.
By then we were a big deal so I sent a guitar roadie down to the music store. He bought a beautiful brand new sunburst Les Paul and brought it to sound check. I picked it up and started playing and said, This isn t anything like my Les Paul. It s not like my neck.
The roadie said, Of course it is, they re all the same. So I grabbed mine and we compared, and the new one was much, much thinner. The guitar tech was surprised. He said he didn t know there were different model necks for Les Pauls.
He went back and played every Les Paul in the store, about 50 of them, and none of them were right. Somebody at the store told him that in 68 there was a reissue that had a fat neck, and they only made it for about six months. It turns out both of the used guitars I bought were built within six months of each other in 1968 and both had the fat neck, and I couldn t find another like it. Apparently the original 57s also have that very deep neck.
Have you tried the Custom Shop Reissue 57 Goldtop?
I have not. I will go check it out. I still don t have a back-up guitar that I can use, and I don t like bringing both of these guitars on the road with me, although I do that. The differences between my two guitars are very slight.
You re famous for having gigantic tone. How much of that comes from your Les Pauls?
They do have a huge sound. It s tough to quantify that. I ve compared them in great depth to lots of other guitars, and I couldn t even put that into technical terms. But the sound is big with lots of character, and if you want a chunky sound it s there or if you want a pure, crystal clear tone it does that. I just don t get that range from other guitars.
What did you have before you got your first Les Paul?
I had a really cool Yamaha beginner s electric guitar made out of balsa wood. It weighed about a pound-and-a-half. I would play it though a transistor radio and that sucker would feed back, but it was quite useless for a real stage with actual amplifiers.
Other than the Mighty Mouse sticker, are your Les Pauls stock?
No. I do a lot of messing around. That year and model came with the big soap bar P-90s pickups, which I love, but I had a lot of trouble with them in the 70s. The lighting systems back then made everything buzz. They put out tremendous amounts of RF. I had to take out the bridge pickups and install humbucking pickups so I could get on stage.
On one guitar I have a tuning device that changes the tension on all the strings by the same amount, so I can go up or down incrementally. We do a lot of outdoor playing so temperatures affect the strings. With a quick one-knob adjustment I can bring the guitar up or down a half step. It is purely a mechanical system. I was going to build an automated tuning system for the market a one-button system that would tune all your strings to a programmed, pre-determined tension. But in general my Les Pauls stay in tune so well I never bothered to develop it.
I have another device that lifts the string so there s very little friction up at the nut, and a custom built roller bridge so there s no friction at the bridge. ebony porn
It s mostly things that make the guitar easier for me to play.
The open strings on a guitar are never going to be quite perfectly in tune. And what size string you use and some other factors affect this, but in general the G is often a little flat, the high E will often be sharp. So I changed the shape of the nut and added pieces of steel to the neck to lift the string. I even have a fake fret behind the second fret on the high E string, so when I play an open D chord the F-sharp will be a little bit flat, which puts it into mathematically perfect pitch for a D chord.