Summary: One Year of Online Guitar Research

[mr22]

From March 2022 to May 2023 I did an extensive research project to see what could be learned about guitar and guitar playing from the Internet. I read forums, I watched videos, I read blogs, et cetera.

What did I discover?

(1) The Electric Guitar Internet is an informational wasteland that is obsessed with gear. If you want information, you would be better off going to a library.

The Electric Guitar Internet (EGI) might be one of the least insightful, least useful places on the entire Internet. If you value your time, then reading the EGI might always be a bad idea.

Statistically, the EGI is a bad place to learn about the science or art of guitar playing. To a first approximation, the EGI only talks about gear. I suspect that less than 5% of conversations on the EGI talk about music, performing, acoustic science, recording engineering, or music theory. If you want to learn about music, you would probably be better off limiting yourself to YouTube channels that focus on lessons and performances. Don't click on anything related to gear, or else your recommendations feed will be poisoned.

What people say about gear is usually not even wrong. (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong for what I mean.) Most assertions cannot be verified or tested.

Reading most forums is like looking at a stack of 1000 graded multiple-choice math tests and seeing that the median score is 5%. If there is no penalty for guessing, someone should be able to score 20-25% on a multiple choice test. If that's the case, how could the median score be

5%?

It's simple.

• People who know what they're talking about don't spend time on forums.
• The marketers on those forums know the truth, but they need to say the opposite for marketing reasons.
• I suspect that many people on forums know that most claims about 'tone' are hoaxes, but they they stay silent for the same reason that magicians don't reveal their tricks: it would spoil the stagecraft if people knew what they were actually seeing.

 And the other people on the forums? They tend to repeat the urban legends and marketing copy.

If you want to learn about electric guitar, the Internet is almost certainly not the right place to go. Instead, you should go to a library, talk to a recording engineer, or ask for advice from someone who fixes guitars (but does not sell them).

There are some high points on the EGI. This forum is one of them. The Electrical Audio Forums are also good (probably because many of the people commenting there are recording engineers). Electrosmash.com is good. And Freestompboxes has some insightful things to say. I like Jim Lill's YouTube channel and "Dave's World of Fun Stuff" (he's a luthier who videotapes his repair jobs -- language is NSFW or for kids).

(2) Virtually every video you see is an advertisement.

Producing videos is hard work. In the long run, people won't do it for free.

I have a conjecture about successful YouTube channels. If the video shows someone doing something that is not their regular day job, then it is an advertisement. For example, if a video channel shows a man doing honeybee removals, and that's his day job, then the video is not an advertisement. If the video shows a college professor lecturing, then it's not an advertisement. And if the video shows a luthier fixing guitars, and that's their day job, then it's not an advertisement. (If the person is filming infomercials about guitar gear and that is their day job, then of course, the video is an advertisement.)

There is nothing wrong with advertisements. However, there is something wrong with people doing gear reviews who don't disclose that they advertisements.

One big law of the Internet is that if you're not paying for the service, then you're the product. The same is true for YouTube videos.

(3) Almost no one has data to back up their claims, because personal experience is invalid data.

People on the Internet make plenty of claims about 'tone' or sound. Virtually none of them are backed up by any evidence. People will claim that "they can hear it." They almost certainly have not put themselves through double-blind tests to determine whether they're right. Although they may strongly believe that "they can hear it" and they can remember what they heard, they're probably wrong.

When it comes to sound, personal experience is usually not valid data.

Check out any reputable scientific research on the question "can people hear the difference between A and B?" You will find that any careful science done on audio A/B testing assumes the following.

• People can't remember sounds for very long -- a few seconds, max.
• People are extremely suggestible, especially when non-auditory cues are present.
• A double-blind testing situation is mandatory to prevent the experimenter from tipping off the subject.
• A and B must be volume matched or else two identical recordings can sound different.

Constructing an experiment that takes all of these things into account is very, very hard. This means that you can probably disregard anyone's claims about A/B comparisons such as "ash is brighter than mahogany, I can hear the difference."

When YouTube channels do careful back-to-back volume matched comparisons that switch back and forth between options in under a few seconds, the results tend to be sobering. For example, Jim Lill's videos upset many people because he plays two different things back-to-back

and gets indistinguishable tones -- even when the visual cues are present! I suspect that Lill has B-reel footage of him trying the side-to-side comparisons without any visual cues, but he scrapped them because people probably would not believe that he was, say, switching back and forth between a Marshall amp and his tacklebox solid-state amp. 

One common claim on forums is that "science says there is no difference, but I can hear a difference." Presumably they mean that EQ curves or spectrum analyses show no difference, but they have hearing that is more acute than scientific instruments. This is a claim that can be tested. A carefully-designed experiment could determine whether these people are right. Some variant of the experiment described here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea ) could be done with audio. I suggest that some motivated soul create an audio version of the James Randi One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to reward these people if they're right. (More information here. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_Challenge )

A useful consequence of reading audio research is that it confirms what Frank Zappa said about writing about music. If someone can't recall what they heard, then surely they're not going to be able to describe it to someone else. Garbage in, garbage out.

(4) Gear discussions are usually indistinguishable from wine taster discussions.

One of the only useful things to come out of online gear discussions is the term "corksniffing." Whoever coined this term and introduced it to gear discussions is a genius.

Analogies can be liberating. They provide a momentary sense of perspective that could grow until it takes a bad idea and dislodges it from your mind.

"Corksniffing" refers to wine fanciers smelling the cork and then reeling off a bizarre string of adjectives to describe the fermented grape juice that is about to be served. (For examples of what these confabulations sound like, check out this sommelier quote generator phrasegenerator.com/wine .) For those who have not been inducted into the wine tasting elect, sommeliers are self-evidently absurd and hilarious.

Now remember a time when you heard someone talking about varieties of germanium transistor, tonewood, or capacitor. Or perhaps talking about the quality of guitar during a certain year of production. When someone calls "corksniffing," you can suddenly see why it is probably

absurd to think that a PNP germanium transistor of 1950's vintage has a "spongy, warm, tube-like, touch-sensitive" response when used in a fuzz circuit.

Scientific tests of wine tasting show that wine tasters cannot reliably tell one wine from another. A wine researcher took some white wine, colored it red, and asked the same group of wine tasters to taste both the dyed and un-dyed wine and to report what they tasted. Apparently, adding flavorless red dye was enough to transform the white wine adjectives into red wine adjectives. (Full story here: www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html )

"Corksniffing" is an adjective that should be introduced to any hobbyist community that suffers from gear problems -- photographers, cyclists, cookware enthusiasts, audiophiles, et cetera. It will save people a lot of time and money.

(5) Smartphones have made amazing music-related apps available for close to nothing.

If you are interested in improving your rhythm, improving your ear, learning music theory, et cetera, then there are several affordable flat-fee apps that will help you with your training. (There are also good subscription apps, but flat fee apps are always preferable to subscription apps.)

I'm a fan of "Perfect Ear" (flat fee) and "Rhythm Trainer" (subscription).

Also, music recording and production has never been easier. A person could conceivably record a high-quality song and music video using a smartphone alone.

(6) Understanding EQ curves, the properties of waves, and basic circuitry will save you a lot of trouble.

If you understand frequency response curves, how to use equalization, and how common overdrive/distortion effects affect wave forms, then you'll be able to steer clear of many delusions people have about amps, pickups, and guitars. Understanding basic physics and circuit design is also helpful.

For example, these excellent posts show the frequency response of the Joyo American Sound pedal for different knob positions. www.tdpri.com/threads/different-voice-settings-on-joyo-american-sound.821457/ www.tdpri.com/threads/joyo-american-vs-tech21-blonde-comparison-many-graphs.786013/ . Since the frequency response plots are provided, it's possible to avoid the meaningless "corksniffing" language and to get an idea of what is really going on.

Forum member Antigua's careful research has convinced me that the intrinsic sound of an electric guitar is determined by three things. (1) The inductance, capacitance, and resistance of the pickups. (2) The size of the wire loops that constitute the pickup. (3) The position of the pickup coils relative to the strings, bridge, and nut. It follows that if you're a player who likes clean tones, the only way that you can dial in the 'tone' that you want is to select a guitar that has the pickups in the position that you want and in a size that you want. Then select pickups that have a low inductance and capacitance, giving the pickups a high resonant frequency. Then, if the resonant frequency is too high, you can bring it back down by wiring in a capacitor of your choice in parallel with the pickup. I've done this and it works very well. If the output of these pickups is not what you want, add some gain somewhere in your signal chain.

(7) People online don't care about the truth, they care about winning. Online discussions are reality TV, not intelligent discourse.

No one ever got fired for playing a swamp ash Telecaster instead of an alder Telecaster on stage. But plenty of people felt the irrational desire to win an argument about which one sounds "brighter" or "punchier" as if their life depended on it.

Online discussions are like reality TV. At best, they're a guilty pleasure. There may be something of value occasionally, by accident, just like how someone on a reality TV show may occasionally say something intelligent and worthwhile that will not be caught by the editor.

Most of the people who say things that are worth hearing would be terrible reality TV show contestants. Could you imagine a reality TV show featuring Antigua (to be clear, he's one of my heroes), Steve Albini, and this guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8dp9clGe-I&t=3s) who created about a 60 minute documentary about guitar electronics that basically says everything there is worth saying about the subject?

One problem with "reality TV" is that the amount of truth and quality in the world will always be dwarfed by people's need to be entertained. That's why fiction was invented: because reality couldn't provide enough entertainment.

And if you read online comments about a topic, eventually you'll run out of truth and there will be nothing left but fictions and drama.

(8) Herbert Simon's satisficing/maximizing theory of choice is invaluable if you want to survive the Internet age.

If you want to make decisions about what gear to buy and what content is worth your time, then the Internet can be overwhelming and confusing. The sheer number of options can inspire you to try out everything, leaving you much poorer as a result.

That is by design.

Every time you log in, you are going up against grandmasters of marketing who can command building-sized server farm supercomputers that are programmed by honest-to-god math geniuses. If you spend a lot of time online, eventually they will convince you to do what they want you to do. In the long run, you cannot win.

What do they want you to do? Keep buying, and keep watching.

Their goal is to convince you that what you have is not good enough, and that your problems can be solved with another purchase. Then they have a huge incentive to do this again and again until the purchasing becomes a habit. They also have a huge incentive to keep you watching (instead of practicing or playing guitar with others). They also have an incentive to keep you curious about the effects of small differences (why else would someone own more than one overdrive pedal?).

To protect yourself from this, commit to being a "satisficer" rather than a "maximizer." A satisficer is someone who has a goal in mind. They keep trying to reach that goal, and when they reach that goal, they stop. A maximizer is someone who is trying to find a global optimum. Achieving their goals is never enough, because they always need to check that they have the absolute best configuration.

The Internet is designed to provoke maximizers into going deep into every rabbit hole. The Wirecutter articles like "we tested 87 carrot peelers to see which one was the best -- this is what we found" model behavior that has become normal among Internet users. This sort of search is like a form of drug addiction for a maximizer. Research, purchase, anticipation, novelty high, acclimatization, dissatisfaction, repeat.

The good news is that you can become a satisficer pretty easily. Just write down what you need to be able to do with your musical instruments and gear. And when you've reached that point, stop researching and buying. Just replace stuff as it breaks and wears out.

Personally, my criterion is that I want to be able to play White Stripes songs, Nirvana songs, and Surf Rock tunes. That's it. You can do that for much less than $2000.

But be careful: the marketing grandmasters have a clever way of turning satisficers into maximizers. They convince them that their goal should be that they should be as versatile as possible -- be able to cover any song, any tone, to be able to always capture "the sound in their head."

This is a trap. It's a good one! (They're grandmasters of marketing, after all.) If they get their way, they will convince you that you need to do shootouts to compare "everything tone" kits like Kemper, Helix, Tonex, and AxeFX -- and then they'll convince you that none of these can nail fuzz, so you also need to go out and buy every fuzz pedal on the planet, because, of course, every one of them is different.

The only way to be happy is to acknowledge that you will never be happy. The only way to have enough is to understand that there can never be enough.

Conclusion

I'm done with this research project. Hopefully this little essay is a rope that you can use to climb out of the rabbit hole I've been in.

Never forget: learning about musical instruments online (or bicycles or cookware or hiking gear or photography) is sort of like trying to get gold out of seawater. Yes, the gold is in there somewhere, and in a surprisingly large concentration. But if you try to get it, you'll waste a lot of energy and your backyard will be quickly filled with metric tons of toxic sludge.

Just stop. Close the computer. And go play your guitar.

[Edit: typos, fixed URLs]

[ssstonelover]

There are some videos on YouTube that do myth busting and I rather enjoy those.
For example the one that shows a full set of strings strung between two tables at guitar pitch with air in between and the pickups work just fine despite lack of tonewood.Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar?

And there there is the one from Rick Beato showing that great tone, even better tone, can come from skinny strings, opposite to lots of marketing out there
You’re Probably Using The WRONG Guitar Strings

For sure I'be been duped a few times, but I am proud to say a lot of my cheapish guitars sound fine with cheapish pickups and despite reading a ton of marketing about how expensive guitars are supposed to sound better thanks to 'breathable' finishes or other nonsense.

[sumgai]

ChrisK, is that you?!

mr22, you stated what I and several others here have also said over the past 18 years, in one form or another.  But no one has ever put all together before now, not even our dearly departed Mentor Emeritus, ChrisK (Chris Kikta), gone now these past 13 years.

Chris had a word that sums up everything you said - FelderGarb.  That's a malapropism, in German, for Geld Farber. The meaning, again in German, directly translates to "gold color", but the idiomatic meaning is "the color of gold, but not the real thing". We also re-branded that to mean "Marketing Speak", as you've so nicely pointed out.  In fact, now that I think on it, you must be a little older than the rest of us, because your maturity level shows great restraint in how you'd really like to describe your findings.... Correct me if I'm wrong here.

And I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that your axe is either a Strat, or more likely, a Jazzmaster.  Or possibly a clone thereof. If you're as old as I think you are, then you're using either a low-watt (and low weight) amp, or you're using a DI into a computer.  Perhaps with a pedal, but if it's the latter, then everything you want/need is already in the software.

Am I even close?

All in all, this is Hall Of Fame material right here! 'Nuff said.




sumgai

[mr22]

It's a real honor to be compared to such a legend like Chris K! Thank you! I'm glad you liked the post. I've had it kicking around in my head for some time now, I just had to get it down.

I started playing guitar in the early 90's when I was a teenager. I quit playing shortly before going off to study at an engineering school. I just started playing again in 2022. So, depending on what counts as old, I'm ... old?

I probably sound like I'm old because I didn't use the Internet for music/gear research purposes for 20+ years. All the stuff I described about the Electric Guitar Internet was new to me when I dived in. I had no mental antibodies.

Using the Internet to do research caused me to have a sort of gear purchasing Rumspringa, but I'm done now and selling stuff left and right. I wrote this monster post so I could close the chapter on that (and help other people snap out of it).

Good guess about my guitars of choice! I'm a fan of single coils. I alternate between a Telecaster, a Stratocaster, and an acoustic. My Stratocaster has a push-push switch that puts the resonant frequency down in p90 territory by adding capacitance in parallel with the pickups. My Telecaster has a Jonny Greenwood killswitch button and a push-push tone knob that switches to both neck and bridge in series to get "humbucker" sounds. (I have to install a trimpot into this configuration so I can shunt some of the bridge pickup's signal to ground so the humbucker configuration... actually bucks hum.) The pickups in both are super-cheap Antigua-approved Chinese OEM alnicos. The two necks on the electrics are pretty much identical so I can swap between the guitars and there's almost no adjustment period. I think with this config, I can do anything I need to do.

I don't play directly into the computer yet, but that sounds like a good idea! Eventually I'd like to program my own effects. (I made pedals for a while but quit because it was eating into my practice time.) My "amp" is a UAFX Dream 65 connected to the power amp of a Boss Katana. I have a few pedals -- a volume pedal (for adjusting gain), pitch shifter (Whammy), a harmonic percolator clone with adjustable clipping (distortion/fuzz), a BOSS OD-3, a tuner, and a digital delay (for playing Les Paul [the musician] tunes). I'd like to see if I could get by with even less than that. I like the Katana a lot, but its spring reverb doesn't do it for me. Also, I wanted to design a setup for shows that could fit into a duffel bag so I can take it to practice rooms or shows with PA systems, so the Dream 65 makes sense. I'm pretty sure I could stick with this setup for another 20 years and be happy.

Musically, right now I'm working on my rhythm, music reading, music theory, song composition, and singing with an acoustic. Getting over my gear research project has freed up a lot of time. Also trying to start a band & find practice buddies.

Thanks again!

[mr22]

Err, correction -- I think that trimpot would have to be in parallel with the bridge pickup, not shunting the signal to ground.

[ozboomer]

mr22

I very much enjoyed your post... and had many giggles along the way whilst reading it

...and our dear sumgai mentioned the legendary ChrisK (who I didn't really 'know' but his reputation is well-known by a lot of us nutz).

Although, as has been mentioned a lot, we have a great mix of folks in here.. and not everyone is an engineer (we have a kindof 'different' approach to sound, I guess... )... and yet you'll still see some... 'discussions'.. about tone wood... miking an amp compared to DI'ing... whether the P90 is 'better' than a noiseless single coil... whether tube amps are 'better' than modellers better than solid state... blah blah blah... and yet, much of this stuff, while totally subjective.. still generates plenty of usage of the word 'better' and similar such comparative adjectives...

...and I'd definitely agree, that perhaps a lot more knowledge about guitar can be gained by actually playing it... and understanding the instrument you have... and learning its capabilities... than by mucking about with it and the gear it's connected to...

...but the mucking about is still SO much fun...
 

[mr22]

ozboomer

Thanks.

I agree, the mucking about is a lot of fun! Messing around with fuzz pedals in particular is fun, but I can't imagine that it is very good for my hearing.

I had to pack away my soldering iron and electronics workbench stuff because I was spending way too much time soldering and not enough time practicing. There's nothing wrong with making pedals or messing around with electronics in general. I don't have time for two hobbies, and one of them had to go. 

After I put the circuitry gear away, I was still tempted to try to see how many variations on fuzz circuits I could make, even while I was convinced that it was not a good use of my time. I bought a Fuzz Factory to scratch that itch. If I want to mess around, twisting some knobs on a Fuzz Factory is much easier and faster than getting out the whole breadboard or ordering some weird bad Soviet-era transistors on eBay (or trawling the Internet looking for parts in general). I can find a new setting on the Fuzz Factory, say "oh that's cool" and then get back to practicing.

A fair amount of the time when I mess around on the Fuzz Factory I find something I like. Then I switch over to my BOSS OD-3 or a distortion pedal and find that the tone I've dialed in on the Fuzz Factory is ... more or less the same one I had on the OD-3 or the distortion pedal. We go through a lot of trouble just to end up sounding like ourselves again in the end.

I think you're right to point the finger at the word "better" as being a chief culprit in the Reality-TV-grade arguments we see on forums. What does that even mean? We've all got different tastes. We've got different requirements.

My uncle once loaned me his 1959 Les Paul Special for several years -- a double cutaway TV yellow guitar. It was a pretty sweet instrument. I liked the p90s. They made tube amps growl a bit when the volume knob on the guitar was dimed. But in a lot of ways that matter, this holy grail guitar was not 'better' than the $175 knockoff Telecaster I own. The neck joint of that Les Paul breaks regularly, intonating with the wraparound bridge is nearly impossible, and it's probably not a good idea to walk around with something that is worth close to US$20,000. And it didn't stay in tune very well!

In contrast, the Indonesian-made knockoff Tele that I own stays in tune sometimes for months at a time, intonates correctly, plays well, sounds great with every amp I've used, and I could use it in a bar fight and the neck would be fine. If your criteria for better are tuning stability, intonation, theft risk, price, and durability, the $175 Tele knockoff is superior to the 1959 Les Paul. No contest. If my criteria for better are "can I take my guitar into the shop and make people lose their minds with jealousy" then yeah, the 1959 Les Paul was better.

One funny thing about the 1959 Les Paul is that for most of the time I had it, it wasn't my #1 choice on any given day. It spent a lot of time in the case. I ended up playing a made-in-the-1990s Stratocaster most of the time. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's because I bought the Strat with summer job money, maybe it's because it was more comfortable to play standing up (my usual playing position), maybe it was because I like sparkly pickups, maybe because it was red, or maybe it was because in a time before the Internet, vintage holy grail guitars didn't have the same sort of power over people.

It's easy to forget that something like a TV Yellow Les Paul from 1959 was the Squier of its time, a student edition, made out of the cheapest possible parts and wood, finished with a dirt-cheap nitrocellulose lacquer that was the same that was used on the cars of the time (multiple layers of shellac? Forget it, who has the time or the skill? Spray it once with nitro, and be done with it). No luthier spent time knocking on the plank of body wood, listening to the resonances while looking thoughtfully into the distance. No one carefully auditioned the capacitors that went into them to see if they had the right sound. It's a mass-produced plank of wood with strings on it, and if you plug it into a Blackstar ID CORE 20 with it's 3inch stereo speaker cones, it will sound like complete crap.

You can go to thomann.de and order something that's probably objectively better in every way for less than $300, including shipping. Maybe in 60 years, your grandchildren will wonder over your rare 2023 Indonesian Cort-factory-era vintage Harley Benton? Why? Because in 2024 the next Jimi Hendrix will play one just like it during her breakout YouTube videos and first European tour. 20 years later people on forums will start to tell stories about the mythical Cort factory luthiers who produced some of the best electric guitars in history (unlike the crap that's coming out of the Central African Republic knock-off factories). And of course, the Harley Benton brand managers will run with it, putting out reissues that use the same type of poly coat that they used on the classics.

Bryan May played his greatest hits on a guitar he made out of trash, plugged into an amp he pulled out of the trash. And people try to make component-by-component replicas of the amp. Will they look for the dumpster that it came out of next? It's a really wonderful way to miss the point entirely.

A brilliant marketer (JHS of JHS pedals) puts on a demo video where he shows that a widely despised and ignored cheap overdrive with a two-band shelving EQ can be made to sound like just about any expensive overdrive. How do people react? They bid up the price of the widely despised and ignored overdrive to insane levels because it is magic -- or because people anticipate that other people will think it is magic. The actual point is missed: the difference between one overdrive and the other is usually just some EQ.

I wish I could laugh about this and get over this stuff, but the fact that I'm writing about it is a sign that some part of me still wants to believe in the magical power of my 1959 Les Paul, because it's such a good story. It makes me feel sort of special -- I had a holy grail guitar! But really, owning something doesn't make you special at all.

[ozboomer]

May 7, 2023 5:56:31 GMT -5 mr22 said:

Thanks.

I agree, the mucking about is a lot of fun! Messing around with fuzz pedals in particular is fun, but I can't imagine that it is very good for my hearing.

In my case, whilst there's some 'degradation' in my hearing, it's the tinnitus that makes me nuts... only when I'm not 'sufficiently distracted'. I dunno where/how it's come about... as I've only been to one stadium concert (Linda Ronstadt at the MCG in '79), a couple of 'concert hall' events (some small orchestra thing somewhere in town and Linda Ronstadt at The [Melbourne] Arts Centre/Hamer Hall in '84) and a couple of guitar shows and a few 'guitar club' things (where the louder noise came from the drummers(!)) and my solo organ performances... and I wore hearing protectors at all of them. Pfft!

[...]

Most folks here have their stories along the lines of what you explained (plus lots more in many cases)... but I'll point you (and others unfamiliar) off to my projects (and note the Guitar Wiring Thread Index, which is a great 'jumping-off' point for the magic that folks around here have developed), as they have links to most of my explorations in my GN2 history:

• A Monterey Surf Green Strat - Made Mean!
• The JJG Modified Affinity Strat

...and one thing that's an on-going project, often (quietly) dubbed 'Oz's Folly' by some:

• Designing Your (Next) Virtual Jazzmaster/Jaguar

The most significant discoveries for me have been:-

• I prefer clean guitar sounds (thus explaining the 'Surf' references everywhere);
• JohnH's discussions about cable loading and the uses of JFET-based buffers;
• Having 31,415 different switching options for precious little discernible difference in sound (to my unsophisticated ears) is too much for this 'bear of very little brain' to deal with;
• single coil pickups, with a 'new standard' 5-way switch + a 'neck on' switch + a treble bleed on the volume + a PTB tone control is more than enough for anything I want to play; and
• understanding how to use EQ can save most anything.

Like y'self, I've been trying to get away from the construction for the last little while... but even more fundamnetally, I'm taking a leaf from dear sumgai's recent post and again looking at why I want to play guitar, how it fits into what I want to be doing with my music... and getting back to some fundamentals... in both my guitar playing, organ/piano playing.. and actually applying all the dang theory I've been bending my brain about the last year or more...

...and I so advise...
  --Sir Lunchalot, 1989