(second block, fourth letter of the prisoners' quadratic tap code...)

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...am here to tap through the walls.


Wed Sep, 16 2009

Shacks Unborn

I just looked at a pile of timbers. They're laying there in a small field where an old barn fell over. There are all kinds of shapes and sizes, some rough-hewn as big as 16"x16" and thirty feet long. Naturally, when I see them, I see building framing, and the person who owns them said that I could take what I want. This is the second or third time he's said it, and it's always been implicit: I could almost roll up there in the middle of the night and start jacking them out without a word. I helped move some of them into that pile after the barn went down, but I hadn't really looked at them lately.

The sick rot of it all is that the very next thing one must account for is how much all the vampires from here to Albany would suck out of the project of so much as pinning a dozen of the goddamned things together upright.

To any seriously thinking person, that must just kick the heart out of it all.

Sep 16, 09 | 12:36 pm

AxeBites

Various guitars I see floating by, mostly Gibson and mostly eBay.

Early Norlin ES-335 -- 1970, in Walnut ("ES-335TDW"). This is a period-piece look and feel, and arguably the sound as well but that's to cut things very finely. A "classic" 335 would be the original of 1958 in the Sunburst or Natural finish, or the Cherry Red of 1959; the Walnut of 1970 (second year of that finish offering) is not really a "classic" 335. In the history of the Gibson aesthetic, this is analogous to, say, vertically-striped polyester bell-bottoms or Bahama Blue shag carpeting. None of this is to say that they're not cool guitars, and this is a nice one. Excellent photographs.

Chrome hardware, featuring the trapeze tailpiece (like my L-47 and I've always liked it) and ABR-1 bridge with period-typical nylon saddles. Bound rosewood fretboard, with small block markers, and then the crown inlay at the machine head. These would be the T-top Humbuckers. Vintage Nazis would moan that the upper bouts are pointy (the body templates were wearing-out in the factory) and the fourteen-degree machine head with the volute signals a sometimes not-fun era of the line, but these things really do rock or moan or whatever you want a 335-type semi-hollow to do. ...which, of course, is because it really is a 335.


In the months since I've let AxeBites languish all to bleedin' hell, Gibson's Robot Guitar technology has sifted out to other models than the original Les Paul application. I don't know how it's going: I still haven't even seen one of these self-tuners. I don't see piles of them burning on the sides of the highway, nor reverent hangings in display cases over bars, so who knows? This 2008 Robot SG is ready to rock in the Metallic Red. Nickel hardware; it's the stoptail wired for data to send to the tuners, with dual Humbuckers. It's a bound rosewood fretboard, but I really like the single-bound machine head with the crown inlay. That's a real cool old-school look, right there, to set off that crazy-ass color. {nod}