About that Bm11: chords on guitar often need to drop a note to make room for others. The first or second note to go is usually the V, I think because we hear it even when it isn’t there. This Bm11 doesn’t have an F# – the notes are BDADE – so it won’t show up in most chord dictionaries.

Once again, the graphic is linked to a much larger version.

Guitar Chords in D

Best Practices

What can we glean from all this? Change your strings. Okay, that’s a metaphor.  Make an investigation of the tone of your strings–the gauge, the materials, the action, the age, and the tuning–part of the fun. Then, investigate everything else in the same level of detail, especially things like picks and pick-up height, where price isn’t much of an issue. If you can avoid hurrying past this part, it will pay off big later.

After extensive research, company president Dean Markley and his staff were able to determine with some certainty that Hendrix played different types of strings at different points in his career. Using the knowledge gained from their research, the engineers at Dean Markley Strings have developed two types of Jimi Hendrix strings…

.

While I’m doubtful about the “extensive research” and custom engineering to begin with, I can live with a little marketing hyperbole.  I can also live with an excuse to brand your nickel-plated strings and your pure nickel strings with the Hendrix name. But if you’re going to sell me a line about getting an extensively reasearched, custom engineered, down-to-the-album Hendrix tone, at least make sure that your website doesn’t say exactly the opposite of your vendors.

Strictly guessing, since the strings Markley lists as “later career” are packaged in the artwork from earlier in his career, Markley’s own website is in error. Here’s a set of screenshots:

Dean Markley vs Jimi Hendrix: The danger's of cut-and-paste marketing verbiage.

I suppose there’s a percentage of people that, being distracted by the horns, won’t notice that he asks questions, listens to the answer, and attempts to take that answer into account in reply. Since logical conversation and reliable information about gear is much more important to me than mainstream coiffure, I’ve not missed it here.

I wouldn’t mention this at all except that the question-answer-response sequence is awfully hard to come by. Plenty of people know more about gear than I’ll ever forget, but will mistakenly presume to know what you’re looking for just by looking at you, or worse, that regardless of what you’re looking for, you’ll be seeking after their tone soon enough.

Some tone chasers have the means to buy vintage guitars and the legendary stomp boxes intended primarily to drive expensive tube amps into harmonic bliss. Such players invariably know a thing or two about making a great rig sound even better. That doesn’t mean they’ll be good resource for taking your Crate and Samick combo to the next level. Other tone chasers are really gear chasers, and if you’re looking to acquire part numbers and specs, will be just what the doctor ordered.  Be forewarned however, that gear chasers don’t always identify themselves as such.

The good news is that–unlike Love or the Economy–after a while it will make perfect sense.

Bobby says that what you really need to do is get a distortion pedal like the one he just got–it’s unbelievable how much difference it makes. Bobby is wrong. He’s not lying, it’s just that he’s gotten used to his $850 Strat and dad’s old 50 watt Fender Bassman. Meanwhile, your Korean Squatacaster is squawking through a Peavy amp that you suspect is for keyboards. While this is an exaggerated example, the principle is nearly ubiquitous.

Best Practices

The first thing to do here is cast a wide net. I know, I know, Bobby just shreds, and he’s been playing for years.  Forget it! Going on one person’s advice–mine included–adds risk while robbing you of perspective.  When it works out, it might not be for the reason you thought; when it doesn’t, you can’t examine the advice you didn’t take. In this case, you don’t even need to know other guitarists–learn from any decent book about guitars. You can’t put icing on every kind of brown sound.

Instead of trying to paint over your tone, here’s a rough sketch of how you might build a good foundation.

1. Get a guitar and an amp.
2. Learn to tune your guitar.
3. Learn to play it, at least a little bit.
4. Get a feel for where you can go with your amp’s volume and gain controls, and how they interact with your guitar’s volume, tone, and pick-up controls.
5. Learn to string and set up (intonate, etc) your guitar.
6. Try different strings and picks.
7. Get a boost, fuzz, overdrive, distortion type pedal that costs between $25 and $90, depending on your budget.
8. Dream big.

What I think is helpful is having a way to think of the connections that doesn’t require you to keep things like “the far pole and the middle throw on the in-most side” in immediate brain access. Using this illustration, you could just call that one “black lightening” (sorry, see title of this post).

The “3p” in 3pdt is for the “3 poles” labeled super, black, and wonder. The “dt” is for “double throw”, and the throws come in sets of superheroes or songs, all or nothing.  So, you get super-man, black-lightning and wonder-woman as a set. Or, you can have super-freak, black-velvet, and wonder-wall.  Those two states – songs or superheroes – are the only two available.

The linked image is enormous to accommodate larger printing if you want (the ruler is at 300 dpi).   I got a few helpful comments and suggestions over at Experamentalists Anonymous, which is my favorite place to learn these things.