Musician's Thread

I love my acoustic for writing songs - it is not great for writing in octaves or for lead lines, I have both a couple of full scale acoustics for that purpose. But this one is great for chord progressions and riffs - it has a really warm tone after 3 years of solid playing since I bought it. It is probably my favourite guitar because it is so unassuming - it was $80 with case when I bought it really wasn't a pretty sounding guitar (it was really tight and tinny when I first got it), but it was also really loud for a small guitar. It started to warm up after the first set of strings broke and now it just has this really sweet tone like an early 60s folk guitar.

Speaking of restringing - what tuning pegs does everyone prefer, and how do you string your guitars. I prefer the vintage style where you thread into the top of the peg:


My plan is to eventually have these on all my guitars - just a matter of finding the time to do the work.

Most of my guitars are the newer style where you string through the peg and then tighten - I am not a fan of these because if you don't do it right and create an anchor spot (like you have to for the vintage pegs) I find the guitars go out of tune easier.

For these I create a little hook the end of the string and then thread that into the peg and started tightening until it catches and starts looping

I can't stand it when the excess string isn't clipped off - this is the best pic I could find illustrating it:

Uarg stay away with these Fender tuners. I can't stand those, needlessly complicated ;-).
All of my guitars have the modern "standard" ones (on my past guitars without locking vibratos I've always installed Sperzel Locking Tuners), and for stringing, I normally have a lot of windings on it since all have locking nuts I don't get problems with detuning. And sometimes a string slips out of the vibrato. So I can just open at the top, clip the bent part and restring it (if the strings aren't too bad in shape).

A friend of mine always leaves his strings unclipped at the top...and it's some kind of miracle that neither he or his bandmates have lost an eye due to it. They often play live and are really into high energy performance and head banging ;-)

lol, I have a few guitar player friends that do it too, I always wonder why not just take the extra time to give it a little trim.

I prefer the vintage tuning pegs - m y first few instruments were all basses with the vintage style but once I got the hang of it I find them quicker to restring and they hold excellent after I have stretched the strings a little. I don't use any locking systems so that is never really anything I have to worry about.

This is my Peavey Raptor, I absolutely love this guitar especially the neck.

Well if you guys are really unlucky, I might record a tune or two with my guitars and you can hear the difference - haven't done that for quite some time, just that bass video demo I posted earlier - and that was only the first few tunes I learned on electric bass.

I do like and probably prefer the vinatge tuners, but modern ones are so much better than the older ones, I don't mind, really. I just put new strings on that Ibanez (I thought it was probably an RG170 - I saw a guy working on one on YT and it looked identical. The GIO has different knobs, too) day before yesterday and it was like it was almost instantly in tune.
When I started playing, in about 1998, I used to put the strings on, with both electric (when I got one) and acoustic and tune it up. You could guarantee the tuning wouldn't last a few lines back then. I would tune it, then go along each string, from the bridge to the neck, pulling it as far out from the fretboard as I dared, retune and repeat until I couldn't or daren't pull on them any more - and then they were good for a day or two before they needed retuning.

I haven't needed to retune that Ibanez since I put the strings on and spent half an hour tuning and retuning. They must be 'pre-stretched' nowadays. In a way it's a shame, because I think modern strings sound a lot worse for it. When I used to fit new strings, it was a fantastic experience playing for the first few weeks. I can't think of the word for the sound, but it was so much brighter and fuller than the tinny dead-pan crap they sound like today - and it's the same strings (Fender for electric and D'Addario for acoustic). These strings were extra-light (009 to 040) due to my knackered fingers, as well and still seem to have no elasticity. There's just no give. Okay, I can bend em like Beckham (arf) but when I play them straight, the strings just seem dead on the guitar, as though they are stretched to their limit already - at least the treble strings do.

I put those new strings on because I swapped the necks on my Ibanez and Telecaster. I like the Tele, because it's very light - the Ibanez weighs a ton, but it is well balanced with that Strat neck on it. Not done any proper testing with it as yet - but next week I plan to do a lot, so my fingers will be aching again :)

I originally wanted a Yamaha acoustic - APX-5 would have been great, a -9 even better. But I couldn't afford it, so I bought that one in the photo - followed shortly after by the Crafter FX550, which was the best selling electro-acoustic at the time. I do like it, but a friend has an APX and I hate playing it because it's fantastic and I regret not having one myself!
He knows that, so every time I go round, the first thing he does is shove it in my hands and say "lets jam a bit".

He's a very good player and singer, too. His was the first band I played in on bass. Used to be a gipsy, but settled down to bring up his daughter after divorcing his wife. That's a good father! He's done a really good job with her, too - she's about 16/17 now. I digress, though, sorry.

Yeah, better stop rambling on.... :p

I use Dean Markley 11-52 strings - still have to stretch the strings quite a bit before playing. I ride my strings till one breaks and then I replace them - I haven't restrung my Peavey in 2 years, love the sound of the strings. My main bass guitar hasn't been restrung in 5 years. LOL

I normally only play GHS Boomers and Pyramid strings, and these need a lot of stretching up front.
I don't know if you get Pyramid where you live (It's an old german brand, that still produces here. High quality and they sound to me more vintage than the GHS ones...which have a harsher attack in my ears), but if you get the chance give them a try.
http://www.pyramidstrings.com/st-guitar.html
D'Addario is a brand that I can't stand. They use a coating or something like that with their strings that reacts with the skin on my fingers. They seem to stick and give you the feeling of cutting into the first layer of skin (if you've ever cut yourself on a piece of paper on your fingertips, you know that feeling) for me. Dean Markley are fine too but very expensive here...and I had some trouble with them due to often breaking at the locking piece in the vibrato units.
All my guitars are tuned down 1 full step to D with 10-52 gauge strings. I like that, has enough area to play around without being too wobbly.

@Brixmis
Please feel free to let us hear something.
To the Ibanez, all RG170s I could find have the standard RG sharp cutouts and not the rounded ones like yours. Anyway the same site I cited before states that they use the same pickus as the GRX70.

So your tuning is D-G-C-F-A-D?

Interesting - all my guitars are Standard except for one bass and one guitar which are tuned down half-step for certain blues covers / Hendrix songs.

I like standard best - I like the tightness of it and the spank you get off of it.

I only ever drop D tune the E string for songs like Bodysnatchers or Another Brick in the Wall - in the studio if I want to get a lower register bass part I normally just do it with a keyboard.

But I kind of like the thought of having one guitar tuned a whole step lower, and think I might be able to get some interesting sounding riff's out of that register.

I can't remember for sure - but I think I read somewhere that Rick Danko used to tune his bass to drop C.

Yeah, that's right.
It comes from my time with Bleak, we started tuning down a whole step to get on the level where our shouter was most comfortable. I'm not the biggest fan of the ultra low tuning sounding stuff most of the time but this change gave everything a bit more foundation and oomph without going to low (and sounding like all the metalcore bands that were popular at that time...all tuned to C) and losing the clarity in the leads.
And after Bleak ended I saw now need to go back up (also I would have had to change all strings on my guitars...which would take forever due to the locking systems ;-) ) and I am now in a tonal range where not that many guys play. 

Drop tunings are something I don't like that much, it always throws me off my game and makes a lot of chords and scales I like to use harder or impossible. It can be fun though I you just wanna play some (dumb) riffs though ;-)

Yeah there is definitely a loss of clarity as you tune lower - but like you say, it is a tonal area outside the norm. I think it would be cool for some more cinematic stuff I have been working on in my spare time - translating to a whole step lower shouldn't be too hard.

I love drop tuning when it works - it opens up some interesting shapes and patterns. Same with some of the open tuning's.

I mostly operate out of standard, but there is something to be said for changing it up - and I usually end up with something I normally wouldn't have found.

When I bought my Left-handed fretless bass in Pittsburgh - I was without an instrument for a week and had no way to change over the strings to make it right handed (had to wait until I got back to Canada for that). So for a week I played it upside down in my hotel room at night - working out songs that I knew and it really gave me a new perspective on the neck. So much so that I had to relearn how to play normal when I got back to real life lol

Think I've only ever used alternative tuning about 4 times max. Off the top of my head....

Fearless (Pink Floyd/Meddle)
Another Brick In The Wall Pt2 (on Bass)
How You Remind Me (Nickleback)

plus one other, whose title eludes me, learned from one of Justin's CD tutorials many moons ago.

Never really felt the urge to experiment with it, but pretty sure it could be very interesting.