Bassling blog

Bill Callahan on staying hydrated

A lot of people, me included, only have so many creative hours inside them every day. It’s a little thing that gets replenished every day—but just a certain amount, like a jug of water. That’s your water for the day. No matter how much you wish there was more water in that pitcher, it’s just like, “No, it’s empty, but it’ll probably be full tomorrow if you do your other responsibilities and take care of yourself.” I learned and accepted that creative work is a finite thing. I used to treat it like an infinite fountain that I would just bathe in for 14 hours a day, but then I realized I’m just sitting in it. There’s no new water coming out of the fountain.

Quackology

Over a few months I've sampled a variety of guitar pickups

It began when I sensed a relationship between the bar magnet on the underside of a pickup and a strong attack in the sound it gave to an amplified guitar.

Last year I went overboard buying different types of guitar pickups and then trialling different wiring options.

Different pickups are often distinguished by their resistance, which accentuates the placement along the strings from the neck as higher amounts are favoured closer to the bridge.

While there are many aspects one would expect, such as dynamics and presence, I found the presentation of characteristics lack a specific quality.

There are charts showing brightness and darkness, treble and bass, harsh and muddy -- okay, I made up the last one -- but I can't think of any mentioning quack.

The quack of a pickup is a characteristic that exists on a similar spectrum and becomes more pronounced as one progresses from neck to bridge.

A quack is one expression of this sound, which begins more like a burr that becomes more throaty and pronounced as distortion adds harmonics.

I think telecasters are renowned for this honky character and I suspect the harmonics with placement of the bridge pickup are central to it.

However, many highly-wound and higher-output pickups seem to also accentuate this sound.

In my explorations I feel as though there's a scale of quack that begins with the Texas variety of pickup, then extends into bluesier and rockier characters as much as country.

As satisfying as the character sounds with a Tweed style distortion or a Marshall grunt, it's not always ideal.

For example, a serve of twang wouldn't sit with that classic stratocaster sound in the soaring leads of Clapton or Gilmour.

It's just a different flavour, yet the quack isn't as easy to pick as guitar builds.

I've figured out that I like single coils more than ceramic pickups, which use the bar magnet, and am now trialling double coils.

When I began installing different humbuckers I found that some had a twang, while others gave a harsh blast or a deep and thick sustain.

This is why I feel like a quack rating system is needed, and it could be represented with ducks.

I haven't paddled very deeply into the waters of humbucking, but I expect the pond is full of many styles of quack.

Potato Cake

Bought a guitar to try scalloped frets and am enjoying the expressive playing.

Also amused by the "fig leaf" sticker placed over the counterfeit branding of this purchase from China.

You can feel the cheaper materials in the shiny neck and plastic tuning pegs, as well as hearing a hum from the bridge pickup; but we live in an age where cheap guitars are made by automated routing in countries that don't respect IP -- so the playability is basically comparable with another Chinese guitar aside from copying the famous Swede.