Tokai Firebird I

I can't remember many times when I've really gone off the deep end for an object, but when I first saw a picture on the internet of a Gibson Firebird I, I thought "that is my dream guitar". Even the pictures of Eric Clapton playing one didn't put me off. The Firebird model in general has never been incredibly popular, but it's stylish - with a kind of 1950s retro-futurist feel. Sadly an actual Gibson Firebird I would cost many thousands of pounds and will almost certainly always be out of my reach.

However, when I saw that a very reasonably priced Chinese-made copy of my dream guitar existed I had to have it. I remember deliberating for a few months, but my desire for this object wouldn't get out of my head. As I recall I ordered it from a shop in Scotland which seemed to be the only place in the UK this model was available. I think it was around £200.

Tokai is a Japanese company renowned for making copies of guitars by the big American brands Gibson and Fender. This was quite controversial at one point, I think in the 1970s. Lawsuits were threatened, or maybe they happened.

The Tokai instruments made in Japan have a reputation for being really very good, but my Tokai Firebird I is not very good, or at least it wasn't when I first took it out of its box. It looks very cool though. It is the best guitar I have for standing in front of the mirror with.

Very cool

What appealed to me at the time was the simplicity of the guitar. One pickup, a simple bridge, and two controls for volume and tone. That was what I was into in 2010, keeping it simple. The problem was that the pickup sounded really weak and the bridge was so basic that the guitar wouldn't intonate properly. This wasn't the machine for laying sonic waste to cities without mercy that I'd thought it would be. The guitar was really badly balanced too, so that the neck drops down all the time when you are playing standing up. There's a great German word for that - "Kopflastigkeit".

So I had a shitty guitar that looked great. I'd kind of expected this. I decided to make some improvements, so I bought a replacement pickup and bridge and took it to a shop to have it improved. The pickup in particular is rather special, and I would hope so given that it cost half of what I'd paid for the guitar. Graham at the shop did a brilliant job, including changing where the strap joined the body, which made it balance perfectly.

Special pickup

Special balance job

I had the wiring changed too, meaning that I could change the sound of the pickup by lifting the tone control knob which now featured a concealed switch like in a Bond film.

Having this guitar improved was a great experience all round, because I ended up with an instrument that was really good, I was given advice and suggestions, and there wasn't any prejudice about it being cheap. I have a justified fear about snobbery in guitar shops, so this was refreshing.

Then I played my Firebird I a fair bit. It's a strange guitar, because the shape is really rather odd when you're playing it (rather than just looking at it). The guitar is enormous, with loads of wood after the neck joins the body. It's like playing a boat. I had to buy a special case to carry it around, and deal with the fact that you can't lean this guitar up against anything without risking it falling over. Still, thanks to the improvements it was really fun to play and I wrote quite a bit of material on it. At the time I was channeling 'classic rock', probably aided by the guitar itself in a weird kind of nominative determinism.

My main memories associated with this guitar are the tour I did with my band in the autumn of 2010. I say tour, but really it was 4 shows in a week, with 3 of them being outside of London. A mini-tour. Still, for us it was really significant. At the show in Bath nobody came to see us, but thankfully there we had a ready-made audience: We went 'on the road' with two bands who were good friend of ours. One band was such good friends that we shared 2 members and the singer used to be in a different band with us.

Throwing shapes on mini-tour

I was two months away from becoming a parent for the first time. The mini-tour is a strange memory, because it was so close to a fundamental change in my life. It was a culmination of a decade playing music with this group of people. It wasn't a "last hurrah" though - that would be crass. And besides, we're still at it.

Yamaha DDS-20M

I like effects pedals. This will become increasingly clear as I write more posts on this blog. I went through a phase between 2002 and 2007 in particular when I bought lots of second hand effects pedals on eBay. It was an addiction, really.

I'm a bit out of guitar 'culture' these days, but I recall a tendency to prize things that are old (or 'vintage'). In some cases this is warranted (like guitars from the 1950s and 1960s), but in others it really isn't. I think older digital delay pedals in particular are a strange thing to prize, because they are computers. Like any computer they have just got more powerful, with more features, and (relatively) cheaper over time.

Still, there's something to be said for good design, and I'm really fond of the Yamaha DDS-20M.

I have two, like a normal person

When I bought these second-hand I think they would have been about 10 years old and around £50. When they were first released they would have been a fairly 'high-end' unit for the time - with the ability to get around 2 seconds of delay and also to sample a 2 second passage and that will loop indefinitely. The loop is retained too, unlike similar pedals of the time like the Boss DD3 where you can capture a phrase but it disappears once you take your foot off the pedal. By comparison, you could get a pedal that can record 30 minutes of your guitar playing for £50 nowadays. But at the time in the 1990s or whatever,  2 seconds WHOA HOLD ON WE ARE GOING TO SPACE.

The unit also has 3 modes to select time ranges (short / medium / long) and it's solidly built with a metal case. These were made in Japan, which suggests a certain degree of quality components, materials, and high quality control too.

I started playing guitar when I was 14, but it was many years before I got a delay pedal because they were always too expensive. Now they are my favourite creative tool. If I was starting playing again, I'd want to have a fairly basic delay pedal for practice because it can really help with your timing. Also delay pedals are a great crutch if you are not very good at playing guitar. You can make yourself sound like you are playing more than you actually are, you can cover up your sloppy chops in a big wall of echo, and if you can sample a phrase then you can stop playing altogether and have a rest or do a "look no hands!" magic trick that will drive audiences wild.

This pedal reminds me of a particular time (2007), and a bit of a watershed in my playing and writing. I wrote a part of a song that featured a cascading, delayed phrase that I then sampled the end of by crouching down and turning a knob to the right. The sampled phrase was in time with the drums (or, the drums played in time to the phrase) and I had my hands free to clap or play a wood block. I do this kind of thing all the time now. I am a very lazy guitarist. Back then, people couldn't work out how I was doing it, which I got a kick out of.

The point was that this unit is intuitive and responsive enough to be easy to try things out in the moment, rather than having to read a manual beforehand. You can also use it to make flying saucer noises.

With the memory of making that song, the Yamaha DDS-20M is also strongly linked to a place. We were rehearsing in a really nice professional studio complex near Old Street in London. It was too good for us. It was the second place we'd been resident in, after the first one (in Holloway Road) closed down because the land was sold for property development.

The place in Old Street suited us, although it was at the limit of our collective budget. The main memory from there was the day that the singer told us he would be leaving the band. I distinctly remember the sudden sinking feeling in my gut, because the news was a complete surprise. Then I remember him leaving rehearsal, and the rest of us quickly resolving to carry on playing together but as a new band, with new songs. There was definitely an immediate reaction to 'keep going'. I don't remember talking about it with the singer much at the time, and I regret that a bit. Not to persuade him to stay because he was definitively leaving, but just to talk about it more than we did.

We had to move out of that rehearsal space before too long, as the rates went up twice within a year and it became impossibly expensive. We've been fairly lucky with rehearsal spaces since, but I assume it's much harder to rehearse in London than it used to be, let alone run a rehearsal studio business.

Both of my Yamaha DDS-20M pedals are slightly faulty now, but they've had plenty of use. They are fairly basic by today's standards, but well made and its various features and settings complement each other really well. Most importantly, this unit opened up a new avenue in my playing that I've got a great deal out of since.

Danelectro Baritone

My name is Dan Barrett, so owning a guitar that's called a Danelectro Baritone is essentially my birthright. That's pretty much the only reason I bought it, I think in 2002. I didn't know anything about baritone guitar at the time. I do remember that I bought it in a bass shop on Denmark Street in London. I seemed exotic and out of place there, maybe a bit neglected. I have no idea how much it cost, but I had more disposable income back then and it didn't seem too expensive.

The Danelectro guitars are famously cheap, being made out of masonite and having originated at a time when there was a gap in the market for instruments that were more accessible to people than the higher quality ones from brands like Fender and Gibson. They are proper instruments though. Jimmy Page played a Danelectro shorthorn so they must be legit.

My burgundy Danelectro Baritone

I was really taken with this weird thing. It's a fairly unpleasant colour, and it's rather ungainly. It sounded really different too - it could be a bit like a bass, or higher notes had this really clanky quality, and playing an open chord was HUGE. It had the strange power of making anything I'd written on a normal guitar sound really miserable, and I was really into that kind of thing in my 20s.

As an amplified instrument, it's only got one really useful sound which is both pickups on at once. It's noisy, as in there's quite a bit of background noise. The strings are thick, because it's tuned low - I usually tune B-E-A-D-F#-B. The neck is long, so it's a fairly physical experience to play. Even if I could shred like Eddie Van Halen (I can't) I'd struggle to do the widely-widdly stuff. I've never had it properly 'set up' so the intonation isn't perfect, and even if I wanted to the bridge is very basic - just a piece of hardwood - so there are limited options for fine tuning. I put a couple of matchsticks in there at one point. Not sure why.

Matchsticks

I rather like all these idiosyncrasies though.

I bought the Danelectro Baritone when my band at the time was still starting out. We'd done a demo and we were playing some shows. There were five of us, with 3 guitarists and a bass player. Things tended to sound a bit frantic and crowded. I had a hunch that playing a baritone guitar would help bring a more distinct voice to the music.

It didn't really work, because a) we weren't very good; and b) I didn't switch wholesale to playing baritone guitar, so the logistics of carrying another instrument around and only playing it on the odd song were a hassle and rather indulgent.

So I stopped playing this guitar with my main band. Over the years I have returned to it for other projects. Even though I've had it for 16 years I don't think I've ever really done it justice. Silkworm (one of my absolute favourite bands) often featured a baritone with guitar and drums in a three-piece - I had dreams of doing something like that. I'm not much of a bass player, but I thought I could do something less conventional and still be filling out space in the music.

I had a project where it was just me with the Danelectro Baritone and a drummer. This was at a time when 2-piece bands were a thing. Or, the first time I remember them being a thing. That was an experience, because I had to play more just to fill up space, but also recognise that there was only so much I could do. In addition, I was very exposed so there wasn't any room for mistakes. The logistics of being in a 2-piece were interesting too. Less banter. Less beer. Very efficient.

I had another project where I was playing with a guitarist and a drummer. This was like the three-piece ideal I'd described, except it was very much instrumental post-rock rather than 'songs' with vocals. This was also an experience, because the other two musicians were very good and had been playing together for years, developing their own innate understanding and musical language. It was a bit of a stretch - a workout even. Still, things came together really well and we'd got to a stage where we were ready to play a show. We were rehearsing in a squat in east London which had the added bonus of friendly people being around to tell us how good we sounded.

My overriding memory of my Danelectro Baritone was the three-piece's last rehearsal. Things were sounding good. Suddenly there was a shout of "fire! fire!", a moment of silence to process it, and then we ran out of the building. Stood at a safe distance I watched the place go up in flames in a matter of minutes. Thankfully everybody got out, but some people had lost everything. It was a strange experience - I must have been watching and waiting there for several hours. I was a few steps removed from the situation - having a small stake in what was going on, but really just being an observer.

The fire brigade wouldn't let anybody back in for some time because it wasn't safe, but eventually they did. Downstairs was dark and wet, totally transformed. Sometimes that initial image of the burnt-out downstairs appears in my dreams.

I went into the back room upstairs where we had been rehearsing, and found my guitar undamaged save for a covering of soot. I packed up quietly and went home. The three-piece never played again.

I still feel like one day I'll do justice to this instrument because it really suits me somehow. Big, a bit awkward, but it can really hold things together given the chance.

Ibanez Gio

Of all the musical instrument and gear I've purchased on a whim, this guitar has to be top of the whim charts. I bought it solely because of the colour, which is a really bright teal. I have quite a few guitars, but this is the first one I bought that is really in a 'heavy metal' shape. It looks like hair metal and is reminiscent of spandex.

Photo by me

This is the guitar I bought most recently, so it doesn't have that many stories associated with it. I think I got it about 3 years ago.

The best thing about this guitar is that my sons really like to play 'rock out' on it. I think it's good to have an instrument around that children are going to gravitate towards and want to play on, no matter how ridiculous it looks.

I've played a couple of shows with this guitar, and inevitably there were comments about Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, the famous guitar widdle-merchants and Ibanez endorsees. Such comments are entirely warranted.

I can't play complex widdly-widdly guitar featuring furious guitar solos at impossible speeds that defy reason. There's something quite gratifying about playing an instrument that looks totally unsuited to the style of music being played. I don't mind the Steve Vai and Joe Satriani comments.

Photo by White Ape

I really like the colour orange, and the colour of this guitar complements orange really well. So, wearing an orange t-shirt with this guitar is a good look. Often it's really difficult to know what to wear with a guitar, which is why black is usually a good bet. Those expensive guitars with the fancy woods and brightly-coloured translucent finishes are really hard to dress with, in addition to being fucking hideous in their own right.

My Ibanez Gio is very cheap. I wouldn't have bought it from the internet solely on the basis of the colour without trying it out if it wasn't cheap. This guitar is also pretty shitty, in addition to being cheap. Not all cheap guitars are shitty.

The hardware (switches, tuning machines, volume and tone controls) is low quality and the humbucker pickups don't really have any character, although they are fairly loud which is something. The input jack is functional but slightly broken and having opened the guitar up it's clear that is a result of poor workmanship when it was being put together.

The neck is fine though. It is flat and slim and actually rather comfortable to play. All in all, I think the neck is the most important thing in a guitar.

Apart from wanting a radical shred machine to go along with the other guitars I own, I thought that the bright blue / green colour would add 'mojo' to the album that my band was writing at the time that I bought it. The album was about swimming, and I thought the vague evocation of water would add a certain something to the record via the writing process. Reflecting on it, this is one of the most idiotic things I've ever done. I don't know if the approach worked, but I do know that I didn't play this guitar on that record at all, because it is a bit rubbish and when you're in a recording studio you need to play your best things because time and money are tight and you shouldn't mess about.

Despite this, I am still very fond of this guitar and I play it regularly. I could always have the cheap bits upgraded, after all.