Yesterday was a good day. First, the weather has turned cool, finally. And my friend AJ got me onto the guest list for A Place To Bury Strangers.

APTBS have become really polished after touring for much of the last year. I really don’t see that many concerts, especially since I’m not a spring chicken, so if I go I want it to be good. And APTBS were definitely up to it. Lots to see and hear. Not to mention an amazing improvement over the last chance I had to see them, when Oliver walked off stage, aborting the show after the second song.

The beauty of APTBS is in the layers of sounds and the references. Oliver Ackermann makes it look effortless to blend so many guitar effects together that it sounds like there are two invisible guitarists on stage with him. I know this sort of effect playing isn’t easy, but you can tell that this is his passion (he’s a founder of Death By Audio effects). And then the projections behind the band, 16mm film strips that were madly edited like Quentin Tarantino meets Andy Warhol, were just the right icing on the cake. Pop art collages of vintage girls, cars, guns, sparks, etc.

The band sounds so much better live than on recordings that I really was wide eyed and disbelieving for the first few minutes. It was full throttle guitar, which is just what I needed. I was also hoping the gig would give me the a taste of the feelings I had when I was infatuated with My Bloody Valentine, Lush, and The Jesus & Mary Chain, and it did. For a fleeting few moments, I was 17 again, with my headphones on. What a strange feeling that was. But it was good. It wasn’t nostalgia, although it was a sort of relief to know that the energy persists and is still evolving. The feeling was more like watching a magic trick and getting completely taken in.

PS. My thanks to AJ and also to Juice for the T-Shirt and helping me pick a 45rpm vinyl single! (seen above)

PPS. Earlier in the evening, I saw my favorite Incredible, Sarah Vowell, listening to her iPod on the uptown 6 train, probably going to the Maurice Sendak/Spike Jones reading at 92nd Street (which is where I would have been going, also on the guestlist, if I didn’t bow out at the last minute to see APTBS).

The basic ideas of electric guitar construction haven’t really changed much since the 1960s. If anything, modern manufacturers have evolved the process of how to do the same old routine guitars more cost effectively since Leo Fender’s first assembly line. After 50 years of trial and error, even the least expensive guitar is actually a highly evolved specimen based on what manufacturing techniques work.

That’s not to say there aren’t lemons. Some say that when Fender started cutting too many corners, such as the shift to thinner rosewood veneer fingerboards in August of 1962, that the tide was turning, and then CBS acquired the company in 1965, which in turn led to the dark ages (1971-1981). Since then, the reputation has gotten appreciably better because of Bill Schultz and Bill Mendello’s leadership, when they remade the company.

So I came around to today’s cheapest entry-level Fender model, the Squier Bullet Strat, their most humble guitar, to ask, “why not hot rod one myself?” They’re an affordable price for the experience. And, after all, they’re likely made with sophisticated machine labour, so they must have some redeeming qualities. Over the next few months, I’m going to see what I can do to take the various pieces of a Bullet Strat and make them into something that would reach for the style of a re-issue ‘62 Stratocaster, but without the overhead expense, and fudging a bit on the specs.

Above: The bridge of a Squier Bullet, Two-Color Sunburst.

What do we know about the Squier Bullet Strat? Well, it wasn’t always a Squier or a Strat. The original 1981 DuoSonic-like Fender Bullet model was a short scale student model produced to eventually phase out the Mustang.

Back in 1982, Fender quietly branded the Squier name (acquired earlier in the 60s from a string manufacturer) for many of the export guitars produced by Fender Japan (more about that can be read here and here at 21Frets), which included the original Bullet. At this time, the Greco team at the FujiGen Gakki factory in Japan was better known for successfully reproducing vintage ‘57 and ‘62 Stratocasters (the Squier JV series). After 1988, the Squier Bullet adopted a Stratocaster design, although I can’t find out precisely when this occurred and how many times afterwards that it’s been tweaked. Over the years, Squier work has been farmed out to other countries, often without consistant quality, which is part of its mystique. Fender tries to keep Squier brand quality and price range below that of Fender brand guitars to compete with the low price knock-offs and sell to students, so that the differentiation drives more money to Fender in the end, but occasionally a Squier model or a particular unit rises above the set quality to price ratio, like the Squier Pro-Tone Stratocaster (1996-1998), and the Squier Deluxe Stratocaster (2007-current). Some people swear they have a “lucky find” Squier guitar that is better than the average USA model.

The Bullet name was re-introduced in 2007 by Squier with a new Stratocaster design that is oh-so-close to the typical Strat, but undermined just enough so that you’ll never be able to pass one off as a more expensive Fender model to a discerning buyer. For example, the body is very thin (42mm or less) and it’s program cut from Basswood, an inexpensive alder-like wood native to southeast Asia. The strange maple and rosewood neck is vintage thin and narrow (1.65” wide at the nut), has a pre-CBS 50’s peghead, but with a modern 9.5” neck radius, and medium jumbo frets. The truss rod is rudimentary (no skunk stripe or any finishing). The guitar’s hardware steel parts are stamped to metric measurements, not USA units. It has a vintage tremolo with 10.5mm spacing. The Bullets are presently completely fabricated and assembled in Indonesia, Korea, or China by non-Fender companies under contract. The business considers them an impulse purchase guitar and so they are priced for that niche ($99 street price in 2008). Because of the extremely low markup, retailers quickly dismiss them so that they can focus customers on something else.

Yet, seriously, have you tried one? Somebody did their job right. No, it’s not going to sound like an ash body with nitrocellulose lacquer, but there is sustain, tone, and the play is very agreeable if you like thin necks and you put a bit of elbow grease into smoothing out the rough. (If you buy one as a gift, don’t forget to spend the additional $60 to $80 to have it properly set up with a new nut, level frets, and a comfortable tremolo resistance.) With a bit more detail work (pickups, tuners), it should actually be a good rival to anything 2 times the total cost (including upgrades), or more.

Let’s take a look at the dissembled body of Bullet, starting with the body.

Below: The neck pocket. It’s a bit raw, but it fits. This particular unit didn’t have any additional shim materials used (hooray!). That hole in the center was used to attach the guitar to a block that hanged the guitar during painting and the poly clear coats.

Below: The central cavity has been factory coated with shielding paint. The ceramic pickups sound vintage clean, but they aren’t very strong and get muddy with any gain or distortion. That’s an RW/RP middle pickup for hum cancelling.

Below: Check out the economy 5 way switch.

Below: The Squier input jack, despite everything I’ve read in online, actually seems sturdy.

Below: The tremolo springs and claw. This is one of two details that could have been better handled in assembly (the other is regarding the peg head, and I’ll mention that another day). Here you can see that the claw is improperly attached at an angle. Mind you, it’s still screwed in super tight, but it’s certainly not helping the tremolo springs much. This gets fixed right away.

Below: The tremolo block and bridge plate. The block is actually pretty tiny, and I believe it’s 100% zinc. But at least it’s dense and heavy. Because of the Bullet’s thin body, this block is actually a little bit shorter than any replacement block you can get. I’d be inclined to keep it.

Next up, dressing the neck’s awkward features and new pickups on a new pick guard.

I bought my 1966 Fender Mustang in New York when I was visiting for the summer in 1994. The guitar store where I found my Mustang has long since been out of business, which is probably for the best. They had told me it was a ‘65 model and they neglected to tell me that someone had abused the guitar cavity by poorly carving out more space (to fit in two humbucker pickups) and that this previous owner also badly rewired everything back together with the original pickups when she or he tried to return the guitar to its vintage glory.

I found out about the charade when I put a guitar technician in Edmonton (at Avenue Guitars) on the job to dress the frets and see about electrical noise. He showed me the wiring nightmare while he had the guitar apart for inspection. Inside, all the electronics were original, but the wiring was a mix of old and (sloppy) new. At some point in the 1970s or 80s, new wires had been spliced in when the vintage pickups were swapped out (and back in), and there was ancient black plastic tape wrapping the new wires and that had begun to turn to black goo. The underside of the switches were covered in more tape that had completely decomposed (you can see a bit of the goo left in the switch cavity in the picture above). It was a royal mess and better left unseen. The guitar tech did some resoldering of the ground wiring, but left the rest to me. I knew then that someday I’d have to clean it all up. This is the standard Fender Mustang wiring schematic / diagram (note that it looks reversed because it’s viewed from underneath):

Well, 14 years later, the time came when one of the switches finally gave up the ghost and I had to get my hands dirty re-wiring it back to proper specifications. There was no restoring the original switches, because they were impossible to clean, no matter how much naptha. I bought 2 new Switchcraft switches and some black and white cloth wire. You can get similar stuff to what I used from Acme Guitar Works, but the cloth wire is the secret ingredient to a good 50s or 60s guitar restoration. In this photo below you can see the vintage ‘66 pickups (left) along side the old switch harness (upper right, with black goo) and the new one I soldered (lower right).

After a good cleaning and everything was put back together, I was delighted to hear the pickups actually sing cleanly like I never heard them before. They were loud and sharp, with far less hum. The difference between good wiring and bad wiring is remarkable. So, my advice is to keep your Mustang upgrades free from crappy wires and tape. And if you’re going to cut new crawl space in your guitar, at least use a straight edge.

Previously: Looking at the Fender Mustang, Part One

I wish there was more to say about this, but there's not a lot written as a matter of public record in Charles Dickens' biographies. Suffice to say that I think fate is a curious thing, because some people experience power early on and other people find it elusive their whole lives. Doesn't it seem sometimes like precocious kids always get it easier and have it in for the geezers?

The story goes like this. In 1836, there was an illustrator by the name of Robert Seymour who gave up a career as a draughtsman to do sport caricature illustrations in the style of the famous George Cruikshank. Apparently, Seymour thought so much of Cruikshank that he liked to refer to himself as "Short Shanks" as a pseudonym. I never really cared too much for Cruikshank style, because the faces are always so poorly done, but to each his own. It was the popular style back then.

The publishers Chapman and Hall really liked what Seymour was doing and wanted to offer him a chance to work with a new writer that was becoming ridiculously famous, the 23 year-old Charles Dickens. The contract was that Seymour would do some etchings around the idea "The Adventures of the Nimrod Club" and Dickens would be approached to write some short stories based on them, but the focus would be primarily on Seymour. The illustrator would be the top billing.

"Better Luck Next Time" by Robert Seymour.

Dickens, however, was cocky and rather full of himself at the time, so he went to the top brass at Chapman and Hall and convinced them that his popular "sketches" stories should be the focus (what would become the The Pickwick Papers) and Seymour should get second billing as the illustrator. Dickens had only recently published his first book, Sketches by Boz - illustrated by Cruikshank (no less), and was transitioning himself from being a reporter to writing stories full time. Seymour had been working equally hard to get a good deal with Chapman and Hall for years and then Dickens somehow spoiled it for him.

Seymour, it is said, was very depressive and self-conscious throughout his life. He was arguably at least twelve years Dicken's senior and had never really caught this sort of lucky coup or popularity that young Dickens experienced. The publishers fawned over Dickens' ideas. To make matters worse, Dickens didn't seem to like either Seymour or his etchings. Coming back from his honeymoon (he married Catherine Hogarth on April 2nd), Dickens opined that Seymour had drawn Mr. Pickwick all wrong. The character was supposed to be fat, not thin. A meeting was set up in early April by Dickens at a local inn so that he could talk to Seymour and some of the publishing staff about the next installment to be published. I'm guessing Dickens related what it was like working with Cruikshank previously. We do know that Seymour ended the meeting by storming out. Seymour's ideas for the story were consistently being pushed aside.

On April 20th, after just 6 etchings with Dickens, Seymour received another letter of "commentary" by Dickens about what needed to be included in the next illustration. Seymour responded by promptly going out back to the shack in his garden and blowing his brains out with a shotgun. The publication didn't take a break until a month later, when Dicken's sister-in-law passed away from illness. Dickens replaced Seymour with Hablot Knight Browne, who was 21 and did a better Cruikshank imitation. Browne referred to himself frequently as "N.E.M.O." as in "no man," which is either self-derogatory or means that Browne liked his anonymity. Either way, Dickens liked his contemporary Browne enough to dub him Phiz. As Boz and Phiz, they worked together for many years. And this is what history remembers.

"No other illustrator ever created the true Dickens characters with the precise and correct quantum of exaggeration. No other illustrator ever breathed the true Dickens atmosphere, in which clerks are clerks and yet at the same time elves."
- G.K. Chesterton on H.K. Browne

I was at the opening for Christopher Daniels’ first solo exhibit at Number 35 Gallery last week. His two canvas drawings on display were enough to fill the small room, because the canvases were so large that they each consumed a whole wall, and, in fact, had to be stretched inside that very room because there was no other way for them to be brought inside. I know that Christopher had been working meticulously on these two drawings for months and months and they deserved their own show. In contrast to recent shows here in New York, like Marcel Dzama and the Henry Darger-ism show at the American Folk Art Museum, Christopher’s drawing installation is very painterly despite the mannered technique of his little hand drawn characters. I’d say the fun and coloring was more akin to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum.

Number 35 Gallery, April 19th, 2008.

What the gallery says about Christopher’s work is that the drawings are made up of thousands of tiny characters in a map-like world of “impossible landscapes.” And this is what a lot of people paid attention to when they looked over the drawings. They would point at little characters or little icons or symbols, each drawn tiny like impulsive drawings in the margins of a school text, hidden in dense patterns of yet more characters. But the most interesting facet of his work, to me, was that the drawings performed well because of the coloring. Christopher is a talented colorist.

Drawing by Christopher Daniels.

The majority of the abstract color work in his pieces, the color field choices, and the push and pull of the larger areas of color and contrasts made the tiny figures almost inconsequential as to what they signified - until you get close enough. Which is why the scale really matters. The shapes and balances were very lovely and enveloping if you stepped back enough (not that you really could, though, since the gallery is quite narrow). You get a sense of what you might experience from afar when you see the above photo of the drawing. It reminds me of Clyfford Still in a strange way. There’s a sort of raggedness. However, the use of squares of color in small portions undermine that and he’s better off in the areas of the canvas that avoid them. Also, the few areas that were worked over with white paint did feel heavier than the bare canvas, so I wish he had restricted himself in some places, but there was never enough paint for these to qualify as paintings.

These drawings take Christopher so long, I can hardly wait to see others with different palettes as he grows, especially something with a richer tonal variety (not just limited to Crayola and Prismacolor pencils and crayons). Hopefully it won’t be another year between drawings!

In early 1964, Fender Guitars introduced what I think was their best short-scale “student” model electric guitar, the Fender Mustang. Even though it was designed to be sold as a relatively less expensive item on their list, it was made on the same assembly line as Fender’s more famous solid body guitars like the Jaguar. Incidentally, this was the first guitar that I bought myself, so I’m going to be biased here. Mine is a 1966 “Dakota Red” Mustang. It’s still one of my favorite guitars and a great workhorse.

The Mustang was based as an update on Fender’s earlier Duosonic / Musicmaster designs in 1964, and the body was usually made out of poplar instead of a more expensive wood like ash or alder (at least until the ‘70’s), which were used in the Stratocaster and Jazzmaster lines. The contour was Fender’s slightly elongated body from the original Musicmaster, just slightly more offset to appear more dynamic. It’s very comfortable. The necks on the Mustang were the standard maple with rosewood fretboard that Fender shared across its many lines, just in the short scales of either 21 frets in 22.5” scale or 22 frets in 24” scale. The shorter version was commonly referred to as 3/4 scale. These shorter necks do best with 10 gauge strings or higher. It can’t be overstated that even into the early CBS years these necks were very player friendly, even when Fender exploited cheaper ways to mass produce them.

The Mustang featured a single tone pot and a single volume pot, like on the Musicmaster/Duosonic models. But unique to the Mustang and the Duosonic II, there were two single coil pickups wired to two switches that enabled 4 pickup modes: neck pickup, bridge pickup, neck + bridge pickups together with hum canceling, and neck + bridge pickups “out of phase”. It’s a much more simple affair than a typical Strat’s 3 or 5-way switch, but this simplicity was really effective. The Mustang could get the bell-like pluck of a Stratocaster with its bridge pickup, yet it could also be fattened up slightly by adding the neck pickup without any 60 cycle hum (this is a bit like a Strat having a reverse wound middle pickup). Alternately, the Mustang’s out of phase option reduced the bottom harmonics considerably without effecting too much of the treble bite. Altogether, these are really good opportunities for both lead and rhythm sounds. It’s not a Stratocaster or a Jazzmaster, but it’s got pluck.

Above: The classic “out-of-phase” switch position.

Leo Fender’s coup, I feel, was the innovation of the Mustang’s unique vibrato system, which almost resembled a hardtail. This is the major difference between the Mustang and the Duosonic, which received no such update and remained a hardtail. Unlike the floating tremolo of the Jazzmaster, or the original tremolo designs for the Telecaster and Stratocaster, the Mustang’s vibrato was a really simple pivot system that was entirely supported by a small bridge with two deep posts where two springs connected underneath to the tailpiece. There was no solid block of metal anchoring the vibrato, like on the Stratocaster. This new design seemingly didn’t upset the strings on their rounded saddles even as much as a Bigsby. However, the range was a bit more limited, because you can’t really dive-bomb without making a lot of adjustments. But it was excellent for vibrato and, sadly, underrated for quite a while. From 1964-65, the vibrato was engraved as patent-pending, and post ‘66 it was patent approved. Why other models never came out with this vibrato design in that time period is a disappointment to me. I know that some guitarists have coveted the Mustang’s vibrato so much they’ve put it on a Jazzmaster or Jaguar to get rid of the floating tremolo’s weaknesses. But that’s strictly a matter of personal taste. Kurt Cobain, for example, hated it. He frequently asked his guitar technician Earnie Bailey to install Gotoh Tune-O-Matic hardtail bridges on his Mustangs instead.

In 2007, Fender finally re-introduced a 1965 re-issue of the Mustang, and I have to say that it’s just about as good as the original, just with more poly finish and a slightly thicker neck. They’ve had Japanese and other Mustang re-issues before, most of them with competition racing stripes or with more modern tuners, but this is the original style. I’m glad to see it back on the market.

Also: Looking at the Fender Mustang, Part Two

Additional Links: Shortscale.org Forums, Jag-Stang Forums, Mr. Maxima’s Mustang StoryThe Third Version (Marcel Roy’s Musicmaster site)

Videos with the Fender Mustang: Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, Good Thing by Fine Young Cannibals, 500 Up by Sloan.

Recently it occurred to me while reading online about digital printing that everytime I encounter the word “detail” it seems amateur technical writers are very dogmatic about its necessity, and, as I’ll explain at the end, very masculine about controlling it.

Detail in photography is a whole philosophy unto itself, with ideas that are really juicy to think about (the aggregation of signifiers, for example, and the limits of a physical photograph to “really” capture a moment without additional qualifiers and technical evidence). But the vernacular usage of the word “detail” on the internet refers to something very technical. So, when it comes to talking about details in a photo, most everyone is only talking about resolution, contrast, and sharpness, and you either have your photo down to pinpoint perfection in those terms or you’re spitting in the face of these gear heads.

Popular Expectations

Detail down to grain or pixel level is what this new general audience of photo enthusiasts wants to see. Often in order to satiate their appetite for detail, a sort of technical clarity is forced on an image that doesn’t really require it. Sharpness and local contrast are two popular methods enthusiasts use to hone detail in their work, perpetuating the bias towards exaggerated detail. Local contrast, which is the distinction between similar sets of pixels next to another, can be digitally exagerrated to increase the perception of detail, but it usually has a tell-tale effect of creating a glowing or traced-over look when you overdo it. What I see in a lot of recent online portfolios is that, for my taste, there is way too much over-sharpening and local contrast all for the sake of accentuating detail, particularly in the shadows, and to achieve a vibrant “pop.” It’s as if when there isn’t enough contrast people are afraid of their photo being labeled as “flat” and lacking professional appeal, or hearing “it’s dead.” Which, again, is to taste. It’s part of the same nonsense that keeps insane hobbiests searching for a super sharp SLR lens when they should really be trying out large format photography.

When a negative or a digital picture gets transmitted to paper, or even reduced for size on average web pages, it forces a slight reduction in detail. Ansel Adams worried about this famously, to the extent that he meticulously described the Zone system he used to manipulate the expected differences (exaggerating detail in his prints rather than lose it).

“My genius, if I have any, is in the slideshows, in the narratives. It is not in making perfect images. It is in the groupings of work. It is in relationships I have with other people.”
- Nan Goldin, interviewed at fotopeta.

However, luckily everyone still agrees that there have been successful images that weren’t apologetic they lost detail due to a poor lens or bad printing technique that resulted in fewer fine details. I think of some of my favorite grainy Nan Goldin shots, or anything from the best photo journalists. But these are becoming exceptions to the rule. While even a faint tin print could get away with being commercially successful 150 years ago, it would struggle today now that we’ve elevated the expectations of the camera, lens, and printer’s acuity. A tin print and Polaroids today seems artificially gimmicky or blatantly commercial in their retro-appeal. The heightened expectations are coming not only from hobbiests, but within the art market, too. Mitch Epstein’s ginormous prints have famous clarity down to 600 pixel per inch level. In fact, I suppose that was a part of the appeal for me in seeing the Cartier-Bresson scrapbooks. They were decidedly lo-fi. And that’s the issue at hand: the only reason to go lo-fi today is to create the illusion of vintage appeal and “classicism.”

Above: The sky on the twilight of Philippine’s suicide. Winterthur. Switzerland. By Nan Goldin, 1997.

The amount of preserved detail in the print is historically/journalistically very important, but it’s not really going to make or break a good photo, no matter how much everyone at Flickr or Smug Mug talks about detail’s necessity. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in lack of detail or unnatural contrast when it’s used as a complimentary aesthetic. Yet, despite what Nan says about not trying to make a “perfect” image, what is expected from a photo in terms of strong local contrast and detail is often the popular litmus test for its success to laymen, because this is something that is easier to judge than subjective meanings.

How Did This Happen?

Thanks to years of exposure to advertising photography that’s crackling sharp (except for what’s airbrushed smooth) and their own inkjet printers at home, people now have grandiose expectations. Amateurs can afford quality what was nearly impossible 20 years ago for professionals. They share tips and gadget lust together in online communities. When they do get out, they’re getting up close to gallery prints, almost pressing their noses against the paper to judge the quality. They want to be wowed by the technical difference between what they can do themselves with off the shelf cameras and printers. And with that in mind, they are looking closely at the artwork’s fine details. As a terrible outcome, in galleries there is a cruel and popular expectation now that a large print is primarily meant to be digested for observers keen on discovering tiny physical details and subtleties, that degradation of detail is to be avoided. Thanks to the growing consumer appetite for technology, educated viewers are losing the battle for popular acceptance of ambiguity and our agility to formulate critical hypotheses about what ambiguity represents.

Maybe this is an effect of “Holy Grail” imaging, the continued search for a medium that captures with God-like precision every detail you could ever hope to use, which slowly prejudices our respect for cheap/old technology by holding us captive to the dream that more is better.