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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.

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.

Jeremy Blake’s work made an indelible impression on me and it will probably always remain an esotaric touchstone I’ll keep coming back to and thinking about. But I can hardly talk about that without first remembering the influence of Graham Peacock and the Lush album “Spooky.”

In 2001 and 2002, Mr. Peacock, a “New-New” painter and one of my painting teachers, was forcing me to evaluate formalism and abstract art, particularly color field painters, with his own sensitivity and energy for the history and value of such projects. He knew how to cut to the chase when analyzing anything by the likes of Jules Olitsky and Morris Lewis, both with and without the Clem Greenberg vocabulary. The psychology of this culture of abstract painting was rich and addled with conflicting ideas of friction and bliss. But I was trying to compliment this education with experimenting in digital work at the same time, and it was difficult for me. I remember showing Graham some of my color field digital paintings done outside the studio and he slightly encouraged it, even if he didn’t like the apparent small scale. Although I didn’t feel successful at abstract painting, eventually it started to be fun. I began to find some confidence in making bright and super-saturated colors work for the first time. I also used motion graphics to experiment with animating my color field paintings from scans and photographs. I took my digital paintings and clips, with ethereal transitions inspired by British shoegaze music, and even converted them to 35mm slides for my portfolio. Admittedly, the Jim Friedman photography for early Lush singles and, in particular, 1992’s Spooky have held my fascination for so many years, that I gravitate to similar blurry, microscopic motifs frequently.

Artwork for Lush singles by Vaughan Oliver and Jim Friedman.

It was when I saw the opening to Punch-Drunk Love that I recognized that what I had been playing at was something other artists had already invested in with better currency. And that’s how I first learned about Jeremy Blake. Searching out information on him after seeing his spectacular animations in that movie, I was floored. He had been doing brilliant, formalist work on a larger, more advanced and articulate scale, with much greater style and visual élan. Better yet, he introduced photography into his work with terrific dynamic taste for iconography and brooding metaphors. His growing body of work was something that made me feel like small potatoes, but it still inspired me to keep trying. Works like The Winchester Trilogy plundered pop culture subjects and fused them into a visual reverie, flowing delicately, undulating in and out of shapes and colors, in a manner that seemed less like animation and more like an effort to use time as temporal collage to extend the canvas or screen. For the extension, our eyes stay focused ahead to watch images unfold into much larger entities, with the frictions and contrasts accentuated by motion and editing. All throughout his oeuvre, I appreciated his energized motifs of childhood innocence, formalist beauty, fractured egos, and self-awareness. It was only in the later works, like The Winchester Trilogy, that it seemed to become much more political and musically collaborative.

From Winchester Trilogy, (c) Jeremy Blake, Feigen Contemporary.

I hoped one day that I would cross paths with Jeremy and finally meet him, get to ask some questions, and to talk. I’m pretty saddened that both his wife, video game designer Theresa Duncan, and he have apparently died from suicides this month. They were both articulate and curious about so many interesting subjects that it’s a real pain that they won’t be around to contribute anymore. The semi-obituary at the NY Times for Jeremy and Theresa barely covers the mystery of how this happened, but I hope if anything their work will get more notoriety so that more people will appreciate what they accomplished with their forward thinking motion narratives and their impact on the art world.

Links: The apparent double suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan, Jeremy Blake at Kinz/Tillou+Feigen Gallery, Jeremy Blake and The Winchester Trilogy, Jeremy Blake: Winchester Book, Quicktime clips of Jeremy Blake’s Punch-Drunk Love contributions, Jeremy Blake, Artnet, 2001, Theresa Duncan’s “The Wit of the Staircase” Blog, “NYTimes: Two Artists, One Suicide, the Other Missing”

My 21” Apple CRT, for bulk pickup, but maybe for the gleamers…

A long while ago, back in 1999, I fondly purchased a used Apple 21” Studio Display. If you’ve never seen that model in person, I’ll say first that it was perhaps one of the largest and finest flat screen CRTs you could ever use for photography and design at the time. The color gamut was brilliant and it had a contrast range worth every dime. Of course, it also looked bizarre. Being an Apple monitor from the original Bondi iMac’s day, it was fabricated in a transparent blue and frosted plastic casing with a corrugated tripod base that made it look very strange yet “designy” on a desk, like a whale’s head sculpted by a futurist. Maybe that was the real premium. You either had taste for this or thought it was childish and repulsive, which is probably why Apple only sold them for what seemed like less than a year.