This distinctive variation on the thinline semihollow electric is the Fender Coronado II and a recent addition to dbTwang database (You can view the profile here but you’ll need to be logged in).

The Coronado Line

Designed by Roger Rossmeisl, who had previously worked for Rickenbacker the Coronado series were Fender’s first hollowbody electrics and their answer to Gibson who’s ES355 series dominated the growing thinline market at the time of their debut in 1966, unfortunately for Fender the Coronado didn’t quite succeed and so was discontinued by 1972.

Jimmie Vaughan takes a Coronado II for a spin!

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Fintan

One of life’s great pleasures for me is to browse the dbTwang database gallery and as often happens come across some collectable beauty that’s been in a cupboard for decades or maybe a buzzed out homegrown mongrel guitar.

In fact anything fretted and new to me is of interest to me, so I’m starting a series of posts where I pick a guitar that one of our members has built a profile for and then post up whatever stats I can find out about the make, model and history of it.

The Yamaha SG2 and SG3

Link Wray with "Screamin' Red"

A geologist once explained to me just why we here in Ireland have some of the most interesting geology on the planet. It seems that many eons ago a good chunk of what is now the west and north-west of the country resided roughly where Canada is now, whilst the remainder was situated where South Africa now is, with a vast ocean separating the two.

Luthier Charlie Hoffman is just on of the 130 plus makers on show at the Montreal Guitar Show

So it is with some hankering for prehistoric times gone by that I realize that had the tectonic shimmy sham that has produced our fair isle not taken place or if I could rewind time by a few hundred million years, I could be well placed to catch some of the world cup in in South Africa in the flesh or even better the upcoming Montreal Guitar Show 2010 that runs from July 2nd to 4th and features over 130 class luthiers… never mind the hungry dinosaurs.

Few things in life can be as fun for a dyed in the wool guitar geek such as myself than the prospect of hunkering down with the dbTwang database and devoting what morsel of concentration my brain is able to muster on a Monday afternoon to the pleasing task of reviewing the guitar information our members have submitted to the database over the past few days.

As dbTwang continues to get new members so we are starting to see some of the guitar’s lesser known chordophonic relatives and I’ve been struck by just how hard it is to get good picture reference and more importantly for me, audio samples of some of these intriguing instruments.

The Puerto Rican Cuatro

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Fintan

For the most part I like to take my recommended daily allowance of entertainment in an audial dose, preferably prepared by a genius with a Ph.D in six string mayhem. I generally find watching TV a thin experience that has an unrelenting narcotic effect and is anything but entertaining.

Well earlier today I noticed that the good folks at the BBC have put online a large selection of the interviews Alan conducted along with unseen and uncut footage – definitely worth checking out whether or not you’ve seen the series.

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Fintan

The secret to keeping your gig calendar open is to avoid attracting the attention of musicians who are looking for collaborators. Even better if you can induce in them the urge to avoid you altogether lest they absentmindedly invite you to jam with them or even worse, audition for the ‘band’.

The most effective way of achieving this state of solitude is to cultivate a reputation for having an excessive array of effects pedals at your disposal and a notoriety for attempting to use all of them at the same time for as long as possible.

Nothing ticks off a fellow traveller on the road to musical enlightenment more than watching you miss the first two bars of your solo as you stamp around like someone trying to put out a cigarette in a firework factory whilst turning on the means to transform your beautiful handcrafted instrument into something that would be effective at dispersing angry mobs at a distance.

But what if you are actually forced to play ‘naked’? Don’t worry, should the miracle of modern electronic science that it took you an hour to engineer before you were ready to tune up fail, either through brain overrun on your behalf or sabotage on the part of your musical correspondents; overuse of effects has a side-effect… You’ll sound nearly as bad without them because you haven’t had to cleanly play a note for years!

Pedal Acquisition Syndrome, a varient of Gear Acquisition Syndrome, can seriously damage your playing. I’ve been in recovery now for a couple of years and my playing has improved immeasurably. I even prefer to play acoustically these days. However I do still own one pedal, the Boss EQ20.

Yes, I know it’s kinda vanilla but it really is great and not just in the way it used to be for me; at boosting range post some hellacious overdrive, but also at fine tuning tone for every guitar I own – a sort of pedal patch if you like, keeps me off the hard stuff and away from my antisocial habit, plus I don’t get asked to leave the room half so much!

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Fintan

For sometime now whenever I need to tune up I reach for my iPhone… no, unfortunately I am not speed dialing my guitar roadie but using the latest guitar tuning app from the ever increasing app’verse.

Recently I’ve been using Guitar Toolkit and found it great as it has lots of features in addition to simply tuning but this morning I discovered that TC Electronics have app’ed their PolyTune pedal and I have to say I’m impressed.

The PolyTune Twins - the one on the left is the one you can stamp on.

The single strum readout is just great and if like me you are the proud owner of ears that even though they resemble an accident at a surrealist textile convention, actually look better than they work, PolyTune’s single strum display tells you instantly which of those wiry suckers is making you sound like Les Dawson on the piano. I also really like the stream display for individual string wrestling. It’s a little pricey for an app that only tunes @ €7.99 but then again it does it really well and the real world pedal is $99.00.

As for using the iPhone for tuning at all; well it obviously would be better to have the real world stomp box inline for real world musical performance but the virtual tuner is perfect for those of us whose real world performances are still in a virtual place.

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Fintan

It’s not my usual terrain but now and again when the urge takes me I like to bust out my old Levin western style acoustic from 1951 that I’ve had for ages (here’s her dbTwang profile – you’ll need to be logged in to see) and spend an afternoon ‘bottleneckin’. It’s got a very flat wide neck and for the inexperienced in glass fretting such as myself it has a high action that flatters me with a cleaner sound than my technique deserves.

When it comes to the bottle neck itself for years I’ve used the little bottles from Magic Markers that used to clutter the bins of the various graphics studios I worked in during a previous lifetime. All of a sudden I’m down to my last one and it seems Magic Markers are no longer made in bottles but are now made with plastic barrels instead.

Harvest time in the days of yore and the Magic Marker gives up her hidden glassy fruit!

So in anticipation of the inevitable accidental destruction of my last pygmy bottle I’m pre-emtivly shopping for a replacement and have come across ceramic bottle necks from Paloma Stone Slides. From a scan around their website it seems Jay who runs the operation making these interesting beauties comes from a high end pottery background and has combined his love of music making with his trade secrets to come up with slides that he says have ‘a warm, organic tone with exceptional sustain’.

Ceramic bottlenecks and slides from Paloma Stone Slides, what a wonderful technological age we live in!

Interesting indeed. Any other unusual bottlenecks out there? Let us know about them, in the meantime I’m going to go ahead and order one of these babies anyway and will post again once I’ve had a chance to try it out.

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Fintan