01.26.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 9:12 pm by George Smith
Made-in-China telecaster, used Atomic Reactor amplifier missing parts (but still takes a guitar line level into the effects return), 10-year old Adrenalinn III for time-based effects and stereo out, 26-28 year old Scholz R&D Rockman Sustainor, 15-year old Bag End 12″ on loan, 30-year old Hiwatt Custom 50 bought when I was at Lehigh.
Guitar to Sustainor for clean, edge distortion (not its highest gain setting by any means), then out to Adrenalinn III for stereo effects — one of the most important, a 12 millisecond delay in stereo for a doubled-in-a-small room very hard echo. (Trust me, that’s rock and roll.)
Then it goes to the Atomic as the main feed and the HiWatt (which pushes the Bag End 12″) for the stereo image.
It’s important to have a cheap EQ in the effects send and return of the Scholz Sustainor. This was my choice, bought years ago.
Some think the Scholz Sustainor, now a very old piece of gear, as only something that furnishes a typecast period piece Boston sound, totally inferior to modern digital modeling equipment. Not so. I use both with no prejudice.
An equalizer the Sustainor’s effects loop de-Bostonizes the sound, if desired.
My settings push up the bass below 400Hz. (The result, with the single coils in a telecaster-type guitar, a mid-scoop that retains body without making the treble ear-shattering. The goal is tight — but not always, heh, rock and roll tone with full bass and solid sound from rhythm to heavy lead. The classic Scholz equipment equalization, which is very good but idiosyncratic to the Boston sound, creates a huge bulge between 500 and 700 or so Hz, the very middle of the electric guitar’s sonic power. It’s perfect for many classic rock lead applications and rhythm sounds that make good pads while getting out of the way of the singing. But it’s not perfectly ideal for waxing quickly between rock and roll — the Beatles, the Stones, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Creedence Clearwater Revival — and arena rock, the Eagles “Hotel California.”)
The Sustainor internal EQ section carves a lot of everything below 400 out for the sake of sitting perfectly in a full range studio mix. As a side undocumented trick, an EQ, even a very cheap one, can put this all back in the Scholz effects return and can be used to push the “clean” settings of the Sustainor into mild overdrive.
So what can this rig do? It’s a jerry-bilt set up, unplanned, done from expedience.
The WhiteManistan Blues Band goes from jangle electric folk and some country to raging boogie and hard rock in 50 minutes of tunes. And it’s a two-man band, the kind of group I was in the early-70’s when I cut my teeth on combo rock. The White Stripes and Black Keys did not, by any means, invent the two-man band.
When you are in a two man band you have the freedom of choices others don’t have and also challenges they don’t.
For example: You can play really loud live (half of what we do). And annihilate the need for a bass player.
Or you can mix it like a lot of pop music. And annihilate the need for a bass player.
Or you can try to do it all, with a span from folk to loud hard rock in a full stereo panoply (the other half of what we do) compensated to combine the best of a raw sound with the dynamic range of a stereo mix.
It’s not easy. Everyone has to roll their own. It comes with experience, an ear, or ears, and what works for you.
Stay cheap.
Note to prospective made-in-China “Fender” telecaster owners: Pick-ups and electronics are stock and not substandard. At really loud volume the single coils are not micro-phonic (a common criticism by know-nothings, prone to atonal squealing caused by vibration of pickup winding) or inferior to domestically-made pickups at all. (Keyword: Squier.)
Pardon the errors: An earlier version of the post screwed up the frequencies by orders of magnitude. Since corrected.
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01.14.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll at 5:16 pm by George Smith
Now for plutocrats and their not-yet-obsolete shoe-shiners.” width=”365″ height=”210″ />
Now for plutocrats and their not-yet-obsolete shoe-shiners.
From the middle class to the upper class in a little over half a century. The de-evolution of the domestically-made electric guitar from a working class instrument to a snob buy primarily for the plutocrats, their immediate servant class and rock stars mirrors much in the calamity that is American inequality. Fender Musical Instruments didn’t cause it but the state of the company and its legendary products does show the systemic problem caused by the Great Recession and the crushing of the middle class.
The buying power of the American middle class took a big hit in 2007 and has never really recovered. Electric guitars and amplifiers are not an essential good. While American companies like Fender now employ the same manufacturing model as the iPhone — design in the United States and outsourcing of production to China or any other comparable low wage or slave labor country — guitars are not smartphones. They are not nearly as essential to young people, not even remotely as “must have.”
Leo Fender’s company was dependent on a healthy middle class as well as a lower class that could aspire to greater things in an economy where the majority could have employment at decent pay. That economy no longer exists.
Like everyone else, Fender followed the track of corporate American manufacturing. And it would be a little unfair, but only a little, to whack it for not realizing where that story could wind up.
Today Fender’s Mexico plant in Ensenada employs around 1,000. It’s Corona plant, here in southern California, approximately 600, according to various reports. Of these, fifty are employed in its Custom Shop, making ridiculously-priced snob pieces for famous musicians and the wealthy.
China now makes 70 percent of the world’s electric guitars, an American innovation. And Fender, like Apple, uses the model of employing an outside contractor in Asia to supervise and implement manufacturing of its low cost Squier line of relatively inexpensive lesser parts and cheap-manufacturing copies. It’s a business in which the guitar-making has disappeared into a warren of low cost Chinese or Indonesian industrial plants, manufacturing operations that house cheap production of multiple brands of electric guitars all under one roof, for whatever is needed.
However, even these instruments are not cheap enough anymore for the working class. And when your business was built upon the buying power of a healthy middle class, that means you have a long term, perhaps permanent, problem.
In 2012, Fender Musical Instruments attempted to go public. It then withdrew the plans for its IPO when the tea leaves were read and it was determined the capitalist market deemed the company over-valued under much of the same ratonale discussed on this blog.
“Though Fender remains the largest guitar-maker in the world and an iconic brand name, the market for guitars hasn’t been great,” reads a piece from Fortune. “The recent recession forced many people to reconsider purchasing luxury items such as electric guitars.”
Unintentional hilarity is provided by the assessment of a financial instruments man as at a wealth investment firm (pay attention because this guy’s going to show up again):
Jeffrey Bronchick, the chief investment officer at investment advisory firm Cove Street Capital, says the stock was overvalued. “It is a much more difficult business than what it was being sold as,” says Bronchick (who also plays guitar, on a Fender). “It was highly levered, there was a big question mark on growth and it was priced too high, which makes for a fairly toxic combination.”
The 1-percenters weren’t the market for the electric guitar in the United States and the west. Now, one can certainly make a product to sell to them, but they’re not enough to sustain the traditional business that one, historically, enjoyed.
Another way of putting it is to state that Fender, domestically anyway, has changed from the equivalent of making Ford Mustangs, a “sports car” just about anyone could hope to own in the Seventies, to Teslas, cars that are only for the top end. With the exception that there have really been no design changes worth noting in 60 years.
In 2009, Michael Hiltzik, a Los Angeles Times reporter did a puff piece on his tour of the Fender Corona plant.
Excerpted, it tells the story:
So it’s no accident that Fender’s $1,590 American Standard Stratocaster, the heart of the catalog, is made in Corona. And that’s not to speak of the models produced by Fender’s eight master builders, elite craftsmen who can spend anywhere from several days to several months building a guitar in the Custom Shop …
John Cruz showed me the replica he fashioned from Swedish guitar-virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen’s 1971 Stratocaster. It’s a heroic reproduction, down to the original’s cigarette burns and tooth marks, not to mention its strip of tape with the words “Play Loud??? and electronics that achieve what Cruz called a “1-to-1 match??? sonically.
Fender then turned out 100 replicas, sold for a list price of $12,500, to Malmsteen devotees — plainly a group that puts the “fan??? into “fanatic??? …
Many guitar experts believe Fender is today experiencing its golden age, but that doesn’t mean the firm is immune from economic woes. It cut back to one shift from two about a year ago, when the recession made $1,000-plus guitars look like dispensable luxuries. Executives say dealers have finally begun to report hazy indications of resurgent demand.
But it never really did turn around and in 2012 Fender could not go public.
It is not Apple, or Facebook, or SnapChat. And while I still think stratocaster and telecaster electric guitars are cool, the choices in “cool” things to have are now consumer electronics of the smaller, globally-networked kind.
Fender, as everyone else in the same business, could also do with average Americans having more money. But that’s not coming back soon. Instead, the current trend is much more worrying for American labor and its compensation.
A more recent story in the Sacramento Bee, another enthusiastic report on a factory tour, gets to another central point: Old guys who can still spend part of their pile, reliving their glory days.
Here:
“Being here today is like a dream come true,??? said Francisco Felix, 60, of Philadelphia. “It took me 50 years to get here. I’m serious. I’m originally from Puerto Rico, and I’ve been in places where guitars are made. But it was like, wow, wouldn’t it be great to go to Fender guitars someday????
“It’s a pilgrimage,??? Fahey added. When his questioner looked at him quizzically, he elaborated: “Why am I here? Fender is huge. It’s the guitar maker. I’ve got a lot of people back home upset with me that I’m here and they’re not. It’s about coming home, seeing where the electric guitar pretty much started.???
Except it’s not. And Leo Fender, unfortunately, is long dead.
The American economic tragedy is also Fender’s. It’s everybody’s.
Any post about Fender Musical Instruments should include something about Guitar Center. These days, they share some corporate DNA.
From the New York Times, in 2012:
But this heart of rock isn’t beating quite the way it once did. Like many other American manufacturers, Fender is struggling to hold on to what it’s got in a tight economy. Sales and profits are down this year. A Strat, after all, is what economists call a consumer discretionary item — a nonessential.
More than macroeconomics, however, is at work here. Fender, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., is also being buffeted by powerful forces on Wall Street.
A private investment firm, Weston Presidio, controls nearly half of the company and has been looking for an exit. It pushed to take Fender public in March, to howls in the guitar-o-sphere that Fender was selling out. But, to Fender’s embarrassment, investors balked …
[The dilemma posed by making guitars for the plutocrat once again turns up like a bad penny in the guise of the familiar financial analyst. The rich man who has money to buy your firm’s guitars is of the class that kicked you to the curb on the IPO, ain’t it a bitch? And they don’t give a shit about inequality and what it means to companies like Fender and Guitar Center.]
“What possible niche is left unexploited by Fender???? asks Jeffrey Bronchick, founder of Cove Street Capital, an investment advisory firm in El Segundo, Calif., and the owner of some 40 guitars, including four Fenders.
Another big player on the American music scene, Guitar Center, has already had financial strains. Like Fender, Guitar Center, the world’s largest chain of instrument retailers, is also involved with private equity. It’s controlled by Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old firm.
Analysts say Guitar Center is crucial to Fender, accounting for roughly a sixth of Fender’s sales — and the ties between the two run deep. Fender’s chief executive, Larry Thomas, used to be the chief of Guitar Center. He sold the company to Bain at the top of the market in 2007 for $2.1 billion, including debt.
Guitar Center has been losing money since.
I shop at Guitar Center. I bought picks and strings there just before Christmas, woo-woo! I like the employees and the company gets a rum deal from many, as a big box store, for perhaps not being the more personal artisan business they would like.
Those objections are rubbish, something from libertarian annoyances, people who believes all the crap they read in a Tom Friedman column about how everyone and everything average is now over, obsolete, suitable only for the trash heap unless it can be remade as globe-spanning suppliers of custom services and goods made only for the most discerning and worthy of customers.
The Great Recession hurt Guitar Center’s business. More importantly, like Fender, the great hollowing out of the middle class has meant bad things for both. Neither company can furnish an answer alone. It’s beyond their power. They are at the mercy of the American economic system.
Corporate America, the banks and Wall Street are doing fine. But can you run big businesses that depend on mass demand and the ability to pay from a middle class that’s being whittled away more and more every year?
Can you keep your traditional business in a world where the only buyers are investment advisors who have forty guitars squirreled away in their posh digs? That’s not a particularly attractive sole customer base for mass market music equipment. (Go ahead, click that link.)
Americans have to have jobs and those jobs have to pay more. A lot more, not part-time limping-along work, not minimum wage work, not jobs in which everyone qualifies for Medicaid health insurance, food stamps or the earned income tax credit.
Guitar Center didn’t make that world but they’re certainly part of it. A lot of their employees could use more spending money.
No one expects most musicians to make much. But not being greatly alarmed by the national way of making penury more universal because corporate America believes labor costs have always nowhere to go but down is a long-term still slowly unfolding disaster for many companies just like Fender and Guitar Center.
Here is a nuanced story on Guitar Center’s economic situation.
Here is a site devoted to employees who tried to unionize some Guitar Center stores.
Excerpt:
“We work at Guitar Center stores throughout New York City, and we love music and our jobs. But since Bain Capital bought the company, our commissions have been cut, and many of us barely make more than minimum wage or receive paid sick days or vacations.”
“But the Great Recession played havoc with the business model.” — USA Today, in a piece on Guitar Center, the day after Christmas.
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12.27.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Predator State, Rock 'n' Roll at 8:54 am by George Smith
Fiore.
‘Twas the day after Xmas through the Senate and House
Salvation was coming for every jobless louse…
See the poor have too much, the jobless are lazy
If we give them much less, they’ll get hired like crazy
But why stop with food stamps and checks, unemployment?
We’ll cut down the moochers for our own enjoyment…
And this is still the electric folk song of the year, from the heart of the great American mean, more on point every damn day.
Just not enough social love on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and et cetera, alas…
I was readin’ Atlas Shrugged
How the rich all get mugged
Blessed are the job creators
They can always hire way more waiters
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12.13.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 10:56 am by George Smith
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary; we all get there, eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich; and we do it right, without no hitch.
Welcome to the United States of Greed; it’s the only country you’ll ever need. If you’re into frauds and useless devices — Uncle Sam, the best of choices!
We do dances, brand new dances, all for the titans of finances…
Predator loans, iPhones and drones! Plus we got lotsa crazy people…
Welcome to the United State of Punishment
Our biggest export is excrement
Now we think freedom’s lame
Because what you need is a life of pain
Welcome to the United States of Security
We’ll inspect you now for purity!
If you have gold and your a– don’t smell
We won’t bomb you straight to Hell.
We do dances, brand new dances, all for the titans of finances…
Predator loans, iPhones and drones! Plus we got lotsa crazy people…
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary
Everyone comes here, eventually!
Yes I know the rent is steep
But the whores and beer are really cheap…
Most appropriate. Do follow the links (they open in a new tab) while listening to the catchy tune!
Rock on and have at it.
And here’s the tip jar.
Need an MP3 for your devices? Of course you do. Click here.
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12.06.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:50 pm by George Smith
John Carpenter’s They Live, from 1988, was the best art describing where we are in 2013. Just take the spotted aliens as the 1 percent and their servant class.
No remake could do justice to the original. But it would certainly be great for an enthusiastic revival on movie channels.
Would you like an MP3 for your devices? Sure you would. Click here!
It even includes the thuds and grunts from the longest fight scene.
You can even tip for it, if you like. Suggested — $1.25, more than twice what one is usually compensated on Mechanical Turk.
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11.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll at 2:06 pm by George Smith
Today, more ridiculous advertising from the American guitar industry, one among many good examples of inequality, the abandonment of a middle class society, and the shift of domestic manufacturing to lavish goods for the one percent and their still employed white collar servants.
If you follow the rock instrument industry you run into hordes of American men who actually think these things are fine, to be coveted, great artisan examples from America’s top-of-the-heap craftsmen. And if you look for video tours of the Fender Custom Shop, you easily find hagiography in which the people who put together priced-for-the-aristocracy basic electric guitar models designed fifty years ago are called master builders. It’s to laugh bitterly.
Here, the eight thousand dollar Fender telecaster, customized until its original reason as an instrument for the Bakersfield country sound or weekend entertainment in the beach ballrooms of southern California.
Better, follow this link to pricing for crystal pickguards.
Fender is the choice for this lampooning in the Culture of Lickspittle because it is a company that continuously drapes itself in the glories of its decades past history when it no longer has any moral or legitimate connection to it other than the fact that the instruments look the same.
You can say many things about the two wine ads. What you can’t say is that they have something to do with the rock ‘n’ roll, only that the concept and spirit of it is demonstrably dead at Fender. When you’re a music equipment manufacturer passing off 35 dollar bottles of snob wine from Sonoma as something cool you deserve to be put down.
Readers may note that six bottles of said Fender wine cost 80 dollars more than a Fender telecaster, made in China, pictured below.
These advertisements are only small bits from the great national decline: Once justifiably famous businesses, places where things that changed the world for the better were made by everyday people, now corporations focused on making intelligence-insulting and/or idiotic luxuries for the top class who laughably think of themselves as rock n rollers.
Today’s face of American employment, what’s left for you when nothing else is available, the great innovation of crowd-sourced free-lance slave labor. May more soon be welcomed into it.
My account on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the pay stub after a half day of work.
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11.10.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll at 3:53 pm by George Smith
Originally designed and made by Leo Fender, in southern California, as the first mass-produced electric guitar for the working musician. Now part of the bifurcation in US society, marketed for the 1 percenters, corporate fascists and their yet un-obsoleted upper middle class servants, the $3,700 Fender Telecaster. (By contrast, the “crafted in China” — really, that’s what it says on the headstock — Fender Squier Telecaster, recently on sale at Guitar Centers nationwide: $119.00.)
That’s an order of magnitude x 3 times difference in cost, the latter item — an electric guitar originally a southern California icon, sent back across the Pacific to its ancestral origin in a container ship. (And if you think there’s an order of magnitude difference in the sound and quality, you need to be put to death.)
The travesty of this is easy to grasp.
Global trade, what once was a good idea, or could have stayed an at least tolerable idea, is now twisted well into the bad.
There is no way to reverse conditions other than the very unlikely institution of a global minimum wage, mandated elevation of US wages, or imposition of tariffs on things like entry of container ships into US ports, tariffs to be paid as dividends to taxpayers, like oil or geologic asset revenue sharing. The latter would be reasonable under the thinking that it was the conditions in post WWII America that allowed for the creation and development of goods, desired around the world, that were domestically produced and then moved overseas. In all these cases more money must be put into the hands of everyone but the top tier types.
Until then, it remains one of the many and growing consumer choices in the new Culture of Lickspittle
Previously — Rock n Bluesmen for the Plutocracy.
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11.08.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Permanent Fail, Rock 'n' Roll at 4:03 pm by George Smith
In the mail today.
Price: $1250 before tax, per.
Made in low employment density custom-shop America, for the [1 percent and their not-yet-obsolete upper middle class servant] people. Bifurcation of US market into domestic manufacturing for the haves, offshore or nothing for everyone else.
More instruments for corporate fascists, to reference last week.
The virtual tip jar. Micro-payments accepted. Everyone should get used to it, because when you finally get to the Amazon Mechanical Turk model, you won’t be given a choice.
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11.02.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Rock 'n' Roll at 8:08 am by George Smith
The beating of people who are down is normal now, something not worth an uncomfortable shrug.
It’s evidence of a raw malevolence in the national spirit, something that’s only increased during the presidency of Barack Obama, put there through prolonged hardship, the rogue GOP and too many centrist Democrats who have always found it convenient to be indifferent.
And, as it worsened, many people turned off, turned away or became inured.
“One in seven in Pennsylvania are on food stamps,” reads a Pennsylvania newspaper this week. “At the stroke of midnight on Halloween, food-stamp benefits were cut throughout America for the first time in history.”
“This is nothing short of catastrophic,” Bill Clark, an executive director of a hunger relief agency in Philadelphia, told the newspaper. (Hat tip to Pine View Farm.)
Similar articles were published around the country, a couple in the Los Angeles Times, some well in advance. But nothing was done and, apparently, nothing can be done.
But you could see it coming. And here’s the WhiteManistan Blues Band’s recollection, Malevolent Nation, in a brace to tunes set on YouTube over the past three years.
The virtual guitar case tip jar.
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11.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Rock 'n' Roll at 1:15 pm by George Smith
It’s all that’s left. Look close at the Amazon Mechanical Turk screens.
Here’s the tip jar by the virtual guitar case.
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