I find that this issue is most prevelant with my wrist-forearm usx setup too 
While i’m here I guess I should ask what strats/strat style guitars you would recommend?
Used Fenders seem like they could be good, but what about other brands like G&L, Sire or Jet guitars?
Great, thanks! I’ll take a look at the video
Shawn Lane is not DSX, he’s USX. His setup looks DSX because he has a trailing edge grip and pronates. This is where following the pick path (which admittedly is hard to do in the footage we have of him) and/or understanding the phrases he plays (we have conclusive evidence of this though) is what we need to focus on.
All that said and academics aside, you can use Shawn’s setup and get a great DSX motion. It’s just not what he did.
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It’s a pretty rare motion he had. There was a thread here about another great player who’s mechanic was similar
In the jazz world there’s also the amazing George Benson and the (also amazing) Cecil Alexander who use this setup and are getting a USX version out of it.
I’ve messed around with many motions presented here and this is one I can’t seem to reproduce, other than some rare occasions where I get it working then I lose it (I also can’t do the “finger motion”). It could be because way back in the day I did a pronated trailing edge grip but I was definitely DSX. So maybe when I get into that posture/setup old habits just want to take over.
EDIT: also, on topic, I HATE the position of volume knobs on pretty much all my guitars lol! I have a cheap strat, I nice PRS McCarty, I nice PRS single cut, and a nice Ibanez RG Prestige. It’s worse on some than others but it always seems “in the way”.
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On the Mustang I find I do sometimes hit the volume knob, but only sometimes. And if I play them frequently I learn to stop doing it. With the Musicmaster / Duo-Sonis, I never hit the volume. So I assume the knob is a little further away, though I haven’t actually measured it.
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They don’t sound super Stratty. There is a little of that but they’re darker. This is typical of shorter-scale guitars — Les Paul being the extreme example. Of course I lean into that by putting humbuckers in them, so I’m not even trying to get something Strat-like.
I’d also point out that there is significant guitar-to-guitar variation which I can’t really explain, since they’re all just basically planks of wood bolted together. I know the whole “tonewood” thing is controversial, but whatever is contributing to the difference in sound, it’s cleary there, even when strumming acoustically.
As an example, here’s the Musicmaster. This is a before and after with the stock vintage '60s single coils and the humbuckers. You’ll notice with the singles it’s not super thin or bright. I just mainly replaced them for the noise control:
Edit: I’m not sure why I wrote “1976 single coil” in the video. Maybe I did some research on that and found that they’re not stock. Either way they’re definitely old.
By comparison, here’s one of the Duo-Sonics with the stock single coils on clean tone. This is the brightest of the short-scale guitars that I own, and again, the difference is apparent even acoustically. I don’t know why that is. It has its charm if you want something really chimy but like the Musicmaster better:
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Just a general FYI I have not seen any footage of Shawn doing continuous DSX alternate picking. I think the form you’re referring to is actually USX, just done with dart-thrower wrist motion, as opposed to reverse-dart. It’s not as common as using a pinky-side anchor, there are examples of it, like our very own Bill Hall!
The form looks like it would be DSX because of the thumb anchor, but it’s actually USX where upstrokes escape. I think Phil X’s USX technique is similar. There are probably others, Guthrie maybe? I haven’t looked at him in a while but I know I thought that previously. Shawn is maybe the most famous “fast” USX dart-thrower player with a flat form or thumb anchor that I can think of off the top of my head.
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Slightly off topic question
How do you come up with some of your musical ideas like the ones in the videos you posted? Do you have something in mind you aim for or do you improvise and through a combination of feel and your learned vocabulary put together really cool sounding passages?
Yes, for example, if one has two such extreme samples and exchanges their necks, what happens? I am sure that all of the manufactures know the answer to this question, but what could it be?
The best comparison of this that I have seen was done by Warmoth. They did a whole series, where they swapped bodies, necks, etc. They kept all the variables identical, and I mean identical, so that only one component was changed. These videos are far better than the supposed “debunking” videos where the guy clamps a guitar bridge to a desk or some other stupid thing.
The result of the individual tests was pretty subtle but still audible:
Based on these, I think if you combined a mahogany neck and body you would definitely get a darker-sounding guitar. So the idea that the wood doesn’t matter, I don’t actually buy that at all. I think these tests are hard to refute.
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The red guitar clean tone clip was a composition, I don’t remember how I came up with it. I think I was just messing around with trying to crosspick four-string chord shapes.
The other stuff is just purely improvisational and I’m sure it shows — it rambles a little. Very generally it’s just chord progressions I like, using whatever single-note fingerings are nearby to the chord shapes. At various points I just play whole chords literally so you can hear the progressions I’m using. Other times I’m just outlining the progressions with arpeggiated figures, but you can still hear them.
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I never really questioned it but I generally used to believe whatever I read in Guitar World or what some great player said haha! Definitely “conventional wisdom” that the materials matter.
I’m a PRS owner and back in '03 or '04 I had a really bad guitar accident that I’ll never forgive my bandmates for (or myself, since I left the guitar on a stand and didn’t put it in the case where it belonged). I lived about 1.5 hours from the PRS factory though and I took it to them to repair it. The guy who worked on my guitar was one of their veteran builders. I asked him a few questions about their building and materials and so forth and he definitely was of the opinion that the wood mattered re: tone and even mentioned how they try to make instruments that sound great even prior to plugging in. He was very cool and the whole thing was super “off the record”. I guess he’d still have motivation for hamming that up since their materials are a big reason PRS price tags are high.
Still, given that his day job was building guitars that (at the time, not sure about now) were known for having great quality control, where you could be confident that any guitar of the same make/model would play/feel/sound the same, I think it’s at least a little more evidence that there’s more to it than just pickups.
And again, (on topic) I just picked up that guitar to play it since I haven’t for a while. I don’t like where the volume knob is!!!
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I really enjoyed Aaron’s analysis! Alas, he didn’t answer my ultimate question:
“Can you apply an EQ to make all of those [UPDATE: Aaron] guitars sound the same?”
Watch at around 8:30 to see how ZZ Top tries to make [UPDATE: all of] their guitars sound the same:
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Not really. This becomes more obvious when you compare very different-sounding guitars like a Strat and a Les Paul. There is no way to EQ the twangier-sounding guitar to sound like the Les Paul. You can add bass but it doesn’t sound the same. You end up with a twangy-sounding guitar with more bass. But you don’t get that fat-sounding chunky muted thing you get on a Les Paul. The attack is totally different, whether single notes or chords.
Where that comes from, I don’t exactly know. The Les Paul is mahogany with a layer of maple glued on top (“maple cap”). And I think a mahogany neck too, also glued in. You can A/B ours with any other guitar we have, even strummed acoustically — it has a very obvious low-mids hump that just sounds totally different than anything else we have.
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Sorry for not being clear, I meant to ask a much more limited question,
- Can EQ make the same model of guitar always sound the same (e.g., Aaron’s test guitars)?
So, can any two Les Pauls be made to sound the same with EQ? Billy Gibbons will tell us “no,” there is only one Mistress Pearly Gates. But I wonder, could he pass a double-blind test between that and a MPG clone? My guess is, “no.”
I don’t even know the answer to this most fundamental question! The answer, however, might be that wood has a lot of non-linear behaviors that depend on how it grows, how it was dried, etc., and this is what shapes the sound, hence EQ won’t work exactly even for the case of Aaron’s guitars.
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Oh really? Sorry my mistake.
I sware I see him doing dsx often. But I guess I’m wrong. The hand position should be good for dsx tho?
Exactly, it’s that hand position. You can do either USX (dart thrower) or DSX (reverse dart thrower) from that setup. If you analyze the phrases he’s playing, everything I’ve ever seen from him is escaping on the upstroke. As far as I know, we have no “clear” footage of him with that nice “down the neck” angle that you’d really need to see if someone is USX or DSX. From the audience perspective looking straight at him, sure. It looks like a DSX setup.
And you’re absolutely correct that you could use his setup and get a DSX motion. It’s similar to what @Scottulus has been up to lately. Pronated, trailing edge grip, but DSX.
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