For the past year the guitar I've been playing the most has been a Gibson Advanced Jumbo, much like this one:
It was a real switch for me, because I'd been using Triple O and OM-sized guitars onstage almost exclusively since the late 1980's. Prior to getting this AJ, every time I'd pick up a dreadnought in a trade in the past twenty years or so I'd dink with it a little bit, but always eventually end up selling or trading it off. No dreads ever threatened the stage supremacy of my 000-42, that's for sure.
But then this round-shouldered dread came along, and it changed my playing to such an extent that I went ahead and asked Howard Klepper to build his interpretation of the Advanced Jumbo idea for me, this time with black walnut back and sides and a Carpathian spruce top. Here's a picture of my friend John Youngblood playing the new Klepper "KJ" at Howard's shop a few days ago:
(Those interested in following the progress of that guitar from boards to fully functional musical instrument can check out the build thread here:
http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f...d.php?t=203278 )
Anyway, while I've been playing my walnut Larrivée OM-03W in public a bit over the last few months (most recently at church last week and at a St. Patrick's Day gig at McGinley's Pub in downtown Anchorage,) my Baxendale Mossman 000-42 has been neglected, frankly. I think I've had it out of the case maybe three times in the last year, which was unheard for me before the AJ showed up. That's my workhorse and my desert island guitar, yet I've been ignoring it.
But tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and one of the songs we always sing is "Who Follows In His Train?" (also called "The Son Of God Goes Forth To War.") It's a wonderful, stirring song, and it's the source of the melody for "The Minstrel Boy."
Thomas Moore, who wrote the words to "The Minstrel Boy," found "The Son Of God Goes Forth To War" in his Church of Ireland hymnal, and used its melody rather effectively! But you can hear that melody with the original hymnal words sung at various times in the film "The Man Who Would Be King."
So we sing this song every Palm Sunday, and none of the guitars I own is quite as effective punching out that melody so that hundreds of parishioners can hear it over the choir, the piano and the other instruments as this 000-42. It really cuts through, and you can hear it in the back row of the church without any problem at all.
So this afternoon I took it out of its case, changed the strings, but then was
appalled by the tone I got from the guitar. It sounded thin! Harsh!! Brittle!!! And way too trebly without much if any bass response....
Yet I know this is a terrific-sounding guitar. What on earth could be wrong with it?
Well, nothing at all, actually. The problem was with me and how my right hand attack had changed a bit in the year since I'd been devoting most of my guitar-playing time to the AJ.
It took me about a half an hour to gradually start getting sounds from the 000-42 that sounded the way they should.
Was this a case of a guitar needing some time to wake up? Well, no, actually. The new strings needed to stretch in and get stabilized, that was part of the problem, but the main problem was that the way I gripped the pick had changed over the past year.
After I got the guitar sounding back to where it should, I stopped and asked myself: "What am I doing differently than I was a half an hour ago?"
It took me a couple of minutes to figure it out.
The answer was that I had shifted my grip on the pick to where only the last quarter inch of the point was sticking out from between my thumb and forefinger - on the AJ and the Gibson J-60 dread I got a few weeks ago, a good half inch of pick has been exposed when I play.
Choking up on just that short amount of distance gave the medium-heavy picks I use a bit less flex, and got the tone back that I remember from that guitar. Playing a big-bodied round-shouldered dread where both tone and volume are easily extracted had made me lazy and inattentive to that sort of detail (although I never had really paid that much attention to HOW I was getting that tone from the Triple O, I just GOT it...)
With some guitars you have to work a little harder to get the tone, but you're rewarded when you finally figure it out!
Hope that makes sense.
Wade Hampton Miller