Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Gibson has been increasing prices steadily over the past 10 years or so. Back in the vintage era, there were basically three models of Les Pauls – the Custom, the Standard, and the Special (the Junior is a single-pickup version of the Special). Now, there’s a crazy array of different models, and keeping them straight is a guitarist’s (and marketer’s) nightmare – the Standard, which is the most popular, has been changed drastically, and the closest to a tradition LP Standard is now called a Traditional.
Gibson does offer single coil pickups – the P-90, which is available on the Les Paul. The best known users of guitars with the P-90s are of course The Beatles, on their Epiphone Casino guitars they started using in 1966.
It’s a question of dialing in your sound with your amplifier more than the pickups – the 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb reissue is a good choice for working musicians. My $0.02….
Sound drops off over distance, so telling the band to turn down doesn’t work – it makes the music too low on the other side of the room. A big part of fixing this problem is putting the speakers up as high as possible – this way, the loudest blast of the music is above the heads of the guests, and if the speakers are angled properly, the sound will be even across the room and at a comfortable level. The speakers also need to be turned inward by 20 or 30 degrees, this minimizes sound reflections and keeps the overall acoustic environment intelligible. Another problem is stage volume and whether the musicians are hearing themselves properly. When one musician plays too loud, the rest of them turn up to compensate, and pretty soon the stage volume is a racket, without any semblance of being musical. If the musicians would use in-ear monitors to hear themselves and the other musicians in proportion, a lot of this turning up can be minimized. If you are booking a band for a chasseneh, ask the band how they are running the sound.