Yesterday while driving I was listening to this show on a radio channel here about the first tape one’s bought. Boy, that made me think!!!

I remember that I asked my mother, I think I was 12 or something to buy me a cassette player and I went with her to a shop nearby and bought one of those 2 rooms stereo cassette players, I even remember the brand name, if it is even a brand…It was called International. Well, that was it! I had my stereo, just that I had no cassette to listen to so I went to a store nearby that was our local half bookstore/half anything else that had anything to do with paper, pens, cassettes, whatever…

I didn’t even know what to buy, you imagine that back then, in Romania we didn’t have any music televisions to give the children any musical taste, even a bad one. So, for I don’t remember what reasons I picked a tape (that was as much as I could afford at that moment, I was 12 or 13), payed for it and went home to listen to it.

Imagine that the tape I picked was Jimi Hendrix!!! Without any musical culture at that moment, with a dubious musical taste and nobody to lead me through music (my mother didn’t have anything to do with music, so…) I picked something that was out of my league for that age…

I played that tape wanting so much to love it, to have something to speak about the next day with my colleagues…but all that I could get was a head ache (no kidding, it is real!) I could not listen more than one side of the album. I don’t even know what album was that!

How unfortunate was that? One of the most important electric guitar players of all times to make such a bad impression on me? I totally hated it and switched to rap music, which I listened until I was about 16 I think when rock music asked it’s share…

A few years later I tried to come back to listen that tape, but I still didn’t like it. I think that the first impression counted a lot in my case since, despite the great appreciation that most guitar players show to Jimi Hendrix and despite my intellectual appreciation for him, I still don’t like his music. If somebody asks me, I rather say I like other kind of guitar players, and it is true, but I think that it is really related to this first experience with rock music, is related to that first tape I bought…

So, do you remember the first cassette you’ve bought? Or was a vinyl?

What’s your story?

Bookmark It

Bookmark It

OK, it may sound fancy but I will explain you in just a second why I named my article “Electric guitars or the universe of sound”.

I named it this way since more than acoustic guitars, electric guitars open a world of sounds that reveal infinite possibilities. There is a lot of science in how an electric guitar sounds, in the way the sound is set by the guitar player or by the sound engineer, the sound needs to have certain mathematical level of trebles, of bass, but if you listen to those guitar heroes that you look up to, you will see that they all have their unique sound.

Electric guitars sound different because of many parameters that should be taken into consideration, from the wood type the electric guitar is made of, to the amplifier parameters and all the way to the particular way the player knows his way around music.

Even the position where the guitar strings are pinched matters when you speak about sounds of electric guitars and that is why all those guitar heroes sound that different.

I picture electric guitars sounding in a “visual” manner

I am a visually oriented person and I “see” everything, including sounds. Maybe it is difficult for you to understand what I mean, but picture this: let’s take a 70’s electric guitar player, let’s say Jimi Hendrix and his astonishing way of playing the guitar (by the way, I am not a big fan of Hendrix, but I do appreciate his perspective of the music) and Joe Satriani, a real God of electric guitars, in my opinion.

When I picture the sound of Jimi Hendrix’ electric guitar I see it as a tape running, flying, twisting in the air, but as a colored tape, I mean like a 2 faces limited thing, in one word…a tape. That, in my opinion defines the whole period of the 70’s from the point of view of how electric guitars sound.

When I think about modern electric guitars, when I think about how Joe Satriani makes his futuristic sounds, I see an infinite, fluid, conic shape, with a small base, some kind of a 3D tube that narrows to the infinite end, reflecting a silver-like light. This is the way modern electric guitars sound. The whole music of Joe Satriani sounds like surfing with the aliens, if you know what I mean…

I don’t know if you agree or not, this is my way of seeing the music, this is the way electric guitars make me feel and imagine music. Various electric guitar players give me different feelings, different impressions.

For example, if I think about Slash of Guns N’ Roses I think of him as having an incredible equilibrium, the way a cat has. Remember, a cat is said to always fall on her feet; this is what Slash makes me feel. Each time I see him playing his Gibson I have a damned ugly feeling that, look, now he’s going to miss a note, see…now, not yet…aaa, he’s going to miss the next one..But you know something? Despite this feeling of insecurity that Slash always throws on me, he always manages to put there as many notes as needed in order to make the song work. Without being one of the best electric guitar players around, Slash has other qualities, in my opinion. He is very melodic and has his unique style of playing. But that will probably be the subject of an other post, sometimes in the near future.

I could speak like this for hours about electric guitars, about how they sound and how various guitar heroes play and how they sound, but for the moment I stop here hoping that you have understood why I named my post “Electric guitars or the universe of sound”…

Bookmark It

Bookmark It