The Collection: Keith Nelson

[Music] hey everybody mark ignacy here for gibson tv today i'm in burbank california outside the studio of my good friend guitarist and producer keith nelson now as a founding member of the bam buck cherry keith saw multi-platinum album sales and two grammy nominations since leaving the band he's had a successful songwriting and producing career working with greats like alice cooper blackberry smoke my chemical romance you better bet with career stats like that comes an impressive stash of musical toys what you're about to see may shock you this is the collection with keith nelson man how you doing good bro come on in i'm excited to see this great to see you good to see you too where does guitar collecting start from you when did you get this whole mug well i think early on okay so i was a drummer first and early on i know right don't hold that against me but i think it kind of gave me a rhythmic advantage in a way my first guitar was a telecaster custom like the keith 72 yeah that a neighbor had taken and painted van halen stripes on sick right yeah and put a humbucker in it and i and i saw the guitar and it was he saw the neck on it and i was putting it together kind of because i couldn't afford a new guitar i wanted to play guitar so he was like 50 bucks or whatever so that was my first guitar took it stripped the van halen paint off of it because i was a keith richards fan okay stern's fan fair enough and it was a telly i never saw eddie play italian got it back to black and rebuilt that and that was kind of like my first guitar when i was ready for my first les paul so i'm from a little town outside of pittsburgh and there was this really cool music store that was upstairs above a store that did new retail new stuff it was called johnny b goods in mckees rocks pennsylvania and i went up there and it was all used stuff and i noticed that the used ones were less expensive than the brand new ones and that's kind of where it all started and i was off to the races of like just looking at old guitars and somehow in my brain somebody must have early on said the old ones are better than the new ones you want to get one of those old ones i don't know how i got that yeah it started there oh man it's a guitar buffet yeah we're doing all right over here it's a buffet of brown and crack cases where you want to start i don't know we just start at the end and work our way down so i don't know if you know this but the les paul as we all know it for a few years but different shape i do know this a lot of people don't know that though the les paul sg so this guitar most people i think feel like this tremolo on it is unplayable but there's a little trick that makes it really playable and two pafs how can you go wrong yeah sideways wiggle stick cheaper than a burst cheaper than a burst solid body with bafs now it appears that that arm is is that fixed that arm is out of the equation right now and we've replaced the spring mechanism with the mojo x which actually disables the tremolo and pulls the strings over the bridge a little bit yeah and as you can see i have a reissue bridge on there because we want to we want to actually i think it may have had nylon saddles 62. oh man where'd you get this uh that came from our good friend elliot in nashville yeah now do you go to sg's often or you this is kind of to have that sound but you're more of a single cut les paul kind of guy or yeah i mean sometimes a les paul to me just takes up too much space a little too wide yeah it's taking up too much space i love these for um guitar solos for you know when you're stacking things against each other layering things getting different sounds just something different yeah you know somewhere in between a les paul and a les paul jr yeah guitar number two guitar number two when two pafs aren't good enough one more paf will normally do the trick so this is an early 60 oh what they call a double o double o serial number so does so it's got a big uh it's got a bigger neck on it double whites have you looked a lot of double-oh serial bursts have yeah i haven't looked no i probably did look at one point but i do not recall now did you do anything to this because i know on the black beauties a lot of people no these are original fretless wonder frets on here but what i did do is i took i saw a picture of keith richards with his middle pickup that direction so i flipped it around like keith has it i don't know that it makes any difference but yeah um see how to phase work for you on this is that part of the attraction to this to get that that sound yeah it's it's really something different you know and and even though frampton's was a was a 56 that was routed i remember like what being a little kid seeing the cover of comes alive and hearing do you feel like we do and just always just thinking of that guitar as as like this mind-blowing unobtainable it's so sexy look at that thing it's black and gold man i sleep better at night it's close by where did this come from that came from elliott michael we're seeing a pattern here yes yes so when you see elliot in his little red porsche yeah that's pretty much why that you bought the porsche yeah it's porsche oh man you're welcome elliott you're welcome dude um no but you know i've been dealing with elliot for a long time and um he found that guitar and there that's great just enough wear on it that you don't have to be shy about playing no you don't have to be shy black guitars kind of show all the all the all the dings and yeah but man it's been great it's a you know i would say i played heavier ones it's not the lightest one i've played but it really sounds phenomenal yeah was stuff like this ever out on the road or is this this is a this is a this is a tool yeah yeah that one wasn't really on the road with me ever yeah so in this case ooh brown kind of the original les paul you know um so this guitar um 52 gold top trapeze and with the trapeze and with the help of a mojo axe tail piece i think it's really playable now and i have to say there's so much tone in these guitars you know i was talking to albert molinaro about these and he was and he was saying these guitars are the same dna as the sunburst les paul and when i play one i mean this could be one of the best sounding less paws i've ever played with p90s because it's there's just something going on with it yeah how you obviously are a big junior fan and you play a lot of p90 guitars does the maple top make a big difference or is it just that pickup i mean to my ear this has a little more zing to it and you know we also have to deal with the pull of the neck pickup so there's definitely something else going on in there um it's different than a junior i think it's a little more high fidelity a little more three-dimensional than a junior junior to me is just like a sledgehammer yeah ah that's great uh it's original frets and uh big neck yeah not too big but that's great and this just kind of gives you some compensation better it does you know there's not a whole lot of adjustment with it but they've really dialed it in so that it just they're making a great product and it slips right on you know you don't have to modify it to modify were you somebody that bought and kept everything that you bought and you got a lot of stuff in here or were you a trader i was uh i was uh i was a flipper early on like i would get something and then i would take a couple more dollars in that guitar and upgrade yeah and then it's kind of been this all the way into a sunburst les paul i always said sunburst les paul is all roads lead to a sunburst and that's kind of how i got my first less sunburst les paul how many sunbursts have you owned in your guitar collecting uh tenure i've picked up everyone i could possibly see starting from the mid 90s working in hollywood at guitar center um i've owned six of them six bursts yeah and and uh only i've only been lucky enough to own one at a time but the one i have now is hopefully the one i'm buried with yeah because i i love it it's everything that i want in the spa i mean we've seen les paul sg we've seen les paul custom we've seen a gold top what else well there's really only one les paul to look at so oh boy this guitar um it's a special guitar yeah i i i've seen a few bursts that you've had i have yet to see this one we've been waiting to uh there it is not really sure of the nickname yet do you name them all uh usually so you we did that collector's choice on lewis how many have you had since since that um maybe one or two but just in you know kind of maneuvering guitars around and trying to find a good fit because for me there was godzilla i played which had a killer top and a ton of red and an angry angry bridge paf and it was almost too clean of a guitar and i know that sounds weird but um it was so perfect that i just think it needed it needed to go to somebody that was going to really baby keep it a guitar yeah to keep it perfect now is this your first one with the bixby my first one with the bixby yeah does that extra mass add anything to the sound do you just like having because we were talking about like bixby's went on a lot of les paul standards and even you know when you don't see it you'll see the snake bite from where the screws were yeah you know i was having a conversation with uh our friend in texas mr perler and he was telling me that um that a lot of people in the early 60s really wanted a bixby so it makes sense that you see les pauls with the bigsby people didn't get a glitch but duane eddy was all the rage and that's what they wanted so um i have had the bixby off of this it's under nine pounds without the benefit with the bixby is like 9.1 so it's still not unruly um i don't really hear that much of a sonic difference with with the bixby i mean it doesn't bother me the reason that it's still on obviously because of the pearl dials it has been it's got studs in there yeah or the the grommets for the studs but um it sounds phenomenal like that and i'm kind of not gonna mess with it what's it like to be on stage but you know you're playing a a real burst does it change does it change where you come from as a player i think so you know um you know there are always moments in the set when you have things that you know you're going to do and then there's those moments where that's like eight bars of improv or there's just nothing sorted out and having something like this or a vintage guitar just takes it to another level like your senses are heightened in this odd kind of way time goes a little bit slower but it sounds like a an lsd trip but it's not um but things really slow down and you're really just in the moment enjoying the bliss of playing playing one yeah oh man it's so great now and i play play it eight nine songs in a row don't have to tune it right yeah now do you still own like custom shop 59s and stuff like that or i do and i have to say my custom shop guitars are phenomenal guitars and you saw a couple in the control room um phenomenal instruments and they are you know nothing's going to replicate the age of this guitar but you guys have gotten as close i think as anybody can yeah where did this one this one come from from uh mr albert molinaro from albert and this is actually featured in the first beauty of the burst book oh very cool yes it's got a great provenance he had it for approximately 30 years oh this was one that he had just been holding on to before i got it so it's definitely special yeah that's killer good stuff man [Music] [Applause] now a lot of people might not know this but i mean you obviously founded buck cherry the band took a long break there that's how all of this kind of happened right or was it happening before that no i mean i literally came to la with um a little shitty s10 pickup truck um a reissue telecaster a reissue marshall 50 watt plexi a suitcase and a drinking problem and that's how i ride and the band got signed in the late 90s made made two records disbanded for about three maybe four years and at that point in time i really didn't have i had a couple things any guitars that i had acquired i had to sell because i had a kid i started working in studios i started working for a record producer as a guitar tech tone guy so i started fixing people's guitars and bringing in my amp collection and a couple of my guitars and they started getting used on lots of records the band got back together i would work in that studio and then i would take what i was learning and just picking up and i would go to my little rehearsal space with like two mic preamps and i would put songs together and i just started recording stuff and then i would play it for my friend joe barisi phenomenal mixer and he'd go oh that sucks let's try this and he really helped me learn how to um some of the basics of just like engineering and mixing and what i was hearing and at the core of it has always been my passion for songwriting the band when the band got back together and we started to make some money i thought to myself i want to i want to create a world for myself and for my band where we don't have to rent a studio we don't have to rent a piece of gear or a microphone or or a microphone preamp we can make our music without anybody telling us it was okay i wanted to be able to press record and make a master whenever i wanted to so the quest started you want to see what's in here i like that shape this is a good one this double white pafs i like the sound of it oh this came from the marty mcfly special this came out from out under a bed in norman oklahoma actually really you got it from like the i got this from our good friends at guitar center yeah right huh they got it from the original uh original i got it from the original owner it had one the tuners are shrinking i'm waiting for a tip so i have that in there so it actually tunes up but it's a phenomenal um zebras yeah 62. now i mean cherry red 345s hold a very special place in my heart because back to the future because that's kind of like why yeah i started playing guitar was like the scene in the movie everything's still hooked up it's still stereo still so you use it with the veritone no just position zero i use it in position zero um and usually and i it still has a stereo jack so i have to kind of put it halfway halfway but it sounds phenomenal i don't really have anything else that does this so in keeping with my whole idea of having tools to make sounds you have the ability to have it yeah norm told me back in the day when he would buy stuff at pawn shops if you would see one of these that was like the great way to get a discount as you plug the the cable all the way and you go dude this pickup's dead and then they'd sell it to you for a discount and then you go and plug stereo cable into it uh the old days oh no for the internet yeah yeah as a matter of fact when i went to check the pickups uh the guys one of the screws had been um stripped or stripped they're like we can't get the neck pickup out and i think i'm the first person to actually take the crack so yeah unmolested unopened i mean tell me about pafs it you know every humbucker that you see is kind of based on that design what is the magic can you can you explain to everybody why a real paf is so magical i mean i'm not an expert but i'll tell you what i think of paf like i don't know if you've ever noticed but there's two notes there's i hear two notes when i hear a paf really obviously not with a ton of gain but you know with some with some distortion you can i hear two notes a lot of times that double tone there's sparkle on the top without being too abrasive i know a lot of people have said we make a paf but a paf to me is an underwound it's not a super hot pickup but it even the pickups that i've had that have metered in the nines they weren't these dark pickups if you get a new pickup and it's a 10 i don't know what that will sound like no but they're just i don't know they just have this fidelity to them it's it's open but it can push it compresses nicely when you put some gain on it yeah you can hear it you can hear every string turn the distortion up you can still hear every string that's what i think about pa yeah incredible pickups yeah tell me about tv yellow because i know we're both big fans of of tv yellow what is it about tv juniors well one of the first rock and roll bands that i became obsessed with were the georgia satellites and rick richards played a tv junior and that's what i wanted and i just became obsessed with it um pictures on my wall and and um learning every single georgia satellite's lick probably incorrectly but you know i just love that band because that was a sound they made a racket together that i just was drawn to and it was a band i could go see um i couldn't go see the stones or aerosmith but you could you know you felt like you could get your hands on the satellites and i loved that so that's where tv started then of course you know keith richards and then you know working in a vintage guitar shop and picking them up and just this love affair with tv yellow started we have a trifecta of croc cases here normally i know what's inside of those and knowing you i definitely know what's inside of them let's have a look can we do a triple reveal a triple reveal oh man these are clean croc cases too which you rarely ever see which these guitars do not travel in these cases but they all came in the croc cases to me so that's how they're going to live shall we oh dude three there's only one color let's get them up tv oh man single cuts double cuts beat ones clean ones do you oh okay obviously you're a fan of les paul juniors there's obviously single cut juniors there's double cut juniors there's harder beveled edge juniors and soft what is the year that you think we got it the most right or is it really all just about oh there's more juniors 1956 is my favorite year okay so what do we have here by the way so so you've got a 57 57 great story behind that guitar we'll take these one at a time but let's get them all so let's get them all out here this guitar i call it van gogh i was in killer vintage guitars in st louis dave's long ago 15 years ago and i was walking out of the store and i said dave i can't believe this is the first time i came to your store and i didn't buy anything and i look over in the corner and i see this tv junior back of a tv junior leaning in the corner and i said what's that guitar he's like you don't want that that's missing half the headstock and uh uh i go well hold on a second i go over this guitar sitting there it's missing the wing off the headstock yeah um it's got no it doesn't have a doesn't have a stop bar it has the pickup and the wiring harness and the frets are just demolished that's the way to find it man i said that's perfect come on but here's the thing it was missing the ear but the tuner strip was still on it and they still worked so i got him to sell me the guitar for nothing well because it was just a carcass basically yeah we um we had a couple parts in the in the in the bin in my work box on the road put strings on i played it that night it was impossible you know i played some slide on it um yeah and it was great sent it to todd money at gibson yeah todd fixed the headstock for me gym foot refredded it for me and then that guitar opened 10 12 years worth of book cherry shows this was the one that wasn't on the road that was the one that was tuned in open g and it was playing all the songs all the songs now i mean you've got mint guitars you've got clean guitars you've got guitars like this does it matter to you if something is i gotta have a mint one or no i got it or is it just sometimes it's it'll speak to you i mean it's guitar by guitar the nice thing about these guitars that were made in this era to me is that they're made with such craftsmanship such an old world craftsmanship that it's really hard to find a bad one there are shades of gray in there some are brighter some are darker some are lighter heavier but there really aren't any bad ones i've never really played a bad one i've never played a junior one that's that's that's just not a good one yeah but i have a bead them and went that's a little bit a little more output that one's a little bit brighter so this is the 57 which that the 59 this is a 58 early 58 so you can tell by the serial number that could be one of the first tv guitars um tortoise guard squared off body yeah which is the level if you look at what god plays he plays a double cut with a squared up body yeah just phenomenal great yellow on there i had strap locks on it because i was playing it um live light as a feather rings like a bell it's a good one yeah i call this one well i don't want to tell you the nickname but you know our lord and savior plays one of these yeah and the other thing you notice when you when you get a chance to look at three of them is how how much the color actually varies on tv yellow especially the earlier and earlier you get it's almost like this wheat color and then you get some that are really lime like you can see the green and then you get this kind of pale yellow like to me that's banana and this is more mustard and i sold our good friend charlie star a phenomenal 56 actually leaner than this one if you can imagine yeah and almost the same color yeah that's just that batch from that year so which this is a 59 59 single cup 59 cuts so pretty rare yeah i've seen a few but that is i mean by 58 the double cut body was already going i mean i had heard that they maybe made 10 yeah but i don't know if that's i've seen two or three this is probably the third one this is great it's light it rings does it have the neck yes is that the it's got the neck the person burst dna right there and big frets yeah which is those are still factory right yep at least that's what i tell myself yeah but i mean you got you got to have a sunburst one that one looks like it's got some stories this one's got lots of stories i got this guitar in the mid i say late 90s from a now defunct store called black market music here in l.a yeah um i think i got it for 1500 bucks which was all the money someone had put like base frets on it and i just thought those are huge yeah and i just thought well i'll just play that guitar until i wear the frets out i haven't worn them out yet um did it look like this when you it was checked but it didn't have that and a lot of that because this guitar i would when i was in the studio working for a producer i would take this guitar and i would hand it and everyone was like oh my god i love this guitar i want to buy it like no but you can use it so this has been on tons of records um it's somebody like who have you handed this to in this the guys in my chemical romance made the three chairs record this guitar was used um the guys in papa roach made get away with murder record i worked on that record handed this to them uh all the buck cherry records but i mean there's a lot of stuff yeah that's some stuff so the funny thing about this and i didn't notice until i got it home is somebody had carved jesus saves in the lacquer the scratched in so i don't know if you can see that maybe he can follow up with the game yeah i can see it now there's a lot of checking on it so it kind of blends into the checking so when i got it this ware spot wasn't there i unfortunately did that with the pick on the road but so i call this the jesus because of the big lebowski yeah because you know f with the jesus the jesus oh man and it's just it's my favorite year 56 i think that's the year that i just love and it's a workhorse man a workhorse it sounds phenomenal it does everything you want a les paul junior to do yeah who needs a second pickup not me yeah get it done with the volume i mean and we have a little theme going on here with one pickup guitars um one pickup does something different yeah less pool more or everything so yeah yeah it's not i think that just got knows that it's going to work harder and do the work of two pickups hello is there anything that you haven't had a chance to own that's on your list oh well there is a i mean after owning a burst really took a lot so much of the wind out of the sail of searching yeah um to me there's like this holy trinity or maybe there's four to me there's a black guard fender uh a burst uh a karina guitar and a herringbone martin so i got three out of four and um the karina could be within sniffing distance so it's transitioning yes it's transitioning slowly um but that's probably it you know a 50s carina gibson yeah you're putting the junior back and i'm just staring at this karina flying v i did is this this is the one that's transitioning this is a known guitar this is what the is lovingly known as the wing 58 karina flying i think our friend joe had that out on the road for a while and i don't know if jd had that out for a while it's been in the hands of a lot of players um it may or may not have found its new home here in los angeles it's been here for a while it's been here for a while um but it's i mean it's a 50s if it's a 58 karina v it needs really no explanation yeah uh this is probably the seventh or eighth one that i've got to get close with have you been putting it to work i have you know um we were talking earlier off camera but i'll tell the story again um i made the ricky warwick solo record and anywhere there was a harmony guitar solos where i played both solos this was one of the guys this is one of the personalities through a tweed band master with a clown pen to the left this guy i mean it's just it's a whole other level of fidelity to me yeah what i mean you got bursts and people that's the guitar i guess this kind of is above a burst what what does the karina do or the shape sonically because it's still p it's a solid body guitar and you've still got the same pafs yeah that are in the burst and all that but what's a work of art first of all yeah it's it's my favorite shape of all times and it's just the coolest to my ear it has this honk this mid-range thing that a les paul's not getting to me the les paul's got a little more bottom in different kind of top end this is kind of cutting through there it's fatter than an sg i don't know we're talking about describing colors and and to everybody it's different but to me that's kind of where it sits i think like fandango like when i think of the sound of this guitar yeah i think which everyone should have yeah [Music] [Music] i worked in a guitar store too yeah so when i moved to la in the early mid 90s 93 um i'd lied my way into a job at guitar center i said yeah i know old guitars that's my thing i loved old guitars and i was this is pre-internet so any information you were getting there were a couple of books out there yeah um i lied my way into the job they hired me um and then i was like i got the job i was like oh man i better figure this out i better learn and i was just engrossed in every piece of book i could find looking at every guitar that they had at the store uh taking a pic you know taking screws out of pick cars looking at pickups learning about pot codes and finishes and serial numbers and just really down the rabbit hole of trying to get knowledge and at the time the guys at guitar center would kind of you know the dealers other dealers would be like oh dump it at guitar center but i always was like yeah you know we're all just trying to learn as much as we can here and that's early on where i realized i was never going to be an expert and anyone that says they're an expert there's too many anomalies to it but there are people that have seen a lot of guitars and are really knowledgeable people so that quest for just learning everything i could about them started because gibson did such a great job with the cases it needs extra towels for safety but this to me i bought this guitar i was looking for a firebird for a long time and i had called a dealer friend in nashville and i said hey what's up with that firebird on your website and he's like oh it's sold but i'm going to the guitar show and i'll look for one for you and then it's saturday afternoon and i'm watching college football on the tour bus and my phone starts ringing and i look down and it's him and i'm just like this is going to cost me money uh 63 it has the liar of a gorilla which i've taken off i've strung it through the tailpiece yep feel the neck on that door it's killer it's just insane so this is a firebird three that's a three so people always get confused on these numberings i always tell them to equate it to like les paul les pauls you have the firebird one which is like a les paul jr yep this is a firebird three which is like a les paul special still dot inlays binding on the neck exactly two pickups barbered five trapezoids wiggle stick like a standard and then the seven you got the three pickup the two pneumatic enters at the five yeah and you get the three pickup with gold parts ebony board all the les paul custom features so this is a firebird three and that does everything i need a fireboard to do and it is phenomenal sounding you know the secret is is the bridge pickup does get a little bright so you just just roll the tone off till like seven and yes get rid of the ice pick kind of things are good yeah rhythm guitar for you lead guitar for you both both so on the record that i was telling you where the v was one personality that was the other one yeah through an ac through the that font ac 15. how bad could that that's a tube screamer it didn't suck yeah so it's good stuff man and you know really clean example not broken so it's hard to find them not broken yeah but like i said it sounds great it's a goer it's got the black ring that's so cool too was that on there when you got it yeah 63 is oh yeah that is appropriate for that and um oh man it's just good stuff all day it's a lot of fun you know the the the tremolo with the bridge that slides on just a little iffy so i just you don't get a ton of angle i mean i like a wiggle stick but yeah and then mojo acts shameless plug for mojo axe they do make the um the tail piece with the g string in the correct spot that's not compensated for flat ones exactly people also don't know that is the lightning bars in the 60s the guitars shift with flat wounds on there so you put a set of 10 gauge round wound strings on there the compensation is actually not in the right place for that because g string yeah or the or that would work for a wound g-string but if you want to play one like this like the modern guitar string yeah you got to do that so he makes a great product of course we keep the right one in the case so should i pass this guitar on i guess you're going to have to look at what's in this ratty that old beat up case thermometer looking things up here let's see what we got i normally don't like what comes in these so as you can see the case has seen better days but since it left the factory in 1953 he's traveled a little this guitar is known as the chunk and this i do believe i got this from our good friend norm harris yeah and one of those oh fake esquire one of those fateful trips out to the big locker storage oh yeah yeah who needs two pickups on the towel i need two pickups what are we doing playing jazz i just want a flat pole piece and that 18 watt marshall down there and oh god how's the weight on it nice you strat guy or you tell a guy i'm really a telly guy although i do have a strat because you have to have one around that's that to me is you know i see your t-shirt i see that guitar it just makes it makes sense how do you use this is this just a texture no this one well this guitar to me you know i've played every black card i could ever get my hand on and something's going on here that that's like a ornery almost p90 yeah it's way more flat there's not a lot of twang going on here it's an aggressive angry guitar so this can really stand on its own it doesn't um in in a rock in a full-on rock band setting this thing keeps up with absolutely everything else um you know we we love that position because it's straight to the volume pot but you know putting the toe knob in a little backing off a little bit even fattens up more phenomenal guitar great weight big neck have you had other black guards and this is the one that you ended up with or is this kind of what you had your no i mean i've had um i probably maybe i think i've owned like six black guard guitars but this to me was the one and any time i've looked at another one i've tried to av it with it and this always comes up for me is what i prefer in a podcaster so since we're talking about telecasters telecasters i got a pair that are pretty cool okay i'll do a pair of tully's i'll grab the black case oh so we got a blonde case we got a black case well that is not the correct case but that's the case that i got that guitar in it's got flowers on a little flower power i have a thing about a double bound guitar yeah i do oh this is a pair of customs oh oh one esquire one telecaster so this is a 1963 esquire custom it has really seen better days but it's phenomenal sounding um tune to open g a lot actually yeah for that kind of thing this is a slab and that is a 1960 oh man slab board custom telecast these guitars do have nicknames that's the princess because she's a princess yeah and this is the nasty because it looks it sounds like it looks yeah it's just ornery ready to fight where did these uh come from um i don't recall where this one came from because i've had it for so long that one came from the guys at olivia's vintage about way back back when they were super affordable i mean they're really they've really picked up on the price of those um but you know someone's played that guitar and it sounds appropriate it's it sounds great that neck pick up on that oh man yeah usually i'm not a fan of the neck pickup in the telly but that sounds really good almost strategy kind of kills the need for a stretch really from in my in my head telecasters maple neck or rosewood board do you ever really have a preference can you hear sonically the difference between the two i do i do i hear the spank of the of the maple fretboard um that there's there's a top infidelity that goes on with it to my ears um but that said you know this guitar for all of its aggressiveness is um it almost lives in les paul junior land really yeah nice like if you thought of a twangy les paul jr that's kind of basically what that is yeah and these guitars get played all the time they they are workhorses and for a reason yeah when you were on the road were you always out chasing it most of your stuff come i mean there's there's kind of a community of collectors that kind of control the the really good yeah stuff but like were you out chasing it in stores too um i'll always like i would go into any store in any strip mall and see what they had always i still am that way like driving past one it's like start to twitch a little bit you know it doesn't happen but i went in every store i picked up every guitar i could see i looked at everybody's guitar that would bring one to a show um always looking and you know it's pretty funny because we toured so much i toured so much at that time that i would buy stuff and i would put it under the bus and we'd come home and i would load it into my locker and i'd go back on the road and then i would come home a year and a half later and go what's in these cases i don't even know what's in here i it was just about like finding stuff i loved and i was excited and passionate about it and then out of sight on mine so but there is like a small network of dealers and i've actually become really good friends with um with a few dealers that um so i can pick up the phone and and call and say what do you got and you were one of those guys um that uh it's one of my go-to guys hey what do you think you know if you found something you knew i liked you'd call me up or i'd just call you or pop in so it's been really cool because it's become more about guitars it's become this community of people um everybody knows each other everybody pretends they like each other mostly everybody likes each other it's the dealers that kind of get a little catty it's a competition too everybody's going after the same yeah stuff that's going to be edited out i'm sure um but it's been a really great community of people and i've met some really really dear friends through vintage guitars rickenbacker you don't strike me as a rickenbacker kind of you know um is it just a student you got to have that sound i'm a tom petty nerd that's everybody loves the beatles petty nerds um this guitar you know going back to what i was talking to you about before about having having the tool kit i mean this is part of wanting to be able to make every sound you're not going to use this on everything but if you need that sound but when you're only going to get it out of a rickenbacker yeah this came from elliott um back when he was in new york for those of you who don't know much about rix when you see the binding the double bound bodies way rarer yeah and and way cooler that's i think this is a what they call a three three five three thirty yeah so two pickups and the five is for the uh the vibrola and it's got that vibrato on it the arms off of it in that bubble wrap right there right on um and it does exactly what you want that to do plug this into a box and just jangle jangle all down yeah it's great moving on to more guitars that you got to have because they only sound like that nothing sounds like it i threw a gretch in there i'm guessing by the tooled leather case we got a 6120 here this is an early 1960 with all the 59 sort of appointments paf filtertrons just um it came with obviously a different bridge that's in the case but that alternates a little better we put that abr1 on there to kind of get it to play right and it does what a gretch is supposed to do who would have thought and freaking orange guitar would be so cool but like it looks so cool and orange it's just so right yeah what kind of stuff would you use this on i mean anything from like wanting to get a more australian rhythm guitar sound yeah like an ac dc kind of thing yeah but uh even more twangy kind of uh almost western kind of stuff spaghetti western stuff it kind of does a bunch of different things they're great rock and roll guitars like into a marshall amp they're phenomenal you know into the tweed band master you get you're in pete townsend land yeah you tweet basement you're in setzerland yeah that's that's a cool guitar so it can really you know if you want to want to push it the pickups are so low output that it's um super responsive and it does a thing now this is something like i need a collection of gretches or it's like i'm gonna buy this one and it's gonna do the thing and and that's my gretch collection that's that's it that's not like a question after a white falcon or after a country i mean it's tempting because they're really um they're they're beautiful and i'd love to have a brown harrison model but that to me does what i what you needed to do which is to give you that that palette in the in the studio yeah i love seeing the ones again it's probably got your handwriting on it probably does so once again falling victim to uh norm harris and his band of merryman 1945 gotta have a herringbone triple oh 28 herringbone amazing yeah amazing and i think you need you know it's much like a burst i don't know if you really understand what's going on with these you know this isn't pre-war technically it's 1945 but um wow and these change so often too and you look at them and you go what's different it's all under the hood with the bracing yeah and 45 is the one year that's only in that one year they did the tapered tapered braces which on a triple o body in particular sound really really incredible i mean the most beautiful piece of brazilian rosewood and just a phenomenal just such a subtly understated guitar but just that little bit of herringbone on the outside just yeah totally sets it off is this a strummer for you this a finger picker for you i mean it does a little bit of both actually i have a little bit of a lighter gauge string on it because of just the antiquity of everything so i don't put like that modern heavy string on it but um it kind of does whatever you ask it to do are you equally as passionate about the acoustic guitars as you are the electrics or is this really just like a couple of tools in the toolbox a couple of tools in the toolbox you know i have some newer acoustic guitars that get a lot of play guitars that i can hand to somebody that sounds phenomenal yeah you know strum on that tune it up tune it down something like this probably wouldn't hand to somebody else unless they were a full adult yeah but um that said um there are tools there is a certain amount of collectibility about something like this this is something i hope that my kids will appreciate long after i'm gone because it's really it's that caliber it is yeah guitar um but a tool nonetheless and if it didn't sound great and play great then it wouldn't be here yeah but the next guitar that you're about to look at is a strummer it's a banger it's a banger and it's a tool i'm guessing this is not the original case so i don't know it's not the original it's in here but it's a much loved 1963 i believe gibson dove dove the tuna matic was is it natural or was it sunburst that really faded out because there's like a uh there's like this shadow around the outs like the rim here that looks like it's almost like a faded out sunburst so i i saw that guitar online many years ago where did it come from it came from elliott michael and i said rumble i called him up he doesn't elliot's pretty well known for not liking these guitars yeah and i said what's it sound like and he goes it sounds like keith richards i'm like send it on no it's sold yeah enough said but then you know hearing from you that uh tom petty did a lot of his writing this was yeah damn the torpedoes and uh and it does that thing man it's you know maple body i mean what is it about maple i don't know acoustic guitar i would think that it would sound really bright and kind of not have any bottom end but that's not the case like the tightest bottom man it's really really good and this thing's really been played for a reason because it sounds phenomenal and you know i was a fan of those melon camp records in the 80s when i was coming up and i was very impressionable and um all over radio there houses like he's probably playing hummingbird but it's they're kind of in the same ballpark as tonally and i just love the sound of them not to mention of course the reason he was doing that was because of the stones and and those guys playing doves and hummingbirds yeah yeah so i think about that and i think that guitar has a home here because it sonically does something that certainly the herringbone doesn't and the d45 doesn't and the d28 doesn't [Music] [Applause] [Music] much like the guitars i've tried to kind of get a nice cross-section of some of my favorite stuff i mean the amps are almost as the amp collection is almost as impressive as the guitar collection what what all so we start here as a park uh 50 watt from the mid 60s 66 this is a park 75 from the early 70s this amp um has kt66s in it and it's just the loudest ball to snap so great for pedals fuzz pedals um it doesn't get real dirty doesn't want to break up yeah this sounds like a marshall 50 watt yep and you know at the time was a bargain so those are this is like the platform for that's good yes yes that that big muffin to that phenomenal yeah that right there is a marshall popular and at one point in time a few nefarious folks were trying to fake blues breakers turn and turn these no nasties no names trying to turn these chassis into blues breakers that's what this was a victim of so i bought it as a marshall popular you were you weren't scammed you knew exactly right and it was sold as such it wasn't you know but it's loud bold awesome yeah 18 watts 210s phenomenal kill what's this just random marshall this is a funny story so this cabinet when i moved to los angeles in the early 90s i found this cabinet on the music connection music connection magazine all right i drove down to venice and bought it i used it i had some hard times i sold it but it had some very specific wear marks and some dirt on it i sold it to guitar center and then many years later my five or six years later this amp this cabinet came back into the store and i said to the guy that brought it in his name is tony and he worked there with me i said where did you get this cabinet it looked really familiar and he said oh i bought it here at the store and i said that was my cabinet so i bought it from him which you weren't totally not supposed to do as an employee but i ended up buying it from him um and it's been on every pretty much every record i've ever made all the buck cherry records rhythm guitars cut through this cabinet and it's just like a non-descript just stock 90s stock marshall with 75 watt speakers but they're so worn that they kind of don't have that brittle thing on top still holds the low end really good and that cabinet's been on everything yeah so it kind of came back right on vox vox land oh fawn is fun a fun ac-15 twin with two twelves and an ac30 copper panel with two twelves top boost yes top not top boost added tacos added at the factory in the back nice and this is just creamy deliciousness yeah this is awesome this is everything from super chimey and awesome and when you that ef-86 tube when you really go for it it just has that phenomenal breakup i love cutting guitar solos through this even though it's only 15 watts it just does something yeah yeah harmonically it's almost three-dimensional very cool brown pro center volume brown pro 60 yes so the earliest version and to me one of the best sounding tremolos i've ever heard oh well the brown amps are like really the only fender amps that have tube driven right tremolo everything else is kind of opto exactly so so this amp um and i have another tweed pro that i took the 15 out of and put a 12 in but that has the 15 in it and it just does this bell-like clean it's really awesome yeah you know i'm not using that for a rock and roll machine i'm using that for bell-like cleans maybe a strat through it anything that needs a tremolo that's the amp that yes that you plug into and then it just sings yeah so starting from the top this is a little martial 20 watt pa head head uh el 84s and at one time i needed some work done on it and mark sampson was helping me out do something from matchless and bad cat and star mark was working on some stuff for me he said you know we used to do this trick on these amps where we would take this channel and feed it into that channel internally so you don't have to jump it and when you plug into this it feeds that so you can plug in here to this channel and you get this channel but when you go in here and then you've got more gain um you can get it to be too much gain yeah it's just it sings i don't think that's possible is there such thing as well i mean it starts to fold back on itself but this just just a really great version of that black flag black flag i believe what a few months and 68 these are made 67 or 68 somewhere that's the i mean this is the angus yes jtm 50. that's it and i've had that for the better part of 20 some years this has probably seen a lot of it's been on tons of records tons of sessions it's exactly what that's supposed to be it's phenomenal yeah and then a big boy and then a big boy 71 still point-to-point wired still alexi still plexi 71 no that's a brush panel right there okay but um it's big and bold and you know it's just sounds like free or jimi hendrix or any of that stuff that the stuff that we love i that through a four by twelve cabinet i mean how old yeah how old is this i'm not exactly sure of the vintage of that cabinet um but it's one of the ones i have a 25 watt speakers in it and it sounds sounds great you need that thing otherwise you're going through the 75. otherwise i'm going through that i have a bunch of other cabinets obviously for today's um setting up in here i didn't really want to drag them all out but there are other toys dragged enough stuff out here my back sore your guys didn't really help me i know they have a worst the worst now you're also kind of part of la guitar lore because everybody kind of knows about joe's place you know nerdville and all that stuff most people don't know that that was that was your house i mean and even before that it has a whole it has a whole guitar problem so i bought that house from oliver lieber um great musician great guitar player fantastic songwriter and producer we were friends i bought that house from him i lived there for eight to ten years i got my first burst from oliver lieber uh which was called the bearded lady um and then i had moved to encino and with my family because i spent a lot of years in that laurel canyon house as a single man yeah um doing what single guys do and now it was time to have a family and so we moved to encino but i still kept the house because i was working out of the studio and i ran into joe at third encore like because we had lockers next to each other i forget where it was and he said oh i just came back from nashville i'm looking at houses and like nashville she's buying my house it's for sale he's like oh maybe i'll come by and he came up and he looked out he's like i have to live here there you go so your what is the museum now at that house used to be your studio and when oliver had it it was more of uh i wouldn't say digital but he didn't have a console in there when i took it over so i completely transferred the thing to an analog studio i had an api console two inch machine there were tie lines in the house i recorded my drums in the living room i made a bunch of records up there yeah tweedtown one of the rarer tweed amps i've had three of these um the cleanest one i ever had that sounds phenomenal is resting in nerdville as the clean tweed stuff does gladly it's a retirement community for clean tweeting and the reason that i was willing to have that rest in nerdville is because this not so clean one to me captures the magic of what the band master is this was owned by a well-known guitar player i don't want to out him in case he doesn't want it but it was owned by a well-known guitar player i didn't buy it directly from him it almost breaks up too soon but i love the sam it doesn't the 310s there's some mojo going on there because i don't think it's a an exact impedance match yeah and it's phenomenal this does a thing yeah probably one of my best selling games nice and then this a guy in the valley named mark ignacy sold me he's a jerk when he worked at norm's guitars it's a tweed vibralux um does it still have the yes it does does this have the footswitch glued to the so somebody glued the foot switch there it is i remember the sam um and it it's awesome it's really awesome it loves it loves a little overdrive pedal a treble booster into that thing is a really nice you know it yeah it does kind of it's not as bold as the deluxe for sure with a 10 inch speaker but it's great that's pretty clean too did you ever try and no maybe we may have talked about it and then this is a 57 fender pro 15 that i've put a 12 new baffle board and 12 in and to me what that does it sounds like a just a more stout deluxe to me yeah a little beefier deluxe yeah and you don't harm the amplifier by just getting one of the baffle boards that mounts right in and it kind of takes an amp that i really wasn't that excited about and turns it into a tone machine oh and then on the bottom is the tweet twin that's the low power power twin um but we don't hate the low powered twin nothing wrong with a low power twin and killer that's it does exactly what a low power twin should do loud yeah and creamy loud and creamy you know you can pull that one out that is really the sleeper of the bunch and i was just having a conversation with someone the silver face prince summerface princeton reverb no this is a drop edge is 68 yep first year with the drip edge that is a phenomenal sound i am and i was talking to charlie star about this you know you see the old pictures of ronnie wood in the faces on stage with one of those mic'd up doing a tv show or something it does a thing man it's mike campbell seems to do okay with it he does it just just fine yeah well i mean do you put humbucking guitars into something like this not afraid yes not afraid to and it handles it a lot of times what i find with these amps i think i saw an interview somewhere with dave cobb where he said you put everything at seven on a tweet and it sounds great and he's right and but these you just kind of put everything about halfway up little adjustment and they just have a dna and they just sound away a certain way so like all the eq's at noon and just a little bit he'll be here all week yeah try the veal do you think you use all your toys more now or back when you're on the road you know playing gigs all over the world um well i always toured once i got a sunburst les paul i toured with it and joe and elliot michael were two of the guys that said you got to tour with that you have to take it off what's the point of having it right um and so i did so i took out a vintage marshall a vintage ac30 and a burst and i got to play it every night and i'm so glad i did i would take out my black guard uh telly i would take out vintage juniors because i really believed in um i don't know if like some of the people in the audience the majority of the people in the audience would care if i was what i was playing i could play a part or fly through a camper yeah and they'd be like oh the dude the singer took a shirt off and they sang that song about the you know and that's the reality of it and i'm i totally get it but for me having my experience playing a sunburst les paul through great amps with a cable that to me was was worth all of the drama to get that guitar in and out of situations and those amps did you ever have a close call with the vintage guitar on the road never um i always just kept them pretty locked down you know i've had the luxury of having great uh two really phenomenal guitar techs during those years uh marcus scheffer and ram the guys that looked after me always made sure that those guitars were taken care of oh dude keith i gotta say thank you man for having us out today and opening the place up to us that was as much fun for me as it was for you i mean it's not every friday afternoon i play a 58 korean v in a summer celeste paul and a bunch of tv juniors it's nice to share this stuff and you know to hear it and to show people yeah well it was a very impressive thing man thank you for having us out here i appreciate it hey i'm mark hagnezy for gibson tv we'll see you guys next time on another episode of the collection [Music] peace [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Gibson TV

Views: 310,050

Keywords: Gibson, Gibson 2020, Gibson TV, The Collection, Buckcherry 2020, Buckcherry Lit Up, Buckcherry Crazy Bitch, Guitar Collection, Vintage Guitar, 1959 Les Paul, Normans Rare Guitars, Guitar of the Day, Andertons, Troglys, Rig Rundown, Reverb, Welcome to Nerdville, Korina Flying V, Music is Win, Paul Davids, Jarrod Dines, Icons, Riff Lords, Les Paul Junior, vintage Gibson, vintage Fender, Amp Collection, Keith nelson, The Witness, Adam Jones Les Paul, Kirk Hammett Icons

Id: wT87CVp1QWQ

Length: 63min 35sec (3815 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020