Every so often at Guitar Today, I get the chance to meet someone who has seen and done it all. Such has been the case in meeting Woody Bridges, from http://www.guitarlessonsonvideo.com Guitar Lessons from a true professional. Woody shared some stories with me that I thought you might enjoy
How I learned to play the Guitar
by Woody Bridges
I got my first guitar when I was nine years old. My mother ordered it from Sears catolog. It was a Gene Arutry guitar. (I still have it)
I thought at the time I could just pick it up a play it. I could sing complete songs at the age of five, all I had to do was listen to the song and open my mouth and sing. I thought the guitar would be the same way. Boy was I wrong. So I put the guitar in the closet and forgot about that little project. Then about a year later I decided that if I wanted to learn to play I would have to get some books and actually try to learn. Then I remembered that my mother’s mom and dad both had played the guitar in their earlier days. So I started going to their house and they start showing me how to tune and some chords. (and how to play to timing)
Well by the time I was 18 I could play pretty good I thought. I went off to the University of Texas to study Electrical Engineering. I stayed at a bording house that had 21 other boys living there. There were 3 other boys there that played guitar. They knew things I didn’t know, so I started picking up things from them. I stayed in college for 2 years and got married and went to work in Port Arthur Texas at the Texaco plant. There I met some more guys that played the guitar. So we would get together and play.
Then I went to a lounge where one of the guys was playing and sat in and sang some song. One thing lead to another and a guy named Murphy McDowell called me and ask if I would go to work in his band as a singer. So I did and that was the start of my career as a musician. A lot has happened since that time. I am a reborn Christian and I’m still married to the same girl. (been 52 years) and I can still sing and play.
THE MAKING OF A STAR
by Woody Bridges
Back in the 60’s, Grace and I had our own band. We were playing 6 nights a week all over the gulf coast of Texas. We had three girls in the band. Grace, Billie Jo Moore and Betty Spears.
This was in the same time frame when we were working with Jack Rhodes.(song writer of Silver Threads and golden needles). Grace and I were going up to Jack’s place every chance we had. One day Billie Jo asked if she could go with us. So we took her up to see Jack. We let her audition for Jack and he liked what he heard. After a few months of working on songs, Jack took her to Nashville and introduced her to Ken Nelson.(the head of Capitol Records in Nashville) This is the same time Jack took Peggy Little to Nashville. Both of them got contracts.
Billie Jo has more or less retired and is living back in Vidor, Texas. The last I heard of Peggy was she had started doing gospel songs according to Barbra (whose late husband wrote “please Release me”. Barbra is now married to my friend Bob McCormmick.
Life moves on.
Among many other variables, two things that affect the sound of the guitar are the type of wood used and the pickup system that the guitar is fitted with. Two popular choices are single coil pickups and humbucking pickups. Single coils (like the pickups fitted on most Stratocasters) tend to produce a bright and more articulate sound that doesn’t take up a lot of space in a mix, where Humbuckers produce a thicker sound that can overpower other mid-range instrument sounds or even other guitars.
Humbuckers are typically the type of pickups used to get the ‘wall of guitar’ sound used in a lot of heavy metal music. Single coil pickups play nice with a guitar amp’s overdrive channel and are what gives the Fender stratocaster its’ distinctive ‘quack’ in blues music.
Although with their respective tones aside, these pickups serve two very different functions. Single coil pickups are more succeptable to electromagnetic interference while humbuckers are designed to reject these types of interference. This gives a more noiseless guitar signal especially when using a really thick distortion and the heavier tone is an afterthought. They can also go a long way towards helping control feedback (I say control because they can be used in your favor to both generate and eliminate feedback).
The Fender Strat beat the Gibson SG hands down in our previous poll. Although it was a close race (the Stratocaster won by a %55 majority) the comments indicated the stratocaster to be a favourite early on.
I decided to continue on and see how the Strat does up against another one of its’ major competitors, the Gibson Les Paul. We only recieved 85 votes in the previous poll so I’m hoping to see a lot more voters this time around. You don’t need to register or be logged in to vote in this poll so go ahead and share your opinion with us.
I found it interesting that so many people found the Les Paul to be a more suitable competitor for the Fender Stratocaster when it comes to Gibson VS Fender. As I stated in the last poll the SG was actually introduced by Gibson to be a direct competitor to the Fender Strat which was then outselling the Les Paul.
Epiphone posted an interesting look at their inspection and quality control process today. It allows you to see the tedious work that goes into inspecting each and every guitar before it goes into stores. Each and every instrument that leaves Epiphone’s Asia factory undergoes a rigorous 15 point inspection before hitting stores in the U.S. and now Epiphone is allowing us a candid look at the process.
I wonder if this is the guy who handled my Epi Dot model before I purchased it at Jett Landry music in Sudbury, Ontario.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Turn down the suck”? I once had a friend say to me in the midst of a brutal hangover the morning after a particularily bad gig, “Boy, you really had the suck knob cranked to 11 last night, huh?”
The funniest thing I’ve ever heard a sound tech say in a sound check was “Whoops! Must have forgot to turn on the talent switch.” I laughed so hard I nearly busted a gut (or a guitar string).
Many would-be musicians like to believe that there is some magical talent knob that is used in professional studio recordings to make horrible musicians sound like guitar gods, and Rossanne Arnold sound like Britney Spears (vocoder anyone). Though it is true that certain types of effects and tweaks can be used to allow amatuer musicians and vocalists to sound better, there is no such thing as studio magic in real life.
Although we can’t make bad musicians sound good, we can apparently make them look smart. Here is the closest example of real life studio magic.
This is my little gem of a guitar from the 80’s. Long before the Ibanez 7 string joined the ranks of ’skid guitars’ popularized by oh-so-lame Nu-Metal bands I lucked out at a hock shop and picked up my Ibanez Roadstar II RS 230 RD for around $250 as a quick replacement around 2002. I didn’t know at the time what a classic electric guitar this was. The Roadstar II is considered to be one of the most well made and reliable guitars ever built.
The thing that drew me to it in the first place was the three v7t single coil pickups which were unlike any electric guitar pickups I had ever seen. The looked like tiny little rails across the shape of a normal guitar pickup. They sound amazing. The Ibanez Roadstar guitars were initially introduced as ‘hot-rod’ strat copies but mine has a distinctive ‘telecaster’ type of tone in my opinion.
The photo above is obviously not my guitar, mine has a few scratches and love marks. It is also covered with stickers as I decided the Roadstar II was the definitive punk-rock guitar a few years back and laid almost every sticker I own onto it. Currently mine is non-operational. When I bought it the pickups were not wired properly and one of my “I can fix anything” moments lead to its’ untimely demise. Still, if I had the money I would have it fixed. There have been many nights I laid in bed awake thinking of what I could sell in order to afford its’ refurbishing, but there just doesn’t seem to be any gear I can part with.
