Working on the Axe…

It’s funny, sometimes, how little things that we plan on
doing completely change as the day progresses. Take, for instance, playing my
guitar. I’ve hardly touched my guitars in two months. Not hard to do when you
are away for so long. Sure, I’ve thought about getting one of those really cool
“backpacker” guitars to take with me on road trips, but I really don’t need
that one extra item to take on a plane and have to lug around.

But, since I was home for a nice, long, holiday weekend I
thought I’d get some guitar time in. A few times during the week I pulled out
my newer JP6 and played it a bit, but found it difficult to get right into it.
I think that is mostly due to my fingers and hands not quite being in shape.
Also, the strings were shot and needed to be replaced.

I replaced my strings a couple of days ago, but nobody
wanted to come and jam. No biggie. I had planned on getting in some practice
time today and throughout the course of the day found all kinds of other chores
that needed taking care of. As it turns out, I finally sat down at my computer
to jam a bit (yes, I use my computer since I have a Line 6 UX8) and ended up
downloading all kinds of driver updates and software updates for the UX8. While
that was going on I also updated the drivers on my Harmony One remote (a very
kick-ass remote).

It also didn’t help that my secondary monitor went on the
fritz and I had to order a new one to replace it. It’s not here, yet, so I have
one monitor with an HDMI connected to my laptop, and the VGA connected to my
media computer and I have to manually switch it back and forth. Big PITA.
This was killing my motivation to jam, but it needed to be
done.

Then I decided to go get some plastic plates so that I could
bring my plants in from the colder weather. I figured I needed to get to the
hardware store before it closed. On the way there I stopped by Best Buy to
check out the e-readers. Specifically, I wanted to get my hands on a Kindle
Touch and a Nook. After checking them both out for quite a while I ended up
picking up a Kindle Touch. I’ll try to write a review on it a bit later….
And then I made it to the hardware store. On the way home I had to get some
food. Done. Back to the house, but now I had food to eat…. So I fire up NetFlix
to watch a flick while I eat, and I plugged my new kindle in to charge up.

So here it is, 8:00ish or so at night and I still haven’t
jammed. No problem. I come in to the computer and fire everything up and cross
connect it to my iPod so I can play along with some stuff. Before I get the
iPod fired up I start dicking around with my intonation. Don’t ask me why, but
for some reason I noticed it was just slightly off and before you know it I
spent about an hour and a half tweaking my intonation and string height setup.

If you don’t play guitar that won’t make much sense to you,
but believe it or not there is a really interesting balance of the string
height to the neck, the tension on the strings, the placement of the bridge,
etc. etc. On an electric with a floating tremolo system, such as my JP6 it’s a
delicate balance of all the working parts. Tweak one little thing, and it
throws the whole guitar out of whack.

It probably took me a solid year to get my Les Paul tweaked
so that it is “just right” for me, and it’s a significantly less complicated
guitar from a mechanical perspective. This is my second or third go-around on
this one, but it already plays even better than it did when it was brand new –
and that’s not an easy feat considering that it was set up great from the
factory.
But, finally, I jammed on it….and jammed, and jammed, and jammed…. Until my
hands are tired, I couldn’t pick properly anymore and my fingertips are already
sore. It was good, though! I got back to some of my older metal roots, almost
learned a new song, and warmed up my chops.

The point was to emphasize how you can start off intending
to do one thing, and end up doing a bunch of different things. I still got the
things I wanted to get done completed, and then some, but there were a bunch of
other things that gone done in between….
Now, what was I saying?