As a metal and rock guitarist, I have two seven-string guitars - a super-cheap Jackson, and a slightly less-cheap Ibanez. Neither of them are studio-quality, but I've at least been beating the hell out of them the last two plus years. I practice a lot, hoping to get good enough one day to play my own music.
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| Jackson JS22-7 DKA HT Dinky Archtop |
The Jackson is made in China, and, as one would expect, has really cheap parts. I eventually had to replace the output jack with something that didn't behave like an acrobat, bending in every direction and causing annoying grounding issues. It was my first soldering job, and it's honestly a miracle it worked as well as it did, since my daughter had oxidized the tip on the iron without me realizing it. I barely got things joined, but somehow I've had no issues with the jack since then. It got its moniker, 'Bad Jack', due to the brand name and the output jack being faulty. I still think of it as Bad Jack, despite the fix.
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| Ibanez RGMS7 |
I should point out here, frustration is my enemy. I don't tolerate it well, and I end up having meltdowns - I'm autistic, so I've learned I have to walk away when I start getting that frustrated. The frustration made it impossible to even practice at times, so I finally gave in and decided to get the guitars repaired. We took in the Jackson first, since we figured the Ibanez was still quasi-playable and we wanted to keep a 'working' instrument.
We took the Jackson to Cithara Guitars here in Hamilton, Ontario, and we were well aware they were swamped and couldn't get to the Jackson until the new year, but we had assured them it wasn't an issue. Until it was, of course.
That fantasy died a couple of weeks ago...along with the electronics in the Ibanez. It started putting out a thin, almost clean sound for a few minutes, until it failed utterly and completely, refusing to peep and squeal any further. I thought something had gone wrong in the amp sim on my computer. After rebooting multiple times and checking for updates, I went through the rest of the signal chain. I eventually plugged in an old six-string, which worked appropriately, in the very out-of-tune way one expects of a guitar that hasn't been played in years (at substantial risk of old strings snapping and cutting me, so I proceeded with caution).
The six-string isn't a playable instrument, which means I haven't had anything I could use for practice. Most of my songs were written on a seven-string and require those extra notes. I'm trying to rehearse for studio recording, so it's been a little crazy-making for me. While I started out not using an amp at all, I now need the auditory feedback (not actual feedback) to know if I've got the feel of something. If I can't hear how it sounds through an amp, I'm not sure if my muting technique is correct, or even my pitch in many cases. I don't want to practice something the wrong way, in other words, because breaking a habit is a pain in the butt...and fingers, hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and back. Playing rock or metal guitar is a very physical thing. One just has to watch Angus Young, shirtless and dripping sweat on stage to get the idea.
With all that, you can be forgiven for assuming I was excited to get the e-mail from Cithara that the Jackson was ready for pickup. Because, your assumption would be correct. My husband has it in hand, and I am awaiting its return as I write this. He's now dropped off the Ibanez, as well, and it's just a matter of time before we have two working instruments once again.
This is important, because it's pretty tough to rehearse with someone whilst sharing a guitar. Yes, I know Walk Off The Earth can do a lot with one acoustic. We're not them. My husband normally plays the Jackson now, since he had to learn to use a seven-string if he wanted to play my music. For now we'll share it. We do have a five-string bass, so one of us can play that in the meantime and get more of our bass lines written.
Our recent issues have highlighted the need to have better instruments. However, as a female guitarist with a fairly large chest, I have a big problem with standard guitar shapes. (Nita Strauss might not understand the need, and jokes about it, but she's not particularly large up front.) They may be designed to look like a woman's body, but they sure as hell don't fit one for playing - especially not lead, where the angle of the guitar changes drastically. There's only one guitar on the market that was designed by a woman, for a woman's body (the St. Vincent model). Cheers to Ernie Ball for doing more than any other guitar manufacturer in the world, but the problem is, it's a six-string. They don't make a seven. I guess they don't think women play metal. But, for their effort, at least, they deserve something. My husband loves their guitars, so he'll likely end up with a John Petrucci model at some point.
Ironically, it was Fender that stumbled onto the fact nearly half the guitarists are women these days. They did a survey a few years ago and got the shock of their lives, apparently. They haven't actually done anything about it beyond giving a few women 'signature' models that look the same as every other guitar in their very small lineup of shapes. Not having a woman design them from scratch is a huge lapse in judgment on their part, and they're still missing out on almost half the market. And Fender, while 'classic', is boring. They never seem to do anything different. Teles, Strats, and the odd squashed versions they do of their own designs. Not very imaginative.
I'm not going near Gibson with a ten-foot pole. Their litigious tendency, and poor design choices top the list of reasons, but the fact you can't keep the damn things in tune is really the biggie for me. They have a lot of nerve charging thousands of dollars for a guitar you can't properly use. When it comes to metal, you're also digging in a lot more, which causes almost any guitar to have tuning issues. So, why make it worse for myself?
This is the reason I've never gone with a vibrato bar (Leo Fender named it a tremolo, and the term stuck, but it's not accurate - he made the opposite mistake on an amp, calling the tremolo knob a vibrato). Even the best vibrato system has tuning stability issues. If one string breaks, the rest usually go wildly out of tune. It happens on a regular bridge, too, but it's not as severe. It's why we have to go through the tuning sequence a couple of times to get things as lined up as possible, and there's a particular way you have to tune vibratro. It's actually not possible to have a guitar in perfect pitch, but we do what we can.
So, after years of frustration with horrid designs, we decided it was time for me to build my own. At one time I would have literally done the building part myself, but I was one of the 'lucky' ones who got early-onset arthritis. My work with hand tools is at a minimum these days. I'll destroy my body to play a guitar, but I'll have to get someone else to build it for me.
The repairs at Cithara are a sort of test, though their reviews are really good. They won't be able to start making it until summer, giving me plenty of time to sort out the details, but I've got most of the stats and components figured out. I'll be doing a video about it on my YouTube channel at some point, but that will be skewed toward the guitar nerd audience. None of the components will make any sense to non-guitarists.
This new guitar is already in the process of being named. Yes, it's a thing. I'm not sure if all guitarists do this, but it does make it easier to tell someone which guitar to hand you if you have multiple models of the same brand. I believe Keith Richards and Todd Rundgren both name their guitars. I don't really follow either guitarist, but I did watch interviews about their gear.
My brain has decided this guitar is female, not male like the other two. She's either going to be called RainStorm or Nemesis. I like both, so it's a toss-up at this point. Nemesis is the goddess of Justice and Retribution, and I've sort of identified with her for as long as I've known of the mythology. It's appropriate the guitar is likely going to be made by a company with a Greek gods theme going on. A cithara is an ancient type of lyre, but they've named at least five of their models after gods. They have yet to use the name Nemesis, so I will be mentioning it to them. Frankly, I want a trademark on the body shape, so I have to figure all that out.
There are two or three companies that make something fairly close to what I'm planning, but one of them charges ~$8,250 US for the model I like, and the others are fully custom shops that charge exorbitant prices. While my own build will be over $4,000, it's still something we consider reasonable for what we're asking from our luthier. The build quality is important, obviously, but some of the parts are also expensive and some require extra router work.
Basically, I'm getting rid of everything in the guitar that bothers me on a regular basis, and tailoring the shape for playability both sitting and standing. Every component will be extremely high quality, and a lot of parts will be Canadian-made. I could get custom pickups wound in Canada, but I already knew I liked the sound of a certain kind of active pickup that happens to be rechargeable, so I didn't want to go with something else that required a disposable 9V battery. Lithium Ion is already bad enough for the environment.
I expect this to be something of a journey, and I'm hoping to include the whole experience in video form on my guitar channel. I've waited this long for a proper guitar, so I'll have to be patient a little while longer. Or try to be, anyway.
