Mosaic Celluloid

Vintage Japanese Mosaic Celluloid Picks!

I was surfing eBay last week to see what was out there in the vintage celluloid pick market, and saw these mosaic celluloid picks. I love the look and I had to have them.

Celluloid is getting harder and harder to find for pick manufacturing, so I figured I better scoop up what I like before they are all gone… These appear to be the D’Andrea No. 346 shape or the Herco No. 35.

Mosaic celluloid was used for Herco picks by their Japanese manufacturer when their “shell” colored celluloid wasn’t available. Herco later asked their manufacturer not to substitute the assorted color/mosaic celluloid except for their thumb pick. I guess the assorted colors didn’t sell well at the time, with the Herco thumb pick being the exception.

They sound similar to a Fender celluloid pick, but look way cooler. Very Rock and Roll!

Source: Picks! by Will Hoover

Godin LG Signature

Godin LG Signature

I purchased the Godin LG Signature a couple of months after I bought the Godin Solidac. I went to a music store in the area who sold Godin guitars as part of their inventory in their showroom. I wanted to compare the Godin LGX’s piezo bridge to the Solidac’s. The LGX definitely did sound a bit better than the Solidac, and cost over twice as much!

While I was in the store one of the sales guys pointed out that Godin’s new LG Signature just came in and I should check it out. He said the Seymour Duncan pickups in the LG Signature sound really great. I tried the guitar out, and decided they were right. I really liked the guitar. I made a deal with the manager of the store to let me take the LG Signature home to try it with my own rig over the weekend in exchange for a $100 credit card security deposit, which could be applied to the purchase price of the guitar if I decided to buy the guitar, or would be credited back to my account when I brought the guitar back to the store.

The LG Signature specs are listed below.

Specs:
• Mahogany Neck
• Rosewood Fingerboard
• Jumbo Frets
• Black Machines (Satin finish) 18:1 ratio
• Mahogany Body
• Black Schaller Bridge
• 5-way Switch
• Seymour Duncan Humbucker Pickups
• Carved flame maple top
• Colors: Trans Blue, Cognacburst, Trans Black

As you can see from the picture I purchased the LG Signature in Transparent Black with a carved AA flame maple top. The LG Sig is quite pretty in my opinion. The guitar has a tune-o-matic bridge, but instead of having the usual stop tailpiece, the LG Signature features string through the body design where the ball end of the strings are held by a brass plate screwed on to the back of the guitar. This system works quite well coupling the string vibrations to the mahogany body, which adds resonance to the guitar’s sound. The neck is a bolt-on design, but the way Godin does this the guitar plays like a set neck guitar. The scale length is 25.5 inches, which is not what you usually expect with a mahogany guitar with a maple cap, but this gives you a lively playing guitar with good snap. The pickups are a Seymour Duncan Jazz in the neck and a specially wound Custom Custom for Godin in the bridge position, so I guess you could consider the pickup to be a Custom Custom Custom, with nickel pickup covers. There is a five position selector switch, which gives you neck humbucker, neck coil-tapped (for single coil sounds), neck and bridge humbuckers combined, bridge coil-tapped, and bridge humbucker. This affords you a large assortment of tonal options.

The Rosewood fingerboard is attached to a fairly thick mahogany neck (some guys I know had their LG Sig’s neck shaved down, but I kept mine nice and fat for better stability). The nut is a Tusq nut, and the frets are nice jumbo frets that were dressed and finished quite well. The tuners turn smoothly, sporting black tuning knobs, with good tuning stability. There is a master volume and tone control, so the typical dual humbucker pickup selector switch stutter effect is not possible from the stock guitar controls, nor is having different switchable volume and tone settings for the neck and bridge pickups. Most of the hardware on the guitar is black.

Playability and Feel

The Godin LG Signature is a dream to play. It has a very comfortable belly cut on the back of the body, and a nice ergo-cut neck with acceptable access to the upper frets. The pickup selector switch, volume and controls are placed nicely as well.

I set the guitar up for slide guitar playing and/or regular guitar playing without a slide. The strings are set slightly higher on the treble side than in a typical setup. Also due to the higher string tension afforded by the  25.5-inch scale length and the fixed bridge, this guitar is a good candidate for alternate tunings such as tuning a half step down or drop tunings on the low E string, where the strings will tend to get too slack on 24.75-inch scale length guitar, without going to a thicker string gauge. If you go all the way to drop C or drop B I would suggest using heavier gauge strings for better string tension.

Sound

This guitar sounds good through a cleanish amp. It can get close to some nice Strat tones when the neck pickup is coil-tapped. The bridge pickup in split-coil mode is a nice option when you want a brighter tone, that sounds thinner, with slightly less drive than in humbucker mode, but does not get overly ice-picky. The humbucker tones are nice and thick and sound great with some overdrive or distortion. The LG Signature makes for a really nice all around guitar for Pop, Blues, Rock, Country or Jazz. Below is a video of me playing the LG Sig with a band I used to play with covering Alice In Chains, Man In A Box. The recording was done with a small camcorder on a tripod, but this will give you an idea on how she sounds for heavy Rock music. Below the video is a quick sound clip of the Godin LG Sig into my modified Fender Pro Junior.

A video and a sound clip are worth at least a 1,000 words…

If you are interested in purchasing a Godin LG Signature the used market (Ebay, Reverb.com, etc.) is where you would want to look, since the guitar is no longer listed on Godin’s updated web site.

Keep pickin’!

 

 

Digitech Metal Master

The Digitech Metal Master… I picked this distortion pedal up used from Guitar Center yesterday. They had it priced to move at $19.99. I have been in the market for a pedal that would give me some high gain tones. I decided to give this pedal a try.

Initial impression is I’m glad I did! The Metal Master has the exact sounds, and then some that I was looking for, to complement my other overdrive and distortion pedals already on my pedalboard. I’ll try the pedal with a couple of the bands I play with to see how this pedal stacks up with the others. That should give me a good picture if the pedal is truly useful in a band setting.

The Metal Master has been sounding real nice during my practice sessions at home. Keep an eye out for the full review coming soon…

Keep pickin’!