Stress Relief
Maybe you never get stressed out. Maybe every day is just perfect and nothing annoys or upsets you. That would be cool, but it's not me. And that's one way that playing guitar helps enormously.
Sometimes it's just the sound and mood that gets created that contributes. While big bodied jazz boxes are certainly not all the rage these days, there is a magic therein.
My ES-175D is from the early 90's. It took me a while to get in a groove with it. It's after all a "jazz" guitar and except for some chords and a short solo from Take 5, my jazz skills are near invisible. I've recently been spending more time with it since adding the Fender 65 Blackface Twin Reverb to my playing area.
The ES-175D is commonly referred to as an archtop. Gibson has done all manner of archtop guitars over the years. Mine is equipped with the stock humbuckers that came with the guitar in the early nineties. I love the sharp point on the florentine cutaway, and the big deep body has a lot of natural resonance. Held to the ear, its tone is warm and liquid.
I have the ES-175 strung with D'Addario Chromes. My setup is the 11-50 gauge set. Chromes, if you have never played them, are flat wounds and fall into the mellow category of strings.
My preferred mellow strings, the D'Addario Chromes
For some time I was not excited about the tone that I was getting from the guitar into my existing amps. It wasn't bad, certainly a better player could get better tone, but when I got the Twin Reverb, things changed for me and the guitar. Instead of fighting with the amp and guitar controls, I could just sit and play. There was the big airbox warmth and mellow ness, without losing all the spark of the bridge humbucker or the high strings with the neck humbucker. If ever an amp and a guitar went together, this pair seemed to be it.
THE amp to use with the ES-175
As regular readers will have noticed, I am a serious pedal geek and I wanted to see what I could do with minimal pedals. I limited myself to only two pedals for this exercise and am very happy with the results. Of course, I am using the fabulous reverb built into the amp, so that should probably count as one, but I don't count it. The only pedals are a TC Electronics Polytune 3 in stroboscopic mode and my fave Cali76 compressor.
My go to compressor on the Fender Twin
I have too many compressors. Diamonds, an Empress and a pair from Origin Systems, the Cali76 and the Stacked. I also like the basic compressor from Robert Keeley, but in all my testing, nothing pairs with the Fender Twin like the Cali76. It's just so good. It's compression without squishiness while delivering sustain for days, particularly in conjunction with a hollow body guitar.
Putting all the pieces together, I get this warm, voluptuous tone that encourages the development of interesting chord progressions and new riffs. I lack the skill to write music out, and my sight reading skills are quite poor. So I sit with a little Zoom recorder and when I come across something that I like the sound of, I hit record, play the bit a few times and then add some voice reminders of key, what chords, I am playing, the starting notes and any patterns involved. This helps me a lot with getting the approach down, because while I know what I like, I suck at writing out a rhthym so recording it makes sense for me, and might for you as well.
By keeping things simple in the sonic change, the work falls back to me and my fingers to get the job done properly. In my recent stress relief sessions that has worked out well, and I have been able to create some stuff that I find interesting and may end up going somewhere. After an hour or so, I realize that I have not been conscious of the passage of time, that my blood pressure and heart rate has relaxed. What stress was troubling me has subsided and I am in a better state.
It's written that music can calm the savage beast. Not so sure how beastly or savage I am, but the tone from this combination is absolutely a winning ticket.
