Hot Damn! Got our name up on the Marquee!!!

[The Gator]

Been playing around town. Gotta gig opening up for a friend's band the Popskull Rebels. It is at a theater so they hVe a really cool retro Marquee on the the front. Just a little place in my home town but it looks cool!

We're gonna rip it up tonight!
Combo Diablo style!

 

[The Gator]

Against my better judgment, LOL. I'm going to share some little Snippets of video that my wife took at a place called The Ship, back in August. Just pieces of songs no solos. It's clear to see how old we are LOL, but we're having fun.

 

[CheapSuitG]

Such a great feeling seeing that, congrats!

 

[The Gator]

Yeah thank you!
I forgot I'm supposed to give some details because we're all pedal nerds. It wouldn't be right not to. I'm the old guy on the left playing the Johnny A Gibson. I'm going into a boss volume pedal than a pigtronics tuner. Next up is a boss noise suppressor. Then in the noise suppressor Loop is a modified pendulum harmonic tremolo, a Gatordrive, and a hybrid fuzz driver I call Live Fuzz..
After all that it goes into a magnetron delay and into the 68 Fender vibrolux.

 

[HamishR]

Can't say I've ever seen my band's name on a sign as cool as that, but it always used to give me a buzz seeing our band mentioned in the papers and on the chalk boards outside venues. From a very young age I would get Thursday's Daily News for the gig guides. When I started to see my bands mentioned it was a huge thrill.

I must be getting old... "back in my day" we used to get into the pubs at 16 to see bands. The beer was a bonus - I mainly went to see the bands. There's no way my son could get into a pub until he was 18. They really police it these days. When I was 16 there were so many options too - punk bands, cover bands, jazz bands, R&B (as in actual blues type R&B), soul...

But I would be proud if that was my band's name on a sign like that. How cool! How's that Johnny A??

 

[The Gator]

The Johnny A plays sinfully easy. It is a long scale however the neck is perfect. I imagine it was not done by hand. With a light spring on the Bigsby it plays like short scale. That being said, the setup on these with a bigsby, is not ideal at all. My initial thought was a hardtail version would be best, with the tail piece swapped out for a Duesenberg Les Trem. They are easy to install the cost less and they work very well. The string brake angle can be adjusted. With the Bigsby you have no choice but to get a bricks bigs fix raised roller. Without it the brake angle is way too steep. The other thing I did was had a luthier make a bone nut for it. The original nut is Corian and I just don't get along with Corian. The hardware on the Johnny A leaves a little bit to be desired as it's actually just an old school ABR 1 Bridge, and the tuners are the old shallow 50 style as well. Johnny A stated that he wanted the guitar designed like it was a 50s Gibson. Which is great if you're talking about pickups. It has the 57 classic pickups in it. It sounds somewhere in between a Les Paul and an SG.
The top is carved on the outside but it's not on the inside. So it ends up being really thick in the middle and it resists feedback more so than other Hollow Bodies are the same size. The feedback it does get is a higher pitch kind of like a Birdland does. I really love the fact that you can put a lot of gain on it and control the feedback pretty easily. So there was definitely some setup involved to get it to stay in tune properly, but now that that's done it's just a joy. And it actually weighs less than an SG. Which that in itself will spoil you rather quickly.

 

[The Gator]

 

[The Gator]

More shameless self promotion...
Here are some video clips of songs taken by various people that night.

 

[HamishR]

I have Bigsbys on some guitars and love 'em. However it's mostly the B3 and B6 - those without the tension roller. The roller seems to reduce the responsiveness and feel unfortunately. I only have one with the roller which is the one I put on my 330. I rarely use it but like what it has done to the sound of the guitar.

On my Gretsches the best thing I have done to improve both the sound and the tuning stability is use a Tru-Arc Serpentune bridge. They have replaced TOMs and Bigsby bridges and make a huge difference to ability to use the Bigsby. If they weren't so expensive to us outside the US right now I would put one on my 330.

I have long been curious about the Johnny A. Gibson is a strange company and make weird decisions about their guitars, but when you get a good one they can be sublime. The 330 I bought this year is as good a guitar as I have ever had. The neck is perfect. The finish is (unusually) flawless. And the playability and sound is off the charts. It gets played a lot!