Loosen Up and Fly Right: Tips for Guitar Air Travel

Flying with your six-string baby is always nerve-wracking. Unless you're in a superstar band. Then it's the guitar tech's problem. But most of us, whether we're working musicians or just can't bear to leave our axes alone at home when we travel, feel a twitch of trepidation when we turn a flight case's handle loose at check-on or sling a bag on our shoulder and walk down the gangway.

Here are some suggestions for transporting guitars in gig bags and flight cases.

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Gibson Tone Tips: True Bypass Pedals and The Buffer Zone

There's a lot of talk these days about "true bypass" effects pedals, and many manufacturers advertise as a major selling point the fact that they include this function. The subject isn't entirely as clear-cut as it might seem, however, and there's more to the issue of true bypass than a simple good/bad dichotomy. Let's take a quick look at what "true bypass" actually means, and why it might be good for your pedal set up—and why, sometimes, it might not be.

When a manufacturer says one of its pedals is "true bypass"—also sometimes called "hard bypass" or "hard-wired"—it means that when the pedal is in the off position the un-effected guitar signal is routed directly from the pedal's input jack to the output jack via the stomp switch, rather than flowing through some portion of the pedal's circuit.

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Under The Influence: Young Acts Who Learned Their Lessons Well

It's easy to keep complaining that things aren't what they used to be. But the truth is, often enough you'll catch young bands who've studied well enough to produce something with much of the dexterity of their established teachers, and a youthful twist that's all their own.

It's that twist, even, that adds the thrill—copying is all well and good, but it's internalizing and uniquely filtering that shows real potential. You'll hear some pronounced influences in the young music-makers listed below—enough that you'll gravitate easily if you have a taste for their forebearers—but you'll hear strong, growing voices, too, and they're ones worth listening to.

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Out of PJ Harvey's '90s Heyday and Into A Quiet Space: Polly Harvey On Her "Peculiar" New Record

You never really know what you're going to get when you unwrap a PJ Harvey album. From the violently careening punk-blues of Dry to the slinky, sexy smokiness of To Bring You My Love, frontwoman Polly Harvey has unleashed persona after persona—and matched those ever-changing moods to equally wide-ranging sounds. She's seldom pushed the envelope as far, however, as she does on her most recent outing, White Chalk. Largely constructed around bare-bones piano lines, the disc finds Harvey exploring meetings both otherworldly ("The Devil") and decidedly physical ("When Under Ether"), while collaborators John Parrish and Flood (who's also worked with Smashing Pumpkins and U2) send subtle streams of sensation into the atmosphere. It's a bracing disc, one that even Harvey herself admits confuses her at times.

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'97 Flashback: How Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind Survived Stormy Studio Sessions

Bob Dylan was 29 studio albums and nearly 40 years into his career when he began recording Time Out of Mind in January 1997. It was a difficult period for Dylan artistically. Although his place as one of the greatest songwriters and personalities in rock and roll was already cemented, his career as a contemporary artist was foundering. Dylan's most recent studio album of new material was 1990's Under the Red Sky, which was generally slagged by critics and fans. He'd followed up with two CDs of folk covers, but was shying away from revealing new songs, even in concert.

Then in 1996 a deep snow fell on his Minnesota farm, and with it came inspiration. Dylan began writing a string of fresh numbers. He even demo'd some of them in the studio—a departure from his usual modus operandi of springing just lyric sheets or bare-boned chords on his session musicians to preserve spontaneity.


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Recording Guitars: Miking Amps, Part 1

In theory, the incredible advances in home recording thanks to digital technology—and conversely declining prices for such gear—put professional music production within the grasp of every musician. All too often, however, I encounter guitarists who are a few months into using their new computer-based "better than CD quality" systems and already on the point of utter frustration about not being able to get studio-quality results out of their gear. This new series on Gibson.com aims to help rectify that, and begins with this nugget of wisdom: however advanced the technology, you still need to learn some good, old-fashioned studio technique if you hope to record professional sounding guitar tracks.

To that end, let's start the series with one of the most basic and crucial realms of studio knowledge: microphone placement*. It doesn't get much more basic than putting the right mic in the right place, and while this might seem a simple and obvious process it really is an art in itself, one which can often separate the men from the boys even among professional recording engineers. That said, the rule of law in mic placement is that there are no rules—what sounds best, works. The real trick is finding the placement that really does sound best, and not just sticking the mic randomly in front of the speaker and hitting record. Great guitar recordings have been made with one, two, three and even more microphones, but let's start with some ways of finding the correct positioning for a single microphone in this installment, and move on to a few two-mic techniques in Part 2.

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Sheepskin and Rhinestones: The Story Behind the Legendary ZZ Top Guitars

Some of the most distinctive guitar sounds in the rock canon have come from the hands of Billy Gibbons and his legendary '59 Les Paul, nicknamed Pearly Gates. A vintage car and guitar collector and authority (see his book Billy F Gibbons: Rock + Roll Gearhead), Billy Gibbons' biggest claim to fame has been as ZZ Top's guitarist. While always "bad and nationwide," ZZ Top became tres of the most famous hombres in the world, thanks to their '80s videos which featured—what else?—badass custom cars and guitars.

The sight of Billy Gibbons and bassist Dusty Hill doing their choreographed moves, holding matching white Explorers, is an iconic one. Those instruments were made for ZZ Top's Afterburner Tour by Matthew Klein of the Gibson Custom Shop. Klein worked on many of those now-famous outré guitar finishes that became part of the ZZ Top legend: sheepskin covered guitars, rhinestone-studded guitars (used in the Back to the Future Part III and made from rhinestone belts provided by Gibbons), and the white Explorers. In 1986, Klein also made "see-through" lattice-work Firebird-style guitars played by the band on the MTV boat party celebrating the unveiling of the refurbished Statue of Liberty.


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The Surprisingly Serious Tale of Comedian Groucho Marx and His Lifelong Quest to Master Guitar

If Groucho Marx didn't exactly invent rock and roll, he nonetheless embodied its irreverent, rebellious spirit in every medium he came to conquer. He and his brothers would make only 13 feature films, yet in 2000, five of them were honored by the American Film Institute as among the top 100 comedies of all time. Such was Groucho's influence across the generations that he became an unlikely youth icon in his mid-80s, mobbed like a rock star at rare personal appearances, and inspiring thousands to pack what's now Los Angeles' Gibson Amphitheater to view a slate of Marx Brothers films made decades before most in the audience were even born.

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