The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
Reply to Thread Bookmark Thread
Posts 1 to 11 of 11
  1. #1

    User Info Menu

    The guitar tone on Metheney's new album seems different from prior recorded works with which I am familiar. Could this be a Slaman guitar?



    Guitar on Pat Metheny's New Album...-screen-shot-2020-10-18-9-16-30-am-jpg
    Guitar on Pat Metheny's New Album...-screen-shot-2020-10-18-9-18-42-am-jpg

  2.  

    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #2

    User Info Menu

    I would guess so. Once he changes guitars he tends to stick with them. Til he changes again.

    Just curious about the CC pickup. With the blade design, it doesn’t really pick up (no pun intended) the sound from individual strings, the way pole pickups do. In other words, a very primitive design. One would think there would be a lot of bleeding of sound from other strings.

    And yet 80 years later, many guitarists seem to prefer it. Interesting.

    (Caveat: I know very little about pickups or electronics. Feel free to educate me if I’m off base here.)

  4. #3

    User Info Menu

    Could be wrong, it seems to me that his sound is softer and with less effects (not a Pat Metheny specialist!)
    The CC pickup have been used by a lot of great players : Charlie Christian himself, Jimmy Raney, Tal Farlow, TBone Walker, Barney Kessel, to name a few . They are still used by numerous players including some on this forum.
    A drawback often criticised : they could hum in certain conditions . The B sting can be too loud (with a little practice you can overcome this) . The post war models had a notch under the B string .
    In the 70s Bill Lawrence made strat style single bar pickups and double bar in humbucking format ; some years after you could find Joe Barden Dany Gatton models.
    Nowadays you can find a lot of CC style pickups . My favorites are Vintage Vibe by Pete Biltoft and the CC Pickups (made in UK).
    If you see a Gibson with an ancient CC pickup it's worth a try for sure !

  5. #4

    User Info Menu

    Sounds nice with string orchestra.
    More traditional jazz guitar sound and playing than on other Pat's CDs.
    I prefer his sound on old Gibson 175d.
    Best
    Kris

  6. #5

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Doctor Jeff
    ... Just curious about the CC pickup. With the blade design, it doesn’t really pick up (no pun intended) the sound from individual strings, the way pole pickups do. ...
    The polepieces on a Gibson-style humbucking pickup don't sense individual strings. There's a pickup-wide magnet assembly in the pickup, along with a single coil of wire per bobbin, and the magnetically-susceptible adjustable polepieces serve to adjust the shape of magnetic field to a small degree. In the Charlie Christian pickup, the single polepiece is not adjustable and therefore the shape of the magnetic field cannot be fine-tuned.

    Magnetic pickups work by magnetic induction. Broadly speaking, a conductor (the string), when vibrating in a magnetic field (produced by the magnets in the pickup), generates a voltage. The wire coil in the pickup has a voltage induced in it from the voltage in the string, which voltage is then sent along to the amplifier. This is 19th century physics, nothing particularly elaborate. There's only one magnetic field involved, and only one signal is generated out of the pickup - a low-voltage alternating current whose alternations depend on the complex frequency superpositions of the frequencies of the vibrating strings. Think of a series of sine waves of different frequencies, all added together.


    In order to sense the strings individually you'd need something like a piezo element under each string. Piezo pickups aren't magnetic; the materials from which they are made have the physical property that they produce a voltage in response to mechanical vibration.

  7. #6

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Doctor Jeff
    One would think there would be a lot of bleeding of sound from other strings.
    All conventional magnetic pickups I know of provide a sum of the signals from all six strings. That way when you play a chord you hear all vibrating strings. Some might do it with multiple magnets or multiple coils, but the outputs are all tied together. Whether you have a bar magnet, individual magnets or pole pieces you’ll alway’s have that “bleeding.” Of course, the magnet and coil structure greatly affects the tone.

    There may be a few exceptions, e.g. pickups that put lower and upper stringsets in different stereo channels, but that’s another topic.

  8. #7

    User Info Menu

    Funny I prefer this tone without any effects. Just like EVH when someone gets famous for a certain tone or way of playing, how many try and copy it.
    In some ways it's flattering, but I find it really sad and annoying!

  9. #8

    User Info Menu

    The one in the large photo, with the "Pat Metheny" inlay at the end of the fretboard, is almost certainly an Ibanez. The inlay style is a giveaway as is the F-hole/body binding and finish. There has been previous discussion on the forum about him having had Ibanez copy the Daniel Slaman guitar, presumably so that he didn't have to tour with that one and instead could travel with one that was more replaceable. The Slaman also had a CC pickup with screw pole pieces for string balancing rather than a bar.

    It is interesting that many decades into his career, Metheny has changed to a very old-fashioned single coil pickup. In terms of managing hum, in interviews he has described using a Hum Debugger pedal. As a result, I bought one for use with my guitar with a Pere Biltoft floating CC-ish pickup in it and it does work quite well.

    I too am happy to hear him playing with a much less processed tone; all those delays that he uses make me kind of nuts and shorten how long I can listen to him.

  10. #9

    User Info Menu

    Source: Pat Metheny | Vintage Guitar(R) magazine

    And you also have an ES-150 that once belonged to Charlie Christian himself and then Les Paul?
    I have to admit that I’m in my middle-age collection zone, and have a place in my life for guitars that goes beyond just tools. And the Charlie Christian thing has become kind of an obsession. There are 40 known ES-250s in the world – the rarest Gibson. At an auction, there was a guitar that was supposedly a gift from Charlie Christian to Les Paul, then to this guy who was getting rid of all these guitars. And I ended up with this guitar, which according to the documentation was once Charlie Christian’s 150. Lynn Wheelwright would probably laugh at that. His level of the documentation of the Christian-owned instrument he has is electron-microscope level. He found photos of Charlie Christian and examined the wood grain and matched it exactly. He’s that level of collector. The requirement for belief of something like that is really high. But I’m going to take this collector-guy’s word that it was Charlie Christian’s – and I know it was Les Paul’s.


    A guy in Holland, Daniel Slaman, is not just making Charlie Christian pickups, but Charlie Christian re-creation guitars – to the nth degree. Fantastic instruments, incredibly accurate. But he’s a very forward-thinking guy. I asked him if he could make me a 150/250 hybird and if he could deal with this pickup issue – to where there are adjustable pole pieces. He got together with CC Pickups in England and figured an adjustable pole piece version of a Charlie Christian pickup, then made me a hybrid 150/250 with a cutaway – because I’m always playing throughout the register, so that’s a nice thing – and the instrument has just kicked my ass in the best possible way. It’s a carved-top guitar, and I’ve been taking it around the past six months – to Japan and Sweden, did a duet concert with Ron Carter in 96-degree weather in Detroit – and the dues I’ve had to go through to make it sound good every day, it’s an hour or so before every gig. As opposed to my Ibanez, which I’m still going to use constantly, because it’s like a

  11. #10

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by dconeill
    The polepieces on a Gibson-style humbucking pickup don't sense individual strings. There's a pickup-wide magnet assembly in the pickup, along with a single coil of wire per bobbin, and the magnetically-susceptible adjustable polepieces serve to adjust the shape of magnetic field to a small degree. In the Charlie Christian pickup, the single polepiece is not adjustable and therefore the shape of the magnetic field cannot be fine-tuned.

    Magnetic pickups work by magnetic induction. Broadly speaking, a conductor (the string), when vibrating in a magnetic field (produced by the magnets in the pickup), generates a voltage. The wire coil in the pickup has a voltage induced in it from the voltage in the string, which voltage is then sent along to the amplifier. This is 19th century physics, nothing particularly elaborate. There's only one magnetic field involved, and only one signal is generated out of the pickup - a low-voltage alternating current whose alternations depend on the complex frequency superpositions of the frequencies of the vibrating strings. Think of a series of sine waves of different frequencies, all added together.


    In order to sense the strings individually you'd need something like a piezo element under each string. Piezo pickups aren't magnetic; the materials from which they are made have the physical property that they produce a voltage in response to mechanical vibration.
    Thanks. I more or less knew that, but it’s nice to see it put into words better than I could. Knowing how the bobbin is wound, and the fact there is only one electrical output, of course, it makes sense.

    I still find it interesting that the most primitive pickup design is one of the most coveted and copied.

  12. #11

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by icr
    Thanks for the link. I read that article when it came out—very thoughtful.

    Pat and I are exactly alike, in that I got rid of a solid body and got a 175 so I could play the music I was hearing in my head. That’s where the similarity ends, sadly. ;-)