John Williams: Blog

The WBC sends a solo/duo and a band to compete in the IBC in Memphis.  I'm not much of a joiner but I'm set to play in the initial showcase this Sunday.  Vocals are factored into the score so I'm pretty much guaranteed not to be competitive.
None the less it's at good room and it should draw a good crowd.  I'm working on my set list and finalizing what gear to bring.  The L-00 with the internal K&K pickup is probably the most bulletproof.
It is frustrating that they won't let me bring my own sound engineer.  They said that making everyone use the same sound guy "levels the field."  Well, if everyone used the same drummer it would level the field even more I suppose.

Amazing how popular FretKillr is on YouTube.  The Hat Tip to Fretkillr I posted some time ago still gets a lot of hits.  I don't know any more about him than anyone else but I do enjoy his videos.

The very most important thing is the cloud of ether that is the song. The song doesn't exist on it's own unless you are actually playing it - it is only an idea. You can write it down on paper but that's only a representation not the actual song. If the song is really good it trumps almost everything else that can go wrong with the recording. If it is bad there is nothing, absolutely nothing you can do to fix it. You end up polishing turds. Moving into the player's head the next most important thing is the performance attitude. Good attitude can't rescue a truly bad song and bad attitude can't totally kill a good song but attitude is still very important. Lots of things up and down the signal chain affect the player's attitude too. "Bad" attitude might actually be good for the song so this is a tricky thing. Next we have the player's hands and how they work on the instrument - the player's technique. Really great technique can't fix a bad song and bad technique won't always kill a song. [...]

The Rainsong WS1000 is a great gigging guitar.  It is durable, sounds good, and is impervious to most environmental problems but a list price of over $2000 makes it a bit hard to justify.  The new "advanced" model has most of those qualities but comes in at about half the price.  They also can be had in red or blue in addition to black.
A new piece of gear always seems to turn up in Musicians Friend's "scratch and dent" just when I think I need it.  They had a black AWS1000 for just under $1k so I hopped on it.  The advanced model comes with a gig bag where the non-advanced (retarded?) model comes with a nice SKB-like case.  No problem there - I like gig bags anyway and the one that is included is very high-quality.  It also comes with Fishman Prefix Plus-T electronics which includes a tuner.  That's very cool since I had to add a Wittman-Spins mini tuner to my older Rainsong.
Out of the box the action was not as low [...]

Doing a solo acoustic gig is really fun.  Little setup, no late band members, no question about what to play next.  Since the time between walking into the venue and pulling the guitar out of it?s bag is so small I've always worried about climate-change problems.  Most of my playing-out in the past has been with an electric guitar.  Acoustic guitars were almost exclusively for use in the studio.  Electrics, especially solid body electrics, are inherently better suited to withstand climate changes.  The acoustic guitars I used were selected solely for their tone which made them tend to be higher-end instruments that aren?t necessarily robust.  RainSong guitars have always interested me and the few I?ve played in stores seemed really well-made.  I never had much problem with the tone either.  When a WS1000 turned up in the ?scratch-n-dent? section of MusiciansFriend.com I jumped on it.  The thing arrived in perfect tune (just like [...]