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Yes, very true! Especially on acoustic.
But nevertheless, I've heard some incredible guitar players with just terrible tone. Gypsy players usually sound superb on just about any acoustic but are often befuddled by technology. And vice versa, so many archtop electric players sound awful when playing acoustic. Like Joe Pass' acoustic stuff on the Virtuoso album. Great playing...terrible acoustic tone!
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Joe's playing on Virtuoso was a technical glitch. They had a mike on his guitar and a mike on his amp. The amp mike was not set up properly and did not record on several tunes (some tunes, the mike worked on and the tone on the blend is good).
Norman Granz decided that the takes were so good, that he included the tunes with the crappy tone of the one working mike along with the tunes that had both mikes.
Everything on the Pablo label is one take only. Granz wanted to capture jazz in its most spontaneous form.
Listen to Joe playing an acoustic guitar (John Pisano's Epiphone Deluxe) on the album "Summer Nights". Joes's solo on Douce Ambiance sounds great!
Cheers,
Marc
www.hotclubpacific.com
That's interesting...but still, it doesn't really say much for Joe's acoustic tone. Why did he have to have the amp mic working to sound decent? I've seen Gypsies play totally junk Asian archtops with rusty floutwounds and they still sound better. Don't get me wrong, Joe is awesome. But he's really an electric player first and foremost.
Some other rare acoustic archtop recordings would include Johnny Smith's Legends CD. He sounds better then Joe Pass, but still pretty weak in my opinion. I guess he had to play his own model Gibson...but unfortunately those are not very good acoustic guitars, I know I because I owned one once! He would have been better off with a different model Gibson...or an old Epi. Again, great playing but the wrong guitar and the wrong technique.
I've also heard some acoustic stuff by Russell Malone which was pretty disappointing as well.
The only archtop guys that I hear successfully doing acoustic stuff these days are Martin Taylor and Frank Vignola, who both incidentally are heavily influenced by Django and the Gypsy jazz genre as a whole.
Obviously it's possible to do really nice acoustic recordings with an archtop, but I'm amazed how rarely it's done. And often when it does happen, the players use flatwound strings and ultra low action which doesn't do much for the acoustic sound. Again, Vignola and Taylor seem to be the exceptions to this....there must be others but I'm having a hard time thinking of any. At least any who are pro, virtuoso type players.
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Kenny Burell gets a good sound out of a flat top acoustic.
John McGloughlin, Larry Coryell, Steve Kahn, Vic Juris, Al Dimeola and Phillip Catherine have all played great jazz on acoustic steel strings.
Go to nylon string acoustics and the list goes on. Charley Bird, Laurendo Almeida, Tommy Tedesco, etc.
Years ago, I watched one of my teachers (Milt Norman, used to play with Sinatra and Bobby Darin among others) play acoustic jazz on his vintage Stromberg that would have made Bireli, Stochelo and the Schmidts cry.
There is a lot of great acoustic jazz out there. You just have to search for it.
Cheers,
Marc
Yes, I'm familiar with all of those artists. I was talking more about archtops though, not flatops or nylon string guitars. I can't think of one acoustic archtop jazz recording of any of the players you mentioned. And even when most of those players are using flatops or nylon strings, they aren't playing swing or bebop. Mostly latin or fusion with maybe one or two small exceptions. And generally, I can't say I'm crazy about the acoustic sound of any of those guys, be it nylon, flatop, or archtop. Dimeloa, McLaughlin, and Coryell had the misfortune of being the Ovation generation. Anyway, I think it's safe to say it's pretty hard to beat the Gypsy guys for acoustic jazz tone. Acoustic playing seems to be largely a novelty for most other jazz players.
I can't really think of any acoustic archtop players who regularly just rips on standards, save for Talyor and Vignola. And even both of them use humbuckers most of the time...
Guys like Burrell and Joe Pass seemed to conceptualize the archtop as solely an electric instrument. It seems like when they wanted to do something acoustic (as you pointed out), they would use a nylon string or a flatop. The accidental acoustic recordings of Joe Pass' archtop add weight to this argument.
But could you imagine Kenny Burrell sitting in with a Gypsy jazz group playing a flatop totally acoustic and actually being heard? No, he doesn't have those sort of chops. any acoustic stuff he's doing is in a totally controlled environment, be it a recording studio or a carefully miced live performance.
Generally speaking, I think it's safe to say we are still waiting for acoustic archtop jazz to really be taken seriously. Unfortunately there really isn't a precedent for it and I'm not sure if it will ever be something as pervasive as acoustic playing in Gypsy jazz.
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This may be absolute heresy but I have got into the habit to using plain old Ernie Ball electric guitar strings when using my Stimer ST48 as it eliminates the problem of the E and B strings sounding much louder due to their higher stell content compared with the wound strings in a set of Argentines.
Would Django still have been using Argentines at that stage? Perhaps the natural compression of a vintage tube amp eliminates that problem to some extent?
What do people think?
I doubt Django would have though...nickel strings might not have even been available in "Gypsy' gauges at that time anyway.
Most Gypsies just use Argies with the Stimer and just ignore the string balance problem. You actually get used to it after a while....and if you're using the guitar for both acoustic and electric playing it's a drag to have the nickel strings on because the acoustic sound isn't great. But if you're only doing electric then nickel is nice.
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Also, the tube amps do smooth everything out much more then transistor amps do.
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Learn how to play Gypsy guitar:
http://alexsimonmusic.com/learn-gypsy-jazz-guitar/