NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE ...
Neville Marten ponders whether it’s best to switch between lots of guitars, or nurture one main instrument that you get to know intimately…
Over the years I’ve tended to adjust to any guitar I pick up. I take it as read that this is what the builder intended to make and so I work around any foibles. It could come from my days at Gibson/Norlin where we’d often QC 100 guitars a day, then the same with CBS/Fender – plus, of course, the thousands I’ve played over decades of working on guitar magazines.
But there are players who are never satisfied with what the guitar companies present. Within days they’re changing pickups, swapping bridges, refretting with bigger wire, and so on. Some players I know have a problem with intonation, too. It’s never in tune enough. So they’ve sought out the Buzz Feiten system, had the guitar Plek’d, fitted roller nuts and locking tuners, or changed bridge saddles.
Now, I have never done those things, except for the time when we all fitted DiMarzio Super Distortion and PAF pickups to our humbucking guitars, then Seymour Duncan JBs. And put Hot Rails in Strats, and so on. Since then, apart from changing pickups for a specific reason, as I did recently on my sunburst Strat, I like things as they are. Of course, I do buy good guitars so perhaps that shouldn’t surprise me.
When I worked for SynthAxe, some guitarists adapted immediately to the techniques required to play this new instrument, while others recoiled in horror. I won’t name names, but I took an ’Axe to several famous guitarists and I reckon it was around 70:30 against. But those that got it, really got it. We were at Summer NAMM in Chicago in 1986 and our stand was causing the usual stir – due in no small part to having Allan Holdsworth demoing on it.
One day, two session guitarists came to try it: hardened studio guys, middle-aged, proper musos who could sight-read the proverbial flypaper. Both were very eager to have a go. I passed the instrument to the first guy, gave him my usual five-mi
