Some guitarists consider the notion of modifying an electric guitar from its stock configuration distasteful, while others consider it mandatory. As a custom builder with a decidedly vintage background, I fall somewhere in between. Generally, I’m most in favor of maximizing an instrument’s usability without jeopardizing the ability to return it to original condition.
However, when I’m building a guitar, there’s a myriad of small adjustments I can make to steer the instrument on a desired trajectory. These micro mods are interactive with each other and, depending upon the combination, offer a wide variety of sonic outcomes. But these little mods can also be applied to existing guitars—your guitars—in any number of permutations and to great affect. Let’s take a look at five mods that are easy enough for most players to try.
1. Foaming Pickup Cavities
The first and easiest adjustment that most electric guitars can benefit from is stuffing soft foam into the cavity behind the pickups in order to stop microphonic squealing. The first time I used this was when I was repairing a Gibson Firebird for Johnny Winter—the foam stopped the pickup’s back plate from vibrating like a microphone diaphragm. I have since learned that reducing the space (the cubic volume) behind a pickup modifies its sound at higher sound levels. Discovering this resonating-chamber effect has altered my approach to routing a body for pickups on new guitars, too.
It’s easy to remove your pickup or pickguard and slide some foam rubber behind the unit. Start with soft foam first, and then increase the density to find the difference you like. Conveniently, the gray foam used in aftermarket pickup packaging makes great damping material: It’s soft enough that you can double it up (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) to create more pressure on the pickup’s back plate, too. This is a relatively no-frills mod that requires minimal materials and tools.
2. Pickup Magnet Tricks
As we all know, sometimes a pickup isn’t a perfect match for a guitar. I always approach pickup selection like a vocalist would choose a microphone—finding the one that best brings out the guitar’s character rather than attempting to change that innate character with a new pickup.
With this in mind, try swapping your existing pickups’ magnets instead of replacing the whole thing. Magnet type and strength are big contributors to a pickup’s tonality, so it stands to reason that tweaking them will affect your sound.
Swapping magnets is easiest to do with humbuckers. In fact, it can actually be done without completely disassembling the pickup—and sometimes without even unsoldering it.
The first step is to determine what’s in your pickup already. The most common magnets for humbuckers are (roughly in order of strength): alnico 2, alnico 4, alnico 5, and then various types of ceramic magnets. In simple terms, the stronger the magnet, the greater the potential output. But you can’t just look at magnetic strength alone, because stronger magnets also affect the string’s ability to sustain.
By moving up or down one level, in terms of magnetic strength, you can usually add or subtract a little edge from a pickup. If your guitar is too tangy, moving down one pickup level (e.g., from alnico 4 to alnico 2) may smooth it out. If you want to add bite, go with a slightly stronger magnet—like, alnico 5 to a ceramic magnet. The good part is that magnets are both easy to find and inexpensive in comparison to buying a whole new pickup.
Here’s how to swap magnets in a humbucker:
1. Before you begin, determine the magnet’s polarity orientation (north/south). You can use a simple magnetic compass to do this (Fig. 3).
2. Desolder the main leads and remove the pickup from your guitar.
3. Remove the protective outer tape (Fig. 4). This gives you a clear view of the internal parts. (Note: Be careful not to pull out the hookup wires underneath.) You should be able to see the magnet in the center, underneath the two coils.
4. Loosen the four small coil-mount screws on the underside of the pickup (Fig. 5).
5. Raise each of the adjustable pole pieces about four turns to release the coil from the back plate (Fig. 6).
6. Gently pry the coils from the plate to provide a little gap (Fig. 7).
7. Place a screwdriver in the gap at one end of the pickup and slowly tap the magnet out (Fig. 8). Once enough of the magnet is exposed outside the housing, you’ll be able to pull the magnet out with your fingers. (Note: If your pickup is wax-potted, you may encounter some initial resistance as the wax breaks free.)
8. Slide in your new magnet, being careful to match the same magnetic orientation you observed in step 1 (Fig. 9).
9. Return the adjustable pole pieces to their prior position, replace the coil-mount screws and tape, and re-install the pickup in your guitar.
3. Modern vs. Vintage Wiring
Another relatively drastic but easy and cheap way to hot-rod your guitar’s sound with its current components is to alter how and where its volume and tone pots are connected to each other. The difference can be subtle—and it’s more a matter of preference than what’s “correct”—but it can make the difference between a guitar that is just OK and one that really is a joy to play.
With this mod, what you’re essentially doing is changing the way the tone and volume control interact, based upon how they “load” each other. I’ve mocked up a control setup here showing one volume and the corresponding tone control.
Fig. 10 Vintage wiring—which has pickups wired to the volume pot alone, and the tone control’s capacitor being attached to the output—yields minimal high-end roll-off when you turn the volume down. Fig. 11 Modern pickup circuits often have the tone control affecting the pickup’s tone before it gets to the volume knob, yielding a decrease in treble response as volume is reduced.
In the vintage setup, the pickup is wired to the pot lug alone, with the tone control capacitor being attached to the output side. This tends to allow the volume to be rolled off without losing too much high end. This is great for those who play clean rhythm by just lowering their guitar volume as opposed to switching amp channels or turning off a boost pedal. It’s old-school, and it works. The downside is that the tone control sometimes has to be rotated a bit more before its effects are heard.
In our so-called modern configuration, the tone cap is attached to the pickup before the volume pot. This presents the volume control with a totally different signal, resulting in a more colored sound as you reduce the volume. This can be useful if you like to turn up the guitar to cut through more. For me, the downside is the way it makes the tone control a bit of a hair-trigger affair. If you’re the type who avoids the tone control, this won’t be a factor for you.
If you have two sets of volume and tone controls (e.g., on a standard Les Paul), you may or may not decide to wire them differently, which can potentially open the door to even more tonal variations.
4. Add Steely Twang to Your Strat
There are times when a single-coil just doesn’t have enough twang. I’ve encountered Strat neck pickups that are just too wooly to provide me with that saucy, SRV/Hendrix-style rhythm juice. Or, sometimes an anemic bridge pickup just needs an extra dose of snap to push it into Tele-like territory. If so, this simple mod could be just what you’re looking for.
When Leo and the boys at the big “F” ranch developed the Tele, they put a big slab of steel under the bridge-pickup coil. This reflected the magnetic field up and toward the strings. In the words of Seymour Duncan’s Evan Skopp, this gives it more “crack”—which, if you’re addicted to twang, is a good thing. The better news is that you can attach a plate (sometimes called an elevator plate, because of how it elevates the magnetic field toward the strings) to any single coil whose pole-piece magnets are exposed at the back.
To do so, purchase a small piece of .047"(18-gauge) sheet steel from your local hardware store. Then:
1. Trim it to a manageable size and shape—about the same dimension as the pickup bobbin (Fig. 12). Then trim it so that it fits within the perimeter of the base plate without touching the lead wire contacts (Fig. 13). 2. Using a small piece of thin, double-sided tape, fit the plate over the bottom of the pickup, and then secure it with dabs of adhesive (Fig. 14). I prefer hot glue, because it’s easy to remove, but you can use epoxy or super glue, too.
This mod works great for Strat-type pickups or aftermarket Tele-style reproduction pickups that don’t already have a plate. Some pickup companies make P-90s that don’t have a metal base plate, and these can be twang-ified in this way, too. The best part is that, if you don’t like the sound, you can just peel the plate off and be right back where you started.
5. Fine-Tuning Your Tuners
This mod is a little different—and definitely not as affordable as the ones we’ve been talking about up to this point. When players think about modifications that involve tuning machines, the subject revolves around tuning stability. That’s all well and good, but I’ve rarely encountered a quality machine that slips—because the mechanical torque required to turn the tuner’s capstan is pretty stout. Problems of pitch are usually more related to capstan wobble or a bad nut-slotting job.
However, there’s another aspect of machine-head selection that I contemplate when building a custom guitar: weight. But this is more about sustain and tone than a question of neck-heaviness.
I’ve written in previous issues of Premier Guitar about how the size and shape of a guitar’s headstock affect its sustain and tone. Clearly, the mass of the tuning machines is a factor in this, as well. Having overseen the building of tens of thousands of custom guitars over the course of my career has given me cause to consider machine-head weight as a fine-tuning tool in and of itself. This kind of mod is more complex than the others I’ve presented here because it is harder to predict, and obviously more costly to dabble in because it involves replacing the existing tuners. Nevertheless, I put it out there for those of you who are willing to go to the limit of sanity in the search for a responsive instrument.
This mod revolves around the concept that adding mass to the headstock lowers its resonant frequency, while reducing mass will raise that frequency. The theory at work here is that vibration is absorbed or reflected back into the strings and body based upon this frequency. Depending upon the harmonic makeup of your particular instrument, changing this can enhance or degrade sustain and accentuate or attenuate certain harmonics. All of this is dependent not only on your guitar’s construction, but also on how large your headstock is to begin with. If all of this seems a bit hazy, that’s because it is. I don’t have a handy-dandy answer like “more mass equals more sustain” because it isn’t always true. Suffice it to say that you can make a difference in a guitar’s character by following this path. I usually go through this exercise with my builds because I have the luxury of time and the resources at hand. It’s like fine tuning a race car’s suspension settings to your liking.
Most of the better machine heads on the market these days use a standard .375" headstock hole, so swapping tuners isn’t that hard to do. The problem comes with the mounting at the rear of the peghead. Luckily, if you use the type that screw down from the front side with a nut and washer, you can swap and test before you drill additional mounting-screw holes.
To illustrate the potential variances in weight that one can expect with different tuners, I rounded up three of the most common choices and threw them on my shop scale. You can weigh your current machines to compare. Be sure to weigh all the hardware— screws, nuts, and washers—because it all comes into play. (All weights are in grams.)
The lightest of the bunch are minimalist Sperzel tuners, which look pretty sci-fi. They clocked in at 138 grams (Fig. 15). Well-made and beautifully finished, the Sperzels use a pin-mount on the back instead of wood screws—further reducing weight. This can be a game-changer if you have a substantial headstock.
Next up are the wonderful vintage Kluson reproductions by TonePros (Fig. 16). These are some of my favorites, and they weigh in at a moderate 186 grams with all hardware included. For many of my builds, the characteristics of these tuners are ideal. I enjoy the modern engineering these tuners hide within their vintage-styled exteriors, and the weight is almost perfect.
Unabashedly brute class, with typical German overbuilding, the Schallers shown here are the Incredible Hulk of the bunch (Fig. 17). At a hefty 272 grams, they have the might to get noticed when you fasten them to your axe. If you have a guitar with a tiny headstock, you’ll hear and feel a difference with the Schallers. Whether or not you like the change is subjective, and it depends on the makeup of the rest of your guitar.
Sweat the Small Stuff
As we’ve shown here, a lot of relatively small—and inexpensive (many are practically free)—tweaks can hot-rod your tone and maneuver it to an array of differing ports of call. In some ways, it’s like tossing a handful of dice instead of just two—because the way small tweaks interact can lead to exponential changes in sound. For that reason, my advice is to take it slow and only make a single change at a time to understand what it delivers. Besides, it’s more fun (and less stressful) that way, anyway!
[Updated 12/30/21]
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The Brian May Gibson SJ-200 12-string in the hands of the artist himself.
Together, with a legion of Vox AC30s and a few effects, May and his homemade Red Special have created some of the richest, most glorious guitar sounds that have ever been documented. It is with that guitar in his hands that he’s crafted everything from his velveteen guitar orchestras to his frenetic riffs and luxuriant harmonies to his effortlessly lyrical leads, which matched the dramatic melodic motifs of Freddie Mercury in one of the most dynamic lead singer/guitarist pairings in rock music.
Although it has a smaller role in his body of work, overshadowed by such an accomplished, prolific electric guitar C.V., May’s acoustic playing is a major part of the story of his music. His bold opening strums of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” are some of the most recognizable D-major chords in the classic-rock canon, and his supportive work on “Spread Your Wings” adds lush dimension between Freddie Mercury’s arpeggiated piano chords and his rich electric guitarmonies. The multi-tracked 12-string figure that opens “’39”—his “cosmic folk song”—is among his most recognizable.
It’s a surprise, then, that when I ask May about the acoustic guitars used while recording with Queen, the most notable is his Hallfredh acoustic, a “cheap as hell” guitar from a virtually unknown brand. “My little old acoustic, which I swapped with my dear friend at school,” he reminisces. “The strings were so low on it that everything buzzed like a sitar. I capitalized on that and put pins on it instead of the bridge saddles, and you can hear that stuff on ‘The Night Comes Down’ [from Queen]. I used it all the way through Queen’s recordings, like on ‘Jealousy’ [from Jazz] years later and lots of things.” He also recalls his Ovation 12-string and some others, but the Hallfredh remains in the foreground of his acoustic memories.
The cosmic inlays on the Brian May SJ-200 represent the rock legend’s work in the field of astrophysics, in which he holds a PhD.
In recent years, May has been performing the 1975 ballad and emotional Mercury vehicle “Love of My Life,” which appears on A Night at the Opera, as an acoustic tribute to the late singer. May and his acoustic 12-string sit center stage each night as he leads the crowd through a heartwarming rendition of the song, joined at its climax by a video of Mercury. For that powerful, commanding moment, he’s relied on “a number of guitars we won’t mention, but it just came to the point where I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t sounding as good as I would like it to.’”
At one concert, a Gibson representative who was around piped up and offered to make him a guitar to his specs specifically for this piece. “I was surprised that they would notice me in the first place,” May recalls, “because part of me never grew up.” A surprising take from a rock star of such stature, but he explains, “I’m still a kid who was reading the Gibson catalogs and not able to afford anything, seeing the SGs and the Les Pauls and dreaming of being able to own a Gibson guitar. I now have a couple of the SGs, which I absolutely love, but, of course, I made my own guitar and I now have my own guitar company, so I went a different way. But to me this was a joy that they would offer to make me a guitar, which I could take out onstage.”
After building one for the guitarist, Gibson created a limited edition run of 100 instruments of the new model, called the Brian May SJ-200 12-string. Featuring a AAA Sitka spruce top with a vintage sunburst finish, AAA rosewood back and sides, a 2-piece AAA maple neck with walnut stringer, and a rosewood fretboard, it’s a top-of-the-line acoustic. The most noticeable feature on the SJ-200 is probably the string arrangement, which is flipped—as is most commonly found on Rickenbacker 12-strings—with the lower string above the higher string in each course. May has made that modification on other 12s, because he likes to string the high string first when fingerpicking. “You get an incredibly pure sound that way,” he points out. “‘Love of My Life’ is a good example—if it’s strung the other way, it sounds very different.”
On its pickguard, all seven of the other planets in our solar system are etched. The shaded one, close at hand, is Mercury, a tribute to the Queen singer.
May’s aesthetic customizations draw from his astrophysics work and add a personal sparkle to the large-bodied acoustic. The pickguard features a custom design with the seven other planets in the system, which is to say, not Earth. Mercury sits close at hand, a tribute to the singer. The fretboard and headstock include 8-point star inlays—to give a “more cosmic feeling”—that are made from agoya shell, as are the bridge inlays.
“It became a discussion about art and science, which I love,” May says of the design process. “That’s probably the biggest thread in my life, this path trodden, some people would say, between art and science. But I would say that they’re the same thing. So, I just tread among art and science.”
May’s own Gibson has already appeared in concert during the “Love of My Life” segment of Queen’s show, and occasionally for “’39.” On social media, where May stays active, many fans caught a glimpse of the guitar when he posted a new song for Christmas Eve. “I just wanted to say Merry Christmas, and that’s the way it came out,” he says. “It was incredibly spontaneous. I wanted it to be a gift. I didn’t want it to be, in any way, a way of advertising or making money or anything. It was just a Merry Christmas gift to whoever wants to listen to me.”
“It became a discussion about art and science, which I love,”
While that was one of the first things created with the new Gibson, he has more plans. “I’ve been playing around with it. In fact, we’ve been dropping the D,” he says, hinting at some future plans with guitarist-vocalist Arielle. “I have quite a few songs with the bottom D dropped. I haven’t normally played them acoustic or 12-string, but I’m discovering that some of that sounds really good. It gets such a lovely big clang and a big depth to it.”
Recently, May spent a great deal of time looking back as the band prepped the Queen I box set. The remixed, remastered, and very expanded version of their 1973 debut, Queen—they’ve added the “I” here—which was released last October, encompasses a rebuild of the entire record, plus additional takes, backing tracks, a version recorded specifically for John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show, and a 1974 live concert recording from London’s Rainbow Theatre.
May says of his new Gibson: “To me, this was a joy that they would offer to make me a guitar."
Revisiting this early document over 50 years later, it’s amazing to hear how well-developed the guitarist’s sound already was—full of the propulsive riffs and harmonies that would become part of his signature. May concurs, “You go back into these tracks quite forensically, and I hear myself in the naked tracks and I think, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that I could do that at that point.’ It must have happened very quickly.”
Reflecting on those formative times, he continues, “I think there’s a period of just exploding, knowing what it is in your head, and striving to make what you play match what’s in your head. But I see it in other people, too. Sometimes, I go back and listen to the first Zeppelin album, and they were pretty young when they made that. But I think, ‘My God, how did they get that far and so quick?’”
“I thought guitars do work as primary orchestral instruments, so that’s what I want to do.”
Before Queen, May had already recorded a two-part guitar solo on the song “Earth,” a late-’60s track recorded with his earlier band, Smile, which also featured future Queen drummer Roger Taylor. While that lead certainly points toward the ambition in May’s later work, its raw untamedness doesn’t quite show evidence of his ultimate precision. But he says he had it in mind from early on. “There weren’t any more tracks to do three parts” when they recorded with Smile, he says, “but I always dreamed of it. It goes back a long, long way to hearing harmonies in other ways from the Everly Brothers, from Buddy Holly and the Crickets, from all sorts of things that we were listening to when we were kids.
“I wanted to make the sound of an orchestra just using guitars, and there’s other little inspirations along the way,” he continues. “Jeff Beck was an inspiration because there’s that wonderful track, ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining,’ which Jeff hated. But there’s one bit where he double-tracks the solo and in just one point it breaks into a two-part harmony, probably by accident. I guess I should have asked him—damn well wish I had. But that sound echoed in my head, and I thought guitars do work as primary orchestral instruments, so that’s what I want to do. I could hear it in my head for a long time before I could make it actually happen.”
Brian May and his Red Special at a recent concert.
Photo by Steve Rose
Though the Queenrecording sessions gave the guitarist his first opportunity to explore the larger harmonized sections that would become part of his signature, many of the sounds on the record left the band dissatisfied. Recorded at Trident Studios in London, the young band could only afford to use the room during downtime. Over the course of four months, they had sessions, usually at night, with in-house producers John Anthony and Roy Thomas Baker, both early supporters. However, the Trident style and sound wasn’t what Queen had in their collective ears, and they’ve remained unhappy with the sonic quality of their debut all these years.
The drums were the band’s primary issue, which Taylor describes as having a “very dry, quite fat, dead sound.” May’s tone is recognizably his own. “Well, I’m a very pushy person,” he laughs. “But nevertheless, it was difficult for me, too. Because of this Trident style of recording, the intention was not to have room sound on it. I kind of pushed, I suppose, to have a mic on the back of the amp as well as the front. That gave me a bit more air. I did feel a little hampered and the change is more subtle on the guitar, but it’s there.
“Jeff Beck was an inspiration because there’s that wonderful track, ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining,’ which Jeff hated. But there’s one bit where he double tracks the solo and in just one point it breaks into a two-part harmony, probably by accident.”
“It’s funny because it changed radically as time went on,” he continues. “And I can remember by the time we got to Sheer Heart Attack, Roy is putting mics all over the room and miking up windows in the booth and whatever to get maximum room sounds. It’s certainly nice to go back and make everything sound the way we pretty much would’ve liked it to sound at the time.”
With Queen I out, a new Queen IIset is in the works, which May calls “a very different kettle of fish.” The drum sounds on their sophomore effort were more in line with the band’s original vision, but the dense layers of overdubs that famously appear on the record came at a cost. “I think it is the biggest step musically and recording-wise that we ever made,” says May. “But there’s a lot of congestion in there. There’s mud because of all this generation-loss stuff [caused by overdubs], and because we liked to saturate the tape, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It made it sound loud. But if you disentangle that and get the bigness in other ways, I think Queen II is going to sound massive.”
The AAA rosewood back and sides of May’s signature acoustic are stunning.
At 77 years old, May certainly seems to keep his schedule packed with music work—not to mention his animal advocacy and scientific endeavors. In May of last year, though, everything came to a halt when the guitarist suffered a stroke. “I couldn’t get a fork from the table to my mouth without it all going all over the place,” he recalls. “It was scary.” Luckily, things began turning around quickly. “After only a few days, it’s amazing what you can get back. By sheer willpower, you just start retraining your muscle.” Not quite a year on when we speak, May estimates he’s regained 95 percent of his abilities, which, he says, “is enough.
“The short answer is, ‘I’m good,’” he assures.
May is in great spirits and appears excited about all his recent projects, finished and in-progress alike. In this time of looking back on his earliest works, I ask him to think about his beginnings, when he would gaze at Gibson catalogs but had to build his own guitar out of necessity, because, as he points out, he “couldn’t afford anything else.”
So, what would young Brian May, stepping into an afterhours session at Trident, making his band’s debut, think about his new limited edition signature model Gibson acoustic? He takes a long pause. “It would have been …” he pauses again, “unthinkable.”
YouTube It
On That’s the Price of Loving Me, “We’re Not Finished Yet” is a love letter to Wareham’s 1968 Gibson ES-335.
The singer-songwriter, 61, has crafted many such moments—most famously during the late ’80s and early ’90s, helping cement the dream-pop genre with cult-favorites Galaxie 500. Take the tenor saxophone, by Ralph Carney, that elevates the back half of “Decomposing Trees” from 1989’s On Fire, or the Mellotron-like atmosphere that bubbles up during “Spook” on This Is Our Music from 1990—both of which, notably, were recorded with journeyman producer Kramer, who’s part of Wareham’s rich sonic universe once again with the songwriter’s new solo album, That’s the Price of Loving Me.
Following This Is Our Music, the final Galaxie 500 album, Wareham and Kramer went their separate ways. The former founded the long-running indie-rock band Luna, formed the duo Dean & Britta with now-wife Britta Phillips, worked on film scores, and released a handful of solo projects. Kramer, meanwhile, grew into a hero of experimental music, playing with and producing everyone from John Zorn to Daniel Johnston. They stayed in touch, even as they drifted apart geographically, and always talked about working together again—but it took the weight of mortality to make it happen.
“[Kramer has] been saying for years, ‘It’s crazy we haven’t made a record together,’” says Wareham over Zoom, his shimmering silver hair flanked in the frame by a wall-hung cherry red Gibson SG and a poster of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1975 drama Faustrecht der Freiheit. “He was living in Florida, and I was living elsewhere and doing other things. But I did lose a couple of friends over the pandemic, and it did occur to me, you can’t just say, ‘I’ll get to it’ forever. Not to be morbid, but we’re not gonna be here forever. We’re not getting any younger, are we?”
Dean Wareham's Gear
Wareham was a member of the early indie dream-pop trio Galaxie 500. After their split, he formed indie rock stalwarts Luna as well as Dean & Britta, with wife and Luna bandmate Britta Phillips.
Photo by Laura Moreau
Guitars
Amps
- Lazy J 20
- Mesa/Boogie California Tweed
Effects
- EAE Hypersleep reverb
- EAE Sending analog delay
- Dr Scientist Frazz Dazzler fuzz
- Danelectro Back Talk
- Joe Parker Raydeen overdrive
Strings, Picks, and Accessories
- Curtis Mangan nickel wounds (.010–.046)
- Dunlop Nylon .88 mm picks
- Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12
In 2020, Dean & Britta recorded a covers album, Quarantine Tapes—the perfect opportunity, amid the agony of lockdown, to finally get Kramer involved. The producer mixed their hazy version of the Seekers’ “The Carnival Is Over,” which planted the seeds for a bigger collaboration on That’s the Price of Loving Me. At first, though, Wareham didn’t have any songs, so he gave himself a hard deadline by booking some time at L.A. studio Lucy’s Meat Market.
“What is it in a song that makes people cry? What is it that moves you? It’s something unexpected.”
“I don’t write songs every day—sometimes I don’t write songs for a whole year or something,” he says with a laugh. “The only thing that gets me to do it is booking studio time. Then I have to write some songs because it’ll be embarrassing if I show up with nothing.”
The space itself—decked out with a jaw-dropping amount of vintage guitars and amplifiers and keyboards—helped animate his sleepy-eyed and gently psychedelic songs. “I thought I had a few nice instruments,” Wareham says, “but I showed up, like, ‘Oh, your Les Paul’s from 1955? I think I’ll play this one. Your Martin is from the ’40s?’” Speed and spontaneity were essential: They worked six full days, with Kramer guiding him to capture every performance without overthinking it.
Wareham’s latest was produced by Kramer, a former member of Shockabilly, Bongwater, and the Butthole Surfers who owns the legendary underground label Shimmy-Disc. He produced all three Galaxie 500 LPs.
“[That’s] how I worked with Kramer back in the day too,” he recalls. “Maybe it kinda spoiled me—he was always like, ‘Yep, that’s it. Next!’ I got lazy about going back and redoing things. We’d make the decision and move on: keep that drum track and bass track. Maybe Britta [bass, backing vocals] would change a few things. Sometimes you’re with people who think every single thing should be replaced and made perfect, and you don’t actually have to do that. When it came time for me to overdub a guitar solo or something, Kramer would just allow me two takes generally: ‘Do it again a little differently. That’s it. That’s good.’”
“I thought I had a few nice instruments, but I showed up, like, ‘Oh, your Les Paul’s from 1955? I think I’ll play this one.’”
The material itself allowed for such malleability, with ringing chord progressions and gentle melodies often influenced by the musicians who happened to be gathered around him that day. “You Were the Ones I Had to Betray” has the baroque-pop sweetness of late-’60s Beatles, partly due to the sawing cellos of L.A. session player Gabe Noel, who also added some boomy bass harmonica to the climax. “It’s an instrument you’d mostly associate with the Beach Boys, I guess,” Wareham says. “It kinda sounds like a saxophone or something.”
Wareham, his 335, and Mesa/Boogie California Tweed at a recent Luna show, with bassist Britta Phillips in the background.
Photo by Mario Heller
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the warm hug of these arrangements, but it’s also worth highlighting Wareham’s lyrics—whether it’s the clever but subtle acrostic poetry of “The Mystery Guest” (“I’d never done that before, and it’s not that hard to do actually. Sometimes it’s just to give yourself a strange assignment to get yourself thinking in a different way”) or the hilarity of “We’re Not Finished Yet,” which scans as carnal but is actually a love letter to his semi-recently acquired 1968 Gibson ES-335.
“Sometimes it’s just to give yourself a strange assignment to get yourself thinking in a different way.”
“I read this poem about a guy polishing an antique wooden cabinet or something,” Wareham explains. “I thought, ‘That’s funny—it’s vaguely sexual, how he’s like rubbing this thing.’ I thought it would be funny if I wrote a song not about a piece of furniture but about the guitar—the experience of buying this. The lyrics in there: ‘I waxed you; I rubbed you; I reamed you.’ It all sounds like a dirty song, but it’s like, ‘No, I had to get the peg holes reamed!’ It works kind of as a love song, but that’s what it’s really about.”
Which brings us back to that idea of the unexpected. The most beautiful touches on Loving Me, crafted with his ol’ producer pal, are the ones that appear out of nowhere—like the blossoming guitar overdubs of “New World Julie” and “Dear Pretty Baby.” Kramer, he says, liked to “run two or three guitar tracks at once, where it becomes a symphony of guitars.”
These surprises, indeed, are the moments that stick with you.
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Luna’s four-song performance on KEXP showcases Dean Wareham’s sparse, low-key indie rock vibe as well as his simple and sweet guitar embellishments.
