Leni Stern is prepped to cut a track with her ngoni as her trusty Custom Shop Strat waits its turn. The guitar's weathering is the result of finish damage by mosquito spray she used while playing festivals in India and Africa.
Everybody knows it's easy to get a clean, full tone from a Fender Blues Junior and a Strat, but what about a ngoni? That's the 6-stringed Malian instrument that guitarist and singer Leni Stern has adopted as her third core voice. With three plucked and three resonating strings, and a wood, calabash, and animal-skin construction, it seems like a potential nightmare to amplify. But … with the right pickup and her little workhorse combo, she's got it dialed in both live and on her new album Dance—bright and punchy, with just the right touch of air, and a propulsive, fat snap that reveals the ngoni's role in inspiring the banjo while sounding, quite rightfully, from an older, nearly timeless place.
Here's Stern's road-warrior Blues Junior, which has a neodymium Jensen Tornado replacement speaker.
The key, says Stern, was installing a pickup by Carlos Juan, who designed the magnetic wonders that Pat Metheny uses to amplify his Linda Manzer-built 42-string Pikasso. It was given to her by classical guitarist Derek Gripper, and once it replaced the contact pickup she'd been using, the ngoni truly came to electrified life. (See this story online to watch her play the ngoni onstage.)
"On tours, I like to bring my own amp, so I had to reduce the weight of the Blues Junior with a flight case so they would come in at 50 pounds exactly."
"It sounds really well-balanced and has very low feedback, with my Blues Junior, Super Champ, or Matchless," Stern says, bringing up the trio of 15-watt amps that are the stars of this month's column. Stern has had some changes made to all of them—adding a neodymium speaker to the Junior, her most frequent traveling companion, and chop-shopping the Matchless Lightning 15 so its head is removable, significantly reducing the stock weight. The Fender Super Champ's original 10" speaker has been replaced with a 12"—an easy and common mod that gives the little bugger a significantly heftier voice.
While it looks like a first-generation Matchless Lightning 15, the head and cab of Stern's amp have been modded so the head can be lifted out and used independently.
Big, often pastel tones—mostly from Teles and Strats (a '59 hardtail Stratocaster is one of her most-prized guitars)—are among Stern's signatures. And while the Super Champ mostly stays home, the Junior and Lightning do globe trot—just like her music, which is a highly evolved mix of ethnically rooted sounds that Stern traces back to the eclectic internationalist musical tastes of her father and the pancultural sensibility she experienced growing up in Germany, which she then fanned to conflagrance via her own miles-deep jones for learning and exploring. West African music is a particular passion and provides much of Dance's backbone.
Leni Stern Trio at Iridium - 11/2012 - Like a Thief
West—Africa that is—meets west as Leni Stern plays her ngoni through one of the faithful Fender Blues Juniors she's carried to gigs around the world for the past 13 years. In this 2012 performance at Manhattan's Iridium, she's playing "Like a Thief," from 2011's Sabani, one of her series of albums blending the traditional sounds of Senegal and Mali with jazz and pop.
"On tours, I like to bring my own amp, so I had to reduce the weight of the Blues Junior with a flight case so they would come in at 50 pounds exactly," she explains. The weight of the Junior is now 23 pounds, verses its out-of-the-factory 31. For the Matchless, it wasn't as simple as a speaker replacement. The company seamlessly modded the 1x12 combo so the head can be nestled in the cab or travel separately. Both are run through a pedalboard, and while the Matchless has no reverb and requires a stompbox, the Junior has the company's classic spring reverb. The tube array is three 12AX7s for the Junior's preamp stage and two EL84 power tubes, with 3-band EQ plus master and volume dials, and a fat-boost switch she often uses. Her favorite source of overdrive, though, is a Free the Tone Heat Blaster, which lends the kind of smooth, creamy power-tone that she shares with her husband, Mike Stern. (Watching them perform together is as much fun as seeing a pair of otters at play.) The Matchless Lightning, by the way, also has three 12AX7s, one EL84 power tube, and volume and master dials with 2-band EQ.
And here's the (mostly) homebody: a Fender Super Champ with a 12" Celestion TN120.
It becomes obvious in conversation that the Junior is her favorite. She speaks of it as warmly as the amp itself speaks. "I've had three over the past 13 years, because it has a circuit board and those get damaged in all the travel, which doesn't happen with point-to-point-wired amps like the Matchless," she notes. "But the Junior is very versatile, with tones that have the lightness and sweetness of a Princeton, but they're stronger and louder. I use the overdrive function a lot. It gets me a little into Boogie territory."
To misquote John Lennon, happiness is a warm tone, but Stern does have one regret regarding amps. "I'm still a little mad at myself for not buying a Dumble 25 years ago when Robben Ford told me I should," she says. "At the time, they were just becoming popular, but a Blues Junior only cost $300 or something like that. I thought paying $3,000 for an amp was ridiculous." She laughs.
Leni Stern: Kono (Bird)
Stern's new album, Dance, is a lovely and gentle fusion of her sprawling influences that amounts to a genre unto itself. Here, Stern and her band, keyboardist Leo Genovese, bassist Mamadou Ba, and percussionist Alioune Faye, showcase the delicate melody and rolling groove of "Kono."
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When entering the world of audio interfaces, Blackstar wanted to offer a solution to musicians that answered many of the much-requested improvements they wanted when using audio interfaces. Through extensive research, we consistently pinpointed three primary challenges encountered by music creators when recording guitar directly through an interface.
- Poor feel and response
- Setting guitar input levels
- Ease of use
The POLAR 2 interface answers all of these challenges and excels beyond those hurdles to provide an incredible all-in-one solution to recording guitar.
Firstly, Polar features FET instrument inputs. The FET inputs give ultra-low noise and high headroom, which gives the recording musician the best sonic foundation for guitar tone, but we didn’t just include FET inputs, we took itone step further with the addition of the “Enhance” switch. When Enhance is switched on the instrument input, it engages a unique circuit that’s been meticulously designed to mimic the input stage of real valve amplifiers—including all its non-linear behaviors and characteristics. The “Enhance” switch restores the touch, the feel, and the response of playing through a real amp.
Secondly, Polar solves the issue with setting levels. Other interfaces often digital clipping due to the dynamic nature of guitar DI signals. With “Enhance” on, POLAR’s innovative input stage will never digitally clip. No more ruined recording takes, no more hassle or confusion around setting the ‘correct’ levels. POLAR allows the musician to drive the interface like the preamp section on a real valve amp.
Recording is made easy with Polar 2. By engaging the “Enhance” feature on the microphone inputs gently lifts the top end of your signal to add just the right amount of air and clarity that sounds great on vocals, acoustic guitars, and more. The microphone preamp has been based off one of the most renowned vintage studio preamps.
POLAR 2’s ultra-low noise and high headroom accommodates for a wide range of microphone and instrument types, empowering the musician to achieve studio-quality recordings in any environment. Included with all POLAR2 units is the POLAR Control app, which allows for fine-tuning of levels, panning, routing. The FET inputs combined with the Enhance switch make it really easy to get an amazing guitar tone. You don’t have to worry about any external hardware, no fancy DI’s—all of that is built right into POLAR.
With its innovative features, impressive headroom (24V), incredibly low noise floor (115db), powerful headphone amps, bus-powered capability, and approachable design, Blackstar’s POLAR 2 is easily the go-to audio interface for anyone that wants to play and record guitar. The POLAR 2 interface was created through the processes of Human-Centred Design, to help create a user-friendly solution to get musicians back to focusing on the most important part: the music.
MAP: $199.99
For more information, please visit blackstaramps.com.
Blackstar POLAR 2 | The USB audio interface designed by guitarists for guitarists
Firebirds came stock with a solid G-logo tailpiece, although Bigsby vibratos were often added.
It also has a personal connection. A guitarist in the band I toured with in the 1980s played a Jet Firebird from this batch extensively, but later sold it. At a decades-on reunion, it was sorely missed, leading me to obtain this one to provide the same “Great Gretsch Sound,” as the company’s ads trumpeted, and style.
Gretsch’s so-called “Jet Stream” models have been one of the company’s enduring creations. Spurred by Gibson’s 1952 Les Paul, Gretsch replied with a guitar of similar size and layout, but different construction. The single-cutaway Jets appeared in late 1953. Designated as solidbodies in the catalog, they were actually semi-solid, built on a mahogany body hollowed out from above and capped with an arched plywood top. This reduced weight and gave them a different sound and feel.
“Designated as solidbodies in the catalog, they were actually semi-solid, built on a mahogany body hollowed out from above and capped with an arched plywood top.”
By 1955, Gretsch fielded a line of Jets: the black-topped Duo Jet and Western-themed Round-Up were followed by the sparkle-top Silver Jet, the red-over-black Jet Firebird and Western orange 6121 Chet Atkins solidbody. Several sold well through the ’50s, but by the turn of the decade, sales seemed to slump, as with the Les Pauls that inspired them. In 1960–’61, Gibson redesigned the Les Paul into a slim-sculpted double-cutaway. In late ’61, Gretsch restyled the Jet body into a symmetrical double-cutaway, retaining the semi-solid construction while persisting in calling them solidbodies. The new catalog announced: “Out of this world.... Find yourself soaring through musical space and time … the epitome of solidbody construction.” The revised Jet Firebird listed at $325, soon raised to $350. The actual transition occurs in a batch bearing serial numbers in the 420XX series. At the time, Gretsch numbering usually allotted 100 pre-numbered labels to a production-year model, with all Jets lumped into one batch. The label is inside the control cavity; the serial number is also hand-etched onto the back plastic cavity cover.
Jets from 1961 retain the main features of their late-1950s predecessors: twin Filter’Tron humbucking pickups, master volume on the lower cutaway, individual pickup volumes on the lower quarter with the pickup selector and tone switch (aka “mud” switch) on the upper, bass side. The Jet’s evolution happened rapidly, moving through three stages over this one batch. The first 30 to 40 420XX examples are still single-cutaways. By 42043, the double-cut body appears, showing a notable eccentricity: the pickup selection and tone switches arrayed across the upper body in a straight line above the pickups, to the rear of the prior position. Unfortunately, this meant players could easily hit them while picking, inadvertently changing tones in mid song!
Note the chips in the headstock wood—signs of an earlier alteration of the tuning pegs, now restored to vintage spec.
Photo by George Aslaender
Shortly after this Jet Firebird bearing the number 42057 was made, the switch array was moved forward to the upper horn, mounted at an angle. This change appears by 42064, suggesting only around 20 to 30 of these first-style double-cuts exist. Known examples are mostly Duo Jets, with a few Jet Firebirds and a couple of rare Sparkle Jets. These also lack the 1961–’62 standby switch fitted on the lower bout. All came stock with a solid G-logo tailpiece, although Bigsby vibratos were often added. The next Jet batch introduced the top-mounted Burns of London vibrato unit as a stock fitting and an upgrade to gold hardware. While the double-cut body gave the Jets a new, modern look, it apparently did not improve sales. The balance suffered from the upper strap button moving back several inches, but otherwise they felt and sounded pretty much like their predecessors. This model is most associated with AC/DC’s Malcom Young, who powered the band with one right from the beginning, with that particular guitar heavily altered along the way.
The company’s Filter’Tron pickups have always had their own distinctive bark.
Photo by George Aslaender
This 1961 Jet Firebird survives in more original condition. The bridge and tuners previously went missing but have been restored to original. A driver’s license number is etched on the back of the headstock, and chips on the peghead face remain from the tuner alteration. A strap button was added to the heel, giving a better balance point. The playability is excellent and the Filter’Trons offer the classic ring and crunch, accentuated by the chambered body. The neck is slim and round-backed, with a bound-ebony fretboard inlaid in the company “neoclassic” pattern, retaining the original frets. Not being a heavy-handed strummer, the eccentric switch location has never bothered me. While in the early 1960s these pseudo-solidbodies seemed to fade from popularity, for me, this early example of Gretsch “jetting” its way into the 1960s remains a solid favorite.
