
It's taken 14 years to come around to this realization, but do I regret the journey? Nah.
I'm trying to remember exactly how it all started—and why. Some details are hazy, as the accumulation of reasons has collided and compounded into each other over the course of approximately 14 years.
I think it started at least partially due to ol' SRV. Not because I was an aspiring bluesman angling for Texas-sized tone via telephone wires. I dig/dug Stevie, don't get me wrong. But maybe I was also breaking strings more than I would've liked. Like I said, when the beginnings of a routine go back that far, it's tough to keep track of all the whys. After a while, your wagon's traveling a deeply rutted road that's difficult to diverge from—if the thought even occurs to you as you enjoy the scenery and tend to other matters at hand on your musical journey. And, of course, early on there are no ruts. It's a fresh, exciting new path to traverse for the first time in your own reality.
All this time, my standard-tuned guitars have had .011 sets. My D-standards, .013s. Then I moved to a new city and state with a smaller scene and wasted too much time trying to find like-minded, well-adjusted players. After a few false starts, I said, "fuck it" and committed to a drums-and-guitar duo format. I figured baritone guitars would be the most effective way to fill out the frequency spectrum, and before long I was primarily playing .014 sets. For eight, maybe nine years now. Add that to nearly 30 years of workdays pounding a QWERTY keyboard, and it's no wonder the inevitable is now reality. Tendonitis and early carpal tunnel syndrome have made playing much more difficult and painful than is healthy or acceptable.
Despite the "crow" I'm now eating, I'm not saying there aren't true sonic and physical differences. It wasn't all in my head. Again, it goes to the compounding rationale. About five years ago I started augmenting my rig's low end by incorporating a bass amp alongside my guitar combos. But before I'd hit upon that idea—when I was trying to fill out the spectrum with just the baritones and guitar amps—the extra low-mid frequencies inherent in heavier strings did make a difference. Along the way, I also got hooked on heavy steel picks (an addiction I heartily stand by and recommend). I liked that you can bash on heavier strings without nearly as much worry about frequency warble as the strings vibrate back to center, not to mention little to no string breakage. Again … the tangled path.
Mortality sucks. It came down to: Do you want to play without pain, or do you want to stay in your stupid wagon tracks?
Alas, mortality sucks. It came down to: Do you want to play without pain, or do you want to stay in your stupid wagon tracks? I'm stubborn, but not that stubborn. My baris are now strung with .012s. Believe it or not, that makes a big difference despite being heavy in the grand string-gauge scheme. But I've also brought standard-scale guitars into the duo format. My Teles, Jazzmasters, and Gretsch aren't just outfitted with .010 sets now—they're also tuned down a full step.
A couple of months ago, when I first dipped a tepid toe into the lower-gauge waters, I figured it would be a tonal sacrifice, albeit a very necessary one. It hasn't been. With a bass amp still in the rig, the whole need for heavy strings' lower mids is completely moot. Apparently I had to shred my tendons to discover this rather than just sit back, think through my gear journey, and untangle its myriad winds and turns like a big boy. The bass frequencies are still there but the signal is clearer, less muddled. Even better, I feel like a man unfettered. Bends and runs are a breeze, stamina is much improved, and aches and pains have been greatly reduced. I've had to learn to adjust finger pressure and attack for proper intonation, but that's a small price to pay.
Plenty of you are looking at me in your mind's eye, thinking, "Everything you've said here is a big duh, dumbass." But I don't regret this journey. And not out of stubbornness, either. The rutted path I've followed these 14 years has led me through myriad gorgeous musical landscapes and lessons too varied and subtle, even subconscious, to separate from my guitar psyche. What's more, it's reinforced a lesson most of us have to learn over and over again in all aspects of our lives. Pausing to nakedly, unswervingly evaluate ourselves, where we've been, and where we're going is a must for progress.
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A phaser with vintage vibes and modern control from Stewmac—win the Phasor II Kit in the I Love Pedals giveaway! Enter today and return daily for more chances!
StewMac Lightcycle Phasor II Pedal Kit, With White Enclosure
StewMac Lightcycle Phasor II Pedal Kit, With White Enclosure Shop StewMac Lightcycle Phasor II Pedal Kit at StewMac. Our take on the revered Mu-Tron Phasor II—the most versatile phaser ever made! StewMAX FREE Shipping!With authentic stage-class Katana amp sounds, wireless music streaming, and advanced spatial technology, the KATANA:GO is designed to offer a premium sound experience without the need for amps or pedals.
BOSS announces the return of KATANA:GO, an ultra-compact headphone amplifier for daily jams with a guitar or bass. KATANA:GO puts authentic sounds from the stage-class BOSS Katana amp series at the instrument’s output jack, paired with wireless music streaming, sound editing, and learning tools on the user’s smartphone. Advanced spatial technology provides a rich 3D audio experience, while BOSS Tone Exchange offers an infinite sound library to explore any musical style.
Offering all the features of the previous generation in a refreshed external design, KATANA:GO delivers premium sound for everyday playing without the hassle of amps, pedals, and computer interfaces. Users can simply plug it into their instrument, connect earbuds or headphones, call up a memory, and go. Onboard controls provide access to volume, memory selection, and other essential functions, while the built-in screen displays the tuner and current memory. The rechargeable battery offers up to five hours of continuous playing time, and the integrated 1/4-inch plug folds down to create a pocket-size package that’s ready to travel anywhere.
KATANA:GO drives sessions with genuine sounds from the best-selling Katana stage amp series. Guitar mode features 10 unique amp characters, including clean, crunch, the high-gain BOSS Brown type, two acoustic/electric guitar characters, and more. There’s also a dedicated bass mode with Vintage, Modern, and Flat types directly ported from the Katana Bass amplifiers. Each mode includes a massive library of BOSS effects to explore, with deep sound customization available in the companion BOSS Tone Studio app for iOS and Android.
The innovative Stage Feel feature in KATANA:GO provides an immersive audio experience with advanced BOSS spatial technology. Presets allow the user to position the amp sound and backing music in different places in the sound field, giving the impression of playing with a backline on stage or jamming in a room with friends.
The guitar and bass modes in KATANA:GO each feature 30 memories loaded with ready-to-play sounds. BOSS Tone Studio allows the player to tweak preset memories, create sounds from scratch, or import Tone Setting memories created with stage-class Katana guitar and bass amplifiers. The app also provides integrated access to BOSS Tone Exchange, where users can download professionally curated Livesets and share sounds with the global BOSS community.
Pairing KATANA:GO with a smartphone offers a complete mobile solution to supercharge daily practice. Players can jam along with songs from their music library and tap into BOSS Tone Studio’s Session feature to hone skills with YouTube learning content. It’s possible to build song lists, loop sections for focused study, and set timestamps to have KATANA:GO switch memories automatically while playing with YouTube backing tracks.
The versatile KATANA:GO functions as a USB audio interface for music production and online content creation on a computer or mobile device. External control of wah, volume, memory selection, and more are also supported via the optional EV-1-WL Wireless MIDI Expression Pedal and FS-1-WL Wireless Footswitch.
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In our third installment with Santa Cruz Guitar Company founder Richard Hoover, the master luthier shows PG's John Bohlinger how his team of builders assemble and construct guitars like a chef preparing food pairings. Hoover explains that the finer details like binding, headstock size and shape, internal bracing, and adhesives are critical players in shaping an instrument's sound. Finally, Richard explains how SCGC uses every inch of wood for making acoustic guitars or outside ventures like surfboards and art.
We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
The Chicago-via-New York trio of best friends reinterpret the best bits of college-rock and ’90s indie on their new record, Phonetics On and On.
Horsegirl guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein are back in their hometown of Chicago during winter break from New York University, where they share an apartment with drummer Gigi Reece. They’re both in the middle of writing papers. Cheng is working on one about Buckminster Fuller for a city planning class, and Lowenstein is untangling Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story, “Three Paths to the Lake.”
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.