Grateful Dead Music Forum

Hello. I'm from upstate NY, a guitar player for 20 years (no band affiliation), archtop guitar builder (no business affiliation) and a GD and Phish fan mostly. I like to display sound bytes of tones I get from my guitar and various combinations of gear in my rig on a YouTube channel I just started. Check it out if you're interested.
https://youtu.be/uB2gYCajt4A

Welcome! And sweet guitar. Is that something you built?

john in san diego

Thanks. Yes that's the second one I've built

Welcome aboard! Sweet guitar! I love the mandolin-ish looking headstock. Nice pickin' too!

Thank you.

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Nice!

It's a generally supportive community of like-minded folks around here.

And I, for one, am looking forward to seeing a vid of guitar No. 3!

Blacklodgebob wrote: ↑Mon May 20, 2019 7:36 am meh no jerry tone or ginger tone - just get a small hollowbody or a solid body guitar. Hate when fan made Phish rigs get into the dead space, they are just a terrible match. Opposites really. This is me being Kind. Take it as encouragement. And no the 25.5 scale is not getting you 'that' tone. Strangedesign is a good place to go for phish heads stereo jamming. Worked for Phish. Hung with Paul Languedoc many times - he hates when people build tributes to his guitar.

That's you being kind? I've taken criticism from all angles and it usually leads back to jealousy. I'm not offended, especially coming from an expert that used to work for Phish. It just let's me know that if you took the time to respond, I must be doing something right. And please let Paul Languedoc know that I'm not building tributes or clones of his guitars. He should understand that when a concept is achieved it will be visited by others and getting upset about it won't accomplish anything. It's kind of like when he copied the concept of the original Fender Starcaster and just added a traditional archtop design to it. Perhaps if he didn't charge $10,000 for a $5,000 guitar there wouldn't be a demand for substitutes of similar likeness. Thanks for the feedback.

Welcome!! Nice playing too! Don’t let the negative nelly get ya worked up. I didn’t find anything ‘kind’ outta his post

Was that really necessary? Nice looking guitar. Anyone who an build an instrument has my respect.

Cool guitar, nice playing and tone, welcome aboard, thanks for sharing!

Thanks folks. I have gotten used to criticism. I obviously don't play exactly like Jerry or Trey and certainly don't have the same skills, but some people tend to forget those things when tone is the subject. Yes, a certain amount of the overall sound comes from technique, but when I refer to tone, I mean the basic tone given by the instrument and the gear that would be present regardless of the player.

I left the gear page years ago because there were a lot of critics over there, but hardly anyone willing to post a video to back up any of their arguments. There were lots of owners of the popular Languedoc clone guitars that are not even real archtops. The people I've seen building actual archtops usually incorporate something of their own into the look of the instrument simply because of the stigma around Languedoc's dislike for the clones. I think Languedoc's main issue is that the clones are usually a flat top hollow body which actually defeats the purpose of trying to reproduce the sound. It's funny, it's the opposite with tributes to Jerry's guitars. Builders of Jerry tributes seem to put a great deal of emphasis on the aspects that produce the tone, where most of the Languedoc clones are just look alikes.