Gibson

Any Key In The U.K. (Unknown publication 1978)

What guitar are you using with U.K.?

Basically I’m using a Strat. It’s got DiMarzio PAF pickups now. Before that, I had Gibson pickups. It’s just got a volume and a tone instead of one volume and two tones. I also did away, with the middle pickup. The toggle switch is just an ordinary three-way. It gives you either pickup or both. I like it because it’s really simple. I like to keep the guitar as simple as possible. I chose the DiMarzio PAF’s because they’re supposed to be an authentic reproduction of the original Gibson pickup. I found with the DiMarzio Super Distortion pickups that, although they’re very loud, the sound isn’t as good. I don’t know why, I’m not really up on what you can do with pickups. I know that if you go over the top with the windings, they become self-inductive or something and I know that if the magnets are too powerful, they’ll stop the string vibrating which is your source, really. these pickups are really good. I can’t tell the difference between the PAF’s and the original Gibson ones, but I can tell the differe nce between the PAF’s and the Super Distortion pickups - they’re very different.

Are you after a Gibson sound with a Strat "feel"?

No, I’m not particularly after a Gibson sound. I feel the Strat is potentially a really great guitar but what lets them down is the pickups. The reason I like Gibson pickups or pickups like Gibsons is because’ they’re humbucking. I always use high amplifier setting. If I use a nonhumbucking pickup I get lots of problems with buzzing and things. Obviously a double-bobbin pickup is better in that respect and I think they’ have a bigger output too and obviously, if you’re going to get it from anywhere, you’ve got to get it from the source.

Have you any other guitars?

Well, I’m having another one made by Dick Knight. He did a lot of work on my Strat. It has a very wide fingerboard. It’s 1¾ inches which isn’t ridiculously wide but certainly wider than most guitars these days. The fingerboard is very flat because I like the flatter feel. The original Fender fingerboards were cambered. In fact, Dick virtually made the guitar. He’s making another that’s almost ready which is really nice. I’m still going to have two pickups on it instead of three but I’m gonna use the DiMarzio Strat pickups with the adjustable polepieces. I really like Strats though, the design is amazing. I also use the tremelo [sic] arm a lot and the Strat tremelo has got to be the best one ever. The whole thing moves so you don’t get that "sawing" effect which pulls them out of tune. I have an old Gibson Firebird with their vibrola on and, when the strings move back and forth over the bridge, even though the tension’s pulled up to where it should be. If a winding gets caught up on the bridge saddle, t hat string will be flat or sharp according to which way it gets caught. That doesn’t happen on a Strat. I’ve heard people say that they can’t keep Strats in tune with the tremelo arm but mine never goes out of tune.

Any other guitars?

I’ve got a Gibson 12-string. It’s like the 335 but it’s really narrow at the nut so I don’t like it much. Unfortunately, there isn’t much choice with 12-strings because I’ve looked around and I couldn’t find one electric 12-String. Nobody seems to stock them. It’s OK apart from the narrow neck. It’s narrower than my Strat and it’s got twice the number of strings! I don’t suppose I’ll be playing it that much. I have an Ovation acoustic guitar. The only reason I bought that was because it’s amplified with that bridge thing. It’s much better than the Barcus Berry. You can get more volume without feedback. I’ve also got an Ibanez L5 copy and that’s beautiful. It’s the best acoustic I’ve ever heard. I used it on the album. I’ve finally found a guitar that I can play my own way. It’s not very loud but it’s really nice for recording.

Allan Holdsworth (Beat Instrumental 1979)

Of course, I was immediately into hire purchase on one! Then people started mentioning this name ‘Gibson’ to me and one day I went into Kitchens in Leeds and saw this amazing looking cherry red S.G. I had to have it, it was such a beautiful guitar, such a lovely piece of wood. I got into even more H.P. debt on that!

"For a while, when I was with Hiseman, I got into 335’s very much. Once I’d got used to them, though, I found it very hard to get back into anything else solid, they seemed so unresponsive next to the semi-acoustic 335. Strangely, now I’m back with solids I can hardly play the semi-acoustics at all."

"I’d always known that I could more or less get what I wanted out of a Fender and I actually like the mechanical modular formula that Leo Fender set all those years ago. I like their strength too. I’m always very careful with my guitars but I had to be super careful with the S.G. which was quite a fragile instrument.

"Another good thing about Fenders is that 25/½"scale as opposed to the 24" and also the sound, that pure tone that they have.

"Despite all those things that attracted me to them, I’d always wondered what a Strat with Gibson pickups on would sound like so I bought one when I was with Tony Williams in an attempt to see what it was like and with a mind to change the pickups at some later date.

The new Strat was, well, it was alright but it didn’t really make it as a guitar for me, not like a good old one. The neck was pretty horrible, very narrow at the nut and the fingerboard was too cambered for me, it just felt really uncomfortable."

Holdsworth & Co. A New Side Of Allan’s Music. (Guitar 1980)

Why do you think the old Gibson pickups sound so good?

I don’t know really. I was a bit confused about that because I put those DiMarzio PAF’s on both my Strats now, and like the sound of them very much. I had a funny experience the other day with this guitar that Dick made, on which I had two DiMarzio PAF’s. I also had an old Gibson PAF and a humbucker lying about, and so I tried them to find the difference between the Gibson and Di Marzio PAF’s. Although there had never seemed much difference before, this time there was, and the DiMarzio sounded much thinner in comparison. Perhaps it was faulty. When I put the other Gibson pickup on that sounded good as well. Gibson say there’s no difference between the old ones and new ones.

I have an old Gibson cello guitar, a Kalamazoo I think, made in 1938, and it’s very loud for a cello guitar. It’s in beautiful condition and has a very nice sound, and the Ibanez only puts out about half the sound yet is twice the size. I know that size doesn’t make any difference anyway, because some over-size guitars sound terrible. I’d really like someone to make a lightly built guitar. Maybe something like a Maccaferri would do, because that was almost like a classical guitar. They feel quite light and put out a lot of volume, even those CSL ones. I find though that if someone is making something like a guitar or an amplifier they have to think about making it for everybody, and that’s the thing that never seems to work out for people like me. The standard one is never quite right, there’s always something I’d like to have done to it, which is why I’d like someone to make me an acoustic guitar.

Allan Holdsworth (Guitar Player 1980)

Allan’s second guitar was a Hofner f-hole acoustic, which he played through a 15-watt amp. In a year’s time he progressed beyond that guitar’s capabilities and talked his parents into buying him a Fender Stratocaster. Within six months he sold the Strat and bought a cherry Gibson SG Standard, which he later replaced with a SG custom played through a Vox AC-30.

Allan Holdsworth (International Musician 1981)

Do you have any other guitars?

ALAN: I’d really like a good acoustic but I can’t afford one. I do borrow guitars from time to time. This Gibson ES175 here belongs to a friend. It seems to be the thing that if you play jazz you have to own a 175. Personally I find the scale a little too short: most jazz players make them sound like rubber bands anyway. I have a Gordon Smith, a lovely guitar, but again I found the scale a little too short, Fender has the extra length that I prefer.

Dick Knight is making me a spurce (sic) solid at the moment, I wonder what the experts make of that. My reason for trying it is because the timber is very light and I tend to get a better sound when I start with a light body. One day I’d like to get a guitar made like a Gibson L7, something that’s smaller than a Gibson Super 400, lighter with a larger scale. I like the clearer sound from a cello (‘f’ hole) guitar - Charlie Christian was my hero. Round hole guitars sound a little on the boomy side to my ears. I’ve used an Ibanez L5 type cello guitar for recording that wasn’t bad.

The Reluctant Virtuoso (Guitar World 1981)

Having exhausted the always intriguing topic of Holdsworth’s technique - a subject, by the way, that bores him to tears - we move on hurriedly to the area of guitars and related equipment. This also induces instant boredom for our protagonist and, skipping the genealogy of his guitars (which includes a Hofner acoustic, Gibson SG Standard, Gibson SG Custom and Fender Strat in roughly that order), we jump to the latest.

"I have two working Fender Strats and one that’s just being finished off. They’re all made from various combinations of necks and bodies which I can’t remember at the moment, although one’s made from all DiMarzio parts and pickups. I use DiMarzio PAF’s on everything, in fact they just sent me some nice black ones, because I have a white guitar and the cream-colored ones didn’t match. All my fingerboards are ebony [he has them flattened also] except for this last one which has a maple fingerboard. It’s different but I’m gettin’ used to it. I’ve been experimenting with different body woods and I’ve formed some definite theories about how they affect the sound but I want to check them out before I embarrass myself. I’m still using the same amps - [Norlin Lab Series for chording and Hartley-Thompson for soloing-the latter only available in U.K.] and the same basic effects [MXR Noise Gate/Line Driver, various volume pedals, discrete echo from the studio board]. It’s just that everything sounds so much better no w and I get so frustrated because I want to put some of these noises on tape."

Allan Holdsworth (Guitar Player 1982)

What kind of guitars did you use?

I just used my old faithful Strat that I had back then. It had two humbuckers on it: one by the bridge and one by the neck. I changed them a lot. For a long time I had a couple of old Gibson Patent Applied Fors that I took off of some old ‘60s SG Customs that I owned previously. I didn’t like the middle pickups on the SGs -- they always got in the way -- so I took them out and saved them. I used them for a long time, and then I changed to the old DiMarzio PAFs, and then I finally changed to a pair of Seymour Duncan 59s. I found that there was a little bit of difference between the Seymour Duncans and the PAFs. So I sold all the PAFs from the SGs and just bought Seymour Duncans.

Why did you switch from Stratocasters to Charvel guitars?

I was really lucky, because just before I sold my Stratocaster, I met [Charvel Luthier/designer] Grover Jackson in London. We went out for a few beers and he was willing to listen to ideas I had about certain woods, whereas a lot of other people wouldn’t. They’d say "you can’t make a guitar from this wood or that wood." But Grover listened to everything, and made three Strat-style guitars from various woods. Also I had the necks made wider at the fingerboard end. I hate the Fender string spacing.

Why’s that?

Fender’s overall string spacing is wider than Gibson’s, but at the same time Gibson’s necks are wider than Fender’s. It’s absolute madness. I had Grover make the necks wide at the top [near the headstock] like Gibsons, and about 2 1/4" wide at the body end of the neck. So that means there’s a good 1/8" on either side of the outer strings, which is really nice. The strings used to really fly off the edges of the Stratocasters. I’m really happy with the guitars Grover made. They’re the best guitars I’ve ever owned.

What kinds of woods were employed in their construction?

All three are different. The red one has a maple neck with an ebony fingerboard and a basswood body. The white one has a maple neck, ebony fingerboard, and a body made of jelutong [a Malaysian and Indonesian softwood]. Then there’s the one that I was most interested in: a maple neck and fingerboard -- one piece -- and a spruce body with a clear finish. They all sound different from each other, which is really great, because I’ve learned so much about what to do about two more guitars that Grover’s going to make. He’s going to use a combination of all the best ideas in these three.

Is the spruce a lot lighter than the others?

No, actually the basswood’s the lightest. The Jelutong and the spruce are about the same, which is probably about the same as alder or something like that. The spruce one sounds stiffer, or harder. Very quick. I wanted to find a real resonant wood, and spruce is often used for the tops of acoustic guitars. I didn’t believe the normal stories that said, "the heavier the better for a solid guitar." And I’ve never believed that. Most of the old guitars I’ve ever played -- the good ones -- have been at least half the weight of their modern equivalents. If you feel the weight of an old Strat or an old Les Paul, it seems to weigh much less than a new one. The wood gives so much to the sound, just like in an acoustic guitar, whereas if the body is really heavy, it just sort of soaks the sound up, and you’re left with a string talking down to the pickup. Then you’d might as well have a concrete body or build it into the ground. I really like when a guitar feels as if it’s got some sort of acoustic thing going for it.

Allan Holdsworth (Music UK 1983)

In Allan Holdsworth’s career, which spans 15 years, he’s gone from cello guitar, to Fender Stratocaster, to Gibson SGs, and today he plays Charvel guitars.

‘When I first played the SG I fell in love with it instantly and I took the Fender which I’d bought on HP back to the shop, and traded it for the Gibson SG Standard they had. I stuck with that for a couple of years while I was a semi-pro, and then I got a job in a Mecca houseband, and that’s when I started messing about with guitars and experimenting with 335s and whatever. That was a real experimental thing, I changed the lot, different amps, different strings, different guitars. I still like trying everything and each one of these Charvel guitars I have is an experiment, but they’re getting closer and closer to what I want. All the necks are 2 ¼" wide at the top of the fretboard which is a lot wider than a Fender, and I really like that. I’ve always been anti heavy guitars, and all of these guitars are light. They’re made of spruce or Bass (as in ass) wood. Most of the older Strats were light.’ Allan Holdsworth had, at the date of our meeting, four Stratocaster type Charvels which included a blonde one w ith a pair of custom wound Dimarzio humbuckers, a red one with a single custom wound Seymour Duncan humbucker, and a white one with two more custom wound Seymour Duncan humbuckers in the middle and rear positions for a certain sound Allan was after. The fourth one is blue, also with a pair of custom wound Seymour Duncan pickups. All of these guitars feature one tone and one volume control plus pickup selector and brightness switches. Another guitar of Allan’s is a Charvel prototype that looks not a million miles from an Ovation Viper, also with Seymour Duncan pickups.

One of these instruments carries a Dave Storey (Kahler) tremelo (sic) which loads from the top, with no tremolo block in sight. Before he emigrated to the USA, Dave was England’s answer to Floyd Rose, and his unique tremolo system. Ah well, England’s loss, America’s gain.

Allan’s collection of instruments has grown since he left old Blighty, and he’s added an old 1956 Gibson Super 300 to his stash. ‘It needs a new bridge and needs refretting, it’s unbelievable it’s so light. I met a guy selling a D’Angelico at the time I bought this and the sound of this one was far superior. It needs bigger strings, I put these light gauge strings on because they were all I had.

The Innocent Abroad (Musician 1984)

Holdsworth’s current lead work is especially unusual because although his tone is as fluid and nimble as a synthesizer, he uses virtually no signal processing at all (he did use a Scholz Rockman for the sax-like bite of "Three Sheets To The Wind"). "I’ve noticed for a long time that lighter bodied guitars always seemed to sound better. [Charvel’s] Grover Jackson was unbelievable, going to all lengths experimenting with different woods. We finished up using bass wood; it’s a little bit like alder, but it’s lighter, very resonant. Grover made four Charvel guitars for me. He also widened the neck dimensions, more like a Gibson. The bridge is an aluminium DiMarzio and the pickups are Seymour Duncans, similar to a PAF but with two rows of pole pieces so that both bobbins are absolutely symmetrical; it makes the magnetic field more uniform." For strings, Allan uses .009 Kaman Performers. His favorite amp for lead playing has been a Hartley-Thompson with an occasional Fender.

Castles Made Of Sand (Guitarist 1987)

One guitar sound I was pretty pleased with was the one I used on 4.15 Bradford Executive. I used two amplifiers on that, a 50 watt Marshall and a 15 watt Gibson and each of them was going into its respective ‘tweak’ box. I had the Marshall panned hard left and the Gibson panned hard right and it worked out really good because each amplifier would reproduce different frequencies, slightly more or slightly less all the time, so you would get this nice fluctuation between left and right. It’s something I’ve never done before and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the boxes.

Axes Of God (Guitar World 1989)

One of the least constant factors in the equation has been Allan’s preference in the characteristics of the guitar itself. Since the early seventies, when he acquired his first Fender Stratocaster, he persistently sought to break the instrument down to an elemental form - moving on to the thinner Gibson SG, another chiselled Strat, several hollowed-out Charvel and Ibanez solidbodies and, most recently, to the deceptively resonant, stripped down plastic Steinbergers - ultimately using MIDI as the basis for its restructure. With two SynthAxes and their corresponding analog Oberheim Matrix 12 and X5B synth modules and disk player, some Yamaha DX 7’s and an Akai S-900 sampler, Allan feels that the dream has been finally realized. "For years, I’ve been trying to get the guitar to do things it simply didn’t want to do," he explains. "I never have to fight the SynthAxe to make it respond, and, in a surprising sense, it’s really the most expressive instrument I’ve ever played through"

The Unreachable Star (Guitar World 1989)

GW: Throughout the years, you’ve played SG’s, Strats, Charvels. What about acoustics? What did you use on your really early work?

HOLDSWORTH: Actually; I didn’t have an acoustic guitar; I borrowed one from Tony Williams’ girlfriend at the time, Tequila, who sang on some of those older albums he did right before Believe It. She had an old acoustic guitar and I used that.

I never really owned an acoustic guitar. For a while, I had an Ibanez copy of a Gibson L5 that I used on the UK album. I love F-hole guitars; the only acoustic guitar I’d ever really like to own would be a really really great acoustic F-hole - you know, no pickups, just a really nice one, but they’re so expensive, and for someone who has such limited use of that instrument, it doesn’t warrant the amount of money that I’d have to spend on it. For three or four thousand dollars, I could buy another synthesizer [laughs very loudly].

GW: So you don’t presently own an acoustic?

HOLDSWORTH: Yeah, I do. I own one custom - made guitar built by Bill DeLap, which is beautiful. It’s a five-string guitar, tuned in fifths. I like that tuning [C,G,D,A,E, low to high]; it’s a really logical tuning to me. The guitar’s standard tuning is really illogical, and if I were starting again… if I hadn’t had so much trouble trying to figure out how to get round the B string, I’d probably have learned to tune like Stanley Jordan, in fourths, to C and F [for the two highest strings]. That’s the most logical tuning.

GW: Did you start experimenting with tunings on the acoustic guitar?

HOLDSWORTH: Well, I started working on it with the SynthAxe, just because it has very great limitations on acoustic instruments; you can only really effectively get four strings tuned in fifths to sound good. You can get five to sound borderline, but six - impossible. Well, nothing’s impossible, is it? But it’s much more difficult with an acoustic instrument, because you’d have to have an instrument as small as a violin and as big as a bass. With the SynthAxe, you don’t have that problem, because you’re just reaming little synthesizers and oscillators.

Axe Maniax (TGM 1993)

A lot of my playing is based on chord voicings which are very keyboard-like, and so a keyboard type of sound is better suited to my style than a distorted lead ‘guitar’ sound. Gibsons may suit a lot of people, but really if I got given one then its only function or use to me would be wallpaper - I’d just hang it on the wall to look at!’

Allan Holdsworth: One Of A Kind (Guitar Shop 1995)

“I love the Steinberger design, but ever since they merged with Gibson, I’ve had trouble communicating with them. Fortunately I met this guy named Bill DeLap who made me two Steinberger-styled guitars that use their hardware, but have wood bodies instead of plastic. We took the best things of a Steinberger and just tried to get more out of that design. They’re full-sized instruments – 25 – ½” – and like a violin, have a maple neck, ebony fingerboard, spruce top and a maple back. Bill also made me some baritone ones that are just really long-scaled guitars – there are 34”, 36”, 38” scale versions. I didn’t use them on the new album, but I did on my last one, Wardenclyffe Tower. I played the 34” on “Zarabeth” and the 38” on “Sphere of Innocence”. And now he’s making me a piccolo guitar. But they all work like a regular guitar with regular strings, partially because the Steinberger bridge system doesn’t need a lot of winds to get in tune. I use LaBella strings – the company has been really amazing to me, too, and helped out whenever they could. My action is pretty low, and I don’t use the tremolo bar much anymore, either. About five years ago when all the heavy metal guys were using them, I sort of stopped, because it started looking like a new toy that everybody got. It was like when the wah-wah and the fuzz box came out and all of a sudden you heard them on every record. So I basically stopped using it.

Allan Holdsworth (steveadelson.com 2000)

TCG: Tell us about your guitar evolution.

AH: I started out with a regular steel string flat top at a young age. Then I got a Hofner. I think it was called a "President." Later I put a pickup on it. My father’s friend built me my first amplifier. I used to love going to his place and watch him solder and such. This got me started in my interest in electronics. When someone lent me a Stratocaster, that was it. I couldn’t believe it. It sounded like the Shadows, or Hank Marvin who was a huge hero to me. I bought a Strat and used it enthusiastically for about six months till I tried a Gibson SG. It changed me again. I sold my Strat and played SGs for about a decade. Later, I did experiment with Strats again but with humbucker replacement pickups. I liked that sound. In 1972, I recorded with a trio called Tempest using an ES-335. I later used the SG with Tony Williams’ Lifetime Band.

Patron Saint (Guitar Player 2004)

At what point did you realize that achieving the ideal of horn-like tone would require a different approach than that of the other players who were searching for the same thing?

Actually, I learned that really early on. I think this is going to make a lot of people laugh, but, early in my career in the ‘60s, I was playing with some local band, and we had an opportunity to go into the studio. I had an AC30 and a Gibson SG, and I used to like to turn up the amp until it was right at that point where it would get real throaty and fat, but without a ton of distortion. So we started playing, and the engineer came in shaking his head saying, "No, no, no. This is all wrong. You turn the amp down, and we turn it up in the control room." And I’m screaming, "No, you don’t understand. I want you to record this sound." This would go on for hours, and it would drive me crazy. I couldn’t figure out why I liked my sound at gigs, but hated it every time it was recorded. Horrible.

A Conversation With Allan Holdsworth (Abstract Logix 2005)

Bill: Speaking of guitars, I remember being at Bill Laswell’s studio in Greenpoint, and he showed me a white Gibson SG that he said once belonged to you. What guitar was that?

Allan: That would’ve been the guitar that I played in the Tony Williams days. The weird thing about that...I used to have two SGs, a white one and a black one, which was really rare. One of those SGs I had painted and it didn’t come out right, it came out pink. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t play a pink guitar.’ So I had the guy paint it blue. I had a number of SGs but the last SG I owned was sold by the woman who tour managed Tony Williams Lifetime...while I was out in the country. He didn’t get paid so he took my guitar and sold it, and I couldn’t get it back. There was nothing I could do about it. It was sold and was just hanging up there in the shop. And I was like, ‘Jeez, I gotta buy my own guitar.’ That was a blue SG with two pickups.

Bill: The one I saw was white with three pickups.

Allan: Well, I actually owned two or three of Ôem at different times. It would be interesting to see it.

The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever (Guitar Player 2008)

I like pickups with low magnetism because the strings aren’t affected by the pickups so much. A lot of people don’t realize how much that affects the sound.

How does it affect the sound?

The best example would be a Stratocaster. I got my first one when I was playing with Tony Williams, and I couldn’t intonate the thing. On the low E I’d get this wobble. But it was just the pickups sucking on the string, because when I put a couple of PAF humbuckers on it the problem went away completely. Then I realized that the older Gibsons that I liked the sound of so much had really weak pickups. So, sometimes I’ll use a booster pedal to bring up the gain and push the front end of an amp a little harder.

Supplemental Editorial Begins: All of your guitars have the wider neck at the top and the flattened-out fretboard, right?

Yeah, they’re usually 11/16ths at the nut to 2 1/4 at the bottom of the neck, pretty much like the Charvel necks that Grover Jackson made for me back in the ’80s, which is not standard at all on a Strat, because Strat necks are really narrow at the top, and the string spacing is really wide, so my problem with Strats was first of all I didn’t like the radius. And then the second thing is that the necks are so narrow at the top, compared to wherever the string spacing is at the bottom, that I would roll the strings off of it on each side of the fretboard. So I just decided to ask Grover, originally, if he’d make a nice wide at the nut neck. But then make it as wide as a Gibson Les Paul at the end of the fretboard. And of course then you look at a Gibson, and the spacing’s down on the bridge end of the fretboard, but the neck is wider. So it seemed completely illogical to me that the Fender neck is really not quite right somehow. It’s just personal taste, that’s all. So I’ve had all my guitars made with pretty much those dimensions. And with just about as big a frets as you can get, and then a pretty flat radius: 20 to 25.