30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs [she/her]

Wow, that’s disgusting! Where would someone go to get bombarded with these tech job offers? You know, so I can avoid them?

I still sound like the Shaggs. Send help.

Sheep tremble and here come the s

That’s really cool; I didn’t know that tidbit! I’m gonna need a six-axis milling machine and the CAD models for a Kahler Flyer because, uh… Reasons

And on the 22nd day, she emerged from the wine cave

Home decorating goals

And it’s a silly point to make – he could easily have started out on a flipped right-handed guitar, and then switched to a lefty in the past 25 years. Christ, even the one in the photo is just a $500-600 Epiphone, not some jagoff dentist custom shop piece made from endangered tree species. I could have picked up that exact model off of Reverb for under $400 pre-pandemic. I didn’t, because I’m not in a jazz band, a baby boomer, or someone who jerks off in the mirror while wearing a Malcolm Young mask (but I repeat myself…), but you get the idea.

There are a lot of good fuckin’ reasons to rag on Blinken (like the fact that in that photo, he’s playing a Neil Young song that trashes neoliberal imperialist capitalism, in Kyiv, without a fucking hint of irony), but “playing guitar left-handed while being 60 years old is bourgeois, ackshually” is a deeply weird hill to die on.

You can literally buy left-handed versions of most popular guitar models brand new for the same price as their right-handed counterparts; in fact, if you hunt around for sales, you’ll often find the lefties on clearance because manufacturers tend to overproduce them. Granted, this is more in the vein of Epiphone/Squier/Fender (Mexico)/Schecter/Ibanez/Jackson (non-USA)/Charvel/ESP than blues lawyer stuff like Gibson, Fender USA, or PRS (non-SE). Affordable left-handed guitars have existed for the last 30 years. (That being said, it looks like Jackson has been ditching their middle-tier left-handed stuff, and you can only get the entry-level models as left-handed options now. Sad, because the Pro series Soloists are really nice for the money, particularly when you can find model year-end closeouts for under $800.)

It’s OK, it’s a $600 Epiphone. OP performed no investigation, and therefore has forfeited his right to you know, the thing

It’s hard to tell at this resolution, but I’m pretty sure that’s an Epiphone, not a Gibson – the first letter in the logo looks like an E instead of a G, there are too many letters’ descenders/“tails” hanging below the baseline at the beginning of the logo, and the headstock shape isn’t as flared/shallow as a Gibson. That’s like a $600 guitar brand new.

Comparison images:

OP, I really do not appreciate you making me white-knight on behalf of left-handed guitar players. Report to !selfcrit@hexbear.net immediately for reeducation.

Edit: OK, yeah, that’s an Epiphone. I found a grainy but super-high-res alternate photo from Reuters; here’s a closeup of the headstock:

Taken from here:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/blinken-guitar-hand-tells-ukraine-keep-rockin-free-world-2024-05-14/

This is part of why tone-chasers (the second-worst kind of chaser) struggle with getting Hendrix’s sound on right-handed Strats – the polepieces aren’t staggered symmetrically on that particular style of single-coil pickup, and they aren’t adjustable without ripping apart the whole damn thing. Basically, this made his A and D strings touchier than they normally would have been on a right-handed setup, and his B and G are a little quieter. When you’re playing through an older-style fuzz like a Tone Bender or Fuzz Face, the difference is pretty noticeable because of how those circuits react to changes in input signal volume. You can sort of accomplish the same thing by tweaking the saddle heights on a Strat, but this has the added effect of ruining the radius of your strings in relation to the fingerboard.

Incidentally, before the Russia/Ukraine stuff kicked off, there was this guy in Moscow that was selling custom-made reverse-staggered pickups wound to the Fender late-1960s spec for dirt cheap on eBay. I used a set on a partscaster build several years back, and while I sound nothing like Jimi Hendrix, I do really dig the oddball response on the low strings.

Thank you for coming to my talk.

Is all the world jails and churches?

TONIGHT on Betteridge’s Law…

Say the line, Parenti

Kinda works as an RATM lyric, if you can imagine Zack screaming it over a guitar riff going BWAM-boom-BWAAAOOOW ICKY ICKY ICKY WAAAOW

On the death/thrash front, have you stumbled across Crypta and/or Nervosa yet? Same label, and a couple of the same members; Crypta is an 80’s/90’s death metal throwback with more modern production techniques, and Nervosa is more thrash-oriented.