Proud Teacher Story | My Student Is Super Smart

Okay, so this is a bit of like an unsolicited story time, but I thought that this story was so cool that I'd share it with all you funny people, because the funny person that showed me this is my eight year old student. 

Now, having an eight year old student already by itself was a little weird for me because I learned guitar at age ten and I had already played piano for a couple of years before then, so the transition wasn't like the craziest thing in the world. 

But this kid has no prior musical experience and just wanted to learn guitar. He's eight years old, so I was like, all right, that's pretty cool. And so recently he did the wildest thing that I've never really tried to experiment with this before, but he figured out that with these single coil pickups on a Strat, because he's got a Strat like mine, and he realized that if he just dials this tone knob, the bottom one down, he loses all the high end. 

And with the amplifier that he has, which is my old Boss Katana 50, I believe he effectively cut a lot of the buzz that he was having. And then he puts the pickup selector in position four, which is the middle and bridge at the same time. So instead of you know that. He cuts it. And he puts this tone knob down all the way, this one up all the way and with the volume. And when you get some crunch, it's like.

And so when I heard that he didn't exactly play it like that -- I'm just exaggerating to prove a point -- but he was playing something. I think it was "Smoke on the Water," actually, and it sounded very wah-ish. Like, he had the whine of, like, in a middle position while it was turned on and not moving at all. 

And I'm like, what did you do to get that sound? Because you weren't sounding like that last week when when I came over and he says, oh, I just turned this tone knob down. And so when you turn it up, it's a lot brighter, obviously. Of course, because that's how it works. 

But it occurred to me that when he turns that knob down, it emulates the wall a little bit. So I added a bit of crunch. I'm actually going to turn it down a little bit, and I started playing "Money for Nothing." (plays)

It's not great. It's not perfect, but it's the way that I know how to play it, just generally. And so already it sounded pretty similar. 

So when I bumped the gain up a bit -- and yeah, I'm in a different tuning. I think this is tuned down like half a step, so it sounds a little bit like a wah. And on his guitar and of course, his amplifier is way brighter than this one because this is a Laney. The crunch is not nearly the same as on the Boss, but I don't know, push the highs a little bit, balance out the mids and the lows. (plays)

And so basically, moral of the story is, if you're on a budget and you don't necessarily have a wall to keep stationary, roll your tone knob down if you have two tone knobs. It was really cool and it taught me that some guitars have such unique sounds, even the most basic ones, that you can just experiment them and come up with some really interesting sounds because like, it's one of those moments where like the student is teaching the teacher something because I had no idea you could do that. And then he just does that just because he was trying to cut buzz. 

And I'm sitting here like -- it's like most people just keep their tone knobs all the way up, right? (plays) They bring it down. When you get that attack on it. And I tried best to go on with the other the pickups too, because he has it on position four and it's. So like the middle pickup is already too warm and too muddy, and the bridge pickup is always too bright. Then the neck pickup didn't work either, but then I put it in position to. That kind of gets it feels like it's trying to get that little like natural harmonic thing going, that it can sometimes have.

And I just thought it was really cool to share that, but just wanted to share that, you know. (plays for 1.5 minutes) 

Anyways, just thought it would be cool to tell that story.