Here’s John McL live in 2016 with Santana, guesting on three numbers with an exotic looking axe, which – I feel sure – Johnny C can tell us all about. The tracks he appears on are:
A Place With No Name
Creation
Awade
From around 37:00 – 53.00, with splrendid soloing therein.
It’s a custom made guitar built by Mike Sabre. According to John Mc “This guitar has an old Johnny Smith Humbucker with Richard McClish hardware and midi pickup. A great traveling guitar with a wonderful sound”
Although since he wrote that it looks like the Johnny Smith Humbucker (which is a small pick-up) has been replaced with a full-sized humbucker. It certainly appears that way in the clip.
Santana is playing his regular Paul Reed Smith guitar.
http://i.imgur.com/QENjeLe.jpg
Sorry, you lost me at ‘humbucker’… đŸ™‚
Still, he gets quite a ‘soaring’ sound out of it, closer to his MO sound than he choses when playing in his own 4th Dimension. The same could be said of his 2011 Montreux performance with Santana (released on DVD) – clearly, he’s prepared to ‘compromise’ some way towards that sound of the past when playing with CS. And I’m glad he does.
Here’s a Gibson Johnny Smith model jazz guitar. This guitar was fitted with pick-ups which were smaller than normal, just like the one in the Mike Sabre guitar above. But in the Santana clip the pick-up on JM’s guitar has been replaced with a normal, full-sized pick-up.
I suspect you do know what humbuckers are, but for the uninitiated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humbucker
http://i.imgur.com/XKeIgby.jpg
Ah, well spotted. Hadn’t heard of this guitar maker before.
Details of JM’s guitar below:-
http://www.mike-sabre.com/Models/JohnMcLaughlinsModel/johnmclaughlinsmodel.html
It’s a strange guitar right enough. And the one in the clip has definitely had the pick-up changed for a normal sized humbucker.
I actually have no idea what humbuckers are – or any of that kind of stuff. I loathe technology, and especially engineering. I’m quite happy that there are people who like that sort of thing, who can tinker and innovate, and then the likes of me can just play the things or listen to the things without knowing or caring about any of that under the bonnett malarkey. I hesitate before saying this – because it’s pure Pseud’s Corner – but I’m into the art not the science.
Having looked at Sabre’s website it seemds JM has been playing this guitar for some years – I just hadn’t noticed.
You know how some guitars give off extraneous noise (or hum) under stage lights?
From Wiki:
Hum is caused by the alternating magnetic fields created by transformers and power supplies inside electrical equipment using alternating current. While playing a guitar without humbuckers, a musician would hear a hum through the pickups during quiet sections of music.
Humbuckers work by pairing a coil with the north poles of its magnets oriented “up”, (toward the strings) with a coil which has the south pole of its magnets oriented up. By connecting the coils together out of phase, the interference is significantly reduced via phase cancellation. The coils can be connected in series or in parallel. In addition to electric guitar pickups, humbucking coils are sometimes used to cancel hum in dynamic microphones.
Humbucking pickups have a distinctive appearance – two slim pick-ups side by side under a metal cover (sometimes the cover is removed) and are most commonly seen on Gibson Les Pauls
To be fair, I had guessed that they must, er, buck the hum. Does that explain the hum at the start and end of the splendid live clip herein (just posted):
No. That’s 50hz mains hum caused if you plug two interconnected units, say two amplifiers, into two sockets connected to earth via two different routes. Humbuckers, as explained admirably by JC, get rid of noise creeping into crappy noise vulnerable guitar amp/cable connections by electronic wizardry you don’t want to get into.
@fentonsteve is a ninja on this stuff.
You fell for it JC.