I walked home after training on the heavy bag and enjoyed the coolness of getting rain-soaked on a humid day. After showering and eating, I headed into Hollow Way.

The baritone LP produces an enormously rich, deep sound, especially with the Bareknuckle Warpigs in the bridge and neck. They’ve got to to be the hottest passive pickups in the world, generating insane amounts of feedback and producing the coolest random harmonics. I have my top string, the thickest one, tuned down to B. When you hit B and F# together you get a nice, dark dyad. It doesn’t matter if you’re running it clean or what– it’ll be dark and satisfying. If you pass it through some fuzz or grind boxes and really crank the gain, the resonance can take on a life of its own– and always a satisfying life. The dyad is set by the waves of B and F# synching into each other. When you add gain, the dyad remains intact but the edge of the wave flails, almost like it’s on fire. If you keep your treble down and increase the volume (literally the space being taken up by the wave) and keep the gain high, the dyad changes into rough-edged beam, ultra hot, perfect with itself. With some hard playing it becomes a hot bolt that you can aim, and overtones will fly off of it and wash over you. When I jam on the LP at high volume and ultra-high distortion, I stand in front of the cab stack and get the hugest, most dangerous erections imaginable. Were it not for the containment of Hollow Way, I’d be destroying entire cities at once.

For my playing style, I keep the LP in open tuning, and Open B specifically these days because it lets me keep auxiliary strings available for various effects and emphases. For example, if I’m riding on a B dyad chord, when it gets nice and full  I can include the third string at the 5th fret, the perfect 5th of the B chord, and it adds an edge that’s perfect and controllable. From that chord I can add the 7th fret 4th string, when needed, and that turns the edged dyad into a lava river with dangerous edges. If you jam on that 4 note chord for more than a minute, you actually start to float off the ground, so be careful. Make sure you’re at least pretty well boxed in or tied down before you start using that.

What you absolutely can’t do from there is add another, higher, B string, the 5th string. Don’t do it. If you add that last open B and let it ring out, you’ll risk everything you know. You see, that’s the porn chord of the drone metal gods. If you run it through a 212o with a compressor and have it cranked,  you risk your entire city getting fucked. So don’t do it.

 OK, do it.

But wisely. And wear loose clothing.

Ready for the group jam tonight with a special guest drummer– it’ll be 6 people in Hollow Way fo the first time. Hopefully the walls will hold. For your sake.

Enjoy mid-week.