Rock guitar lessons in Miami is my specialty. Hi! This is Dyce Kimura. I am a Miami guitar teacher and Skype instructor and today I’m going to show you my Gibson 335 in indigo blue. I got this in 2015. It’s a 2015 model. It sounds amazing. I want to talk about it with you but first I’m just going to play it a little bit just to break the ice and kick this video off. I’m just going to hook it in with my smooth jazz backing track. Here we go… That gives you an idea. Rock guitar lessons in Miami is Dyce Kimura’s specialty. I just want to break the ice and establish the tone of this guitar and how exquisite of an instrument it really is. In terms of price, Gibson website sells it for $3800 and it’s worth every penny.

I want to go through a few things that is unique about this guitar. First of all, the neck is really nice. It’s a slim 60’s tapered neck and it’s probably the slimmest neck that I have in guitars and I’ve had every kind of neck from D necks, C necks, V necks, slim necks, fat necks, 50’s necks, 60’s necks, compound necks, 7 1/4 radius, 12 inch radius – you name it. And this is a great neck; I love the trapezoid, I love the pearl inlays, but most of all I love the tone. This guitar sounds amazing as you already know, you can hear it. It’s got this really sweet nasally kind of sound both in the front and the rare pickup.

Best Rock Guitar Lessons in Miami

So if I play it again. I’m just running through a basic or rig today; I’m running through my Hughes and Kettner tube Meister on clean and I’ve got a hand wired tube screamer turned all the way up and I’m running into a celestial vintage 30 speakers 65 watts. Rock guitar lessons in Miami are Dyce Kimura’s specialty. So this is the guitar; I’m going to play some lead work for you. I’m just looking; that’s with the tone knob at like five. I’m going to put the master at six and the tone at six. Let’s hear the front pickup. I’m also going to put that at six and six. Put everything on 10s for a second. Front pickup on 10. Very, very cool. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami.

Let’s talk about a few things. I love a few things about this guitar; the hardware is like pewter, it’s like a dull silver which just really accents nicely with the indigo wood. Obviously, a major selling point of this guitar is the wood. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami.

This is extremely exquisite; its tiger stripe maple. It’s actually a two tone guitar, because the neck is like a dark blue then abruptly at the heel it turns into tiger stripe maple and I believe. Let me pull up some info on the website on this guitar. I believe it’s a 3 plywood, it’s got cream binding and this red sticker you could see it in there it means that that’s a Memphis off the top guitar which you know just because it’s 2015. In case you were wondering, the Nashville shop closed down at the end of the 80s. As a matter of fact, this Gold Top is probably one of the last guitars that came out Nashville; not like the last, but one of the last. It was the last year 89 and then they opened up the Memphis custom shop in 1990, I believe. Comment if there is any details I’m missing out, please.

Anyway, so what’s cool about this guitar? I love the neck like I mentioned. The size is a 335; it’s a little bulky. I like playing it sitting down. Live, if I’m standing up it’s a little bulky, but it’s a big guitar. I have a lot of big guitars. I play acoustic live, electric… Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami. And I want to talk about the size of the guitars for a second. The size of the guitar is really important for the tone. If you’re watching this video and you are an avid 335 lover, that’s great, good for you. In case this is your first time exposed to 335, something of this size, I want you to understand that the reason the guitar is this big is because it needs to be this big in order to sound the way it sounds. In other words, the sound is created in the guitar body, in the cavity and that’s where it resonates. So I want you to compare the concept of the guitar size and shape of like a bell. So if you have a little bell, you have a little high-pitched sound perhaps. It could be piercing, but it’s not going to be deep gong like a big fat bell. If you want to deep bell like the Liberty Bell or whatever and you ring it it’s like bong or you ring it it’s like ding-a-ling and that’s the difference with the guitar size especially when it comes to hollow body the resonance is really coming out of the cavity in the wood. Rock guitar lessons in Miami are Dyce Kimura’s specialty.

The hollow sound it’s a very fuzzy and woofy. It kind of reminds me of ZZ Top, but I don’t want you to pigeonhole this guitar with something like ZZ Top or Billy Gibbons which is all very much pigeonholed rock ‘n roll, which is great I love it. It’s a great sound, but it’s very one track minded. Other 335 players that have a wide range of tones like Gary Clark Junior, Joe Bonamassa; Eric Johnson in the 90s play a lot of 335. Robin Ford, he played the 335, he also played — I believe it’s a 339 which is a different shape, but it’s a little smaller. Again, the size of the body really matters. I am a guitar teacher; I have beginners coming in here and especially, mostly girls or people that are smaller frames, they go to the store and they pick up an acoustics for instance and they don’t want to get a full size dread down like this Martin HD 35 I’ve got back here; they want acoustic, but they’ll go with something smaller because they think it’s like smaller for their smaller body, it’s kind of cute. And I understand the logic of that, but the thing they fail to realize is that the sound is crucial to the manufacturing of the tone. Get a full size guitar and you’ll get a full size sound. I could go on and on about this; but one last little analogy I’ll throw in, it’s like a V-8 motor. Nothing quite sounds like a V-8 motor but the V-8 motor. If you get a V4 and you take the muffler of its loud and whiny, but it doesn’t have the authority and the rumble of a V-8. It definitely can’t what a V-8 do. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami.  Here is a blog of my SRV strat modifications.

Rock Guitar Lessons in Miami from Dyce Kimura

So food for thought, start thinking about that when you look at guitars and you try to understand why they make them the way they make them. I tend to modify a lot of my guitars to my specs. I am a professional, so I’m very particular about what I like and what I don’t like. That being said, I made it a point not to do any modifications whatsoever to this guitar because it’s extremely valuable; it retails at about $3800, so I just keep it just manufactured specs. It’s kind of almost like a collector piece. As a matter of fact, mine is in really good condition. One of the things that I really liked about it was not just the pewter tuning heads but the way that they made these vintage style. I’m not a fan of the locking tuning heads. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami. All my guitars that came with the locking tuning heads – almost all of them except for two of them – I take of the locking heads and I put on the old fashion vintage tuners. I just think that I can wind more of the string on. If you look closely at the neck you can see I actually put a lot of the string on, if not all of the string. I put as much string as possible on the tuning head and that gives me a very strong stability in the tuning, in the resonance and also its ability to stay in tuned. And that the more string wines you put on there the stronger your ability to transfer your residence into that headstock, which is what I want, I want the headstock resonating and I want it to be secure and strong. When I say secure and strong, I don’t want the string to slip. I also want a very sharp acute angle from the bottom of the winding to the nut; that’s why I put a lot of the string on. Rock guitar lessons in Miami are Dyce Kimura’s specialty.

Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami.

So these types of tuners that are not locking tuners, they actually allow me to put more of the string on which I like. Also this comes with a locking tailpiece, so basically if you take all the strings off the tailpiece doesn’t come off unless you unscrew it and that’s kind of nice; this is very convenient. Everything else is very much true to form — it’s very vintage. Like I said, it’s really sweet mids, these are great pickups, these are classic 57s which is one of my favourite. I would say between classic 57 and path is my favorite. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami. If I want a more aggressive Gibson sound I’ll go with the Trad Pro Zebra pickups and I would put a midboost in there. But if you want to go with more of a classic gentler tone, the 57 classics are great and also the Paps. I definitely don’t like the dirty fingers; just too much of everything.

So these are good in terms of the pickups and like I said, that tone is really nasally kind of sounding in a good way; it’s just a very unique sweat mid-range sound. So if you listen to it. I like this tone. This is called a bone nut, which is my personal preference. I usually change out all my guitars to be bone nut as well. And the wood tiger stripe maple, this is like a big craze. I collect older guitars too and you saw the tiger stripe starting to come out in the 80s in a few exquisite models like the Heritage models and stuff, the Heritage ADS model. But you really saw in the early 90s Gibson really making an effort to make really nice AAA flame, 4A, 5A flame, like, from 1992 on. By 1996 it was in full swing. Right now I’m making this video in 2016. There’s just a lot of stuff out there that’s really… High grade maple collectors really love it, that’s what people want and so they started building them. So I got into it too; it’s kind of why I acquired this guitar because it’s so gorgeous to look at. It looks great with black outfit and that’s one of the reason I like it. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami.

So I’m going to keep playing some things for you. Let me play another track before I talk some more about this guitar specs. Maybe you want to hear some slow blues. So I am just in a slow blues kind of mood today. I hope you don’t mind me indulging. Let me talk about a couple of specs on this guitar. It says it’s a little over 4.6 pounds so it’s not too heavy. It is very balance though; I don’t struggle with it leaning one way or the other. It’s made of maple and poplar. It’s actually maple and poplar maple; it’s three ply and… So then the neck is also made of maple and I guess that’s all I really want to discuss. I mean, the frets are very comfortable, they are not too high and not too low they are kind of like medium frets — very comfortable neck. I do want to discuss one thing, I had this guitar — I bought it with a crack head stock and it works great. I did have it repaired, but it’s a headstock repair and it’s really nicely done. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami. It was partially cracked and it’s been repaired. Just a little about cracked headstock with Gibson, if you get a cracked headstock guitar that’s been properly repaired it’s going to sound just the same as it didn’t have the crack. In fact, it’s even stronger because it’s like a bone. Once you fix a cracked headstock, once you glue it back in place properly it will never break there again, it actually reinforces the guitar and it’s just as good as new. As a matter of fact, a lot of this on this, this was set, clamped and glued back into place. A lot of your guitar connections are glued into place including the heel the whole thing is glued so nothing is necessarily screw or nailed in on this particular guitar. There are other guitars that do use screws but this one does not. Rock guitar lessons in Miami are Dyce Kimura’s specialty.

So what are the advantages/disadvantages of cracked headstock? There is no disadvantage in terms of playing and I’m a pro player so I don’t mind a cracked headstock, but I like it because it makes it cheaper. So I’m able to acquire a guitar that has a cracked headstock; I can get it cheaper than if it were in a pristine condition. So couple of my guitars I bought with cracked headstocks including this other Gibson as well and I like to buy that way, because it’s a better deal for me and it plays just as good. So in case you’re curious on that, do your own research on crack head stock Gibsons and the repair process and how that affects value. It doesn’t affect tone or playability at all as you can see in the camera you can barely even see it unless I would mention it to you. Dyce offers the best rock guitar lessons in Miami. Anyway, I would love to hear from you so leave your comments below and feel free to subscribe and like. I’ll see you guys in the next video. Thanks.