Old Heritage H150 - perfect Les Paul.

[les paulverizer]

A while ago, I started a band devoted to paying homage to the British Blues phenomenon, a movement that, quite simply, gave the world Rock(!) as we know it.

It started with Eric Clapton essentially inventing "the Rock" sound in APril 1966 by plugging a Les Paul into a cranked Marshall and proceeding to let loose playing long, articulate, screaming and and soulful lead guitar, something that had never been done before, not to that extent and which spawned a myriad of bands that we all know and love in the process.

For the record, this band's not a "tribute" as it's generally intended, I have absolutely zero desire to mimic someone else and/or reproduce someone else's solos note-for-note, no matter how famous, great, cool and historically important the player is; in truth ("Truth", great album!!!) I have been offered the position in 3 or 4 of such outfit and even though the players in question were among my main influences, I love 'em dearly, I graciously declined, it just goes against what I believe, which is to pay respetful homage to such cats by capturing the spirit, not the notes. By doing that you take your chances, of course, but that's excatly what those guys did in the first place, right?.

Anyway, the band has played a handful of gigs in the Lndon area and next month we'll have the official launch in a specialised, highly respected top London club and this, my Heritage H150 will be the guitar I'll be using. A wonderful Custom Shop Les Paul Custom, which I love, will be there too but only as a spare in case I break a string or something, which very rarely happens!

Yesterday we had a reharsal, just to finalise the set while next week a dress rehearsal is in the cards, but let me tell you that this guitar plugged straight into a valve 1/2 stack with just a Tube Screamer in between (an Ibanez TS808 DX, to be precise) didn't even sound close to perfection...it was actually perfect!!!

The sound, the feel, oh my God, I hadn't played this guitar for few months and I was actually contemplating getting a XXX McCarty 594, an amazing guitar for sure, but once you have an Heritage H150 set up to perfection, and on this one I also replaced the original pups with a set of OX4 "Beano" pups (yeah, Beano, I know....!) frankly if you want a righteous Les Paul tone you don't need anything else. And my wife agrees....

For the record, according to the serial number this guitar was made on Nov. 13th 2000. I was also born in November, good month indeed...

 

 

[rwinking]

Cool! So what does your set list look like?

[les paulverizer]

The set list mainly mid/late 60s-early 70s stuff, with few tracks from the Jeff Beck Group's Truth & Beck Ola albums and John Mayall's feat. Eric Clapton's "Beano" album, plus B sides and tracks from obscure but killer bands of the same period. I already play guitar in a Jeff Beck tribute/homage show so for me it's just an extension of the same thing!

Once you start playing that stuff you realise where a lot of bands that later became world famous, not mentioning names but 4 or 5 came to mind straight away, got the idea and inspiration from! Even bands that later branched into different slightly styles and sounds, but the musical DNA...."remains the same"!

I remember Lemmy of Motorhead saying that a lot of Heavy Metal bands actually left him cold as he somehow needed to "feel some Blues in there", which according to him those bands totally lacked, and I can see what he meant...

Goin back to the gear I use, apart from all out Rock/Hard Rock I've used my Heritage in a lot of different situations like Funk, C&W, Soul, Jazz, Pop session and even Irish Folk(!) but I think that this guitar, and probably Heritage guitars in general, really comes to life and kinda makes sense especially when playing a certain kind of stuff; set the amp up for a kind of "AC/DC plus a bit" kind of tone, step on a quality OD pedal so it'll push the sound a bit more over the edge, crank up and let your soul hang out!!!!

I LUV it!

 

 

 

[nuke]

You could just learn all the licks in "Steppin Out" on the Beano album and make a career out of just that.