Reeves Gabrels - Guitars on Tour

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Reeves Gabrels - Guitars on Tour
by Reeves Gabrels on Wednesday, 8 August 2012 at 15:45 ·

Starting today, I'll post about the instruments I'm playing with The Cure during this summer's festival tour in Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Thanks to the reader of this page who suggested this, and another who shared stage photos of each of my guitars in action. Here goes... see the next Note for a brief introduction of my "Orange RG2," a Reeves Gabrels II Signature Guitar by Reverend Guitars. Cheers, rg

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Guitars on Tour: Reverend Reeves Gabrels II (Orange RG2)
byReeves Gabrels on Wednesday, 8 August 2012 at 15:49

Reverend Reeves Gabrels II Signature Guitar (Orange RG2)

The orange RG2 has been the workhorse of the summer Cure shows. I’ve played 75% of every night on this guitar (which I had the chance to use live just once before heading into rehearsals with The Cure).

The guitar is stock, as it arrived from Reverend. It has 2 Railhammer chisel pickups, a 3 position pickup selector switch, a pull/push true phase switch, and bass contour (roll-off). The only difference from the stock setup is that I use .009 - .46 gauge strings, instead of the strings it is shipped with.

The combination of features gives me a pretty wide palette to paint from. By combining pickups and rolling the bass contour full off, I get a chimey Gretsch-like sound. Stay with the same pickup selection, bass contour full off, add some distortion and it becomes a very angry Telecaster-like tone. Dial the bass contour back up, and it’s a Peter Green Les Paul tone. With these sounds, plus the usual tones of a two-humbucker guitar, the orange RG2 covers a lot of ground in the course of a Cure live set of 3+ hours.

For examples, listen to the orange RG2 during the following songs, where these tones appear:

High – chimey Gretsch-like sound

Just One Kiss; Let’s Go To Bed – snarly Telecaster sound

Fight – tone à la Peter Green on a Les Paul

Bananafishbones – two-humbucker tone



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Guitars on Tour: The Reverend "Reevito"
by Reeves Gabrels on Saturday, 11 August 2012 at 12:13 ·

The Reverend "Reevito"

The mint green Reverend guitar I play on "The Edge of the Deep Green Sea," "The End," and "Disintegration" this summer with The Cure is actually a modified Rick Vito signature model.

My own Reeves Gabrels II (RG2) signature guitar has a 25-1/4 inch scale length, as Fenders do. (Scale length is the distance between the nut or zero fret and the bridge.) Yet in the course of our three-hour sets there are certain songs where I want to play a guitar that has a Gibson-type feel. Something with a 24-3/4 inch scale length. I find the shorter scale changes the way I play. Hard to believe that 1/2 inch would make that much difference but it definitely affects my finger vibrato, making it wider. At least I think so. What I lose when the guitar does not have a vibrato bar seems to show up in my fretting hand and I enjoy that. Plus, having a shorter scale makes some slightly larger chord stretches easier to reach. Just ask the late Tal Farlow.

Before I headed to The Cure rehearsals in England, I was having a conversation with Chris Boyle at Rock Block Guitars in Nashville about how to solve my self-perceived need for a cool guitar with a Les Paul-ish look, 24-3/4 inch scale length, and two humbuckers. After listening to me ramble for a few minutes, Chris matter-of-factly pointed out that I should just speak to Reverend and see if they would modify a Rick Vito guitar for me. Why didn't I think of that? Sooo... I spoke to Ken Haas at Reverend and asked that he remove the pickups and substitute a Joe Naylor Railhammer Vintage humbucker in the neck and a Railhammer chisel humbucker in the bridge position. Ken thought it was a great idea. In fact, he had already done something similar to his personal Vito model guitar... It must be good to be the company president.

The guitar reached me after the first summer festival show. I took it out of the box and restrung it with my preferred gauge of Curt Mangan strings. My friend and guitar tech Kan Lailey intonated it for the lighter strings, and I have been gigging with it since. We started calling it "The Reevito" when a friend and apparent Reverend fan clocked what was going on and gave it the name... a hybrid of two Reverend endorsing musicians.

Guitar tweeker and cork sniffer section:

I discovered that, after switching out the original large single-coil pickups in the guitar, the folks at Reverend hadn't changed the pots for volume, tone and bass roll-off (a Reverend proprietary circuit) from the original 250 k value (for single coils) to the humbucker-appropriate (and industry standard) 500k value control pots.

The benefit of this accident is a throatier tone with warmer top end. I have done this on purpose in the past on guitars containing humbuckers that I found to be too harsh (my favorite for most humbuckers is a Gibson 300k pot) but this was a most pleasant surprise.

The best way I can describe the tone of this guitar when it is wide open is to say that it falls in Mick Ronson/early Jeff Beck territory... But that's ultimately in the hands of the player and the ear of the beholder. Combine that with the wide range of tones from the standard Reverend wiring harness (reverse capacitance on the volume, for no loss of top end when you dial the volume down, plus the clever bass roll-off control) and the Reevito is a very versatile guitar.

Some examples of why I like this guitar for certain songs:

From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea - I use wider vibrato in the solo, and more extreme pitch bends (made possible by the lighter string tension of the shorter scale).

Disintegration - In the guitar line I play in this song, the notes often move in pointillistic fashion, and I can execute wide chord voicings more elegantly thanks to the shorter scale length.

The End - The Reevito is rather "skittish" and more willing to give up notes in the form of feedback, which suits this song in live performance.

Just Like Heaven - I roll the bass contour off, and just plain enjoy playing this instrument for this song.



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Guitars on Tour: "The Tabby" Reverend Reeves Gabrels Signature Guitar (RG1), Modified
by Reeves Gabrels on Sunday, 19 August 2012 at 14:52 ·


Reverend Reeves Gabrels Signature Guitar (RG1), Modified -- “The Tabby”

My grey Reverend Reeves Gabrels (RG1) guitar is nicknamed “The Tabby” because the transparent black wood stain on the highly figured maple grain face looks to me like the coat of a tabby cat.


I use this guitar for several songs every night on tour with The Cure. In particular, it is essential for The Cure’s song "Wrong Number."


When I originally recorded the guitars on the studio version of Wrong Number in the late 1990s, I was still playing my sustainer-modified Parker guitar through a Roland VG8 modeling system. The singing-feedback guitar lines that supply the melodic guitar hook of this song are dependent on having a sustainer pickup system allowing infinite, dependable sustain at any volume. Plus, Wrong Number is the song where I am most in my natural element, so I need a perfect device for those improvisational, freak-out moments.


This guitar lets me do all of the above. Here's why.


The Tabby may look pretty much like one of my standard RG1 signature model guitars, but it actually has been modified quite a bit, yet in not so obvious ways. When I received the guitar from Reverend, it was a prototype for the RG1, a non-tremolo instrument. We were also still debating fret size, and unlike the eventual production model, the prototype didn't have quite the taller size frets I prefer.


Over the course of a year, then, this was The Tabby’s journey:

-- The first thing to happen was that Steve Uncapher, at Rock Block Guitars in Nashville, refretted the neck with Dunlop 6100 fret wire.

-- Next, I put on a Stetsbar tremolo -- which worked great.

-- Then I shipped the guitar off to Sustainiac, to have one of their sustainers fitted.

-- Not long after, we decided the next generation RG1 would have a factory-installed Wilkinson tremolo. Being partial to the traditional lever and fulcrum vibrato bar design, I sent the guitar back to Reverend. They retrofitted my refretted neck and Sustainiac system into a new Wilkinson-equipped body, and sent it back to me.

-- On the guitar’s return, I replaced the original Reverend bridge humbucker pickup with a Naylor Railhammer "Anvil" for extra heaviness of tone.

-- Last of all, Doug Jarrell at Rock Block put in a kill switch – it’s at the lower end of the guitar body, just past the control plate, and allows me to "kill" entirely the output from the guitar. This lets me do staccato effects.


After all this, the only visible differences you might notice on The Tabby, other than the kill switch, are the two small toggle switches at the lower end of the pick guard. One switch turns the sustainer on/off, while the other lets me choose the type of feedback I want. The feedback choices are fundamental (the pitch I am playing), the octave-up overtone, or a blend of the two.


All of these mods are available through Reverend via special order.


I also use The Tabby on “One Hundred Years” because the guitar’s heavier tone, thanks to the Railhammer chisel pickup, seems appropriate. I choose it as well to play “Want,” because of the controlled feedback it allows me to do underneath Robert’s vocal.



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Guitars on Tour: Fender VI
by Reeves Gabrels on Friday, 24 August 2012 at 12:36

Fender VI

On the guitar front, if there is a single instrument that makes The Cure sound like The Cure, in my opinion it's the Fender VI (six-string bass), with Robert Smith’s distinctive playing and use of it, not as a bass—totally unnecessary when you have an incredible bass player like Simon Gallup—but as a unique guitar voice.

So, in rehearsals for this summer, when it was time to figure out what parts needed to be played in which songs, I was pleasantly surprised when Robert asked me to play the Fender on "Inbetween Days," "Push,” and “Primary.”

Since I do not own a Fender VI (though I did, for a time, own a Jerry Jones Danelectro-style six-string bass), Robert offered me one of his.

Thus the instrument I am playing on those three songs live is Robert Smith’s black 1962 Fender VI, which has a reddish tortoise-shell pick guard. I’m sure it has a lot of stories to tell. It has the three original Fender Jaguar-style single-coil pickups, plus three on/off pickup selector switches (one for each), as was standard for that era Fender VI.

The neck is a 30-inch scale, shorter than most other Fender bass guitars, and feels more like the neck of a Fender Stratocaster of like vintage. The strings I am using are lighter gauge than one would normally put on a regular bass. All in all, perfect for a guitar player.

The electronics of this Fender VI have been modified with an additional tone control, so it has three knobs (volume, tone, tone) instead of the standard two (volume, tone).

Two small toggle switches were also added. One is a bass cut, which removes the lowest frequency tones from all six strings. The other changes the phase of the middle pickup, resulting in a more nasal sound when used in combination with one or both of the other pickups.

My control settings on this instrument never change: Volume and tone controls all the way up (on 10); all three pickups on, in phase; with bass cut engaged (which keeps me out of the tonality occupied by Simon's bass).

The result: I have become a Fender VI fanatic, I look forward to playing it, and it’s one of my favorite things to do at every show.

Some notes about the sound and role of the Fender VI this summer:

Primary – The Fender VI plays in the same register (pitch range) as the bass, but has a brighter, thinner tone; Robert plays a six-string electric guitar.

Inbetween Days – I play the intro melody line on the Fender VI, in an upper register, yet the thicker strings give the line additional weight; for this song Robert is playing an acoustic guitar.

Push – Counterpoint (melodic interplay) among Robert, Simon and me.

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Reeves Gabrels reveals the guitar he will use on LatAm Tour

you will be seeing me playing this reverend "tricky gomez" prototype guitar ( minus the cat toys) quite a bit on the road with The Cure. quite the versatile little hot rod.

for more info visit reverendguitars.com all the details and specs are there. and more

Attachments:

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finally got my hands on a prototype of the new reeves gabrels signature "spacehawk" from reverend guitars. video by guitar player magazine at NAMM in california.

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