Scratches, stickers & blood: meet James Bay’s battleworn guitars | My Guitars & Me S2E2 - video Dailymotion

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00:00Hi, I'm James Bay and this is My Guitars And Me.

00:13This is a Gibson ES-330, it's the Luther Dickinson signature model.

00:19Which, what I remember being told, and I think what I like about it as well,

00:23is it feels a bit, it's still got the P90s, which we love, the Bixby's fun,

00:27because they don't always have those, I guess the old 330s didn't have one of those,

00:31so that makes it a bit heavier, but lots of different guitar players that I like

00:36have always said, you know, more springs and more opportunity for the thing to vibrate,

00:40like the more the better, and it has this Bixby which just, you know, adds to that.

00:45Lots of 330s are completely hollow, very light, which I love all of that,

00:50but all of that makes for just sort of more and more like uncontrollable feedback apparently.

00:55And then the 335, I think, I'm not like completely sure,

00:59but I think that has a block of wood all the way down the middle.

01:02The Luther Dickinson one has a block of wood that sort of stops halfway,

01:05because he was trying to help the feedback and stuff apparently.

01:09And then my version, which is this one, and I've had it for 10 years,

01:13and I've played it live a lot, I've not recorded it too much,

01:18but it now features this very specific guitar, features on the cover of my new album,

01:24because I like the look of the guitar, but really because my daughter decorated it

01:28with some really great bus and dinosaur stickers.

01:31It was the first electric guitar that Gibson gave me.

01:34The G is a plain G string instead of a wound one.

01:38These are all on the bridge, all sort of movable.

01:41You can really kind of tweak and treat the intonation to sort of get it completely perfect.

01:46And the access is just sort of generally sort of different for like the heel of your hand.

01:51The strings aren't up here. Everything's sort of closer together.

01:54Action is more electric guitar sort of style.

01:57And I wanted that, but I like the hollow body thing.

01:59P90s can be a bit argumentative with like whether it's lights or whatever.

02:05There's opportunity with these kinds of electric guitars

02:09to ultimately like not necessarily be able to avoid like outside noises.

02:17This isn't a perfect sort of sound-treated, soundproof studio of a guitar.

02:23There are issues, and that's some of my favorite stuff about playing them and writing on them.

02:28Because if your atmosphere and your environment for creating or playing or whatever

02:33is kind of pristine and perfect and silky and, you know, wonderful,

02:37that doesn't do it for me. That doesn't sort of turn me on.

02:39I need a bit of friction somewhere somehow.

02:47I have a lot of adrenaline when I'm on stage and when I'm playing.

03:14I can really put it, they can take it, these guitars. I think that's what I like.

03:17I can tell you that while the stickers are on here and that's new,

03:20there are some spots between these two pickups.

03:22There's some sort of brown spots that I can guarantee you are blood.

03:24The adrenaline was absolutely like raging when I was like first getting up in front of

03:28like thousands of people that actually wanted to see me.

03:30I felt unbelievable, but as well like terrified and had to put all of that energy somewhere.

03:36So there's, yeah, there's blood on here too, and I'm not interested in cleaning it.

03:39I try not to be too careful with guitars. They're very precious, yes.

03:43They're very expensive. They're beautiful pieces of art, but like I live with them

03:49and I fight with them and I get emotional with them and all that stuff that you do

03:54if you write, you know, on an instrument.

03:56Quite happy for it to get sort of bashed up if that's how it kind of goes on.

04:02I'm not sure how these occurred, but it's nice to see them.

04:05I don't want it to look too polished. I'm not as excited by that.

04:13Now I'm holding a National Resonator and it's a new one.

04:27I think as much as anything, all the old ones, the frets were like dead

04:32and this just felt like I could replay it here, not just here.

04:37This was a little bit of a whim. I just thought, you know, I'd grown up

04:41having my moment in my sort of teens, like obsessing over the old blues players

04:47of a long, long time ago, and so many of them thinking about people like Son House.

04:53A lot of different players from that kind of time had or were known for playing

04:57a steel guitar, a Resonator.

05:00And I think I've always, I've continued to sort of dream about a collection

05:04that I continue to build, and there had to be one in there.

05:07Maybe there'll be another one day.

05:10But the first single for this album was called Up All Night.

05:12I released it a couple months ago. It's me and it's Noah Khan.

05:16It's The Lumineers. We're all on it together, showering away and having a fun time.

05:21And the song was born in the studio, and this is the guitar that I recorded,

05:25that I ultimately wrote and recorded the song on.

05:29It's one of my kind of riffier songs, which I'm really proud to say,

05:33because I want to have riffs, all around.

05:35Again, this is tuned down a whole step. This is D standard again.

05:38I'm just more comfortable singing there.

05:40So it looks like an E, but it's a D chord when I play this.

05:55That's the riff for the song.

05:57And I recorded it just mic'd up just like this, just clean.

06:00And we even did this thing, and I definitely enjoyed doing this when I played.

06:04There's a solo in that song that goes...

06:08And when we did that, it was the same thing.

06:28It was a microphone on the guitar, because there's no electronics.

06:32You just have to mic it up.

06:34And then we cranked the preamp on the desk until it's distorted

06:38and fantastically sort of horrible sounding.

06:41And that's the sound of the guitar solo, just a mic with the preamp

06:45in front of this guitar with the preamp turned all the way up.

06:47So yeah, you get all these overtones and beautiful sort of rings and chimes

06:51out of this because of this bit, I guess.

06:54You get all that stuff. I even play that on Up All Night.

06:59And then with that fuzz from the preamp, I love the chaos of all of that sound.

07:03It's as much a voice this guitar on that record as the voices are.

07:32This is a Gibson J-200, or SJ-200 as it says inside.

07:37And I always forget to say the S, which potentially means super.

07:41Super Jumbo? Don't know.

07:43It's a Jumbo body acoustic guitar.

07:45And I guess I feel like if I may be so bold, this is the other guitar

07:51that I feel quite sort of renowned in the last 10 years for playing.

07:58I grew up playing an Epiphone, a very blonde, very blonde,

08:02very kind of yellow Epiphone J-200.

08:08Because of all the things that I've been telling you about,

08:10like I used to play open mic nights and busk and I was all on my own

08:13and I wanted to sound as big as I could.

08:16I also wanted to sort of sing in like lower keys.

08:18So I tuned the guitar down so I could sing sort of lower and higher.

08:22I was trying to sort of broaden my range in all ways,

08:24instrumentally, musically, vocally.

08:26And these Jumbo body Gibson acoustic guitars made that possible, basically.

08:31The big sort of Dreadnought Martins and stuff are fantastic,

08:33but this just does it for me and works the best.

08:37And I've sort of gone on to involve them in like a band set up on stage

08:40when I tour with the whole band.

08:42And they're also wonderful for me when I'm like solo on my own,

08:45but like plugged in.

08:46I know I can do a great show on one of these.

08:50That's like a relatively sort of guaranteed thing.

08:53So I always go back to them.

08:55This is a new one, by the way.

08:56I'm pretty sure this is 2019.

08:58From 2019, as we do or don't know, Gibson stuff got particularly good.

09:03So I'm really enjoying playing those ones.

09:04This one sometimes gets tuned down to C sharp standard

09:08because some of my stuff's really high and I can't do it.

09:12And I don't want to sing that high or like try and sort of maintain my voice every night.

09:15But yeah, it's a great thing.

09:17And there's an LR bags pickup in this.

09:20I use those in most of these for like live plugged in stuff.

09:24This got recorded.

09:25There's a song called Go On on my new album.

09:30And it's funny, you know, so Go On, just to give you a tiny little bit about the song.

09:34I lost a family member in 2021.

09:38I didn't say to myself once he passed away that I needed to make a song about that.

09:44But it is one of my most effective ways to express myself in difficult moments

09:50or in, you know, elated moments or whatever.

09:53And I wrote this song.

09:55And it was a little bit of a kind of send off.

09:58It felt like the feel of the song is a little,

10:01it doesn't sound like a sort of traditional funeral march,

10:03but it was my funeral march for him.

10:05But when it came to recording it, the chords, you know,

10:09basically speaking kind of, it's all these.

10:18It felt great, but it felt right on this big, deep, dark,

10:24kind of dour sounding instrument.

10:27So it was kind of always in hindsight, it was always going to be on a J-200.

10:30And it might well have been this one.

10:32If it wasn't this one, then I've got one identical to this

10:34that I usually tune a semitone different.

10:37It would have been on one of these.

10:39And it's nice to record on old instruments, vintage instruments.

10:41And we would have included some of those in that song, I guess.

10:44But like this just held it down.

10:46And almost like a funeral, you need someone who's kind of going to hold it together.

10:49And this guitar did that, because it was a very emotional experience recording the song.

10:57I'm James Bay. Thank you for watching Guitar.com.

10:59And that has been My Guitars and Me.

Scratches, stickers & blood: meet James Bay’s battleworn guitars | My Guitars & Me S2E2

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