u/PentaSector

Surprised Hysteria isn’t here.

Yep. If I need to explain Muse to somebody in one song, I point them to Hysteria (not because it captures the full extent of their musical range, but because it's a peak rock song that provides an excellent entry point). I'd have been stoked to see it as their one pick for the list.

If there were a second pick after Hysteria, I'd have fully expected it to be Knights of Cydonia, which does go much further distance to capture their range, at least as demonstrated through the '00s. Citizen Erased would be an even better choice, in my opinion, but I'd never expect it to have been chosen.

Yep, I was always super excited to have that gigantic, open, movable Esus2 voicing available, so lute tuning on a guitar was very enticing to me the first time I came upon it (though I went the Bruce Cockburn route and just tweaked the G string down to F# rather than tuning up a minor third).

A chord shapes and octaves built on the A string become a bit tedious, but creatively, it felt game-changing for me, especially after I discovered 7-strings and realized I could have all the perqs of both a baritone guitar and an E lute if I tuned the G string down to F#.

Really, the lute provides under-acknowleged precedent for a ton of the innovations we see in modern guitar, including alternate tunings, extended range, and even eventual niche instruments like baritone guitars and the Bass VI. My remark about 8-strings being "weird" was just a riff on the fact that they're often regarded as kind of oddball instruments by the guitar community at large, but I suspect that'd be less the case if lute history (or more broadly, the evolutionary history of the guitar) were more widely known and appreciated.

Is this a normal/reasonable way to tune an 8-string?

This is exactly how I tune my main 8-string (a 28" straight-scale), occasionally going up or down a half or whole step. Before I ever got deep into extended range, I played mostly in baritone-range tunings on a 6-string, so after plenty of experimentation, B standard or thereabouts flanked by two additional perfect fourths, made the most sense to me as an 8-string tuning.

I've tried going the route of adding two lower strings to one of my usual 6-string tunings, but the 8th string quickly turns dicey, what with ridiculous string inharmonicity and gauges that become tedious just to install on the instrument if you don't want to modify it to accommodate the string (e.g., removing the outer winding above the nut to enable passing through the tuner). I find that, after about F1, I start compromising on either tonal quality or string tension to a degree that's not worth it in either direction for me (though, to be real, a .095 at C#1 is loads of fun to chug on just for grins), so the approach you describe here is where I've landed as well.

Is it weird? Eh, it's an 8-string. It's already weird.

He's probably just as surprised as most of us are that we all got to see the day where we can say Muse legit djents. 😏

This is silly as fuck

Yeah, it is, and we're here for it. Shoot that silly shot!

Yeah, I definitely like arched tops, for purely cosmetic reasons. I've owned flat -/slab-tops that I loved, but that arched look is just more elegant to me.

I never paid much attention to Washburn in their heyday, but what little I've seen of their stuff is definitely attractive. That Renegade you posted is definitely a looker!

In full disclosure, I own a couple of single-pickup baritones, and they're both two of my favorite and most creatively inspiring guitars, so the appeal isn't lost on me. But I write a lot of music on those guitars that I can't play as I hear in my head, because I frequently do need access to a neck pickup or tone knob to recreate an idea with high fidelity.

I've kind of found a happy medium by writing lots of material specifically tailored to the one-trick sounds of those instruments, but I'd much prefer to just have back the missing electronics. I could easily make one of those baris almost the only instrument I ever played, if not for the lack of those electronics.

Right?! This is the part that really gets me - it feels like an obvious cost-cutting measure, because frequently, even in this market, the exact same model with a neck pickup and tone knob, could easily retail at the exact same price point.

It's a toss-up, to be honest. The LTD has that aforementioned arched top, and the Ibby bridge is as attractive as it is comfortable and practical, but it's hard to deny that the Jackson is decked out like the canonical metal machine, and solid black is always a reliably good-looking choice. I like the finish on the LTD, but give it a true gloss black and it would edge out ahead for me.

Really, though, a few feature changes on either and I'd be having a good time.

Sorry, what? I.e., is it a matter of "you didn't answer my question and I object?"

If so, I'm personally not particularly partial to either model, but a few additional features and I'd be enticed by the LTD.

The Jackson has some neat features going for it, but I tend to prefer arched tops and hardtail bridges (a Floyd-like doesn't qualify, for me).

I'm super-over the trend of nixing neck pickups and tone knobs. Some of us play heavy music and definitely have use cases for both.

If the LTD MT had either, I'd at least give it a spin. It packs in some killer features, but they hardly make up for what it doesn't.

Some rules of thumb:

• For most guitar string manufacturers, unit weight tends to scale roughly linearly with diameter (modulo material or wrap changes - i.e., when transitioning from unwound to wound gauges, or from standard to extended-range gauges)
• Tension is a function of unit weight, diameter, and open pitch
• In 12-EDO, the equal-tempered metatuning that defines the conventional pitch system of Western music (i.e., "12 Equal Divisions of the Octave"), an interval of a perfect fourth is achieved by multiplying the root pitch by 2^5/12, which is very close to the rational number (4/3)

Taking all of this together, if you want your 7th string to approximate the tension of your 6th, take its respective gauge (.052, in your set) and multiply by 4/3, which gives you 69 1/3.

Hence, in theory, you can go a little tighter with a .070 or a little looser with a .068. In practice, one might be much closer to your 6th than the other, since. 068 and. 070 are potentially both double wound and that will offset the unit weight a bit so as to break consistency with lower heavy gauges, but either choice will put your 7th closer to your other low strings.

Your mileage may vary - maybe you already know that you still want your 7th string a little looser or tighter yet relative to the other strings, for example - but hopefully this insight provides some framing to help make it easier to decide your next move.

Definitely a show worth getting out in the pit for, down to the dramatically timed rainfall towards the end. Congratulations on getting in there and getting the experience, OP!

I mean, I get the wisdom, and I partially agree, but pickups with a distinct tonal character are plenty worthwhile if they capture a nuance that you want to be associated with your tone. I personally am also not huge on digital modeling tech - nothing against it, but not my preferred rig - so pickup choices can be pretty influential in my setup when they do have a particularly eccentric tonal profile.

Maybe a better question would have simply been "how would you contrast the Ragnaroks with (e.g.) the Nazgul/Sentient set or the Lundgren M7 (assuming OP has experience with either)?" My understanding is that they're comparable to either in that they have a significant mid-range bump, but if it's something interestingly different from the Nazgul's upper-mid snarl or the M7's low-end oomph, or even the EMG 57's adorable, slightly quacky quality*, I'd be down to try them out. I'm not necessarily chasing some holy grail tone in the first place as much as just morbidly curious to try something noticeably different (but still within a familiar zone, however much or little sense that makes to say).

* I know these are actives, but they're definitely comparable to modern mid-heavy passives

Beautiful axes! Let's be real, superstrats never go out of style.

How do you like the Ragnaroks? On paper, they sound like something I would absolutely get down on, but BKPs are just pricey enough to temper my enthusiasm to bother when I already know I can count on, say, the SD Nazgul/Sentient set or the Lundgren M series.

Third Muse show, also (almost) 20 years since my first. I will never not bang my head to Hysteria. What a perfect frakking opener, and it was only upwards from there!

A takeaway here is that terminology around guitar tunings is not well standardized.

"Double drop D" used to refer to dropping the low and high strings a whole step from E to D (yielding the tuning [low to high] DADGBD). That went more or less uncontested for a long time, because that particular type of tuning was most often used by, say, Neil Young, folk artists, and folk-adjacent rock bands like Days of the New.

"Double drop" tunings in the context of modern metal often refers to standard drop tunings (where only the lowest string is "dropped" relative to the respective "standard" tuning of the rest of the strings), but shifted down an octave from the equivalent "regular" drop tuning. "Double drop D," in this context, might refer to DADGBE on a 6-string, DADGCEA on a 7-string, or DADGCFAD (or sometimes, even more confusingly, DADADGBE) on an 8-string, but what's important to note is that all of these tunings start with a low string tuned to D1 and proceed with intervals of a fifth followed by consecutive fourths and the usual "kinked" third of the respective standard tuning.

Other people have offered other similar but nonetheless differing definitions here, and the situation is such that no single answer is inherently right or wrong absent context, so there really isn't a particularly truly universal terminology around drop tunings that all guitarists will agree with. Note that Alex Skolnick of Testament actually has a video tutorial instructing beginners how to tune to "drop B" on a 6-string, which turns out to be what's more widely and uncontroversially known as B standard, and yet "drop X" on a 6-string is usually generally understood to refer to a given modulated standard tuning, with the 6th string tuned down an additional whole step, so even pre-extended range guitars or apart from modern metal-specific idioms, there's disagreement amongst musicians.

I usually just spell out the entire tuning in terms of string pitches if I expect any amount of uncertainty amongst the audience.

Great little park right outside the front door of (well, and down the steps from) Foot of the Mountain. The creek runs right through it. It's a beautiful space with a decent amount of activity (enough to feel lively but not crowded) 'round this time of year.

I tend to say that I seek someone who "surprises" me. I certainly hope that that sense of surprise entails qualities, talents, and preoccupations that, when expressed, motivate me to think more deeply about things, but I deliberately resist framing what I want as someone who simply does make me think more deeply, for a few reasons:

• Being open to surprise lends itself to many different ways of being coaxed into thinking more deeply. At least when I frame the want specifically as intellectual stimulation, I tend to narrow focus on things that look like some sort of "classical" intellectual activity, and that feels to me like it eliminates too many other ways to learn. (This is actually specifically why I eventually adopted the "surprise" mindset.)
• No one owes it to me to shape my inner epistemology
• Corollary to the last point, I believe strongly that there's reciprocal onus on us to find what's surprising in the people we engage with. It's fine to want the people in our sphere to spark our curiosity, but we should also look into them, as much as we are welcome to, and examine what's unique and worth learning from them, if we want to learn from them.

I also try to balance that want with the question of whether I feel equipped to offer the same kind of surprise to another person. I consider myself academically minded in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't want to feel myself being screened for whether I'm "smart" in that sense (i.e., I wouldn't want someone probing for things that I probably used to). I'd much rather be given room to bloom out and let my perspective be welcomed in without the pressure to frame it as something more particular than I can live up to.

Given that this occurred in conversation with your manager, there's an argument that a sense of pressure kicked in for you. (You'll know the honest answer, but this isn't uncommon the first or even first few times a person gets caught in a conversation of this kind with a power differential.)

Your mandate from here is to develop an intentional mechanism to resist participating in this kind of conversation. Going quiet, as you say you did, was a solid approach, particularly if you don't feel safe to try redirecting the discussion (which is conceivable where there's a power differential). If you feel like you can't stay totally unreactive, as much as you can, just stay with empty but implicitly affirmative answers - e.g., "hmm," "interesting," "oh, wow," etc. A self-aware coworker will eventually take the hint, and one less so will feel affirmed without you having had to contribute to the negativity (or the material) of the discussion. An approach like this allows you to remove yourself from liability, both with respect to HR concerns and your own conscience, while not creating any interpersonal disruption with the coworker.

"l've heard the same thing" is an idle observation that's easily explained away if this conversation somehow comes back around, so that is not worth sweating. Take today's lesson, realize that this is apparently a challenge you could be dealing with out of this person going forward, and be ready to navigate it gracefully if you can't wiggle out of it.

What do you mean it is hailing this hard by the Art Museum?

Listen, as any good Satanist will tell you, when you hail, you want it to be somewhere fun 'n' fancy.

Wishing you a fruitful journey out into the open!

Solidarity, that was an incredible set!

Two random people at Outdoor Days stopped to tell me they loved my shirt. Another dude bumped into me walking by as I was jamming out to Death Cab and we exchanged almost Canadian levels of pleasantry.

All delightful moments that made me go "yep... I like it here."

While I agree wholeheartedly, I would also like to register my confidence that Death Cab's Friday night performance will be a lit good time, as the modern kids are wont to say.

Edit:

Narrator:

It was a lit good time.