A cool thing about being me is that people bring over really cool guitars for me to play. The other day, my friend Jerry stopped by with a "vintage" Ibanez ICEMAN with an 8-string neck. First of all, can something from the seventies be considered "vintage?" Second, OMG WTF how have I missed this guitar? I played a "Paul Stanley" Iceman years ago and it was very nice but this guitar has double-course first and second strings with two extra tuners sticking out the back. How cool is that?
If you know me at all, you know I play the 12-string pretty much exclusively, so I'm a fan of the double-course strings.
Normally with these guitars, you tune both sets of strings in unison like you would on the first and second strings of a 12-string.
There is an old rock-and-roll Rickenbacker trick of micro-tuning one just a little out. It's sort of like tuning your 6th pair on a 12-string in thirds. but not. It isn't a third, it isn't even a half step, what it is, is one or two lights on your tuner. That's what we did here. I tuned as normal and then, using the electronic tuner built in to my amp, I dropped the high string of each pair one light short of in-tune. You can do this by ear and, if you get it right, you will hear the wave as the two notes waver in and out of tune. It is sort of an organic Chorus effect. You know that button on your mixer that says Chorus this is what it does. Essentially when two strings are "tuned the same" there is microtones that we can't really hear or rather we all hear differently. The effect of two strings playing the same note is the slight wavering between in and out of tune, That is what makes the 12-string sound so full and rich. On the electric, depending on how "out" you make the pair and how much crunch you add, you can go from beautiful to evil with an eighth of a turn on the tuning machine and get sounds you'll have trouble finding on your chorus box.
I like to play electric now and then, so we plugged this thing in to see what it can do. It can do just fine, thank you very much. I asked Ric to pick a letter from A to G and he picked F, we started playing, I asked him to pick another he picked B, Perfect, Mike and I started with F and Bb and off we went. This is the first thing I tried on the Iceman and I enjoyed it very much. I'm a little rusty myself.
So anyway, here's something you don't see every day
Dan Grigor on an 8-string Ibanez Iceman guitar. I'm jacked into a Behringer Vtone GMX212 through my trusty/rusty ol'skool Danelectro Fuzztone.
Enjoy!
f you ever get a chance to play one of these guitars you won't be disappointed. If you find one for sale. send them my way.
There is something special about the sound of two strings ringing the same note. It's physics at work. I like that, and it has just the right amount of chaos to make it sound so good.