My double bass gets a mic, the pickup sound I just hate
While I wouldn't say I hate the pick up sound, I'm with you on that one. I used to record double bass with the pick up and the pick up picked up every slight brush of cable, foot movement and anything. Once I got back to DB, I didn't want to go that route. I would if I played it live but recording it, it's mics all the way. I've actually worked out how to get a pretty good sound.
"NO LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER!"
Ha ha, Vader never actually says that. I used that line in one of my songs, "Luke, I am your father" but having watched the film so many times, it's noteworthy he never calls his name.
But I'm not changing the lyric !!
My 6 strings have never had a drop D in their lives and I could try alternate tunings, but I won't
The first time I experimented with a drop D, I absolutely loved what it did to the sound of chords....but it absolutely altered how the melody worked with the music and I had to rejig bits of it.
But I do like alternate tunings. Double drop D is even better than drop D. There are other ones that I don't even know what they're called and some of them are awful but some of them are gorgeous. Besides, along with capos and varispeeding, they make me sound like a near genius !
Well, Keith Richards used an acoustic for the main guitar on Street Fightin' Man, so there's that...
He was into that thing at the time, record the guitar onto a cassette recorder without a limiter so it was overdriven, then send it to a small extension speaker and put a mic in front of that and then record it onto an 8 track. It made this great electricky sound but with an acoustic guitar. Unfortunately for him, Philips stopped making the cassettes
without limiters because they would overdrive and distort and the engineers at Philips were into pristine sound. So the acoustic guitar sounds on songs like "Street fightin' man," "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Gimme Shelter" are unique, never to be reproduced sounds.
I also wear the finger picks backwards
I think I do too. The way I wear the finger pick just looks wrong. Because I sometimes use them for bass, if I want that clicky sound, putting them on the right way would make them get caught under the string whereas backwards is just like my fingerpads.
My electric guitars have the tremolo arms (some folk call them "whammy bars"); but I have never seen an acoustic guitar with one
There's YouTube video I saw with one, last year I think. But there's an easier way to tremolo an acoustic ~ play it and send the mic into an amp with a tremolo setting and mic that. I've done that and it sounds neat.
I have 5 and 6 string basses and I would never play a chord on them
Unless I was specifically going for the Lemmy sound or one of those cute fretless chord sounds, I wouldn't either. In saying that though, I would play chords on bass to act as a bolster to heavy guitar chording. I have used the bass as a lead guitar type guitar before and it sounded great ! But I'm crap at bass chords.
So in that 1966~69 period there were some bands like the Beatles and the Pretty Things and others that got some really interesting guitar sounds that sounded sort of electric but weren't. In a parallel development, Keith Richards was finding that one could subvert the sound of an acoustic towards a more electric sound, as was discussed earlier.
