Gibson Melody Maker SG: How To Play Guitar With Pelvic Thrusts
In this video, Charlie Pickett shows us the Gibson Melody Maker SG, one of his many guitars and one that hit the road with him during the wilder days of the mid-1980s. Charlie talks about the guitar a little bit before introducing us to some interesting techniques he used to play this guitar.
Some of these techniques are no longer legal in all 50 states, so be sure to check state and local laws while on tour before executing. If you're under 18 years old, you probably shouldn't watch this video.
CHARLIE PICKETT: I think -- Now, again, I'm not historic. Everyone I know has called this a Melody Maker because of the thin...
PATRICK OGLE: The head.
CHARLIE PICKETT: ...headstock, and I've seen a lot of stores that called this body style a Melody Maker. It's thinner than an SG, and they typically will come with a single coil in here. I bought this used in around '70 -- No, I'm sorry -- used in around '82. It's a pretty old guitar. Again, I don't want to speculate because I'm probably wrong but I'm guessing it's a '67, '68, '66. I switched out the tuners, but this pickup was already in it when I got it.
PATRICK OGLE: It's a dual coil.
CHARLIE PICKETT: Yeah, it's a dual coil, probably a 480. Also, this bridge has been switched out because I just wanted something a little more solid. But the interesting part about this particular guitar, now this one went around with me -- this was on tour with me from '88, '83 to '88. This particular guitar was the best. It was so much fun. You know, I played two tunings so I play regular tuning and I play a slide, and I use this one on slide a lot, but this screw back here was loose and this one had popped out. This is just all by accident so what eventually ended up happening was that the pickup would rock in here, and as you tilted the guitar this way, the pickup will come up and hit the E string, but it would always bounce back just a little bit so it would hit the E string and not lay on it, so it would actually strike the E string so you can get an extra strike out of the guitar. What I would learn to do [LAUGHING] -- Hey look, it's punk rock time and it's the '80s -- is I learned to either hit it with the back of my hand to make the pickup come out and hit the E string, so I was not hitting it with the right hand and getting a lot of showmanship stuff out of it but you can also bump it with your pelvis and do sort of the Jimi Hendrix thing, go rocking across the stage humping the guitar with your hand loose and it would come out, and every time you humped it, it would hit the E string and it would go [IMITATING THE RHYTHMIC SOUND OF HIS UNIQUE GIBSON MELODY MAKER TECHNIQUE], and anyway it was a grand guitar to have, a great amount of fun. But anyway, like I said, this guitar has no value except sentimental value and that's a good sounding guitar but it also has a spongy neck at this point. It's just, you know, if you're playing straight guitar on it, you just, you know, more, just holding the neck changes the tuning practically, so I just play slide on it occasionally and put it away.





Id give my left nut for one
Id give my left nut for one of those.
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