Today's guitar-buying public is faced with its share of disheartening economic facts, not the least of which is the continuously rising cost of new American-made instruments. Moreover, while such new instruments have risen in price in relation to the rising cost of everything else (more or less), the cost of used instruments from the "vintage" days of rock 'n' roll has gone out of sight. The owner of a 50's model Les Paul Sunburst can demand and get anywhere from $3500 to $5000 for the instrument. Of course Sunbursts have been a high-dollar item since the Woodstock days, but right here in 1979, such marginally collectable items as pre-1966 Fender Stratocasters with rosewood necks are going for as much as $750.

So where does that leave the guitarist (note that I said guitarist— not the parlor-picker with enough cash flow from a day gig to buy up every good guitar in town!) who needs a good instrument? Combine this price crunch with the fact that a full-time musician is considered a bad credit risk at the bank, and you have the economic basis for punk rock. No wonder Elvis Costello plays an old Fender Jazzmaster—it's probably all he could afford to buy!

Seriously, it is hard to come up with a decent instrument for under five or six hundred bucks. Sure, there are still a few mythical guitars floating around in attics, pawn shops and utility rooms, but there are also untold hordes of crazed collectors in pursuit of those lost icons. Most musicians don't have the time or the desire to go running around like John Wayne in Hatari to track down the White Rhino in Guitar Jungleland.

However, there is one glaring exception to the recent trend in guitar manufacturing and guitar prices. Vintage guitar freaks will scoff at it, music store dealers who don't sell it will tell you all its faults, but the fact is: The Peavey T-60 electric guitar is the best buy on the matkettoday. Period.

Now before you recoil in disgust and throw this magazine out the window, listen to this: The Peavey T-60 is a solid body instrument with a maple neck, two humbucking pickups arid more versatile electronics than either a new Fender (Strat) or Gibson (Les Paul), and the T-60 with a flight case included costs $375 list price!

But even though that price is roughly half of what a new Les Paul Standard sells for at list price, many guitarists still wonder whether a Pea vey guitar is really any good. Sure, the price is low, but how can something so cheap possibly be any good? Well, even after seeing the Peavey factory from the inside, it is still beyond me how they can sell the guitar at that price, but there is no doubt in my mind as to the quality of the instrument.

At first glance, the T-60 does not look very impressive. The laminated ash body has a clear satin finish and the maple neck is protected by a coat of clear lacquer—no fancy paint job to drive up the cost of the guitar.

The neck itself, with its 21 frets and tuning gears all inlined on one side of the headstock, looks vaguely like a Fender neck. However, the Peavey neck is made by a computer-controlled machine, and the frets are installed by machine, so there is no variation from unit to unit—each

neck is exactly the same. The neck feels thin and wide to the touch, and there is ample string spacing on the fretboard for playing in the rock idiom; i.e., fast as possible with a maximum number of bent strings.

The frets in the T-60 are made of an 18% nickel-silver alloy, an extremely hard material that won't wear out as fast as conventional frets. The tuning machines have a ratio of 12:1, and are sealed so as to resist moisture and debris. The truss-rod is adjustable at the headstock.

The bridge on the T-60 is made of die-cast metal which is plated first with a copper base plating, then with nickel and finally with chrome. The bridge is both durable and beautiful, and each string saddle is individually adjustable for both the height and intonation of a particular string.

Ah, but what about the pickups and the wiring harness? Remember what I said earlier about the T-60 having better electronics than other guitars; well, here's the reason why.

First of all, the T-60 has two humbucking pickups, which we all know are desirable due to their resistance to hum. On the other hand, a lot of players prefer the brighter edge of a single-coil pickup, even though they have lower output and more inherent noise than a humbucker. In recent years, it has become fashionable to install dual-coil humbuckers which act as single-coil pickups when the appropriate switch or pull-pot is activated. The T-60 offers both humbucking and single coil operation of the pickups in a new and unique way: Simply by backing off on either of the tone controls from full-on 10 to around 7, the pickup (s) become single-coil!

Most guitars with two pickups have a three-way toggle switch that activates either or both pickups. Les Paul users know that when the toggle switch is in the middle position and both pickups are on, both volume controls have to be turned up before the guitar will make any sound. On the T-60 that is not the case. Because the guitar is grounded differently than other guitars, both volume controls work independently of each other. Therefore, the guitar will produce a signal when the toggle switch is in the middle position and only one of the volume controls is turned Up. This simplifies the operation of the instrument and at the same time opens up some new possibilities to the player who likes to control his volume with the little finger of his picking hand while playing.

Finally, there is a phase reversal switch on the Peavey T-60. This switch, when combined with the single-coil mode of the pick-ups, will produce the famous "out-of-phase-Strat" sound that many guitarists use for soloing.

So there you have it—the lowdown on the Peavey T-60. There is a bass guitar of the same nature also available—the T-40. It doesn't, cost much, either. Go to a music store and play one. You'll see.

OBERHEIM OB-X

Talk about extremes— here we gofrom a guitar that costs less than some three-piece disco suits to a polyphonic synthesizer that costs more than some new cars! But even though the new OB-X from Oberheim Electronics costs more than what's sitting in your driveway, the OB-X is the Cadillac of synthesizers, with performance capabilities and features worthy of a classic coupe.

When synthesizers really became affordable and practical some 10-odd years ago (at roughly the same time that transistor circuitry came into its own), it was a giant leap for keyboard players. No longer prohibited from owning a synthesizer because of the enormous cost of early experimental units, keyboard players quickly embraced the new instruments and began making...well, music among other things.

Early synthos were monophonic units; that is, they were capable of playing only one note at a time. Naturally, the cry went up for synthesizers that could be played polyphonically—in more or less standard keyboard fashion—without cramping a keyboardist's already developed style. Just as naturally, manufacturers scrambled to produce such a synthesizer, and as the demands being made by keyboard musicians became heavier, the technology got heavier. Today we stand on the brink of something really heavy: microprocessor-controlled synthesizers. Or, expressed another way: computers with keyboards attached.

One of the most obvious problems with early-model synthesizers was that in order to change from one sound to another, the user had to "re-pate h" the synthesizer. This was the case with the early models, and it severely limited what a synthesizer could do in a live performance situation. 1 mean, nobody wants to go out for popcorn in the middle of an ELP concert while Emerson dawdles with a bunch of wires and knobs! It's true that one can alter the sound of something like a Minimoog or an Arp Odyssey with relative ease, and it has been done in concert often enough, but the lowly human who is programming the synthesizer can only move so fast, and he can only remember so much—he is limited, alas, by his own frail humanity.

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The computer suffers from no such frailities. Like the Hulk, Wonder Woman and the 6 Mil Man, the computer has powers beyond those of humans.

Microprocessor technology enables the OB-X to store up to 32 (thirty-two!) different programs (sound sources, control functions and modifications) at one time. Any one of these sounds can be brought to the keyboard by pressing two buttons in the programmer bank. The desired sound can then be manually modified during the actual playing or before playing. The desired sound, should it become undesirable, can be erased entirely and a new program can be manually written in its place. Or—and here's the real ass-kicker—the entire memory bank of 32 sounds can be "dumped" onto a standard cassette tape and stored in a "library" until the user wants to recall those sounds. Thirty-two more programs can then be written into the programmer bank of the OB-X and stored on a cassette in the same way—and on and on until every possibility is exhausted. (My guess is that the musician would get tired of trying to find new sound long before all the possibilities were exhausted!)

What this means is that the musician can go on stage with an arsenal of sounds at his fingertips. No more tedious patching or adjusting need be done during performance. In fact, the OB-X is so convenience-oriented that all one has to do to get in tune is press a button!

Another feature of the OB-X that was obviously designed with the bozo in mind is the Pitch Bend lever. On many synthesizers, the pitch bending control was open-ended—crank the knob up and away she goes—with little or no way to get back in tune with the rest of the band other than relying on the lowly and frail human ear. The OB-X lever is designed to bend to a fixed pitch (either a whole step or an octave above or below the keyboard note) and return to standard pitch. This amounts to no less than a godsend for those who like to stay in tune or listen to music that is in tune.

There are many other features on the OB-X, but they are mostly things as mundane as oscillators, filters and waveforms. Anyone familiar with synthesizer language would have no real trouble finding his way around the control panel, which has two oscillators, LFO section, filter section, portamento, loudness envelope and filter envelope. The OB-X can be purchased with either four, six, or eight voices. The four-voice unit retails for only $4995.

That may seem like a lot of money for an instrument, but when you consider that the OB-X can faithfully reproduce the sound of an organ, a clavinet, and electric piano, a string section, a brass section and infinitely much more, the cost does not seem so high. If you add up what it would cost you to buy one of each kind of keyboard just mentioned, you will find that you can spend $5000 on keyboards and barely fill up the back seat of your car!

All cost considerations aside, there is still a debate as to what is the more aesthetically pleasing—the sight and sound of a Hammond B-3 with a Leslie cabinet, or a synthesizer that can make the same sound. Likewise, there is debate over whether synthesizers make "real" music, or merely act as poor electronic substitutes for conventional instruments.

I don't expect to settle the debate with a couple of sentences, but here's my two cents' worth: It was us humans who made all the instruments, synthesizers included. The synthesizer is capable of making a tremendous contribution to our already vast treasure of good music, but only if the user of the synthesizer understands the tremendous, power that has been placed in his hands. No amount of electronic wizardry is going to replace the years of practice and training that makes good music or good musicians (I hope!).