Andy Timmons - Cry for You, Strawberry Fields Forever, & Headed for the Ditch
Added 2025-07-06 15:00:09 +0000 UTCCollege educated, lives in McKinney, Texas and plays musically and in different styles? This was a fun dive!
Comments
I need to see if I can run into him sometime since he’s local. It would be really cool to have an opportunity to see him play live! …and thank you for all the knowledge! It’s interesting to read the history and builds of the guitars because I have very limited knowledge.
NittPicc
2025-07-07 02:47:25 +0000 UTCOh no! I wouldn’t say it’s ordinary. Even listening to the cover I heard in that movie I was thrown off because it wasn’t the usual Beatles songs I had heard from their early era. Sorry if I said it that way in this video! 😅
NittPicc
2025-07-07 02:44:20 +0000 UTCI don't think I'd refer to Strawberry Fields Forever as an "ordinary" Beatles song. Maybe give the original a listen some day...
Glenner7
2025-07-07 02:42:01 +0000 UTCAndy still lives in McKinney and occasionally plays small local gigs sitting in with bands or playing solo at short notice as well as more formal shows (often for album releases) and masterclass type clinics at The Guitar Sanctuary (awesome looking local music store/venue you might not be familiar with, looks like the kinda place I'd love to visit one day). Speaking of Ibanez, in the first two videos Andy is playing his old faithful guitar built for him by the USA custom shop in 1994, between the first and second performance there's probably a good 20yrs of visible wear and tear. They did a very limited run of replica signature models of this guitar in '99 as the AT100; before introducing a regular production model version, the AT100CL in '09, that's been available ever since. He's had several other signature models with them in the intervening years (I have a soft spot for the AT300 from '04-'07 he was playing when I first discovered his music), but all of them have been variations on this type of super-strat guitar design. With the Fender Telecaster, beyond the body shape the pickups and bridge construction are also very different compared to a Stratocaster. For regular Tele models the body is a slab design without the contouring of the Strat, so is slightly less comfortable and has a reputation of being more of a workhorse guitar in terms of its image. The bridge pickup is mounted directly to the metal bridge rather than a pickguard or the guitar body itself and has a lot of 'spank' to the sound, some examples can have an almost 'ice pick' level of treble response depending on the amp settings. Whereas the neck pickup is much more mellow sounding and has a following amongst jazz guitarists who don't want to play hollow body guitars. Then depending on the year & model the strings can either go through the body and be anchored in metal retainer ferrules on the back of the body (like with Andy's here) or be top-loaded where they just anchor through holes in the back of the bridge, both approaches affect the sound and immediacy of the note attack in different way. I believe the example Andy is playing in this video is a vintage model from 1968. The foam under the strings behind the nut is to prevent any unintentional open string resonating that might get picked up whilst playing, for live purposes it's normally not too noticeable & just blends into the background, but in the studio when you're wanting a cleaner recording it's more often taken into account (especially in more distorted rock/metal situations). You've actually seen the opposite of this when you saw Rolling Quartz live, in the instrumental band intro part they do at the start of the show before Blaze, Hyunjung strums behind the nut on her blue Suhr briefly mid-twiddle for a flashy squawk effect.
Andrew Hellebrand
2025-07-06 21:37:27 +0000 UTC
