The Making of Betty

Behind the Lines with Michael Smith – Drum Media 

February 2010

 

You’ve probably all seen those great double-neck guitars that that seemed to be all the rage in the 70s as played by Jimmy Page and the like. Well, Blue Mountains-based blues and roots sol artist Claude Hay found that the sort of thing he’s doing required something along the double-neck line but couldn’t find it, so he built his own and named it Betty.

Basically, Hay explains, the top half of it is 25½ scale bass guitar, so it’s a guitar size bass and the bottom part is like a baritone guitar. Because they’re different scale lengths I couldnt really get anything readymade and Ive made guitars before since I wanted something sort of custom with all the different specs on it that I like.

 

The body Is an old kitchen benchtop that I had lying around, a nice piece of maple, but I kind of regret it now because it weights a ton! Because of all the looping I do I wanted all the strings on a bass and all the guitar strings as well, and its also kind of an acoustic guitar as well. Ive put an acoustic Piezo LR Baggs bridge with an acoustic preamp built inside as well, so I can switch it from an electric to an acoustic to a bass. I wanted as many sounds and options as possible quickly, on the fly. Though its a solid body electric, you plug the Piezo in and youd be hardpressed to tell it apart from a Yamaha APX live it really does sound like an acoustic.

 

For the electric side of things, I just used Bill Lawrence Stratocaster pickups, and I had an old Japanese bass I never used and pulled the pickups out of that, which are sort of like P-style pickups, just nice and old warm Fender copies so to speak but from the 70s. There was a lot of fiddling to work out all the scale lengths and where the best spot was to put things, because I couldnt find a 25 ½ inch-scale standard-tuning bass on the internet, and I also really had to experiment with string gauges to find the right gauge, but its great. Its all I mostly use now because I can get so many sounds out of it. Stringswise I ended up using 60s and 120s on the bass side, while the baritone electric side is actually quite different. The A string is actually D, and the E string actually has a bass string. So its an octave below that again, so when I do the looping if I stop into a midsection I can sill play a little bass as well. So its very low and unusual tuning and Im getting my head around how to play it!

 

More importantly, Hay not only had to transpose a lot of his old songs in order to play them on Betty but has written his forthcoming album , Deep Fried Satisfied from which his latest single How Can You Live With Yourself is taken. He’ll be launching it al Raval on Saturday March 27.