Cranberry Sauce

Long one so get comfortable – like John Lennon may have said “I’m very bored” or maybe it was “I buried Paul” or maybe just “cranberry sauce.”

My drummer and Dead fan friend Paul sent me this link to an article about Bob Weir’s early favorite – the Guild Starfire…

Always enjoyed Weir’s voice and playing.  But all of those guys are very talented and good people and very lucky to follow their dreams.  Keeping my fingers crossed for Phil’s bladder cancer.

That guitar is very cool – When looking a guitar pics, I immediately almost always look at the pickups and if I see new ones, I think to myself that I’d like to find a guitar with those pickups.  I care less about the guitar itself, the pickups to me are important.  Not even the play-ability because the limitations can guide or force you in the context of a song to maybe concentrate on lyrics, percussion or bass or whatever.   The pickups.

Nice article about old pickups that are not the standard Fender Gibson ones we all have heard about a zillion times…I have yet to digest this but it looks like a good resource.   Speaking of digestion…I’ll be right back!

Continuing on…

I subscribe to this great free magazine called Tape Op.  Just search for it and give them your address – I think they have lots of sample articles and maybe a few PDF copies to download and check out on their site.  Anyway, they had this cool interview with a guy named Deke Dickerson who is an author, guitarist and records other people.  He seems to be associated with retro-minded musics like rockabilly but also seems very multi-faceted, funny and intelligent.

My memory is a little fuzzy here but perhaps because of this I looked up the EchoSonic which was apparently the first tape echo (within a guitar amp, from what I understand).  This was invented/made by Ray Butts.  I looked him up to find that he also invented a guitar humbucker pre-Gibson that became the Gretsch Filter’Tron.

Gretsch and Guild have forever been associated in my mind as two other G manufacturers who were not Gibson.  So full circle.  Kinda.

Have a swell day!