Shalom!
Well, we just had the first Twitch rehearsal of 2011 after a little new year sabbatical. It felt great to have a play, seemed longer than the 18 days since our gig on new years eve. A couple more tunes from the album should be appearing in the set soon and potentially a duelling vocoder break!
The next gig is an acoustic show with just me and Dave. It is at Hepworth village hall which has been putting on quite a lot of folk gigs recently. It is a charity show as well helping out banana farmers from the Caribbean island of St Vincent. It's not even a charity, the money goes directly to them which is fantastic! There is a facebook event here -
As well as myself there is some great acts on that are well worth catching: Stefan Melbourne, Owen Phillips and The Sail Pattern.
I have been busying myself since new year working on the studio and building some baffles for the shiny new Gretsch drum kit I bought before christmas. I have also been trying to learn how to set up guitars which i've been meaning to do for years. This guitar pictured below (Frank or Frankenstein to give him his full name) started life as a Squier Tele back in 1999. Over the years I painted it a variety of different colours and patterns and upgraded the bridge pickup to a piercing Di Marzio Twang King. One day I got bored of the shitty paint job so decided to sand it down and go for a natural finish. However, my arm swiftly got tired of the sanding action so I decided to go for the 'driftwood' look and finished the job with a chisel and a blowtorch. Not exactly a professional finish but certainly unique!
Anyway, for years the guitar had been fitted with flat wound strings and used exclusively for slide work (the bad intonation made any chords sound bad) but Eddie's gift of a very nice 80s left handed ESP strat neck he saw sticking out of a skip gave me the motivation to get the beast in shape and back in action. 12 hours of trial and error sorted out the action/intonation and now with the flatwound strings and a Seymour Duncan Seth Lover in the neck it sounds beautiful.
Having just used it for a two hour rehearsal I am pretty happy with how it's turned out, it is bloody heavy though so I may try and do some more chiseling around the back and try go for a contoured strat feel!
Well, that's enough of that guitar geekery. I went to see Richard Thompson at the weekend with my dad so i'll leave you with a link to a video of him. It's amazing he's not better known, he has to be one of the greatest guitarist the world has ever seen and an amazing songwriter as well!
