"I Have Some Ideas"
Published: Fri, 12/15/23
So in a recent exchange, I sent over a picture of a funky sort of Epiphone I've had out in the studio for the past week or two. I rarely play this guitar, and I'm not even sure what model it is, but I've been using it to do some remote recording for another friend, one of the songwriters in my Monday night writers' meeting. It's been rigged out with after-market P-90s, but it's main attraction for me is it's the one guitar I own with a Bigbsy vibrato. Plus it's kind of cool-looking, so when Peter mentioned a new Epiphone Les Paul he'd recently picked up, I had to send over a shot of my Epi in response.
His response was, "That looks fun! Is it old? Knowing you, I'm betting it's like 1970." Which made me stop and think – am I one of those guys with old guitars? I don't consider myself much of a gearhead, nor any kind of collector per se. But while this Bigbsy-equipped axe is probably no older than the early 2000's, upon reflection I realized a fair percentage of my modest stash could qualify at this point as "vintage," from the 1930s National Trojan I bought the first summer I lived in Austin to the 1970s Stratocaster I bought some time in the late '80s, the result of a one-day mission to return home with something that qualified as Strat-like in nature.
But still, that doesn't make me knowledgeable about old gear or make my stash a collection; it's just an accumulation, each instrument acquired to satisfy some particular need at some particular time. So when questions about gear come up, I never think I'll have much to say about it. And yet I have the things I have for a reason, and I do like my gear to work in certain ways, and certainly have opinions when it comes to what makes a guitar work for me, and the way I'm going to be playing it.
So when someone on the Fingerstyle Five forum posted a few days ago looking for advice about getting a new guitar set up for slide, I felt like Will Ferrell in Elf when Zoe Deschanel asks "Where are we going?" I have some ideas. And since this is not the first time I've been asked about this sort of thing, I thought those ideas could make a good Youtube video. So I shot one, and you can find it at the link below:
The Best Setup For Slide Guitar?
The astute reader will have noticed something of a lapse in the newsletter and the Youtube channel of late. Occasionally, I sit down to write something or shoot something and just get this feeling of "Really? Me again?" Turns out even I need the occasional break from hearing what I think about XYZ. It seems to happen about once a year, maybe twice, and when it does, I feel it's best to just pipe down and do something else until an idea worth pursuing comes along. So that's what I've done for the past few weeks, and I stand by my decision. But now I can feel the grey cells starting to whir again, so look for things to be back to the usual weekly racket early in the new year.
More soon,
David
The Fingerstyle Five membership provides over a hundred hours of in-depth, on-demand video lessons for every level of fingerpicker, and hundreds of pages of accurate, downloadable tab. Learn more and sign up at www.fretboardconfidential.com.