The Joy of Axe

I've been playing guitar for a long time, at least 30 years, and while I'm not the best by any stretch of the imagination, I'm good enough to play in public each week at church. I started out with a generic "Student guitar" - it had 6 strings and functioned mostly like a guitar was supposed to, but it didn't sound particularly good, nor was it the easiest to play. The strings were about 1/4 inch above the fretboard at the bottom, and it sounded like it was made of cardboard. Years later, I was playing music with my friend Phil, and he loaned me his dad's old Epiphone acoustic guitar. It sounded better (with the right strings) and was a little easier to play, but since it had been used for slide guitar work, the strings were still fairly high. Then I bought a used electric - small, single humbucker - that had an adjustable bridge. That made it a little easier to drop the strings more, but the neck wasn't exactly the best. I also got a used Applause acoustic electric which had a better quality neck, but had annoyances of it's own.

Time passed, and I picked up some NEW guitars, a pair of Danelectro guitars. Guitar magazine had called the new Danelectro line the best cheap guitar you could get, so at some local shops I picked up a black and white DC3 and a black Convertible. I also traded the little white electric guitar and some cash to the neighbor for his Ibanez RG170. I worked with those 4 guitars for a while, and it came down to the fact that I played the Ibanez the most, the Applause the least, and the Danelectros somewhere between. So I sold the Applause at a rummage sale, and the Danelctros on eBay (I paid $200 for one, and $225 for the other - they sold as a set for $500! I guess they were a wise investment) I took that money, and bought an Ibanez Talman TCY20 and an Ibanez GSR200 bass guitar (I'd wanted a bass guitar to begin with, but mom got me a guitar instead). I was pretty happy with this arrangement - I play electric guitar Sunday mornings, bass guitar Sunday nights, and had the acoustic electric at home.

Then I got a guitar synthesizer.

The Roland GR1 guitar synth isn't a synthesized guitar, but rather, a synthesizer you play with a guitar (instead of a keyboard). It uses a special pickup that sends a signal for each individual string to the synthesizer, where it detects the pitch of the string and sounds the corresponding note on the synth. It works great, and when our keyboard player moved to Indiana, there was no one to take his place - except me. The only drawback is the pickup - you have to stick it (and the largish control box) to your guitar. I did, it worked great, but was a bit clunky. Then one day, I was looking through a Musicians Friend catalog, and I saw a listing for a Godin xtSA guitar for under $1000. It had the same pickup arrangement as my Ibanez (which I liked a lot), as well as acoustic piezo pickups in the bridge (which I had been seriously considering adding to the Ibanez). The real kicker was the built-in Roland compatible interface (which meant no more box stuck on the front of the guitar). One income tax refund later, I am the proud owner of a transparent red finished xtSA. It's almost as pretty as my curly maple finished Talman, and sounds better than anything I've yet owned. In the past I always bought the best guitar I could get with a limited amount of money.

This time I bought the best guitar for what I wanted to do. I really should have done that a long time ago...