guitars and amp
Last summer (2020), when this house was nearly completely re-decorated, we decided to get the guitars off the floor - they were standing in 2 corners of the living room - and hang them on some walls.
The older one, a steel-stringed blues guitar, went up to the red room, and the newer one, a classical Spanish guitar, stayed in the corner downstairs. You can see this in the last 3 photos.
And I decided it might be a good idea to start playing them again. I replaced the strings on both and, because the nut broke on the steel-stringed guitar, I took both of them to the Captain Guitar Lounge in Emmering. The nut was replaced and the actions of both guitars corrected. As the agony level was too high playing the steel strings because my poor fingertips were only used to stroking keys on keyboards, I pretty much only played the Spanish guitar with the nylon strings.
This week my new guitar arrived. And today the amplifier.
I bought my first guitar during my first year in Cambridge, in 1972 or 1973, from Gavin, a good friend from the Magdalene commune, who's now in Yale. I can't remember why he sold it, but I do remember that it cost all of 17 pounds, or around 180 Euros at current prices.
It's called "The Hawk" made by Boosey and Hawkes, probably from the 60s. Over the years I must have played this guitar quite a lot.
I bought my second guitar in July 2005 from Musikrestposten.de which no longer exists. I bought one for my younger daughter, Anne Freytag, the famous Munich author, and decided to get one for myself, because they only cost 140 Euros each. (I wonder which lorry they fell off.)
It's a concert guitar Mod. B - 10 Sapeli from Francisco Bros, Alicante, Spain. I didn't play it much for years but started again last summer, playing every day to get the callouses on my fingertips back. Since then I've been doing all kinds of courses on Guitareo.
I found this YouTube video from Francisco Bros, "a documentary of the artisan construction of Francisco Bros". Very impressive.
As I mentioned, I bought my most recent guitar this week from Muziker and the practice amp to go with it, a Spark 40, from Positive Grid. The amp's not very big: in the last photo it's almost hidden on the left next to the left speaker.
It's a Gibson Les Paul Tribute Satin Iced Tea; it cost a bit more than the other 2 and I'm still getting used to how heavy it is. The Spanish guitar weighs not much over a kilo, the blues guitar just over 2, and the Les Paul around 3 and half. Here one can read: "a rounded maple neck profile and ultra-modern weight relief make the Gibson Les Paul Studio Tribute a pleasure to play". The older ones without "ultra-modern weight relief" weigh about twice as much.
It sounds wonderful. And from next weekend I'll be looking at all the snazzy things the Spark amp with its app can do.
So I've got a lot to do! Not just organising having a house built in Las Breñas …
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