Building a guitar - part one

So - I woke up a few weeks ago with the familiar feeling that drives a man, after exhausting all possible practice strategies, to improve his learning curve by buying a new guitar which will make him a more toneful, faster, neater, sexier guitar player.

Then I went out trying out some guitars.

Quite apart from the fact that most of the stock in your average guitar shop is absolute rubbish, I noticed that all of the ones made from decent bits were priced well over £1500. That doesn't seem too steep for a quality musical instrument, until you realise that (a) the aggregate cost of buying all the high-quality bits needed to make such an instrument from various online shops comes to less than £500 and (b) the work involved in assembling said bits into a guitar is pretty minimal. You'd need a screwdriver and a soldering iron. Maybe a desk to work at. And a few strong cups of tea. What would I be paying the extra grand for? Someone who could tell the difference between good and bad componentry? I'm clearly in the wrong line of work.

So far so good. I had a strategy. But then I got over-excited and bought, not a nice guitar body, but a nice bit of wood, in no way shaped like a guitar. Unless it's Bo Diddley's guitar we're talking about.

So far I have managed to cut up my rectangular bit of ash into roughly the shape I want. Now it's time to cut some holes in it. This could result in great embarrassment on my part, since a hole in the wrong place might kill the whole project.

Looking on the bright side, I still have all my fingers.

A new monster guitarist to listen to!

This guy - Rick Peckham - is an absolute beast. And he plays jazz on a telecaster. One more to add to the list! He's managed to get international distribution on his album, which means it's possible to listen to snippets of his 70s-rock-jazz fusion thing here

His website has some interesting, um, deviant pentatonic materials on it as well. Excellent.

I thought I'd lost this forever...

...when my VHS player packed in, and I realized I couldn't find the tape anyway, as it was marked only by a post it note, and stored in a box I can't find in a house I haven't lived in for five years. But the magic of youtube has saved a Tori Amos-shaped bit of my past for me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smJ23yBfm7A

And, as if that wasn't enough, I was THERE for this gig:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFZ3oXCRtIM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibgcR6viAi8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1QQFGixbs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUseTonvkRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqrMzDUyvs4
I remember nearly missing it owing to severe mud-related indolence, and the fact that, even with sensible footwear and an all-body suit made out of heavy-duty bin liners and gaffa tape, it took hours to travel the smallest distances. If you look closely enough at the folks swaying along in the front of the crowd you can see some people I used to know, including Ken the guitarist from Rebellion programmers. Hi Ken!

What is it about music you get into aged between 15 and 20? Nothing you find later on ever means as much.

I'm going to see Tori in London in July. She better live up to the standard she set in 1998... the band is the same; that's a good sign.