The Magic Guitar

I have had the chance to play and own a bunch of good guitars and basses...for several decades I just had one acoustic guitar (a little Gibson) and a Fender Jazz Bass, and that was it. But in the last few years I've gotten the bug, and have created a little collection of nice instruments that I use in the studio and out at gigs. Some come and then go, and others are keepers, but I learn something from each one, even if what I learn is that I don't play that particular instrument.

I had that experience recently with a little jazz guitar I bought on ebay. It was a Jay Turser copy of a Gibson 175, and I was excited to get it. I've been getting into the primal stages of chord melody guitar (in another 20 years I might start getting good) and I thought this was the ticket. But for some reason, this just wasn't the guitar that was working for me. Didn't sound right, didn't feel right, although it was a very beautiful and well-made guitar. Dang, I thought, back to Ebay for you I guess.

But as luck would have it, my friend Danny Pratt had been looking around for a nice hollowbody, and when he called me up to play a gig I mentioned the Turser. He offered me a trade for a Tex-Mex Stratocaster, and since it had a whammy bar, and I needed a guitar with one for a studio track I was doing, I said OK. I had never thought I'd want a Strat, I'd always thought of them as kind of sterile in my hands, although I've seen people pull amazing music from them (Hendrix, Clapton and Michael Katon, amongst many others). But he played the Turser at the gig, and he sounded so good on it and seemed so happy, I figured it was cool, if I had to I'd just sell the Strat later.

But then I sat down with it, and time evaporated completely, and when I came to myself I was still playing and it was 3 hours later! Always the sign of a very special axe. Just forget whatever I said before about Strats, this one has made me re-examine my paradigm! It plays like a dream and just sounds beautiful, I'm playing it through an old Epiphone amp and I'm just amazed with the tone. I just used it on a new tune last night in the studio, thinking I was just goofing around, but somehow having that guitar in my hands created something magic. That's a keeper track! I found myself playing melodic phrases I hadn't known I could and might never even have thought of before, there's just something about it. A Magic Guitar!! Amazing.