"Aweary of this Great World" - Guitars

I love the sound of the trees in the breeze. 

If the forest is so clearly musical, 

why can’t it play the guitar while I sing Nirvana covers?

Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not FOR SALE

Hey everyone, welcome back to another session of The Art of Caesura!

I hope you’ve all had a good week and are hanging up the shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day next Thursday! I’m heading to Rome in the morning for a few days which I’m super-excited about, but don’t worry I’ll be back in time for next week’s entry!

This week I wanted to talk about another hobby of mine: we’ve been looking at miniatures, drinking some beer, and how about adding some guitar to the mix?

Just to whet your appetite:

Now, today I want to introduce you to two of my pals and the stories behind them: Portia and Vlad.

My parents bought Portia for me when I graduated from my undergrad. Her name came about because, from the body shape she’s clearly female, and with the Florentine cut (the awesome sharp cutaway) I needed an Italian name. I’m a bit of a Shakespeare nut and so I was thinking of strong, Italian women from Shakespeare’s plays and settled on Portia from The Merchant of Venice. Whenever I introduce her to people, they think it’s Porsche, but you guys know the truth!

Portia is an Epiphone PR-5E, she’s an electric-acoustic with a stunning sunburst spruce top and mahogany body with a rosewood fingerboard. She’s got a body that turns heads, not only for the Florentine cut but also because the body of the guitar is narrower than a lot of dreadnaughts so she sits closer to your body. In order to compensate, so that there’s still enough area inside for the sound to resonate nicely, the back end is bowled out bigger than usual. And the tone is lovely.

I play a lot of different styles of music, but recently with Portia I’ve been playing more folky stuff: The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Sarah Harmer…

But now the main event (sorry Portia) I want to introduce you to Portia’s big brother: VLAD!

Vlad has been with me almost from the beginning of my guitar-playing days. I learned to play guitar when I was 14 on my mum’s old Goya (with brütal sky-high action that killed me at the time, but in retrospect was great for learning guitar) taking guitar lessons for about a year and a half. In that time, I borrowed my uncle’s beautiful candy apple red American-madeFender Strat. I worshipped that guitar, but because it wasn’t mine I was a little too precious with it and was almost scared to use it properly in case I chipped the finish or something. I inherited another uncle’s crappy Kyoto (a Japanese-made acoustic) which became “The Beater”. Its action was refreshingly (fret-buzzingly) low and it was already beat up when he gave it to me (he’d got it when he went to a friend’s wedding in Japan – they had, like a 25-course meal or something, and after dinner, as a wedding present, the restaurant gave the bride and groom this guitar, but neither of them played so they gave it to my uncle) so that was the guitar that joined me on night-time walks, camping trips and beach bon-fires.

I’m afraid Goya and The Beater are at my parents’ house in Canada, so I can’t show you pictures.

After playing my uncle’s strat for a summer (demonstrating to my parents that I was dedicated to this guitar thing) I saved up all the money that I’d earned working my first full-time summer job at a grocery store, went to Long & McQuade and first clapped eyes on Vlad.

It was love at first sight. Gibson had just released their Voodoo Series a month or two before: these are mega-guitars. Vlad is an SG with the wicked devil horns, he has a swamp ash body (actually!) that is stained black and then the wood grain is rubbed with red filler so you can actually see the red wood grain leering out from the black. I love that. The ebony fretboard has no fret markings except for a red pearl voodoo skull at the fifth fret. And the juju humbuckers are mismatched black and red. Awesome. On top of all that he came in an imitation python-skin case. My God, he’s perfect. And man, does he growl!

My fiancé often jokes that if the house was burning she worries that I’d grab him first instead of her!

 

Wow, that was fun to talk about, I better restrain myself or I’ll go on all day! I hope it wasn’t a boring stroll down memory lane for you guys. Let us know about your instruments – the love, the hate, the origin stories!

Until next time folks, thanks for tuning into The Art of Caesura.

Listening: Parlez-Vous Francais – Art vs. Science

Reading: 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Vern

Drinking: Nothing! I’ve been working nights, which aren’t too conducive to a jar!

Gaming: Wolfenstein: The New Order

Next Week: 
Some of the bands I've been using these beautiful instruments with...