Not sure how I never stumbled onto this forum before, but here I am.
I live in Charlottesville, VA, work full time and play (I'm the resident electric guitar player) in the worship band at Christ Community Church. I got my first guitar, a sub-scale Suzuki, for Christmas 1968 when we lived in Taiwan. The first song I ever learned--in a group lesson setting, no less--was Hand Down Your Head Tom Dooley. It was, after all, the Summer of Love.
My main electrics are a Rick Turner Model 1 Lindsay Buckingham (named Gypsy) and a Fender Eric Johnson Strat with the EMG David Gilmour pickups. My pedalboard is pretty much Starship Strymon. (Pedalboards are a G.A.S. sickness all their own.)
My Taylors and their stories:
My first Taylor was a 310, bought at Strings & Things, Memphis, back in 1999 or so. It opened up under my pounding strum too much, so that it became too easily overdriven by me, but a fantastic fingerstyle guitar. I sold it about ten years ago and got a Baden. (I have owned three Badens, but now only have one, an A-Style Cedar on Maple.)
I travel a lot for work, and after many years of traveling with a full size guitar (and having two cased destroyed by airlines), I got a Composite Acoustic travel guitar. It was indestructible, but just didn't fret in tune. So I sold it and bought a GS Mini when they came out. That guitar had a big blonde spot on the fingerboard, so I named him Spot. Spot went all over the country, as well as to Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and, eventually in 2016, to Honduras, from whence his neck had come. There I met a college kid named Carlos, whose huge heart for God and his country really moved me. Carlos now owns Spot. Getting a GS Mini here in the States is no big deal; it is something quite different in a country like Honduras.
Spot was replaced by a lovely Koa GS Mini-e that has amazing figure, both front and back. I love how the warmth of the Koa makes it sound even less like a small guitar. His name is Koabunga. Koabunga got to meet and jam with Spot on last year's trip to Honduras!
Then one day last year I was killing time in a Guitar Center and played an 818e. Boy was that a mistake! I could not get the sound--that big, fat, take-no-prisoners tone out of my head. So I did what any reasonable person would do; I started trolling the listings on Reverb. Lo, and it came to pass that there was a 48 hour discount code that got that 2017 NAMM demo to my door for 55% of regular price. His name is Milkshake, cuz his tone is rich and thick.
As I said, I travel, and guitar stores offer nice places to kill time. At one store I tried an 812ce, and really liked the physical feel, the short scale and the alternate voice. (Forgive me, y'all, but the *14 and *16 tend to sound too midrangey to me.) And so it was that a 2009 GC8 made its way, via Reverb again, into my music room. This guitar, oddly enough, has not called out for a name yet. This one has traveled with me, and I bring it to work most days to play in the gazebo out front. Somehow the gazebo has not been colonized by invaders from Planet Nicotine.
Lastly, I sometimes repair vintage tube amps and build custom amps. Nothing rocks like a box of bottles.
Cheers,
The Reverend of Reverb
The King of Swirl
