It’s a 1981 Guild D-25M Dreadnought with a masterfully installed piezo pickup. Cherry-mahogany finish that has darkened beautifully over the past 23 years. It’s a solid top with an arched back, and I would rate it at just below mint condition.
I was shopping around toying with the idea of a new Larrivee when the guy at the store recommended I try this older guitar that had been sitting in the back a while. When he opened the case, I knew it was meant to be mine. It’s that 70’s singer-songwriter tone - REALLY rich, fairly bassy but really well rounded, and man does it project!
I was looking for a new bluegrass guitar (read: bright, cutting tone for flatpicking), and wound up with the exact opposite, but I couldn’t be happier.
Oh yeah - it was pretty much free, too, with a store credit one of my clients hooked me up with (and selling one of my lesser guitars - a Takamine that wasn’t seeing much action at all). Net cost to me: $37. I’m estimating true bluebook value on the thing at somewhere between $500 and $750.
I might go play out with it tonight.
::dances the Dance of Joy ::
Tell about new guitars/instruments/musical toys you’ve bought recently.
Last thing I bought is probably my RODE NT1 mic and Behringer tube mic preamp… But it’s been a couple of months.
I have one bass, one guitar, mpc2000 (sampler sequencer), multitrackrecorder, effects, synths (pk7 which is an emu proteus keyboard version and electribe ea-1)… that’s about it.
I’m up to 5 guitars now myself. I’ve still got my eye on a few more. . .
It sure does feel good to get a great deal doesn’t it? The last one I bought turned out to be a really good deal, but not in the way I exactly expected. I stumbled across the Oscar Scmidt OE30 online a while back, which is bascially a Gibson E335 knockoff. It tends to sell for very cheap to start with, and I saw a ‘scratch and dent’ for sale even cheaper.
Now, I had been kinda wanting a decent hollow-body electric for a while but hadn’t scraped up the cash. When I saw the OE30, I thought I would just take a gamble on it. I mean, for that little money I didn’t expect much. But it would be something I could fool around with and take places without worry. I read some reviews that gave it pretty good marks overall too. Not much to lose, in other words.
When the guitar arrived, it turned out the cosmetic damage was totally insignificant. It was just a slight crack in the surface finish on the top edge of the back. The kind of thing that most guitars with a painted or laquered finish develop over time just stitting around. It wasn’t even visible when holding the guitar. So I was pleased with that right away, and then I started playing it! It played great. Easy action, comfortable neck, nice acoustic tone. And to top it off, it sounds really good plugged in. And when I say this, I don’t mean that it “sounds good for the money”. It just plays and sounds good period.
So I bought this guitar sight-unseen (something I would normally never do) just because it was so cheap and it turned out to be a great guitar. I’ve had it for a couple of months now and I’m still really happy with it. I don’t know if I just got a particularly good example or not. But I’d definitely recommend one to anybody looking for an inexpensive guitar of that style.
We’re up to 5 instruments - piano, Hammond organ (not a B3 ), Stratocaster, Kustom bass and Yamaha acoustic. Yesterday, my newest toy arrived. It’s a Rolls GCi404 Audio Computer Interface. It fits in a drive bay, and has mixable inputs for XLR mic (with phantom power and ducking), instrument, RCA line, 1/8" TRS line and phono with ground and RIAA preamp. It’s powered by a spare floppy disk drive connector, and has 4-pin header output to your sound card, and a 4-pin header input for your CD drive, whose spot on the sound card it has just taken up. There are also RCA and 1/8" outputs on the back that are going unused. It’s going to be way handy! No more patch cords and adapters! And it cost less than $100!
I play mostly electric bass these days, and I go back and forth between wanting a huge stable of basses, and wanting only one or two perfect ones. I like the streamlined simplicity of owning just one or two, especially since I’m not a professional musician. But it’s true that there’s really no instrument that does all styles of music perfectly. And it’s also true that sometimes, you just want another instrument, even if you don’t need it.
My recent purchase: after playing exclusively fretless basses for several years, I finally broke down and bought a bass with speed bumps. Recently I’ve been playing with a small group that does mostly classic rock stuff, and while I still insist that a fretless bass can fit well in any style of music, there are songs that just sound a little better with the fretted. I’m having fun with it, though it weighs a ton. It looks and sounds remarkably like a Warwick Thumb bass, but it’s a knock-off. I don’t really approve of such products, but I live in one of the knock-off capitals of the world, and this one cost one tenth what a real Thumb would cost. (I’ve heard rumors that Warwick “borrowed” the design from someone else, so that helps me rationalize it a bit.)
So now I’m at four fretless basses (one back home in my parents’ spare room), and one fretted. A few assorted percussion, wind, and guitar-type instruments. Still a pretty modest collection.
), Stratocaster, Kustom bass and Yamaha acoustic. Yesterday, my newest toy arrived. It’s a Rolls GCi404 Audio Computer Interface. It fits in a drive bay, and has mixable inputs for XLR mic (with phantom power and ducking), instrument, RCA line, 1/8" TRS line and phono with ground and RIAA preamp. It’s powered by a spare floppy disk drive connector, and has 4-pin header output to your sound card, and a 4-pin header input for your CD drive, whose spot on the sound card it has just taken up. There are also RCA and 1/8" outputs on the back that are going unused. It’s going to be way handy! No more patch cords and adapters! And it cost less than $100!