Guitars

MY GUITARS

Rickenbacker 330	This is my Rickenbacker 330. I got it a couple of years ago when I was deciding what to consider as my main electric guitar. We have a Mexican Fender Strat and it's OK but a little wimpy, next I thought about getting a Les-Paul bet the body is too tiny. I have a semi-acoustic Gibson copy so I was considering getting something like an Epiphone Casino but I love the Beatles and a lot of their early sound comes from Rickenbacker guitars. The odious choice would therefore be the tri-pickup 325 but that was a little out of my budget. I must confess the 330 was not cheap and I could have got two good guitars for the same price, however I love the looks of this and it sounds great through my Vox AC-25 amplifier. I still use my semi-acoustic through the Vox if I want natural overdrive at low volumes because the pickups have a little more power than the 330 but for the most part the Rickenbacker has become the mainstay of my sound. I have a Boss Acoustic Simulator pedal which I sometimes use with the Rickenbacker because the action is so light I can play more difficult stuff on this than my twelve string guitar.
Yamaha APX-4-12	This is my Yamaha APX-4-12A, part of Yamaha's very successful APX family of guitars. It has a Piezo electric pickup so it can be plugged into an amplifier or P.A. system. There are volume, bass and treble sliders on the top as well as a sweepable midrange equalizer to help reduce feedback. I have a cheap round-back Electro-acoustic six string guitar which was starting to loose its tune because the intonation was out due to the neck warping. I considered another six string but I have never owned a twelve string guitar before and the price was reasonable so how could I resist ? The reason I wanted an Electro-acoustic twelve string was mainly to ease recording problems. I now have tonal control and I can still mike up the guitar and mix the two sounds to my liking now. I have changed my approach to playing acoustic guitars a lot since I got the Yamaha, I used to mainly strum in the background on most of my songs because that was the was I had composed them. Now I spend a lot more time picking the strings and writing song that way so the songs are evolving at the same time.
David Pagett Š1999 T.D.F. micro-visions	This is a very cheep Encore bass guitar. It has one, split pickup and simple volume and tone controls. I bought this second-hand on an impulse one day from a junk shop in Erdington near Birmingham. I can remember walking into the shop after seeing the guitar in the window. I parked out of site to make it look as though I had not stopped just for the guitar. I asked to try the bass on display and the assistant dually obliged. Now I must stress that my knowledge concerning bass guitars was, and still is, very limited and I had never seen a split pickup before. So I assumed that it was actually two pickups with independent volume controls. I complained to the lady in the shop that the electric's were faulty and if she could offer me a reduction on the asking price which she did. She obviously knew even less than I did about bass guitars and the owner was out (who had assured her the guitar was working fine). Well anyway this guitar does not get used that often but it is always nice to have the option of a real bass guitar as opposed to a keyboard sound, you just can't get the same feeling with a synthesizer.