Wednesday 12th December '07

Road trip!!!  Now this was a fun day!  Harry, the owner of the old Vox that has been gracing the pages of this unworthy tome for the past few weeks, and myself paid a visit to a guitar collector/writer.  The main motivation was to take all the dimnsions of this vintage Burns Short Scale Jazz Guitar Special.. one of about 50 made..

but, of course we also spent the day talking guitars.. and more importantly, meeting them!

Double necked Stratosphere for starters..

look at the way the pickups are angled but the magnets are straight with the strings.. I love old engineering, something sadly lacking in the modern age where most guitar builders just use the available parts and leave it at that!

a beautiful old jazzer..

and then the first ever Distortocaster..

I cannot believe how well this plays! .. and it's bent through three dimensions!

and then the one and only blue moon guitar.. I've been seeing pics of these two beauties in books since I started getting interested in guitars!

whicj is a very humbling feeling..

though it is good to know that when the feet are attached to the guitar they tend to kick you in the nuts..

Harry playing another Bison.. one of about thirty that Paul has..

a Brian Moore guitar.. a very impressive American luthier.. this is mostly built using composite materials..

except obviously for the top veneer.. very very pretty..

Now.. out of the six of these silhouette guitars built Paul has three of them..

Including the very guitar that started me on the rocky road to being a luthier.  I saw a picture of this in a reference book and knew that I wanted to build guitars for a living..

It is, to my mind, one of the best guitar designs out there..

and of course I have the tattoo to prove my devotion.. though it sometimes gets a bit wierd having another guitar companies logo etched into my flesh.. still, it all helps to remind me why I do this.. good design, great playability and a bit of fun are all the ingredients you need!

All my best,

Ben