Leaderboard

It's now one year and seven months since I left my band, route 62. I have found that it was the right thing to do and I haven't regretted it once. One thing I am glad about is that when I left, I kept the real reasons to myself and didn't tell the other guys - after all, we'd had some good times together aswell as the frustrations that led me to leave. When I did leave, Robin in particular was very angry with me, but there were times when he had caused some major upsets and he was aware of that. Robin was our other guitar player. But despite the issues he had caused from time to time (and some of them were very awkward) beneath it all was a good friendship. It was a long time before we were in contact and I used this Christmas as an opportunity to send him an e mail (i'd tried phoning) and wish him all the very best. I received a really nice one back and we're going to meet up for a drink sometime and have a catch up. Shaun, our bass player has been a friend of mine since we were thirteen and we never fell out, he never got upset at me when I left even though he was disappointed and asked me to come back. We've been in constant touch and our friendship is solid. But over all this time, I have hardly picked up a guitar as I had got to the point where I was just sick of it all and needed a really good break. But slowly but surely my desire to play has been creeping back - not to the extent of playing in the band again, or joining another - but to just enjoy the guitar. What I would like to do with some spare time is learn to read music. As some of you may know, I ahve always had a desire for a core range PRS, but the cost of them new has risen so much over the years that I just can't justify almost £4000 for one. However, I've not written off the idea of buying a used one at some point. But to carry on - I've been watching all the you tube reviews of the SE line new models, paritcularly Paul's guitar and the SE DGT. As I had all the day to myself yesterday I decided to explore them and made the twenty three mile drive up to the city of Leeds to Professional Music Technology where they had told me on the phone they had everything in stock. They didn't have the DGT SE, but they did have the core DGT, which they offered me the opportunity to play. I declined the offer because I felt that at £4000 it was not right to play a guitar I had no intention of buying when some one else would be buying it at some point and whoever that person is deserves it to be as new and unplayed as possible. T did however play three SE models - Paul's guitar, the McCarty and custom 24. I was somewhat disappointed after all the hype. They weren't bad guitars and sounded very good - perhaps the fact that the shop had made no attempt to set them up. I'd still like to try the DGT SE, but I am coming to the conclusion that if I do ever buy a PRS, it will have to be a core model and also used. What I did find that I really liked when I played it was the Yamaha Revstar, which sounded and played great, I will definitely be having one of those with P90's at some point. So, I left the shop somewhat underwhelmed with the SE guitars but glad I'd played them. This morning I took my Japanese Tokai Love Rock (think 59 Les Paul) out of it's case for the first time in ages and really enjoyed playing it, the quality is excellent and surpassed the quality of the SE range by quite a distance. I got to thinking that I do have some nice guitars, not all of them in the price bracket of my H555, but none the less good guitars. Oneof my favourite youtube channels is five watt world, where the emphasis is using what you have, and for now, I think that is just what I am going to do. Here's the MIJ Tokai.

Still on the shaky side. My remaining Heritage guitar is a sweet, stunning, Sweet 16. I've had equally stunning h-530, h-575, and custom h-150 come and go. At 70 years of age I'm not sure how long I can wear my rock and roll shoes. Carpe Diem indeed