Bluey

And lo, it was finally done.

On Sunday I bought a lovely new guitar (top).


More pictures here:
http://tinyurl.com/8sjt8

It plays very nicely indeed. The neck is slightly wider than a regular strat and, unusually for a Fender, has an ebony fingerboard.

The pickups are of the new SCN variety designed by Bill Lawrence. They're not quite the 'vintage' strat tone, but they do sound 'strat-like'. It's a guitar with a modern feel and boasts some nice new technology. As well as the new noise-cancelling pickups it employs S1 switching, which allows the player to create fat, creamy humbucker-type sounds from various combinations of the single coils. In all ten distinct tones are available - five fat ones and five more traditional strat tones, from thin and spikey highs to barking and growling lows.

I'm very pleased with the sounds available. I like the fact that it's not a carbon copy of strats from the 60's and is very much its own instrument.

I gave it it's first propper work-out yesterday with the band. Cue lots of wrong notes, bad chords, weird leaps up and down in volume and general confusion as I get used to the scale of the neck, different controls and the way it interacts with my amp and pedals.

For the past eleven years I've been playing a wonderful mid-90's Gibson Les Paul Studio (opposite bottom) which has a much shorter neck. The longer neck on the strat means more stretching for my fingers on those tricky chord voicings and thinking I'm in one key, when I'm actually in another (the fact that there are no inlays on the fingerboard also didn't help!). I'm sure I'll settle down after a few rehearsals and some extra practice

My only critisism of the guitar is that the volume control is too subtle from 1-5 and then far too brutal from 6-8. It makes the fine volume control that I am used to having on the Gibson much more difficult. The volume and tone knobs are also a bit of a crappy design compared to the Gibson - but this goes for all strats (and most Fenders).

Overall I my new guitar and look forward to using it alongside the Gibson on stage. Judging from last night some songs will work better on one than the other.

Oh yeah, and I can now go 'boioioioing' with the tremomlo arm