I spent Saturday in the music room fixing guitars. One guy wanted an acoustic strung for a lefty..no problem. Just before I started to re-string a perfectly good instrument, I found one already strung that way. I adjusted the bridge (flipped the saddle) and put on a new set of strings...another satisfied customer.
On to the electrics. When I opened the closet, I found two cheap Strats I had never seen before. The necks looked like the ski jump shown at the begining of Wide World of Sports ("...and the agony of defeat..."). After a little tweakage of the truss rod, I had 'em mostly straightened out. New strings and an intonation job, and these were now playable guitars. Oh yeah, I had to take the neck off of one of them it was so bad. I found two shims that were out of place causing the neck/body joint to be seriously askew. After resetting the shims, this guitar was a whole new instrument. There is an old Telecaster Custom here too. This thing had action that required gorilla-type strength to play. I reset the truss and the bridge and tweaked the intonation and this thing was good to go. Lastly was "my old friend" the black Les Paul Standard. This was such a joy to discover and play until it had enough of my thrashing on it. It still had the broken D string when I opened the case. It broke 2 strings Jan 12 during the station dedication gig. I haven't touched it since. I asked a southbound winterover to bring new saddle pieces which he did. I installed these, and set the intonation. It plays like a champ now. If I come back next winter, I'll bring my strobe tuner and re-do all these intonations again. The tuner in my PX-4D is good, but there's no substitute for a strobe when doing intonation.
Later Saturday night, the boys had the Guitar Hero game on the "Drive-In" screen (a 30 foot sheet hanging on the wall in the gym). We had two controllers out and there were probably 10 people taking turns playing. What made this evening so fun is that two (of 12) girls showed up to play. They brought a whole different vibe to the game. As it turns out, their favorite song was the unbelievably fast speed-metal of Dragonforce. I had never heard of this band until the Guitar Hero game. I look forward to them conquering this song. I did find one true guitar hero song on the "setlist": Eric Johnson's Cliffs of Dover. It's a brilliant piece of music I have seen him perform several times. As soon as I saw it, I had to try. As I may have stated in a previous entry, I think it will be easier to learn these songs on an actual guitar than to get them right on the video game. The timing just isn't there. Some songs I know every note of on a real guitar, but look like an idiot on this video game. I guess if I could be good at either the game or the real thing, I'll leave things just as they are.
In other news, we're pretty busy at work. We have 4 heads to change on one of the 3512's. This sure makes the shift fly by.
Happy Birthday Dad!!!
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