As an amateur Jazz guitar player, I am often asked about the best guitar to buy for playing Jazz. That is a question I have wrestled with often, and the answer has come to cost me a lot of money and sweat, but I do feel prepared today to answer that inquiry for you in full.
Danny Gatton was one of the best and finest guitar players in the world. Danny befriended Arlen Roth early in Arlen’s career and helped find him work and a career in music. Danny was so beloved by Fender that they created a special one-off Telecaster for him:
What is the best guitar for playing the electric Blues? A Fender Eric Clapton Custom Shop Stratocaster or a Gibson Les Paul Standard? I’m narrowing the Gibson vs. Fender debate to a couple of guitars since I have one of each in hand and I play The Blues on both. Better men than I have been broken trying to make this comparison fairly sing — so I will do my best to give you a competent, if not persnickety, breakdown of
my experience.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get your hands around an excellent electric guitar for playing The Blues. Here’s the first electric I bought — The Deluxe Nashville Power Tele — eagerly acquired after a couple of decades away from my Martin acoustic. I have the Honey Blonde version seen below on the left and I do love it so.
If you play the guitar, you gotta love Redd Volkaert and his mastery of the Fender Telecaster. Redd wants to teach you how to play Country Blues in his fantastic and warm and funny DVD, “TeleTwang.”
Continue reading → The Amazing Redd Volkaert and His TeleTwang
We expressed our love for guitarist Jim Campilongo in our — Jim Campilongo Goes Orange — review and Jim has mentioned our review, but not linked back to us, from his MySpace:
This BolesBlues.com blog was founded on the notion to better centralize our articles on music, reviews and thoughts and contemplations on melody. Here is how we came to land here.
Our favorite Mad Telecaster SuperGenius, Jim Campilongo, has a brand new album called “Orange” that will be released on February 16, 2010 — and, due to the magic of the internets, you can buy it right now via iTunes — that sets a broad, new, standard for experimentation in melody and intention.
When you write a lot of blogs on a variety of topics, there are few real surprises left in life because you’ve read and written and dreamt it all. However, after I wrote my Fender and Gibson branded clothing review, I was genuinely surprised to receive an email from Fender thanking me for my review. I paid for all the Fender and Gibson clothes in my original review and I did not contact Fender or Gibson to let them know my review was published. Fender found me. Gibson did not.
When you start buying electric guitars, the habit can become compulsive and joy lifting. The trick, to me anyway, is to only add a new guitar to your collection that has some useful uniqueness and hopeful provenance. I’m not interested in ever re-selling my guitars, but I am always interested in the providential find online. Last week, for some reason, I was drawn to eBay — I haven’t bought or sold anything online there in over seven years — and I did a quick search on “GE Smith Telecaster“, because I fell in love with the sound of that chunk of wood and wires on YouTube, and I found one for sale at a great price in a hard-to-find black color. In this promotional shot, Black isn’t even shown and, on the Fender website and in the promotional video for his Telecaster, GE Smith “hopes” one day it will be available in Black:
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