I wanted to introduce my instruments to you so I took a bunch of pics tonight and will be posting them one at a time in my Instruments folder of my images section. I'll add a blog to tell a bit about the history of the instrument in my hands.

The first instrument to be featured is my circa 1972 Gibson J-40. In the mid-80's, I fancied myself a keyboard player and had a couple of early Roland keyboards, one a monophonic synthesizer (with a single VCO and single ADSR envelope!) and a string synth. A friend of mine, who will remain nameless for the boneheadedness of his trade, gave me the Gibson for those two keyboards. Somewhere along the way, I actually ended up with 2 of that guy's guitars, this Gibson and an electric Electra guitar that was really rather pretty, but only later did I find it played like hell. This friend is responsible for the leather all over the soundboard. One would think it would kill the sound, but over the years, the leather has bonded and become rather brittle, so that it mellows the sound very nicely and keeps this large body guitar from being too boomy.

The Gibson was my main guitar for quite a few years.  Then, around 1994, my toddling first daughter accidentally brushed the Gibson where I had foolishly leaned it against the wall for a moment, and it fell face first onto the floor, snapping-off the headstock. Being poor, and the Gibson being the only acoustic guitar I had, I took TiteBond glue to it and mashed it all back together. That fix is still VERY visible on the guitar since I didn't have the patience back then to do a proper job. It still played, but I didn't really love its action or feel, so I eventually bought a Takamine to replace it and the Gibson sat fallow for many years.

I once took it to a luthier in Houston to see if there was anything that could be done for it and he laughed...saying that it would cost much more than the guitar was worth to do anything at all.

So the guitar was set aside. About a year ago, I felt sorry for it and grabbed it in order to play it and noticed that the strings at the 12th fret were about an inch off the fretboard. Argh! The neck had separated from the body!

But now I had the Internet, so I did some searching about how to work on the guitar myself and eventually found out how to completely remove the neck without damaging the guitar. Then, I put everything back together...and when I strung the guitar the first time, it played like it had never played before. The action was perfect and the sound seemed better. I was hooked.

I promptly removed all the strings and created a new compensated TUSQ saddle, since the original bone one had snapped in two years ago. I use extremely light John Pease strings on it (10's) after playing one of Dana Cooper's guitars and marveling at how light his strings were. They also produce less bowing force on the overall guitar so maybe I can get a few more years out of it before it falls apart again.

It has cracks in the soundboard, lots of bits falling off of it, but it is my favorite guitar to play, even though its fretboard is very narrow. I use this guitar now for mostly open tunings since those don't usually require more than one or two fingers, so I have space to move around on the narrow neck.