Anyway, we have a very small, low-key gig planned for late April – mainly so we can try out some of our more eclectic material on a real audience. Hopefully it will go down as well with them as it has done with the band members so far. Let’s see, shall we?

As you may have read before, I replaced the microphonic bridge pickup with a very reasonably priiced Kent Armstrong “Rocker” humbucker. Initial impressions of the pickup are very favourable indeed. I’ll try to post some audio of it in action. Some time.

In keeping with this tradition, I made a new purchase last weekend at the Newcastle Guitar Show. I had set off for the show with a vague idea of picking up a cheap Floyd Rose equipped guitar for use on an upcoming project. Most of the guitars fell into one of the two categories – cheap or Floyd-equipped. Just as I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that I was going to be out of luck, I came across the C H Guitars stand. That’s when my luck changed.

The first guitar my eyes fell upon was a Parker Fly-like, chinese made guitar with a quilt blue burst finish. And it had a Floyd clone. And it was £139. Something had to be very wrong, or so I thought.

From it’s stand it played remarkably well for such a low-cost instrument. Great action, lovely amounts of sustain, near-perfect intonation. The only low point was a couple of dead spots on the upper reaches of the fretboard, but these were removed easily by tuning the instrument up to correct pitch (it was about 3/4 of a tone flat on the stand). What could I do but hand over the cash there and then?

The day after buying, I took the guitar to a rehearsal to put it through its paces properly. Unfortunatley, I discovered that the bridge pickup was very microphonic, so using overdrive at decent volume was not an option. The neck pickup was beautiful, though, with a lovely warm tone. A quick call to my luthier and we’d arranged a very good price for swapping out the bridge pickup for a Kent Armstring “Rocker”, and the addition of a coil tap. With any luck, I’ll get the guitear back tonight and be giving it a good workout ovber the weekend. I’ll keep you posted, and also add some better pictures.

*UPDATE* It turns out that this was a pre-production prototype. I’m still impressed, even given that my luthier scratched the top while working on it. These things happen, and he’s repaired the damage done and thrown in a setup for my trouble. That saves me a job, at least! With a little luck, it should be ready for the next rehearsal on Monday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.