I’m going to write about the studio in more detail in a future post, but I want to take a minute to make a few points that will provide a little context for the music that I post to the Media page.
I previously provided a little history of what led to my putting together a studio. And while I stand by my position that COVID-19 was (mostly) to blame, there’s at least a little more blame to spread around. And a good portion of that I hereby assign to my neighbor Peter.
Peter’s name will pop up with some regularity here. A former/retired defense attorney, Peter is, among other things, a skilled carpenter, an outstanding guitar player, an exceptional conversationalist, and just a really nice guy. Combining his woodworking and musical skills, he built his own acoustic guitar. Yeah, I know. I’ve played it. It’s incredible. More will be written about my dear friends and neighbors, Peter and Chris (whom I’ve already mentioned) at some point. For now, however, I want to focus on Peter’s contribution to all this.
After a summer of playing an acoustic guitar, I was jonesing for an electric. And not just any electric. I wanted a Rickenbacker. I wanted a Rickenbacker 360 semi-hollow body 12-string in Fireglo. I had once owned a Ric 620 6-string in Jetglo, and I loved it, but I sold it, and now, for whatever reason, I had my sights on the 360/12.
Reality set in when (1) I saw the price, and (2) I saw they were backordered everywhere for like a year. This turned out to be a good thing because it gave me a chance to realize (or maybe rationalize) that I didn’t want my only electric to be a 12-string, and what I really wanted was to get my Jetglo Ric 620/6 back. A new mission!
The Ric 620’s are still expensive, but MUCH more reasonably priced than the 360/12. Still, I hadn’t quite made up my mind whether I was going to buy anything at all. I did have a lot of free time approaching. As a result of many unused vacation days and upcoming holidays, I was going to be mostly off work between Thanksgiving and the new year. But was I prepared to spend all that time playing guitar? Was having that time off enough to justify the purchase?
One evening, mid-November 2020, I visited the website of Sweetwater, a very popular and respected music equipment retailer, to get a quote on the 620. While I was awaiting the response, Peter, with whom I had been discussing my potential purchase, sent me an email asking if I had pulled the trigger on a new guitar. I replied that I was waiting for a quote, which came moments later, accompanied by the news that they were on backorder until September 2021.
Ugh. Rickenbacker makes all of their guitars to order, which means if you want, say, a new Ric 620/6 in Jetglo, you either have to order it through an authorized dealer and wait for Rickenbacker to build it for you, or you have to find an authorized dealer who happened to have ordered one on speculation — and miraculously hadn’t already sold it. I kind of resigned myself to the fact that it was not to be, and I was faced with another year of strumming the acoustic, after which I quite possibly could have lost interest in this altogether.
I delivered the disappointing backorder news to Peter, and about 12 nanoseconds later, Peter sent me a link to a page on Reverb.com (an online new and used music equipment marketplace), where the exact model I wanted, brand new, was listed for sale from an authorized Rickenbacker dealer (Pittsburgh Guitars).
I bought it immediately.
So what does one need once one has a new electric guitar? An amp! Back to Sweetwater to get the Vox AC15 I had my eye on. Sold!
A day or so later, while contemplating the effort that would be required to turn a mostly unused storage space in the basement into a “guitar room”, a thought occurred to me: Playing guitar is great and all, but I used to have a lot of fun recording my own stuff. I’d been fooling around a bit with GarageBand on my iPad, so I started thinking about what — in addition to the Ric 620 and Vox AC15 — it would take to assemble a real studio. The answer was simple: A bass guitar, a bass amp, a keyboard, microphones and stands, some percussion, lots of cables, a desk, and a few electronic gadgets. Oh, and the room needed a coat of paint (or two), carpeting, some acoustic foam panels for the walls to dampen the echo, some curtains to close it off from the rest of the basement, and some wall art to give the room that “studio feel.”
In less than 2 weeks from that night I almost gave up — but did not because Peter decided to Google “Rickenbacker 620 Jetglo” — I had my studio.
Blame COVID-19. But blame Peter a little, too. Uh, I mean, “Thanks Peter!!”