For a show in Germany a few years ago I borrowed a friend’s guitar. I wasn’t picky because the guitar part was easy to cover and in the grand scheme not really important. That borrowed guitar happened to be a very nice Fender Stratocaster. I had never played a Strat before and the whole…

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 In the late 1990’s we started making plans to take our band BeebleBrox on a tour to Germany. I intended to bring my Godin Multiac on the airplane in its hardshell case inside of a large keyboard flight case. But I also needed an electric guitar. That’s when I bought this Steinberger Spirit. I ended…

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  For about a year now I have been thinking about what it would be like to have yet another string below the low B of a seven string guitar. This really only came about after I discovered that  Frameworks now also make an 8 string classical. After much tossing and turning I gave up on that…

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  This a very similar guitar to the Schecter Blackjack 7 that I have been playing for years. One complaint I had with the Blackjack were the hard to see neck position markers. After starting to mess around with the Hellraiser 8 string guitar I really liked the sound and so just for the heck…

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  After gradually switching from 6 to 7 string guitars over the past decade I have hardly looked twice at any 6 string. Until this 6 string version of my two Schecter Hellraisers showed up for a price too low to pass over. I used it live for the first time on a gig whith…

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  Circa 2006 I became interested in seven string guitars. Not knowing much about the subject I did some web research and found that for jazz guitars I would have to spend more money than I paid for my last car. Then I saw this Schecter in a Musicians Friend catalog.   The first thing…

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  By now (2014) it’s properly established that I like to have an extra low string on my guitars. Towards that end I went on eBay last Spring to find an inexpensive 7 string electric to travel with. Just as with my Carvin Fretless bass I thought it might be nice to just deposit a…

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 Before I received this guitar from somebody in Hawaii I had never heard of Raines guitars. The eBay listing didn’t mention a brand name and the headstock logo is impossible to read unless you are really close. After I had fiddled around with the Schecter Blackjack 7 for a while and had fallen in love…

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  This is a custom guitar! Although it wasn’t build for me. As a matter of fact this freak of an instrument was supposed to die in a fire! In the mid 1970s my friend Lothar Landenberger (who was and still is one hell of a classical guitarist, played bass in my first fusion band…

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  If buying a new guitar is like buying a new car then that would explain this one. Another Ibanez. Brand-loyalty. It must have been late 1979 when Manfred Brietzke and I started an acoustic guitar duo – later to become a trio via the inclusion of Ulli Fischer.   As is so often the…

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  The Ibanez George Benson GB10 was my first ‘real good guitar’. According to the label it was made in 1979. I bought it towards the end of my first steady gig in early 1980 (of course I didn’t know the end was coming – or I wouldn’t have spent that much money). But that…

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  There was a time, around age 21 or so, when I thought playing bass is easy. Plus, I really liked Jaco Pastorius’ playing. Well, one day this Ibanez fretless bass showed up in my favorite music store, Musicland in Albstadt, Germany. And it was very affordable. At the time I was already playing bass…

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  I was pretty sure that after playing mainly seven string electric and acoustic guitars for a decade now I’d not buy another six string guitar. This past Summer (2016) we were supposed to record an album in Germany. In the past I had often borrowed an electric guitar so I didn’t have to carry…

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 The Multiac was the first Godin guitar I purchased. Around 1995 I was very much into John McLaughlin’s acoustic trio with Kai Eckhardt on bass and Trilok Gurtu on percussion. I had been looking for a while to find a classical guitar that was easy to play and sounded good through an amplifier. This one…

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  In the late 1990s it became clear that I needed a new electric solid body guitar. So far I had been using the George Benson GB10 and the Kist 02 for my electric needs. Also since I now was using a guitar synth with the Godin Multiac I thought an electric with a synth…

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  Sometime around 2006 I happened to drive by Guitar Center in Indianapolis. I usually try to stay far away from that place. Don’t like to be called “Buddy” by some sales guy.   But that day I had a little time to kill and nowehere else to go. Just because it was tremendously loud…

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 Funny, I don’t have to say much about this guitar because I use it rarely for one big reason. After many good experiences with Godin guitars I thought I couldn’t go wrong with this one. Around 2005 I was playing in a Django Reinhardt style quartet and the only amplifiable acoustic guitars I owned were…

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  For some reason I always took to slightly unusual instruments. More strings = better. I had been fooling around on a Schecter Blackjack 7 for a while. While trying to make sense of that added low B-string I thought that for a classical guitar a low B-string could be really useful – especially for…

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  This ‘classic’ classical guitar has no remarkable features except that it actually sounds very nice and it smells great. It was made in Brazil and there is something about the wood – same thing with my other Giannini guitar. I have had this one since the late seventies.   My very first guitar had…

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  This was my very first electric guitar whose purchase in late 1974 pretty exactly dates my entry into guitar-player-hood (or hell/heaven). At that time in history Framus guitars were everywhere in Germany – right after the sought after but expensive US brands. Countless times did I look through the Framus catalog. I didn’t really…

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