Guitars and Life

One of my favourite Rush songs ever - finally played live.  Terrific!!!  Look at that Zemetis bass too - is that an original?

I've had a mandolin about 18 months now - frankly I can strum a few chords on it that is about all.  But it's a fun addition to the Furtheron music family.  I had thought about if I wanted to ever use it live or easy recording, i.e. without miking up etc. and did a search on eBay for mandolin pickups. One of these popped up. It was madly only £6.35 ($10.00) including postage from China.  I mean - you can't lose can you.  How can they make this stuff and ship it at that price?  I know people moan about putting local firms out of business but simply that is too good a bargain to resist.  If I'd seen this in a local shop at say £15 I'd have thought twice, £20 I wouldn't have considered it.  You get my point. Simple to install.  I placed the pickup centrally behind the bridge using the adhesive pad already on it.  You get one more spare in the pack too.  That has a cable to a small jack you plug into a passive vol and tone unit....

Not the first Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess signature model but I think the best looking in terms of colour and the look of the maple used for the top. The Axcess main feature is the re-shaping of the neck joint, so whilst it is a traditional glued mortice joint it has the feel of a neck thru body.  Added to that the Axcess is subtly thinner and has a "belly scarf" - like the back contour on a strat body.  Whilst you can get the Axcess with a standard Les Paul stopbar they are most often seen sporting a Floyd Rose locking trem adding dive bomb whammy option to your Les Paul crunch. The electrics are actually the biggest departure for the Alex Lifeson signature model from the standard Axcess.  It is fitted with a Piezo powered bridge allowing you to get an acoustic like sound from it too.  This can be routed via a dedicated output jack to go to a separate amp or the PA whilst the magnetic pickups feed through the standard jack to your amp, or if you insert one cab...

I've not bought much new music recently.  But here's a round up of the last two CDs that have entered the Furtheron CD tower - which if I did stack them all up would probably be taller than the house by now. Revolution Saints. Their début eponymously named offering.  Revolution Saints are one of them there supergroups !  The line up is Jack Blades on bass and vocals most known for his work with Night Ranger, who I have to admit are a band I know very little about as they never really hit it off on the Eastern side of the Atlantic.  Deen Castronovo who is the main vocalist and drummer.  Deen is most known for his long stint on the drum stool in Journey.  Lastly and what really originally caught my eye Doug Aldrich ex Dio and ex Whitesnake.  I've considered the previous two Whitesnake albums almost back to their best like the early line up with Moody and Marsden and the Skykes powered version that created the mega-selling eponymously named album now ...

That is book reviews I haven't done for a while.  Not brilliant reviews... or necessarily brilliant books... I should have just thought of a better post title than have to explain all this!  LOL The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles Book 6)... Angus Donald... How long can Angus keep plugging away at this retelling of the Robin Hood tale?  Well a good deal longer as the next episode is already out in Hardback!  Actually joking aside I'm loving this series and it hasn't lost my interest yet - although I will wait for the Kindle price of Book 7 to come down once the paperback is released as £10 for an electronic copy feels awfully steep. Enough of this; what's the story?  Well the story is that Richard that Lionheart is no more and King John is having a bit of a problem in France his ancestral homelands in Brittany and France.  That upstart Philip II of France is bashing him about a bit.  He is also somewhat strapped for cash and the Barrons are giving...

I've not blogged on here for a while - apologies to any long suffering followers.  Simply though music has taken a bit of a backseat recently.  In middle of April I started to get a buzzing in my left ear.  I've had this before on and off for a long time - must be close to 20 years now.  I went to see my old doctor about it when it first happened (that's how I know it must be in the 90s some point - she retired in 2001).  She shrugged then and told me not much you can do about it.  Since then it has come and gone at irregular intervals - often with years between episodes.  Now when I started having balance and vertigo problems some while back I put 2 + 2 together and diagnosed myself with Meniere's Disease which my Grandma suffered with.  The way they treated it years ago was to drill into her ear drum leaving her profoundly deaf.  Many times we'd sit in her living room the tv on so loud the shelves were shaking and you still couldn't hear it...