nightshift blues

one of the advantages of working nightshift is that everyone else is asleep and you have more free time to mess around with stuff. or to wander the world wide web and become entranced by things you may never have been exposed to before. i've seen cigar box guitars around before and always dismissed them as a poor imitation of a mountain dulcimer (an instrument i've loved and played for years). i now realize that i was sadly mistaken!

this little baby went together much faster than i expected and i still have a few modifications that i want to make, like finding a nice vintage bakelite knob for the volume, some abalone fret marker dots to inlay on the ebony fingerboard (instead of the little red stickers), and i have a set of skull-shaped tuners on order that will replace those garden variety ones in it right now. i even found a cool metal plate for the hookup jack that i am thinking of installing. but for now, he's got a sweet acoustic sound and a killer electric beef that i get to play with until those other parts arrive!

i've never played a four string guitar before, so i'm still learning the fretboard layout and discovering the chords (which are surprisingly different than on a regular six string guitar). at the moment, i'm just using a basic glass slide by fender for the slide work, but i have found instructions for making a genuine (that's pronounced, "jen-you-WINE") bottle slide from an old wine bottle that i plan on giving a try. i recorded this little noodle session through a line 6 pocket pod which is an ingenious little speakerless amp with hundreds of tube and filter combos built right in which gives me a direct line to record from on my laptop, could be plugged into a headset for practice, or be plugged into an amp and used effectively as a pre-amp. hope you enjoy hearing a little something on my latest obsession!

meanwhile, back to some needle chanting on community at large in between noodling around on my new geeTAR!

namaste'