A New Family Member

As brother Dave's guitar playing has flourished, the urge to upgrade and expand his collection of instruments and equipment has obviously been strong. I have been the beneficiary of this in the past, with a beginner Yamaha acoustic and a Line-6 modelling amp to show for it. Dave's most recent purchase was a very nice Epiphone Casino hollow body electric (Gibson's second brand version of the Gibson ES330). The Casino is perhaps best known as the guitar used by all of the Beatles at different points, and by John Lennon for most of his time with them. The Casino is a true hollow body, and very light, but otherwise similar to my "holy grail guitar", the Gibson ES335 semi-hollow body (in Justin Hayward cherry red of course...). But I digress...

Apparently, a strong request made around Dave's household was that if a new electric guitar came into the house, one of the existing ones should leave, therefore maintaining... balance... shall we say. Dave mentioned to me that he was going to keep the Fender Telecaster and put his Epiphone Les Paul copy on Craig's List.

At that point, it seemed an awful shame to lose a member of the extended family, so I purchased the guitar from Dave, and now it will live with me. In a way, this is a bit of silliness, but I can say that I have been fooling around on my guitar more than I ever have, and have gotten myself one step above total hack status, so what the heck. At the very least, it gives my Strat someone to commiserate with; the two guitars can hang out in the basement and bemoan the fact that they were not blessed with a more talented owner.

Dave brought the Les Paul over this past weekend and I played it for a while with Dave using my Strat. He taught me some things, and a few of them actually clicked. It was very productive and energizing.

So between the two of us, we now have a Statocaster, a Telecaster, a Casino and a Les Paul copy. Plus a bass. And three acoustics. And amps. And electronics. Oh well, so much for balance (but it is a lot of fun!).