Hello everyone! Just wanted to say Happy New Year! Hope to see you at the shop sometime soon in 2012.

Check out this video of Billy Gibbons at the Roxy on the 23rd, sitting in with the Camp Freddy gang for their annual December residency on the Sunset Strip. Just doesnt get any more blues than this.

Billy Gibbons tears it up

Ok, this is definitely the cheapest and ugliest guitar in my collection. I make no bones about it,  and make no excuses.  It served a purpose even if it doesnt get played very often these days.   I bought this Montana Brand(mfg in Romania- hotbed of guitar making knowledge) for $90 in 2003 mainly as a travel guitar for a 5 week trip to Europe and to practice some guitar repair techniques after leaving Summit School of repair in Canada.

it started out with this horrible fretboard; no radius, aweful cheap frets and poorly painted black wood.  So the first thing I did was yank those frets out, sand in a 12″ radius, stain the light wood a cherry color and refret.  Then I installed that Select single coil pickup I bought for cheap from Stew Mac along with a volume knob. 

After that the guitar at least played a little better. I had to stick with acoustic strings as electric strings pulled the intonation out really bad.   I brought the guitar back to the shop where I bought it, and the salesman there was impressed and a bit jealous.  He had the same guitar setup with a pickup for slide but it wasnt nearly as nice as this one.

Turns out this guitar, although it still sounds like crap acoustically, sounds REALLY  good plugged into an overdriven amp, tuned to open D and played with a slide.   It has the electric sound with a nice hint of air to it, but doesn’t feed back.   So that is primarily what i use if for anymore.