Blue Sky Spearfish
Tremolo
First Impressions
Having the chance to sit down with Rick and play this guitar was a tremendous experience. The craftsmanship speaks for itself: it’s wonderful to play, comfortable, beautiful to look at, and most importantly sounds excellent. The tremolo is incredibly smooth, and it’s amazing to pitch shift chords in tune. The tuning stability is also the best I’ve experienced on any tremolo. Being able to drop the low E and stay in tune is wild!
Thank you again for hosting us this past Saturday. Reflecting with Chris during my lesson tonight, it really was a joy to be surrounded by music in its rawest form, and getting to share in that experimentation was as eye opening as it was inspiring.
My biggest takeaway from playing and conversing between the three of us was the importance of respecting the music and composition versus “taking a solo”. Improvisation has form, and establishing lead sections (beginning, middle, end) is as exciting and engaging as supporting with rhythmic and/or ambient variations.
Black Wolf ’67
I wanted to explore in a different direction with this build.
Black Wolf ’67 is the mirror of Birdseye Blonde ’67 — taking the same platform but radically flipping the electronics plus some subtle construction details. Lithe dark magic emerges from this forest, all glowing eyes and bright fangs in the gloaming.
Bare Knuckle alnico Nailbombs coil-split with superorganic woodiness into singles with punch and depth. Perfect gleam and ruthless clarity, there is no outrunning in this fairy tale. Slip between the trees…but full-on humbucking brings every soft creature in the valley to standstill.
Birdseye Blonde ’67
Playing through Tweedle this last month has been inspiring. The mids are just perfect, radio friendly. As you know, Tweed lows are infamously wild and wooly. But, as it turns out, those lows are tamed when matched with era-correct single coil pickups.
Leo was iterating his amps and guitars in parallel.
When you hear them together, the world comes into focus. Man, what tone.
USM Earthshine
Center city Philadelphia skyline, visible on the horizon, is not lit green this year. Eagles distracted themselves with internal politics, spiraling into the Delaware River, forgetting to come up for air.
The dog and I outside in the January evening darkness just now. Her senses alert to the movement of large animals, green eyes of deer bobbing in the field at the limit of my flashlight’s quick glance. I wonder what she thinks of the human hand’s ability to conjure light at will.
My attention is heavenward. Orion is our companion, now and for some months ahead. Jupiter too, alone this year for the most part, playing a solo in contrast to last winter when Mars and Saturn were constant accompanists.
Too much light at the moment, maybe Bortle 8. When we repeat our steps in the hour or two before sunrise, mankind will be asleep, skies maybe Bortle 6 here in the northeast. Perhaps visible a string of 19 space jewels moving south to north, a wink from Elon.
