Loud, Bad Guitar

A while back while I was looking for my Hagstrom guitar I ended up on the Ed Roman site and poked around a bit to see what he had to say. His site definitely has a high entertainment value compared to many other high traffic guitar sites on the web because unlike most other sites that simply reproduce the marketing copy of the big name guitar makers and avoid much controversy, Ed Roman (or Ed Roman's ghost writer, if he uses one) aims to attract an audience that is suspicious of these marketing claims. The gist of Ed Roman's arguments can be summed up in two sentences: You're a sucker if you buy a big name guitar from a corporate music store. Smart guitar players buy hand built American guitars from Ed Roman. Ed puts forth this argument wherever he can, weaving it through his ad copy and linking in and out of his webpage to lead surfers from the popular brands on his site to one of the guitars -- an Abstract, Baker, Pearlcaster, or Quicksilver -- for which Ed Roman is the p...

I'm making this blog in order to have a place to post my thoughts on all matters guitar. I've been playing on and off for years -- pretty basic stuff, mostly -- and I pretty much suck as a guitarist. There are pre-teens that have made more progress in a year of playing than I have in all my years. That's okay with me. I only do this because I like playing. I get to make sounds not entirely unlike music, some of which are pretty enough to keep my partner from leaving the room when I play and have fun doing it with absolutely no bad consequences when I screw up. Not a bad gig, all in all. That said, I love guitar just as much as the next, better player. And I love *my* guitars just as much as the next gearhead. And I love finding new sounds to make with them. I live in an apartment, so my primary setup is running my Hagstrom Swede through a Line 6 USB audio interface into an iMac running any one of a half-dozen virtual hardware sims, demo or full, to satisfy my jones for tone...