CD Finished and "new" guitar

The ICW Blues is finished and is being mastered with help from Bruce Kula (Thanks Bruce). It will be off to CD Baby by the end of the week as well as the Latitudes and Attitudes Radio site. I am tentatively planning to make it available at the Cruisers' Thanksgiving celebration in Vero beach.

In other news, I purchased an elderly acoustic guitar. It reminded me of a Stevie Ray Vaughan story. Stevie reportedly walked into a music store and saw a well-worn Stratocaster hanging on the wall and just knew it would sound good, so he bought it and it became the famous #1 that he used for most of his recordings.

While I do not claim to be Stevie Ray Vaughan, I do like to fool around with older guitars and I have picked out some good ones. I was making my rounds of pawn shops this week and I saw an old Japanese Martin knockoff that was intriguing in that it was a 000 size and looked well made. I took it down and played it and really liked the neck and the construction. It has a 24 3/4" scale length. It didn't sound too great but the strings looked about as old as the guitar (about 30 years) despite the fact that the owner said he had replaced them.

Anyway, I went back and bought it for a favorable price and have spent the afternoon doing some setup work and replacing strings. It now sounds great and has a worn in feel with a smooth, comfortable neck. It has suffered a few dings over the years but I will just live with those. It's called a Ventura V12 and was built in Japan by Matsumoku or one of the other contract builders from the seventies. I took a couple of photos before I fixed it up..........