James Bisset: 50th Anniversary Edition

As my avid readers know, the hub of the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition is a 20″ 1.8 gHz iMac, which takes pride of place in the studio. But recently, I’ve been getting even less stuff done than usual, because when I get home from work, one of my sons will already be on the computer. [...]

Ah yes, the truss rod…
When I was but a young lad, dreaming sleep away with erotic dreams of sinuous, curved Fenders and dark, sweet Gibsons which shamed my clunky third rate guitars, a truss rod was just the thing that made your guitar neck straight. Buying a secondhand guitar always involved sighting down the neck, [...]

OK, I know it’s not a fair contest.
The Yamaha FG200 is from another millennium, when budget guitars were made from plywood (sorry, laminated tonewoods ) and the Freshman is made of solid woods throughout, 21st century and designed to improve through the years. But I thought it was worth giving you, readers and listeners, the [...]

Gulp! I’ve bought a new guitar…
As if things weren’t confusing enough already, with all this technology updating faster than my learning processes can cope with, I finally decided that my 30 year old plywood Yamaha FG200 just didn’t cut it as part of the 50th Anniversary Edition equipment list.
So, before the family holiday burnt up [...]

One of the interesting side effects of stopping smoking is that the extended mid-life crisis that is the 50th Anniversary Edition is now having a little mid-life crisis of its own.
Having stopped smoking, it was time to clean out the studio, which had a fine layer of smoke and tar over everything: fresh start, new [...]