Pick On It Two

John picked up his seafoam green Cruzer guitar on Wednesday afternoon (the day before his birthday) and we went out and ate pasta with daughter Erica and son-in-law Danny. John bought the Fight Night 4 video game, so he and Danny duked it out after the meal.

Early the next morning, John sprang from the bed that he rarely has crawled from before 9am this summer and plugged the Cruzer into my Sears 5XL (that I posted about in the past). I cranked the little booger's 3 watts, or whatever, for him and he played the snippets that he had been woodshedding on with his acoustic. His favorite piece is the intro to Jimi's Purple Haze, that the Washburn classical cat gut strings just never quite did justice to, and he soon had the Cruzer whomping the distortion from the speaker. Sounded quite good.

He moved into All Along The Watchtower, Led Zep's Stairway To Heaven, a little generic blues shuffle intro,and then Tears In Heaven (which does sound great on the acoustic, of course). He quickly wanted to try out another amp and we plugged into my 5 wattish Kalamazoo, which got amazingly loud (his neighbor friend heard it while walking his goats down the road). Great natural distorted tones come from that dude. It's one of my favorite harp amps and really made the Cruzer sing and zing.

Not being satisfied, yet, he wanted to play through my Silvertone 1483/4X10 cab (the Python also posted earlier). The 23 watt Silvertone pumped up the Cruzer's volume and he went to whomping and stomping. This amp has plenty of harp mods soldered into it and is my all time favorite blues harp amplifier, but it really brought swell tones out to the Cruzer. Just as I seldom get away with cranking this one up around the house, unless it is vacant of other human inhabitants, he'll run into the same volume restrictions. My signal for him to stop immediately, because the phone might be ringin, will be flipping the light switch to the upstairs amp loft off and on. I might have to install red bulbs up there for more emphasis.

The volume of the 23 watter amazed him and I had to remind him of his brother-in-law Brad's Fender Blues Deluxe trial run here at the house and to remember the volume that the 40 watter put out. Hard to imagine needing that much volume--until one steps on stage at real world jams and it swallows up anything below those 40 watts.


So far I'm impressed with this Korean made clonish Strat and I think that John will have a ball picking on it. We've got three lessons lined up with the owner of Brazos Arts Music School and Supplies where we bought the guitar in Bryan, Texas. That'll pump up the enthusiasm even a bit more, so until we meet again--'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky. Anyway--