I wasn't sure this day would ever come...

In spite of my sporadic posts (which is, I promise, the last time I'm going to talk about that), I've actually been quite busy with moving around guitar gear lately. Too busy, in fact. Maybe one of the reasons why I haven't been posting much is because I could never figure out what gear to talk about, since I was getting so much new gear so often. And it's come to the point where I'm now doing one of the most difficult things I've ever done related to guitars:

I'm down-sizing.

I looked up the other day and I had 9 guitars. 9! I don't have 9 sets of hands! How could I have that many? The fact is, it just kind of happened over time. But it made me realize just how much money I had tied up in cheap guitars, with about four different plans to upgrade them and make them my own. But I can't justify 9 guitars. So I'm selling off two of them to make some money to, you know, actually upgrade some of the others.

Best example: I've had an Epiphone Les Paul forever. But what I really want it some kind of ES-335. So I bought and Epiphone Dot, with the thought that I'd eventually upgrade all of the hardware and the pickups and end up with a very good guitar. But what I've realized is, that was kind of my plan all along for the Les Paul. So what am I going to do? Sell the Dot and another guitar and finally make the upgrades that I've wanted to make. I still want an ES-335 someday. But if I upgrade the pickups on my cheapie Les Paul, then someday when I do get a nice Gibson ES-335, I can just swap out the pickups and have a guitar to drool over. And in the mean time, I can get pretty good tone from my Les Paul, and I can then sell it with the original pickups and not lose any money.

I'm not sure why it took me 9 guitars to figure all of that out. I've been putting money in to my pedalboard for years, only having recently slowed way down and concentrated more on upgrades than on buying new things because they're shiny. Amps are the same way; I got nicer tubes and am on the waiting list to have Bill M mod my Blues Jr., and in the mean time I've been digging my Musicmaster way, way more for how clear of a tone it puts out. And that's even with a 35 year old speaker. Something about the hand-wiring, I'm sure.

So yeah, this isn't an exciting post. More like a "responsible" one. How boring.