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Post by alembic1989 on Jun 11, 2017 19:40:36 GMT
Hi, I own 4 of Rob Aylward's guitars..all of them commissioned by me. His build quality is top drawer, and his guitars are second to none. The last one I had built had 3 piece sides, and a 5 piece back..around parlour size , with cutaway. The woods for back and sides was pink ivory and African Blackwood, and is one of the finest sounding guitars I've ever played. As has already been mentioned he is a top geezer. I can't recommend him highly enough.
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Post by alembic1989 on Sept 26, 2015 8:33:53 GMT
I recently bought this guitar..and thought I'd share my views on it, as I found nothing helpful on the internet when I was considering buying mine. i will keep to the important points and try not to waffle. First of all..this guitar is an OM type guitar. The thing that made me look at it in the first place was the combination of price and high spec. The top is Adirondack, the back and sides are solid Madagascar rosewood...that is impressive enough..and then you notice the price! This is/was a limited edition model..but there are still one or two shops in the UK that have one, the full price is £1049, including a nice fitted hard case. The build quality is very good, and the tags show measurements of the action for 1st and 6th strings when it left their QA dept...the standard set up came with an action of 2.7mm at the 12 th fret for the low E....and 2.2mm for high E.....with plenty of bridge saddle showing. ( saddle & nut are bone). Now the important bit...the tone.....it's BIG. There is a lot of volume on tap and a nice bass presence when strumming an open E chord...very nice. i am not a strummer..or a fingerpicker..I play single notes, and I fell in love with the headroom on this guitar....and the very strong 'overtones/reverby' afterglow after each note. The guitar is still brand new and therefore still tight...but sounds fabulous straight out of the box. It comes fitted with Martin SP strings..which I find a bit harsh. I'll be putting some different strings on it when these are worn out..and maybe lowering the action a tad....but might not, as even though it's trickier to play fast flurries in the higher positions (... And I realise that not everybody plays like that)... I like the robustness of the tone as it is...I'm addicted to the fact that it just gets louder the more I dig in with my pick. Im really looking forward to this guitar opening up..it's going to be one hell of a guitar. I'm not really a Martin fan, as I think they are over priced, and overrated...but this spec..at this price...I'm very impressed, and really doubt that the Martin version is worth the extra thousands. So there's my tuppence worth..hope that helps, and was useful to someone.
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Post by alembic1989 on Jul 6, 2014 11:53:12 GMT
A master....
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Post by alembic1989 on Jul 6, 2014 11:45:22 GMT
Great player......just shows yet again..it's the player...not the guitar. all that lovely tone from a relatively cheap instrument...wow.
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Post by alembic1989 on Mar 21, 2014 15:44:34 GMT
My guitar arrived safe and sound from the USA about an hour ago.....I am one dead chuffed geezer link
i'm gonna wait for my excitement to die down....and then give a good beating in a couple of days.
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Post by alembic1989 on Mar 14, 2014 20:46:10 GMT
After many years of searching, yesterday I managed to locate and buy a guitar I've searching for since the 90's. I'm a big John McLaughlin fan..and loved his playing with his trio..using his Wechter Florentine nylon guitar. I living in the UK so the chances of finding one here are pretty much nil. Not only did I find one...the one I found was personally built for the previous owner by Abe Wechter himself.....and not an ' off the shelf ' model. i am over the moon. It should arrive in a few weeks from the USA . the only thing that concerns me ( apart from it arriving safe and sound)... Is after 20 odd years of anticipation....will it live up to expectations...or will it disappoint? mind you, if its good enough for JM..... Well done!! Is there a web site we can see it on or anything? Regards Phil Here you go Phil reverb.com/item/71198-wechter-elite-cutaway-nylon-string-guitar
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Post by alembic1989 on Mar 14, 2014 20:42:32 GMT
That was beautifully played. that guitar sounds amazing.
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Post by alembic1989 on Mar 13, 2014 21:32:10 GMT
After many years of searching, yesterday I managed to locate and buy a guitar I've searching for since the 90's. I'm a big John McLaughlin fan..and loved his playing with his trio..using his Wechter Florentine nylon guitar. I living in the UK so the chances of finding one here are pretty much nil. Not only did I find one...the one I found was personally built for the previous owner by Abe Wechter himself.....and not an ' off the shelf ' model. i am over the moon. It should arrive in a few weeks from the USA . the only thing that concerns me ( apart from it arriving safe and sound)... Is after 20 odd years of anticipation....will it live up to expectations...or will it disappoint? mind you, if its good enough for JM.....
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Post by alembic1989 on Mar 3, 2014 9:11:35 GMT
I don't think this sort of music is cool or clever but I do think it's the direction some talented guitarists have gone, to express themselves. There is much in the performances to get your teeth into and anjoy. But as complete peices, they don't work for me. My preference is for a balancing of "conventional" and "other". It gives the brain a reference to spread out from. Whether you're going for something almost cinematic or raw emotion, I think it's worth considering that you are trying to communicate and the listener/audience should be considered, to some extent. I'm glad at least a few more of you folk joined in with the discussion, and I don't think it's a topic that will ever be settled one way or another. There is no right or wrong, but what I'm intrigued by is what motivates people to want to play/listen to this 'style' (if we can even call it a style) in the first place. Artists in many other disciplines - theatre, painting, sculpture, cinema - have sought to, effectively, completely de-construct the form they first began working in...but in order to do/find/express what? There are plenty of interviews with Derek Bailey out there on the internet which make for interesting - no, ESSENTIAL - reading for anyone who is even vaguely curious as to what made him tick. My own preference, too, is the idea of counterbalancing the 'conventional' with the 'out there'; light and shade; Yin and Yang; harmony and dissonance. Maybe - since I get the feeling that the discussion is starting to peter out - the last word should come from Derek Bailey himself, especially on the questions of audiences and communication. And maybe this raises even more questions than before... Derek Bailey: I’ve never been sure about audiences. I’ve never understood what the responsibility of a performer is to an audience. It’s intensely complicated. When people talk about audiences, they usually drool on about communication. Anyone interested in communication should spend time digging holes for telegraph poles. There’s much more going on between a performer and an audience than just communication. I don’t know what happens but I think that the audience’s role in listening to improvising – and I never liked saying anything about audiences because if anyone asks what I think about an audience, I’m just grateful there is one – but actually I would think that an audience listening to improvisation has a greater responsibility than any other type of audience because they can affect the musical performance in a direct way, in a way that no other audience can affect the musical performance. They can affect the creative process in every aspect. Every aspect of the music, every part of the process can be affected by the audience if it’s improvised music because the whole thing is going on at the time they’re witnessing it. They’re witnessing the whole process of producing that music. I mean, there’s a lot of work behind it, and they’re not going to affect that, but they can affect the immediate production of the music, its immediate construction, which is the crucial time for improvisation.i enjoyed that...
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Post by alembic1989 on Mar 3, 2014 9:07:36 GMT
What intrigues me about Derek Bailey is that here is a musician who learned to play and studied music in a conventional way (whatever definition we choose to put on 'conventional'), but then departed so radically from it to spend the rest of his life wringing tones, timbres and sounds from his instrument in a way that flew in the face of all that I suspect the majority of Soundboard members would regard as 'guitar playing'. And it's up to him what he does with this training. Let's go slightly deeper... If we can agree that music (and more specifically, instrumental or non verbal music) is a language (having a semantic and syntactical basis regardless of parent culture) then perhaps we can also agree that music is unique in the fact that it is the only language that communicates entirely in emotion, not information. The cognitive dissonance experienced when confronted by a pensioner with an archtop guitar who steadfastly refuses to play tasteful extended harmonies to "Autumn Leaves" and instead bombards our senses with grinding, upsetting noises and an apparent disregard for the values that we as guitarists/musicians hold dear (sweet tone, clean attack, lyrical phrasing, clever tasty chord melody movement etc) is akin to being shouted at in Japanese by an elderly relative. (Adjust to Geordie if your elderly relatives are in fact Japanese). Hence an undeniable emotional response... We should also bear in mind that this clip is an introduction to a Derek Bailey performance, he's talking to the audience, setting the scene, perhaps even preparing them a little for what's to come. Not that what's to come is going to be any less "other"... There are some amazing techniques on display that I have stolen in the past (I love playing behind the bridge on an archtop and freely admit to snaffling this idea from Derek Bailey) but that's not at the heart of this performance. What is perhaps most admirable is that there's no coersion, no attempt to pander to taste/demographic/fashion. Derek Bailey sat down with the intention of giving a specific timbre of performance. He did that without compromise throughout his career. Hats off. Nicely put Michael..... I remember meeting Amrit for the first time...we were strangers, and were due to be playing a gig together ...with some other guitarists, at our local arts centre...a kind of guitarists extravaganza..each player having his own style. We sat in my bedroom, and he played first...he performed Rigid Geometry...and then asked me what I though of it...I could only say that I'd never heard anything like it in my life...he liked my response....nice guy, liked his music...and it was a great gig too....no egos.
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Post by alembic1989 on Feb 7, 2014 17:53:07 GMT
Rajan, I saw this guitar on the AGF a while back, thought it might be of some interest to you. I think it sounds pretty nice. I also like Steve Sedgwick's guitar with sympathetic strings Also have you heard of Paul Metzger? He's modified his banjo to have 23 strings like a sarod. Hi, thanks a lot for that my friend....I liked the design of the first guitar, it sounded nice too. stephen Sedgewicks also sounded nice....wasn't too bowled over by the tone of banjo...even though like him I am very influenced by sarod players..I think I'll check out the first luthier . thank again. :-)
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Post by alembic1989 on Feb 6, 2014 22:02:24 GMT
Soooooo, my pink ivory/ African Blackwood guitar is due end of Feb...and I've already commissioned another build..it official I LOVE doing that....I'm fed up of telling lies to myself like..." I'm thinning the herd"..... And other cliches..the fact is I just love the arrival of a new guitar made by a builder who loves building....there I've said it. i have approached an Italian luthier, after seeing his guitars both on his website, and demonstrated on you tube by a forum member on this very forum ( me&myguitar)....the first thing that grabbed my attention was how incredibly elegant they looked.
i contacted the luthier (Lukas Milani) with a very specific remit, something I've tried unsuccessfully with other builders. I DON'T want a a ' fingerstyle guitar' i DON'T want a ' sing and strum guitar' ..like instruments like flute, sax, brass, violin, sitar, sarod...the list goes on.... I WANT a guitar that is designed to produce perfect SINGLE NOTES.... i talked to him about, the initial attack of a single note, the sustain, the decay, overtones, sweetness, headroom, DYNMIC RANGE....and he got back to me and took me seriously...I sent him some recordings of mine with my multi string guitar, and told him my likes and dislikes about it...
I knew I'd picked the right guy when he said that he would listen to the CDs to get 'inspiration'....but he also wanted me to name the guitar to help him with the creative process/inspiration. the guitar has been named " Goddess" with a picture sent to him of Goddess Durga (from Hinduism)... Along with an explanation of the meanings of the symbolism present in her depictions.....a lot to do with the forces of light and darkness.Last week he had a ' Eureka' moment, and he knew the concepts and aesthetic he would use..Like I said...I love working with people like this...a true first.Got the first pics thru today of the first stages of the build...and I'm officially excited.....The deposit was sent last week....it's all on top..it really is happening. i don't know how to post a build thread on here...pity.
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Post by alembic1989 on Jan 28, 2014 13:06:22 GMT
I keep going back to Rob, because his guitars sound fantastic, and his build quality is also fantastic....unfortunately the build time is fantastically long. He has an excellent reputation with the gypsy jazzers...I'm a huge Django fan, but not alas a gypsy jazz guitarist, BUT I love the tone of those guitars....so I have 2 built by Rob.....I love the volume they produce when digging in with a thick pick....I only really play single notes...so its great. i also have a gorgeous flat top with offset soundhole ( similar to the American McPhersons)... Mine has a floating fretboard extension, so the top can move freely, African Blackwood back sides....and pink ivory binding...it is an awesome guitar. i will post some pics when I get some batteries for my camera.
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Post by alembic1989 on Jan 28, 2014 10:54:58 GMT
I may be up that way the weekend before, wonder if he'll let me get first play on it... I was a nightmare waiting for my Moon! Nice try.
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Post by alembic1989 on Jan 28, 2014 10:53:48 GMT
Aaaah..there's nothing like talking to kindred spirits....people who love buying guitars. Alisdair I see from the short time I've been on the forum that you too like custom guitars...good man..I have quite a few too...we might even end up doing some kind of trade at some point in the future...you never know. Keith...my wife tells me that I have no patience.....nice to year that you think she is wrong too....
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