I bought my Jackson JDR-94 Concept electric guitar new in 1994, when I was 14. Sometime in 1995 I upgraded the neck pickup, and it's been a nice reliable guitar ever since. I bought a used Ibanez custom 7-string when I was in high school, and let Bryan borrow the Jackson since I had something "better". But in 2007 when I moved to New Orleans and was once again living near Bryan, I got to play the Jackson again and remembered how much I loved playing it. So I asked for it back, and I've been enjoying it ever since.

An aside: For most of the 15 years or so that I've been playing guitar, I've had a mistrust of tone knobs, because my impression was that they never made much of a difference in the sound. I'd generally leave my tone knob around the middle, and occasionally turn it up or down if I felt that the song required a brighter or darker tone, but I couldn't ever really tell much of a difference in the sound, and I felt like a tone-deaf simpleton because I couldn't hear any change in my guitar's tone.

Anyway, Andrés and I were invited to join our friends' band, Senryu, and that will involve playing live in front of audiences, so I've been working on cleaning up all the little faults that the guitar has developed but I never bothered to fix.

[Entry Continues...]