What Guitar Are You Playing At This Very Moment...

Restrung Yamaha ll16d
 

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My trusty ES-125 on stage while I take a tea break during an evening jazz jam session. I was the only chording instrument for the first two hours, and was able to practice my spontaneous comping including cold reading from lead sheets on tunes I didn't know. I also called a couple of tunes; since there were 3 horns on stage one of them was Watermelon Man. The hook groove is usually done by the pianist, so I worked out chording for guitar without piano. Mostly we played standards. The horn players love to call Oleo, and at fast tempos it's challenging, pushing me to the limits of my skills.

Soon after taking my short tea break and playing a couple more tunes, two other guitarists arrived, so I ceded my seat to them, until one of them beckoned me back on stage to join on the last song. This time, using the ES-125, I played only with the neck pickup and through a JC-120 set more or less flat. I didn't fiddle with my tone too much, on guitar nor amp, since I needed to stay focused on keeping up with the tunes. In an earlier post I noted how I prefer the middle setting on the ES-125 enabling me to adjust knobs to taste on the fly, but this time it was set it and forget, controlling the dynamics with my hands. The P-90s are quite responsive to touch. I also found that I prefer the thin bodied ES-125; it doesn't feed back as much as the full bodied Gibson archtop that I'd been using.
 
My sister started learning a few months ago and wanted a smaller bodied acoustic to learn on. I found her a used Taylor Big Baby locally and have been genuinely surprised at just how good it is, especially considering how little we paid for it.
Yeah they're great guitars. That's what I had for my first acoustic and still happily play it today
 
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