Guitar Shopping in Nashville
19 September 2018 • by Bob • Guitar, Music
My wife and I had an opportunity to travel to Nashville, and since Nashville has long-been hailed as the "Music City," I decided that I should take advantage of the situation to check out some of the local guitar shops while I was in town. As a brief bit of background, I have a good friend, Harold, whom I have known from my earliest days at Microsoft. Harold lives in Nashville now, but when the two of us lived in Seattle, we used to hit all of the guitar shops in that area from time to time. With that in mind, I pinged Harold prior to my arrival and suggested that we should plan to visit a couple of guitar stores while I was in town. (Because the algebraic formula for how many guitars a guy should own is
Having said all of that, Harold and I spent a great afternoon visiting two stores, and here's the lowdown on them.
Store #1 - Carter Vintage Guitars
The first store we visited was Carter Vintage Guitars (www.cartervintage.com), which has thousands of vintage guitars, amps, and pedals...
On a personal note, it was a little disconcerting to see an original tape-based EchoPlex selling for $1250, since I sold mine for $50 way back in the 1980s. (At that time in my life I was a poor 20-something and I needed the cash.)
I tried out dozens of amazing guitars, all original and vintage, and most of them selling for a hefty price. (Hey - they are vintage guitars, after all.)
I didn't buy anything, but they had a beautiful 1974 Gibson EDS-1275 that I would have loved to bring home with me - if only I had the $7,500 to spend on it. [Deep Sigh.]
Store #2 - Gruhn Guitars
The next store that Harold and I visited was one that I had on my list before I arrived: Gruhn Guitars (www.guitars.com), which is a Nashville institution. They have two floors of guitars: the first floor had hundreds of guitars - many of the newer models are what you might expect in your typical guitar store are on that floor, although there were dozens of special gems scattered around, too...
The second floor has an amazing collection of vintage guitars, (although you need to talk to a salesperson to access that floor)...
I found a pristine 1918 Gibson Harp guitar on the second floor that would have found a nice home in my studio, but once again - the $7,500 price tag was more than I could muster.
There were several guitars nestled among the vintage collection that were even more valuable based on their previous owner; for example - one of the acoustic guitars had belonged to John Denver, and the following Flying V used to belong to the great Albert King...
As Harold and I were perusing the various vintage guitars on the second floor, we bumped into George Gruhn, the founder and owner of Gruhn Guitars. George is something of a legend in the Music City, and he's also the nicest guy you could ever meet.
George invited Harold and me into his office to see his amazing collection of - pythons. Yes, you read that correctly - George has a dozen or so pythons and other snakes in his office. The three of us talked about his collection of reptiles, and then George brought out a couple of his snakes for us to hold. Harold held a tiny but friendly pale-colored python, whereas I held a species of serpent that resembled a coral snake a little too close for comfort. He was a full-sized and quite curious fellow; he kept trying to inspect what I had in my pockets, and I had to keep shifting him from arm to arm in order to prevent him from falling. After ten or so minutes of reptilian admiration, we returned the snakes and resumed our discussion of guitars.
George had an amazing resonator guitar in his office, and the three of us took turns playing it; I played a little jazz piece on it, Harold played excerpts from a classical etude, and George played some amazing vintage improvisational fingerstyle (with hints of Celtic influence). This particular resonator had an amazing sound, but the price tag was a bit out of my range. (Although Harold was seriously contemplating adding it to his collection.)
As we discussed the various guitars we each owned, George shared a bit of his guitar wisdom with Harold and me. For example, he said that there are three primary reasons why someone buys a guitar:
- They don't have a guitar
- They want a better guitar
- They collect guitars (which all three of us obviously do)
We all laughed about George's observation, but George pointed out that many collectors do not seem to actually care about the quality; some of the collectors he meets are simply trying to fill a generic void in their collection. I responded that I buy different guitars for specific purposes; each of mine is unique and purchased for an individual sound or purpose.
George also produced a Martin that I played briefly, and when I commented that I much preferred the neck on my Taylor for playing fingerstyle, George produced a trio of Taylor prototypes that had not yet been assigned a specific model number. (One of the prototypes was personally signed by Bob Taylor and addressed to George.) I liked the Taylors much better; their necks were more like what I was accustomed to playing. After a few minutes George needed to head back to work, so Harold and I headed downstairs, where Harold continued to put the resonator from George's office through its paces while I browsed through the wide-ranging collection of acoustic guitars.
About ten minutes later George found me; he said that he had a 1946 Epiphone upstairs that he wanted to show me, so the two of us headed back upstairs to check it out. I own an 1965 Epiphone 12-string, and George's 1946 6-string was somewhat reminiscent of my guitar, (albeit in better shape than mine). I swapped out the Epiphone for one of the Taylor protoypes, then George picked up a 5-string banjo and started to play various melody lines in Old Americana, Celtic, and Klezmer/Yiddish styles as I tried to keep up with the rapid chord changes on the guitar. It was a fun, impromptu jam session between guitar geeks, and I had a blast.
Eventually Harold joined us on the second floor, and it was time for us to go. I had to meet my wife downtown for a previous engagement, so Harold and I bid George adieu and headed off into the proverbial Tennessee sunset.
Christmas in the UK
02 December 2015 • by bob • Humor, Travel
OK, I will admit - we followed a few of these traditions at our house... I'm not saying which ones, though. 
How to Have a British Christmas
Anglophenia Ep 20
Anglophenia Ep 20
Cool Towns Around The World
12 November 2015 • by bob • Travel, Humor
I'm not sure what it is, but there's something cool about the street names in this tiny town outside of Eindhoven in the Netherlands... I can't quite put my finger on it...
Advertising IIS Around the World
10 April 2009 • by Bob • IIS, Humor, Travel
In case you haven't already surmised from some of my other blog posts, I've been around IIS for a long time, so it should go without saying that I'm a big fan of IIS.
I remember when we first released IIS 1.0 for Windows NT 3.51 and we were handing out IIS CD-ROMs at trade shows way back in early 1996; everyone kept asking, "What is this for?" (Obviously the Internet was still a new concept to a lot of people back then.) Out of nostalgia, I kept a shrink-wrapped copy of IIS 1.0 for myself, and I think that I have one of the few boxes left. It usually sits in my office next to my IIS 4.0 Limited Edition CD-ROM...
Anyway, over the years the IIS team has printed up an assortment of IIS shirts, and I have been wearing several of these various IIS shirts as I have travelled around the world. Because I have been doing so for some time, I've found myself advertising IIS in some unexpected places. For example, my wife and I were visiting our daughter in Peru this past March, and we took the following photograph of my daughter and me (wearing one of my IIS shirts) at Machu Picchu:
So - you may ask, "What does IIS have to do with one of the newest wonders of the world?" My answer is, "Um... nothing, really." I happened to be wearing my IIS shirt that day, and it made a pretty good photo. (Obviously, it was a bad hair day for me... so I'm blaming the mountain winds. ;-] )
As another example, my son and I took a road trip down the California coast this past summer to visit my brother in San Francisco, and we posed for the following photo before boarding the boat to Alcatraz:
There are other times where I have taken advantage of a situation to deliberately and shamelessly pose for IIS. For example, I was scuba diving in Hawaii a couple of years ago, and I borrowed someone's dive slate to write the following message:
Actually, I tend to wear IIS shirts when I go scuba diving as a matter of habit - it's kind of a good luck charm for me - and this behavior of mine has led to some interesting experiences.
For example, my wife and I were going scuba diving in the Bahamas several years ago, and once again I was wearing one of my IIS t-shirts that day. The dive company had sent a van to our hotel to pick up several divers, and as I climbed aboard, one of the other passengers saw my shirt and remarked, "Oh, we have an IIS person today. I'm more of an Apache Girl myself." I quickly replied, "That's okay, everybody needs a hobby." I really only expected her to get the joke, but apparently we had a tech-savvy group that day because everyone else on the bus chimed in with, "Ooooooh - you're in trouble." I didn't realize what everyone meant until we got to the dive boat where Apache Girl came walking up to me holding an air tank and said, "I'm your dive guide today, and I picked this air tank especially for you." We both had a good laugh, and I survived the dive so she can thankfully take a joke.
All that being said, I really like to show off IIS. It's a lot of fun to demonstrate the many features of IIS to customers at trade shows, and it's a lot of fun to unofficially advertise IIS when I'm traveling on vacation in various places around the world. So if you see me when I'm on vacation somewhere, the chances are good that you'll be able to find me in a crowd - because I'll be the geek wearing the IIS shirt.
Note: This blog was originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/