As my then-teenage daughter once said, "Ya know, you just never know. You know?" 
I bought a Special Semi-Hollow last fall. I wasn't looking for anything special (excuse the pun), what I wanted was something different to use as an occasional spice in a track. My original plan was to have a guitar I'd use in moments of creative desperation, when I need to think and play in a different way, i.e., every once in a blue moon.
The Special I bought is about as far out of my wheelhouse as any guitar I could imagine living with.
It has an ebony fretboard. I prefer rosewood.
It has coil tap switches. I figured I'd get very little use out of them. I didn't use the taps much on any of my other PRS Guitars.
The finish is so far out of my zone of comfort that I almost didn't buy the guitar for that reason alone. Erm..blue with a purple burst? I named it the Gothic Special for its goth-girl-hair color.
But there were a couple of things I figured I'd like:
It has a semi-hollow body. I knew I'd like that, because I had a semi-hollow CU22 Ltd 11 a decade or so ago. It has three pickups, one of which, the narrowfield middle pickup is my favorite middle pickup. The 5-way blade is a necessity to get max benefit from the three pickups.
Once I decided to get away from my norm, I picked the guitar for its features, so the finish became an afterthought. And there aren't a lot of these out in the wild. So I bought it. Call it a tone-experimenting buy, and you'd be pretty close. It's nice to have an 'every so often' guitar, or so I thought.
Fast-forward nine months...
I've spent some quality time with the Special. I've played it more than any of my other guitars since I got it. I've learned to work with its features and learn more about its nuances, and how to get useful sounds with it. Bottom line, I grok it, at least as much as my ability allows in the context of my own sound palette.
I guess you could say the guitar has broken me in, rather than the other way around! But I'd make one additional observation - not only not to judge a book by its cover, so to speak, but you really don't know for sure about an instrument until you've lived with it, played it enough to understand what you can do with it, or not do with it, etc.
Today I was practicing with it, working out some ideas, and I realized it's an incredibly great guitar. I love playing it. Instead of an occasional piece, it's a mainstay.
'Once in a blue moon' has become my new normal. I'm going to have to rename it: Blue Moon.
I bought a Special Semi-Hollow last fall. I wasn't looking for anything special (excuse the pun), what I wanted was something different to use as an occasional spice in a track. My original plan was to have a guitar I'd use in moments of creative desperation, when I need to think and play in a different way, i.e., every once in a blue moon.
The Special I bought is about as far out of my wheelhouse as any guitar I could imagine living with.
It has an ebony fretboard. I prefer rosewood.
It has coil tap switches. I figured I'd get very little use out of them. I didn't use the taps much on any of my other PRS Guitars.
The finish is so far out of my zone of comfort that I almost didn't buy the guitar for that reason alone. Erm..blue with a purple burst? I named it the Gothic Special for its goth-girl-hair color.
But there were a couple of things I figured I'd like:
It has a semi-hollow body. I knew I'd like that, because I had a semi-hollow CU22 Ltd 11 a decade or so ago. It has three pickups, one of which, the narrowfield middle pickup is my favorite middle pickup. The 5-way blade is a necessity to get max benefit from the three pickups.
Once I decided to get away from my norm, I picked the guitar for its features, so the finish became an afterthought. And there aren't a lot of these out in the wild. So I bought it. Call it a tone-experimenting buy, and you'd be pretty close. It's nice to have an 'every so often' guitar, or so I thought.
Fast-forward nine months...
I've spent some quality time with the Special. I've played it more than any of my other guitars since I got it. I've learned to work with its features and learn more about its nuances, and how to get useful sounds with it. Bottom line, I grok it, at least as much as my ability allows in the context of my own sound palette.
I guess you could say the guitar has broken me in, rather than the other way around! But I'd make one additional observation - not only not to judge a book by its cover, so to speak, but you really don't know for sure about an instrument until you've lived with it, played it enough to understand what you can do with it, or not do with it, etc.
Today I was practicing with it, working out some ideas, and I realized it's an incredibly great guitar. I love playing it. Instead of an occasional piece, it's a mainstay.
'Once in a blue moon' has become my new normal. I'm going to have to rename it: Blue Moon.
