I’ve only ever bought a new guitar when I have a need for one, when there’s a sound I can’t get with my existing guitars – until now.
This guitar is quite simply a “bucket list” guitar. I have long wanted an actual PRS Custom 24. Of course, it does sound different from my other guitars, but not that much different from, say, my CE 24. I definitely did not need this guitar for the music.
Thing is, 2020 made me realize you never know what’s round the corner. You think you know what’s in store, you think you have control, you have a say in what will happen… but at any time, things can come up you’d never have predicted, and which you have no influence over.
The year showed that you could lose your livelihood, your health, or even your life, with everything from the pandemic, to the Christmas morning bombing that happened about 20 minutes from me in downtown Nashville.
So, I had no plans to buy a guitar, until the Sunday after Christmas when I changed my mind through some accidental browsing on YouTube and window shopping in online stores. From that, I found this beauty, and realized that why not? Why not grab it now, while I can, since I have no idea what tomorrow may bring.
So I bought it at 3.30am in the morning on Monday, unable to get to sleep for thinking about it 🙂 I found THE guitar, from Wild West Guitars, who got it shipped within a short while of them opening on Monday, and it arrived on Sat Jan 2nd. What a great way to start 2021!
It’s a 35th Anniversary Custom 24, a perfect fit for me with the controls taken from the Paul’s Guitar design rather than the standard 5-way blade selector normally seen on a Custom 24.
It’s also served to refresh my enthusiasm for music, as my creativity had taken a knock after 2020. Not only that, but after doing some recent work on the upcoming “The Shadow Behind the Sun” I realized that I was spending so much time searching for this sound, tweaking this part of the mix, adding this effect, registering things with my PRO, coming up with covers for singles, and so on, that I simply was not playing any more. It’s amazing how little playing there can be in completing singles and albums!
So I spend the last week of 2020 mostly just playing (and my fingertips got sore, a sure confirmation that I wasn’t playing often enough), and the arrival of this beauty on Jan 2nd is only going to encourage more of that!
Work continues on “Shadow” of course, but no longer at the pell-mell pace I was trying to set, and it will be all the better for it! After some tweaks before Christmas, I have the first 24 minutes complete, with two maybe three tracks on the go, which should take it to completion in a month or two – and will include this violet blue burst beauty on it now!
Here’s to a great 2021 for everybody!
All the best,
Tom (Cu Sithe)