Here you go!

In the end I figured it made sense to get a Santa Cruz since, you know, I live in Santa Cruz. So I walked into Sylvan music ready to buy. I’ve never bought a guitar this expensive before, and the prices I saw on the Internet were quite a bit lower than the sticker price in the store. While I would never buy a guitar like this off the Internet and I don’t expect my local guitar shop to meet those kinds of prices, I wondered if they could come down a little. When I asked if they could come down a bit, a funny thing happened. The salesperson gave me a deadpan “No” and a look that just seemed to dare me not to buy it. Extra strings? Strap? Picks? Nope, I guess he wanted to make this decision very easy for me.

So, I walked out of the store and across town to the Martin dealer, Union Grove Music. I asked the same question about coming down in price, and instead of dismissing it out of hand, the salesperson entered into an interesting dialog with me. He told me about how this guitar isn’t made any more, and Martin’s equivalent replacement costs $5K, so I’m getting a good deal with the sticker price. I told him about the prices people were buying them for when they were available (thanks Harmony Central!) and eventually we found a middle ground: he knocked $300 off the price. He also told me everything I could ever want to know about the Martin company and their guitars.

So, I’m the proud owner of a Martin HD28-LSV and I have no regrets. It’s a battleship of a guitar (hey, where do you think the dreadnought gets its name?) and takes some extra effort to play, but the sheer power is enough to make it fun– strumming a G chord hits you in the chest like the tailpipe of a Harley Davidson. And now I know what they mean by the “Martin Mystique”. The tone is warm and single notes have subtle complexities that make it great for lead as well as rhythm.

When I came home I plugged in the mic and immediately wrote and recorded two songs with it:

It Took a While and Squish. Both of them are for my wife Jenny.

The truth is, up until now that “transcription” has been in my head and I had never recorded the song or written down how to play it on guitar. Well this weekend I got around to doing both.

Here’s a recording of the song: Sunset Road

And here’s the transcription in PDF format. The transcription is pretty much just the basic shell of the song so you can get an idea of what the chord fingerings are like, but it’s meant to be expanded upon as you can hear in the recording.

If I recall, this came about because I was practicing the picking pattern in House of the Rising Sun and got bored of playing the same thing over and over. I started playing E, B, E7, A, Am, E, F# and a whole new song developed.

The tempo and meter changes are typical of my writing style. Sometimes I hear a melody in my head that matches the mood of the song, but not necessarily the tempo or time signature. So what? If it sounds good to my ears, I go with it… unless I’m writing for a full funk/rock/pop band, in which case it really ticks off the people trying to dance. The looks on their faces as they try to cope with 4/4 -> 13/8 -> 11/8 -> 12/8 (transposed triplets) is almost worth it.