Some old banner SJ examples

tpbiii · December 15, 2020

One of the joys of owning and caring for old guitars is playing them and listening to them. I guess you would say my late wife and I were method musicians -- not practiced performers mostly. A song to us was a melody and a set of lyrics -- then we had a number of styles and vocal ranges to use to play them. Kind of a bag of tricks that could be mixed and matched for fun. We also had an acoustic audio/video recording setup in the basement so we could hear what we sounded like -- I still have many hours of unedited video from such "I wonder what it would sound like" sessions.

I have literally 100s of videos -- all done in the same facility with the same high quality acoustic recording environment -- that involve a variety of different vintage guitars. The facility was in fact designed to demo and compare vintage guitars, but (being so easily available) it was also used just to see how something sounded. We (my late wife and I and others) often combined songs and instruments in different ways just for fun. Well in hind sight that also can be a interesting (unplanned) of examples of how different vintage.instruments sound. Here is an example where we used a couple of old banners to play an old folk song -- this is that would not have been part of any performance for the most part: a 1942 LG-1 and an 1943 SJ (not RW).

Here is another example -- Aina Jo singing UNWED FATHERS. The first two are fingerpicked on two old Gibsons -- the same 1943 SJ and the 36 AJ. I never did this in real life. The way we actually did it in our band cross picked on (in this case) a 1954 D-18 Martin. That was one of my favorite stage guitars.