Epiphone Sheraton

I am pretty sure that I bought this guitar in 2002. The serial number tells me it was made in 2001, and I know I didn't buy in it 2001. Since I bought it it's probably the guitar I've used the most.

This guitar is an Epiphone Sheraton. It is semi-hollow, which means the body has two hollow sections either side of a central block of wood. I haven't made any changes to this guitar except for replacing the tiny plastic tip on the switch that selects the two different pickups.

My tastes in guitars have changed a bit over the years, and nowadays I'm not especially keen on fancy bits like gold-plated components and elaborate inlays. I didn't realise at the time, but much of the cost of this guitar is in the aesthetics, rather than the quality of the instrument itself. Also it is coated in really thick, glassy, polyurethane varnish which makes it pretty resilient but I'm not too fond of the way it looks. The gold-plated bits are especially pointless - all the metal parts on my guitars get fairly corroded and there isn't anything I can do about it.

Corrosion

Aesthetics aside, I wouldn't have used this guitar for so long and returned to it regularly after playing other ones if there weren't really good bits about it. It's reliable, easy for me to play because the neck is wide and the fingerboard is flat, and the overall size (pretty big) suits me both sitting down and standing up.

The best thing is when you are playing it really loud and everything is resonating you can feel air coming out of the holes in the side, which is kind of thrilling. I have played some of my favourite guitar with this, and recently it's the instrument I play most at home.

I've had this for so long that I've had two different kinds of grief about it from my bandmates. At first, the drummer would call it my Oasis guitar, which kind of makes sense because it is very similar to the kind of guitars Oasis used to play before they got really, really rich. More recently the drummer would call it my Vampire Weekend guitar, which makes perfect sense because it is identical to the guitar that Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend plays. Neither band influenced my purchase. I wish I was famous.

There are a couple of dents on the side. I remember when they happened. It was very soon after buying the guitar, so let's say 2002. My band at the time were playing a show in Croydon, which was so far away from where we were based in North London that it felt like a proper adventure. I remember getting accused by the person doing sound at the venue of breaking some microphones. We didn't break any microphones. This is kind of a speculative scam by venues (or employees trying to shift blame) and it happened a few times over the years at different places. 

Anyway, in Croydon I accidentally dropped a Cry Baby way on my fairly new guitar from a fair height. That wah pedal is big and heavy, with a metal chassis. God knows what I was doing with a wah pedal back then, I've never been able to do anything decent with one. The accident left a couple of small dents, which illustrate just how tough the polyurethane finish is.

Dents

The main thing I remember about this guitar was the day that I bought it. My future wife and I were in the early stages of seeing each other. We were out on Oxford Street for lunch or maybe breakfast, I might have it wrong but I think she was living in Marble Arch at the time which explains why we'd be there. It was a really clear, spring day. A Sunday. My future wife had plans nearby with a friend, so we met and I said goodbye to them both. I remember thinking "I'm going to go and buy a guitar". I don't know where the money came from back then. I guess my rent was very low, I was working, and I ate a lot of pasta and pesto.

I went to Denmark Street, where there are lots of musical instrument shops. There is a cliche about staff in guitar shops having a terrible attitude and I've often found it to be the case, particularly that day. Admittedly I did say something rather stupid when I went in the shop, asking them if they were open (because it was Sunday) and the two cool dudes behind the desk who unlike me could widdly widdly shred on the guitar like George Lynch snorted in utter disdain and one said "OBVIOUSLY". I felt really at ease then, it was super great retailing from the guitar dudes. I suppose I did end up buying a guitar though. I vaguely remember trying a few semi-hollow guitars in the shop, and then being offered this one at a slight discount. I'm not sure why it was cheaper - there must have been something wrong with it but I've never known what.

My wife and I are separated now, and getting divorced. She has always supported me in my making music, without being closely involved. This guitar is one of the few music things I have that I strongly associate with her, purely because of my memory of buying it. I don't want to come across too sentimental though - it's not like this guitar is making me sad. 

Still, I do think there is something interesting about musical instruments. They can last a long time, steadily accumulating new memories, as long as you keep playing them.

Alesis Nanoverb

I have had this thing for ages. I'm not 100% sure, but I think I bought it from a shop on the corner of Denmark Street in London in 1998. As I recall, I bought it to complement the 4-track cassette recorder I'd recently bought. My 4-track had a feature where you could plug external effects in when you were mixing, like in a real recording studio. This was an exciting prospect. I was going to get all budget Rick Rubin. Or maybe cheap Dave Fridmann.

Alesis Nanoverb

Zhou did the quality control in 1997

This is a very small, digital rackmount effects unit. It has lots of different effects in it, but with limited control over changing their parameters, because it was the cheapest of the Alesis line at the time. The effects I've used the most are the reverbs, of which there are 10 different kinds, including a gated reverb for the purpose of sounding like Phil Collins.

For many years, I used this on pretty much everything I recorded with my 4-track. It made everything sound instantly better. It helped to fill out sounds, particularly drums.

That said, my main memories with the Alesis Nanoverb are the times I wasn't using on something that had already been recorded.

First was the time I recorded howling seagull noises by putting a battery powered guitar amplifier on maximum volume and a microphone under an enamel bucket, lay my guitar on top of the bucket, and ran the signal through the Alesis Nanoverb on the 'delay' setting. The enamel bucket was mostly to keep the noise down, because I was living with my parents at the time.

Then there was the time I accidentally wrote a rather good song.

I was in a three-piece band (drums, bass, guitar and vocals) where I shared bass and guitar duties with the other singer, swapping over instruments like Sebadoh. We were rehearsing in the bass player's flat, which was above a piano shop in Winchester. There were egg boxes on the walls. There was a djembe. I think this was in 1998 and 1999. Coincidentally my mum and dad live in Winchester now, and I often try (and fail) to work out where exactly the piano shop used to be when I'm out for a walk.

I would get the train to Winchester from Fareham or maybe Portsmouth via Eastleigh. Eastleigh looked like a hole. Often I'd travel with the drummer. The drummer and I got on well, although we didn't talk much. We'd already been in one band together that split up when I went to university. One time I remember we were waiting in silence in a train at Eastleigh. It was very cold. Somebody in the carriage had their headphones up really loud playing Bran Van 3000's 'Drinking In LA'. At the beginning somebody says "hello my name is stereo Mike" and the drummer said "hello stereo Mike" which was somehow hilarious, particularly because I don't think we said anything else to each other for the rest of the journey.

I decided to use my Alesis Nanoverb during rehearsal at the flat above the piano shop, running my guitar through it and into the amplifier. I chose one of the reverbs with a long decay. It sounded instantly huge, with notes lasting forever. I barely had to touch the guitar and there was all this wonderful sound coming out of it. The bass player and drummer put down a repetitive groove underneath and we had that collective moment where you feel something really great has come together. I didn't have to concentrate too much on what I was playing so I could dance about, which was another plus.

That band only played one show, but I remember the rather good song being a real highlight. I expect we closed the set with it, and that I danced around.

I also remember what the bass player's flatmate said to us about the song, on the day it all came together. He said "it sounds amazing, but [looking at me] it looks like you don't know how you're making all that noise".

This was true, of course. It was all an accident, and the entire song was based around an effect. I probably only played 3 notes in the whole piece. This was the first time I remember sounding impossibly awesome without really putting any work in. Effects can be a crutch.

Since the rather good song, I've tried not to write music based around an effect. When I came to play shows regularly this became more of a logistics problem - it's difficult to justify having an effects unit with you that you only use for one song, and what if it breaks?

In the early 2000s I tried to use the Alesis Nanoverb as a reverb unit through my guitar amp when I was playing with my band, but that didn't really work because it required extra cables and was rather fiddly. Also it would have to sit on top of my amp and risked falling off. I could have gaffer taped it on, I suppose.

When I started transferring audio from my 4-track direct to a computer I used the Alesis Nanoverb less and less. Now, I can't remember the last time I used it - I wonder if it still works?