Going To Dust That Thing Right Out Of My Hair.

Well, I've sort of put my La Cabronita - The Joe a Taxi One - ideas to one side for a little while as a couple of other interesting things popped up and caught my eye.

Highly Speedy Dusting

The first of these is a bit of a '70s relic, and is a Japanese - CMI, who I think were/made Ibanez guitars - copy of a Gibson Marauder. And after all my Gassing for a Fender Marauder...it's the fates, don't you know?

Anyway, in case you haven't come across them, for a wee while in the '70s Gibson made yet another attempt to steal some of Fender's thunder, and made a couple of bolt-on necked wonders, the Marauder being one of them. The pickups were a humbucker and a single coil designed for them by Bill Lawrence, and it looked like a Les Paul crossed with something more Danelectro-insprired.

As with everything Gibson release, nobody particularly liked it much at the time - too Fender for Gibson fans, too Gibson for Fender-o-philes - and they quietly dropped it.

No doubt they will reintroduce them for three grand a pop in the near future and we will wish we'd bought one all that time ago. Well, I was 8 and my pocket money wouldn't have stretched that far as it was tied-up with a weekly Beano, but you know what I mean.

As was the way at the time, it got copied over in Japan and quality wise there wasn't a lot to choose between them.

Marauding On Another Man's Sofa

So, coming this week I have a CMI Marauder, which I am rather excited about as I've always loved the shape of the thing. And there we are.

The other one I snapped up, is a bit of an oddity, and was (I believe) made by a luthier-type as a one off, but never finished. It is vaguely Firebird shaped, and has an oak body with a maple neck. I just thought it looked rather stunning and couldn't resist it, so there we are.

What I end-up doing with the pair of them, who knows. But it should keep me thinking for a while.

As for the Music Radar $100 Challenge, that is on now and while we're in the midst of a foney war during February - hunter gatherer time - I'll be doing my best to put together a guitar for a ton during March. What, I really don't know...

Other than that the EMG pickups for The Dust My Broom One arrived, and to be totally honest I haven't got a clue what to do with them. Not least because there are three pots and only two holes for them in the control panel. Although one good suggestion was to use the tone control as a trim pot, and hide it away under the control panel, leaving the volume a SPC pot - which is a bit of a sooper active booster kinda thing) in the usual positions.

So today has been given over to trying to get my head around what bits go where. I have four sets of instructions, none of which seem to agree and there we are.

Hmmm...not sure I'm cut out for all this modernity. Still, we shall over-come... (All together now).

La la laaa