At this point everything about it has been replaced and it doesn’t really feel or play the same way. Then I broke the pick guard and had to replace that too. At one point I snapped the neck and had to put a new one on. I remember playing shows in Montreal where I would just chuck it across the stage and shit. That said, I didn’t always treat it well. It was kind of nice to have something no one else had, something you couldn’t just pick up at any old big box store. Since it doesn’t look generic, people had all kinds of opinions and ideas about what it was. Then kids started posting pictures and questions on the Internet. I took the special shitty guitar with me to Montreal, kept on playing it, and eventually people started noticing it and asking me about it. I was about eighteen when that became my “signature” guitar, and I then I sold all of my other guitars including the really nice one my mom bought me. What can I say? It had a magic sound so I had to keep on playing it. And from that point on, the guitar became special to me, even though it was always hard to play, and could never stay in tune, and always had broken strings. When I moved to Vancouver I recorded an EP with that guitar as Makeout Videotape. If you play it clean and soft it has a very specific tone and if you hit it really hard it sounds completely different. I’ve never really found another guitar that sounds the same way. It took a long time to get it to where I wanted it to be.īut after a few years the neck finally did wear in, and the pickup was great. I took a nail file and tried to fix all the frets to get it a playable level, but I never really knew what to do with the action.
It was like playing a baseball bat! And the frets were dead and buzzing and it sounded God awful unless I played it really, really hard. Now I find this stuff really funny but at the time I thought if you wanted to be a guitarist you had to play like other people.īy the time I got that guitar at Lillo’s I had a better sense of what I actually wanted to do. At that point I loved AC/DC and Van Halen, and then it turned into Eric Clapton and John Mayall and the Blues Breakers.
But after a while he tried to turn me into a fusion jazz guitarist with tapping and stuff and I was not really a huge fan of that style. It was a fancy place to go and the lessons cost a whack load of money, but the guy who taught me was a great instructor, and the style was contemporary, and after he showed me a few things he asked me what I wanted to learn.Īt the time I was into “dad rock” old school stuff-the same stuff a guitar teacher would be into-so we went together well. So guitar came through my friends in junior high school, and then I took lessons for maybe a year or a year and a half at the conservatory of music in Alberta. I come from a musical family and they wanted me to play piano, and take singing lessons, but whenever they pushed me I was like, nah. As soon as I played this guitar, I was like “Wow, this thing is actually a piece of shit!” They were like, “Thirty bucks?” And I was like, “Sure.” They brought me something perfectly crappy. It’s the kind of place where if you bug them enough they’ll go through the basement and find what you’re looking for. It’s a music store, but also half like a pawn shop. I mean real hunks of crap! But they sounded cool, and I was like, “Oh, I gotta get me one of those!” At first I was like, “Yeah!” but then I started going out to see bands in my hometown of Edmonton and all of these guys were playing really shitty guitars. I also had a cheap Strat, and after I’d finished my first year of guitar lessons my mom bought me a really fancy Telecaster.
A lot of people think this is my first guitar, but to set the record straight, my first guitar was this all-black Yamaha shredder-a crazy metal guy rig.
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