My first Gretsch....

[duhvoodooman***]

I've been playing in our church's adult praise band for a couple of years now, but we recently had a new guitarist join the band. He's a very experienced guitarist and musician, far more accomplished than I'll ever be. He's also been a worship leader for several years, so has brought a lot to the band beyond just his excellent guitar skills. He's also always willing to answer questions and show me things, which I very much appreciate. And he's a fellow "gear hound" who owns some absolutely killer stuff.

Anyway, he had mentioned to me that he found the sound of many of the Gretsch guitars to be a really good fit with praise music--something that was validated when he brought his gorgeous White Falcon to rehearsal a couple of months back. Anyway, that piqued my interest (always a bad thing, financially!) so I started poking around on Reverb.com to see what was available, Gretsch-wise. Initially, I was looking mostly at the Streamliner models, chiefly the G2622T and G2620T models, because of their very reasonable pricing. But then I came across a next-to-new G5420T Electromatic at a really attractive price. I offered a bit less and it was accepted. I've had the guitar for a couple of weeks now and am very pleased with it. It's the first hollowbody (as opposed to semi-hollowbody) guitar I've owned, and between that and the "blacktop" Filterton pickups, it sounds like nothing else I have. Seems to sound particularly sweet with the "ambient" guitar sound (dotted eighth delay and LOTS of reverb) that is so commonly used in modern praise music. The guitar was set up very well as received--all it needed was a new set of strings--and is very comfortable to play. It's a big guitar, but then again, I'm a big guy, so I haven't found that to be a problem at all. The Bigsby seems to keep the guitar nicely in tune, though I obviously am not doing whammy bar tricks in church! Not that I really know any, anyway...

Here are a few pics of the guitar that I downloaded, cropped & resized from the Reverb.com listing. Better quality photos than I could take! The color is called Aspen Green--kind of a light olive-green/silver metallic finish, very attractive.