So, I'm having my favorite breakfast of toasted bagel, cream cheese and salsa (La Victoria's
Salsa Ranchera HOT with a couple of spoonfuls of my homemade million-Scoville habanero paste for kick) and wondering what to post about. And I remember...
I got a new guitar last night! I call it Porchtar I. Will there be a II or III? One never knows. Problem is, I don't know what Porchtar I is. It's a brandless wonder, an eclectic electric oddity - a freak of guitar nature! Check it out:
Yeah, it looks kinda like other guitars, but there's no manufacturer's name on it at all. No serial number, no info, no nothing. Kinda appears to have a Fender headstock, don't it? But if it really is, it's a factory second. Close inspection shows some poor cutting technique on it.
How about these pickups? Look an awful lot like classic Strats to me and to the guy at the guitar shop. He dates the thing maybe early to mid-70s. Maybe. But how do you tell. Was this homemade from scratch or from a kit? Is it Japanese? European? Eastern Bloc? Soviet? (That's my favorite theory - that I got a Soviet guitar. It's kinda like someone showed a picture of a Strat to a Russian instrument maker and said "Make one! Or die!")
And those knobs, those sweet sweet knobs! Shiny, shiny gold they are, gold I tells ya!!! But they are each imperfect. You can see the uppermost knob has an imperfection in the center, but so do the other two. It's like this came from the Island of Misfit Guitars.
Does it play good you ask? Sound good? The answer is very much yes. Action's a bit high but I'll tweak that. Really feels like a Fender neck too, like a decent Telecaster. The awesome thing is the sound, though. Huge! Hot! Hard! Sexy as all Hell! That's a five-position switch and it goes from the bottom with a dry, flat, chunky, chip-yr-teeth wicked Strat sound up to the top with a full-bore sweetly distorted humbuckingness Heaven kinda sound. And loud, loud, loud. I barely had to crank the volume on my Vox. It was worth the 60 bucks just for the pickups.
Oh. Last thing. There's no strap buttons on this baby. Never were. How odd. But that's all part of the beauty of Porchtar I, I guess.
Anybody have a clue about this? Lemme know.