This one is a lap steel slide, a Gretsch G9220 Bobtail Round-Neck Resonator to be precise. It's a good guitar, well made, sweet tone, as metallic as you'd expect but there's enough wood in the sound as well. It projects well, is  comfortable and responsive to play. It records well. I haven't used the internal pickup much but it seems adequate. I don't know how it compares to the very expensive models but I can't imagine they's be much better than this Gretsch. You can hear it on my acoustic albums Honeyfield Road and Broken Landscapes over on Bandcamp. 

​One day I'll buy a Weissenborn because there's no imitating the sound of that wonderful instrument.

This is the Gretsch 9221 Bobtail, a straight up resonator, all metal. It plays as well as the 9220, reliable and a clean sound. I bought this used and had to take off the front to make some adjustments to the resonator. To get the steel sound you need to play a little more towards the bridge. Internal pickup - seems fine. It's a good one for trying out different tunings, free improvisation or straight up Appalachian tune-making. I play some tunes on my acoustic albums as well as on Outside, my album of free improvisations for acoustic guitars, again on Bandcamp.

There's something I wanted to mention briefly and it concerns the performer's awareness of musical time which is obviously different from that of the listener. I know - the performer is a listener too but the listener isn't a performer, at least not in the same way as I might be if I'm playing a concert to people.

It's this. When I'm playing a pre-composed piece that I've committed to memory or am reading from a score, say a classical study, or a piece I know by heart, my attention is on the present and the future, broadly speaking. I don't think much about what's just happened, unless I've made a complete horse's arse of a section but that requires the application of experience and diligence to ignore. If I'm improvising with little more than a few abstract ideas or even less, my attention will roam between past, present and future. I need to have in mind what I've just done to make some kind of musical sense (yes, I still believe in that) as I go forward through time. I also need to be aware of what I'm actually playing and I have to attention on what's to come. How this works is complex. Maybe it's something like what computers do when they're multithreading.

What I'm doing now
and forever more if I can't find any musicians to play with.

sit down

pick a guitar

make up a tuning

select preparations

play guitar

record 
​

This is my Dowina Grand Auditorium steel strung acoustic guitar. I have it in open C or one of the many variants, tunings I found by looking into the music of Robbie Basho and others. I bought it from Richards Guitars in Stratford and it's one of the best purchases I've made.

I can't say if it's better than any of the other big name guitars but I've never played a better acoustic guitar. It has that balance which makes an acoustic so enjoyable to play and it suits my style of playing as I normally like to drive the guitar with complex right hand picking. The LR Baggs pickup is loud and clear. I can mix the internal mic and pickup from controls at the soundhole. The guitar police love to come up at gigs and tell me all about it, how best to use it and how they were thinking of buying one the same but went for a better model. Bless.

I'm told it was hand made in Slovakia by a Czech maker. The top is spruce, the back and sides Padauk. I like a wide enough neck to be able to 'work' the fingerboard and this one is perfect. I can't be sure but I like to think that the spruce tops aren't that different from the wood used to make all those high-end Italian violins. I do know that there was at one time a cottage industry of very good fiddle makers in Bohemia and Moravia. I feel confident that this guitar was made by someone who knows their trade.

There's only one tiny little thing that I'd have requested and that's to have bigger and brighter fret markers on the side of the neck (there are none on the fretboard). I just use little dots of white tippex to see where I'm going.

Here we go. After years of procrastination I've finally decided to talk about equipment. The reason it took me so long is because the stuff you read about on forums tends to turn my stomach - which guitar? (aka my guitar is better than yours), what strings?, why American gear is better than anything else. Not to mention guys called Brad with dodgy tats who shout at you from Youtube. So now it's my turn. Let's start with the best electric guitar in the world.

And it's a Yamaha. Yes, I don't have any problems with buying Japanese guitars. In fact if I had the money I'd get myself one of their amazing SA2000 hollow bodies and an LL16 twelve string acoustic just for good measure. I'd save myself a fortune by not buying Gibsons and I'd have better instruments.

This is a Revstar RS820CR, modelled on London 60's motorbike styles. I bought it second-hand in mint condition for less than £500. I used to teach guitar from a big guitar shop and I've tried just about every model of Les Paul and all the Les Paul derivatives. This is better than any of them, maybe with the possible exception of an Ibanez 'lawsuit' Les Paul that I'd dearly love to extract from a friend of mine but he's having none of it.

It's a heavy instrument which is good news for a solid body electric. The pickups sound very different from each other and the middle position is perfect. It handles low open tunings without any flopping around.

I'll be using it on my next electric album where I want to investigate tripped out country and the ecstasy of desert music.