Music Therapy? Fuck It, Works For Me

I'm a much better mood now, for a number of reasons. One (well, two) of which is that I've been playing the living fuck out of the two guitars below for several hours a day.





The crying, rattling sound of a bottleneck smacking against the strings of a National steel guitar is one of the most beautiful noises on this planet and also the one that can reduce me to tears and put a huge grin on my face simultaneously faster than anything else in music. You just can't make those sounds with any other guitar, from high, keening, at times almost theremin like wails to a fucking rude barking klang, accompanied by a spectral harmonic haze of sympathetic overtones rarely heard from a normal acoustic or even electric guitar.

I could bang about this for fucking ages, but I can't be arsed because typing this takes up time I could be playing. Just go and listen to Son House, especially his 60s Columbia recordings, for the perfect example of the klanking, gutteral yawp of the single cone (lower pic) and possibly the greatest Blues voice of all time, and Tampa Red's classic Yazoo recordings to wallow in the more refined, stinging, almost vocal sound of the tricone (top). Time for more wine'n'slide I think...