I found a cassette tape the other day dated 1982. It was a recording of various covers from James Taylor, Supertramp and John Martyn along with a couple of instrumental originals. It was recorded on a standard stereo cassette recorder using 4 cheap microphones through an equally cheap mixer.

Quality? Not tremendous.

Nostalgic? Very.

It was recorded in the front room of my first wife's parents house. Just set the mic's up and hit the record button and lets see what we get. No practice, just go for it. I was quite surprised with the quality of the playing. The vocals were a bit dodgy at times, and remarkably higher in pitch than I can manage now, but good none the less.

Why do I mention this?

Well, is it normal to hear a particular guitar/bass line that you have played on a recording, but cannot remember playing it, or even believe that you were capable of such a complex tune/phrasing?

While I am re-working the lyrics for the chosen tracks for my forth coming CD, I am listening to some recordings of older songs, just to get a feel of what I thought they originally sounded like.

Can you have too many guitars? Should you pay thousands for a guitar? What's in a make/model?

I have always bought guitars on a budget, which means seeking out second hand or junk shops, looking through the classified ads in the local paper and searching the internet. I have picked up some amazing guitars over the years. Some I still have and others have gone by the wayside.

I first purchased a Yamaha acoustic guitar back in the early 90's, and this proved to be a really lovely instrument.

Then in 1999 I picked up a Yamaha nylon string classical guitar, mainly because the other Yamaha was so good. The classical guitar was advertised with an outboard  pre-amp (which is what I really wanted), but I found that the guitar was excellent and I still use this today. The preamp was rubbish!

I fitted both these guitars with Fishman pickups and they amplify/record beautifully.

So when I was looking for a fretless bass, I went to a Yamaha dealer to see what they had. I ended up with a very fine instrument - an RBX270F. It even had fret inlays, which helped enormously in the early days of playing it. It was also very affordable!

Recently I found the fretted version of the fretless (RBX270). It was on an internet site. It looked brand new and cost a lot less than half the price of a new one.

I am really sold on Yamaha instruments. Good value for money, beautifully made and sound good too!