00:00Hey, I'm Jake Kiska here with guitar.com, and this is My Guitars and Me.
00:13So when Greta left Michigan many many years ago, we'd stopped at Chicago Music Exchange because a
00:20manager was friends with the owner there, and I was looking around at everything, all the guitars that were there,
00:26and the owner said, well, try this one, you know, based on everything that I was really into at the time,
00:34and I plugged it in, and it was one of those moments of absolute divine intervention. It was just like,
00:40you know, just the lightning split from the sky, and it was really unbelievable. It was like everything
00:47that I've been looking for sonically in a guitar, everything in a guitar that I've been looking for my
00:52whole life was right here, and I was like, so I was like, okay, perfect. Well, now the guitar is like
00:5825,000 USD, so, and he let me take the guitar, you know, he's like, you can take this guitar,
01:04go tour with it, and then when you can afford it, you pay me back for it. So it was incredible on him
01:10for letting me do that, and I've obviously had it ever since, this 1961 Les Paul, technically.
01:16There's a piece of me in this guitar, but there's also a piece of this guitar in me, so it's like,
01:21in reality, a lot of my playing and the way that I've developed playing have actually come from the,
01:27this very specific instrument itself. Like, in reality, as much as I'd like to take all of the
01:32credit for, from, from my guitar playing and all of that stuff, a fair share of that's been this
01:38instrument itself, sort of in influencing the way that I approach it. So that's why I've, you know,
01:44maintained that this guitar, I've, I've really, I've hung on to it because, um, I guess we've got
01:50sort of a shared sort of chemistry at this point.
01:53It was just such a blast to go between these two roles. I was playing in some ways, you know,
02:12as a pure guitar player in Greta, and, and somewhat of a frontman vocalist and guitar player in Mirador,
02:17but, you know, to, to be stood up there with, you know, my brothers in many respects of both sides of that,
02:23a difference in chemistry between the two, that was immediate, was like, okay, this isn't, you know,
02:27Greta band, this is a completely different band. So with the Mirador stuff, there's a lot of sort of
02:33traditional and ancient pre-historical English folk music and European folk music and, and Romani, you know,
02:40gypsy music and there's so much of that, that kind of becomes part of the thread of, of the narrative,
02:47which is quite interesting.
02:52There's no way I could part with this. I'll probably be buried with it.
02:56It looks kind of quite new when I got it originally, but this is, yeah, this is all this sort of sweat and
03:03of these gouges. This is what happens when you start wearing rhinestones on, on suits with no jacket over them.
03:12And this is what my nipples have done.
03:14No, it's, it's completely ridiculous. Hacked apart. Looks like a cutting board, doesn't it?
03:20But it still sounds good. It's a lot lighter than when I got it originally.
03:23That's interesting.
03:24Yeah, I've sanded it away. You see that?
03:26No, yeah, it's, it's definitely taken a lot of wear from, from my suits.
03:31Yeah. What's interesting is Gibson will have to invent an entirely new specification of aging level to do guitar that,
03:39that as this level of aging and, and sell it would be essentially selling half of a fraction of a guitar for a certain price
03:47that I'm not sure someone would be willing to buy half of a guitar or whatever.
03:51So I wanted to find something that, that could be sort of a guitar that would be the Mirador Acoustic.
04:03And I went to Gibson and I went to tons of people in the, you know, to do something specifically with certain types of inlies,
04:09obviously in the cool bits, which is this, you know, the Mirador M.
04:13I went to Martin and asked if they could do it and they said, yes.
04:25We went to them and kind of designed these 0028s.
04:29Um, and I wanted them aged, you know, because it's sort of like, you know, sort of looks like a Renaissance guitar with a slotted headstop.
04:37I'm like, like, could you guys build me a pirate guitar?
04:41This is what they came up with, which is quite brilliant.
04:44And there was a certain level of aging that I had in mind that, yes, this can be done.
04:48But the, they came back, I think four times and they're like, are you sure you want it more?
04:53You know, Tim Chris and I said, yes, we want more aging.
04:57And so Chris Martin himself had to come in and finish aging these.
05:02I've looked for another black 0028 like this.
05:06I cannot find one.
05:07I think we, these are literally the only two on the face of the earth, which is quite cool.
05:14I kind of ran into the Martin thing.
05:19I was playing with Greta.
05:21We're trying to find a 12 string at last minute sort of production rehearsals.
05:25And it was crazy.
05:26And, and, and someone had a Martin 12 string lying around.
05:29I was like, well, you try this, you know, like carve it up, put in a pickup in so that we can get it going.
05:34And I really fell in love with it.
05:35Martin's acoustics is one whole thing, but it's certainly between, let's say the equivalent, Gibson equivalent to like the parlor style.
05:43Let's say L double zero and double O 28.
05:47This is a bit more, it's like the Vogue on those two, you know, it's sort of, it's a bit more refined in some ways.
05:55That, that was kind of a step into this sort of like, it's a direction of sort of writing in the performance style.
06:02It became a bit more polished maybe.
06:05For the balladeering stuff, for the sort of like that, those types of really big, romantic, open, vista type of songs and that type of writing.
06:14This came in handy like incredibly well, but I really enjoy playing this.
06:17And I don't know that I would play it in Greta.
06:19I would, I would only use it in Mirador because it does that thing, you know.
06:31And it took about a year for it to open up.
06:33Like I always thought that was bullshit when I was like coming into playing guitars and it was like, oh, this one takes, it's like a fine one.
06:39You see, it takes, it takes a year to open it, but this one takes a year or whatever.
06:43I was like, yeah, it doesn't really though.
06:44I mean, that does, it totally does.
06:46It's a complete fact.
06:47It's like this after the, over the course of a year completely has changed entirely.
06:53And now it sounds like an old vintage guitar, really dry, really bright, really loud.
07:00And then it's the shit now, but it took, it took a sack, but it's like, yeah, definitely is amazing.
07:09Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy the Mirador record coming out in September.
07:39Bye.
07:40Bye.
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