Big Al clutching his first Variax 700 acoustic A mere four years later - he is ready to face the world! A vision realised   Doing a few festival gigs over the years.  i realised certain things:   1) Unlike a folk club gig - there wasn't much time.  Retuning a guitar two or three times and/or swapping them onstage was a pain in the butt for everybody - the audience - but also the performer.  An acoustic guitar goes out of tune all the time - certainly every time you pick it up!   2) I was too ill with angina to carry round three guitars, and you always got offered help to carry the guitars, and the help NEVER materialised.   3) The new acoustic venues didn't have the tradition of a listening audience that folk clubs did.  Some of the reason that the newer artistes didn't develop a decent fingerpicking style was that they simply had to thrash their guitars to be heard.  The answer wasn't bigger PA systems.  Most duo's and solo acts carried in excess of a kilowatt of power and they still fought to be heard.   The solution came to me six months ago.    I WOULD MAKE THAT VARIAX GUITAR THAT I HAD SLUNG IN THE CORNER THREE YEARS AGO  - DO EXACTLY WHAT IT SAID IT WOULD DO ON THE PACKET!   There followed six months of toe to toe confrontation with Line 6 who made the guitar.  The guitar went into the workshop in Daventry thrice (one time I even took it there myself); it was the subject of debate on the Line 6 website;  I got letters of sympathy and offers of help from all over the world and finally I got to talk on the phone with two Line 6 employees in Belgium who knew how it worked!   Frankly I think I have got it working and once people see how well it works - it will be all over the English and American folkscene like a rash.    Because this guitar points the way to the future.

Why this guitar! This guitar was described to me by a friend and it seemed to answer so many problems.  I had always worked tough noisy clubs - places where you couldn't delicately pick an acoustic guitar - they had to be bashed to be heard at at all,   This guitar had an acoustic sound, with no feedback problems, a unique selection of diferent voices, without carrying an effects rack.   My regular gig involved a lot of stage antics and throwing myself round - i figured if I could get this guitar working, I could do a gig just sitting on a stool.  And as I was experiencing health problems cos of a dickie heart - this could be the answer to my prayers.   The only problem was I couldn't get the damned guitar to work.  So for about three years I forgot it - and concentrated on songwiting and playing the acoustic guitar in various open tunings and living the life of a retired musician.   Then strangely enough my songwriting started attracting attention following the construction of my website and my appearance at several folk festivals and clubs. And so the present strategy was born!