A Photography and Travel Blog by Jamie Chan

>Attack of the strings

I went down to a few guitar stores a few weeks back to take a look at some really pretty sounding guitars.  My goal was to flush out a sound that I really liked as I knew nuts about guitar. 

In a way, selecting my cello was pretty easy.  There are not many stores that stock the cello in Singapore.  They prefer miniature instruments like the violin, guitar or even the piano.  Its so rare to come across a store that stocks the cello and the double bass!  So with the two stores that I visited, I probably had about fifty-ish cello to choose from.  These fifty can be further divided into three ranges, mainly:

1) The affordable range

2) The eat grass for a month range

3) Go marry Steven Tyler range

As the prices go up, so do the quality and tone of the cello. 

The ‘go marry Steven Tyler range’ had a selection of about 5 different type of wood all with it’s own gorgeous charm and workmanship.  The tone is to die for!  It is absolutely beautiful! 

The affordable range had such an affordable sound that it was kind of pointless getting it. 

So I got a really lovely cello from the eat grass range and I love my cello so much. 

As compared to the cello, selecting a guitar was terrifying.  Well anything more than ten choices are always terrifying.  So imagine a room with close to a hundred guitars of every imaginable color and patterns.  Red, blue, purple, Hello Kitty… Yes Hello Kitty(: My favorite depressed cat, screaming BUY ME I LOOK PRETTY!!! 

dilemma.jpec

I had one goal in mind when I walked into the guitar store and that is to play the blues.  So inspired by Clapton. 

The cello is great but the cello is still a cello.  You can play almost everything and anything on the cello but I just can’t bring out that blues twang.  And the strings are really thick but playable just not as bluesy as the guitar would sound like. 

The sad story comes as I left the stores without getting a guitar as my clients decided to delay my payment PAY ME DAMMIT *shakes fist* but all was good as this gave me time to think and digest the different kinds of sounds I heard(:

So I shot a few emails here and there with the intention of getting a guitar.  The problem now would be what kind of guitar… Acoustic?  Electric?  Classical? 

As I was mulling over it, my uncle offered me an electric guitar with an amplifier and all the guitar stuff I needed to get started!  I was over the moon! 

It’s a really pretty 600sgd ish guitar! 

So I took the guitar, gave it some love and began playing the blues like Clapton 8D Layla~ You got me on my knees, Layla~ I’m begging darling please~

Ok I am lying.  I took the guitar and went to youtube to learn how to tune it… so much for a musical genius

Cello -4 strings

Guitar -6 strings

I mean how hard can it get?  With a dead electronic tuner and a tuning fork, what could possibly go wrong? 

I died. 

YouTube is a brilliant place to learn stuff but you can only do so much with it as tuning the guitar with YouTube is even more difficult than I thought. 

It took me an hour to get a partially tuned guitar…

Partially tuned because it sounds right but wrong.  Partially. 

So here I am, playing the blues.  With huge amounts of images to go through from eight different shoots.  I am not very happy with the most urgent batch as I did really badly for the actual shoot.  Which makes my motivation to post process the images non existent.  T_T

Ah wells… I will get there!!!  After the blues(:

Ponyo: Ahhh!  That mad woman is playing the guitar again!!!Make it stop!!!!!!!!