SeSSion diary Less Is More
While his GAS struggle is real, session player Adam Goldsmith admits that keeping his guitar collection to an absolute minimum is actually more beneficial to his playing
i’ve definitely finished buying guitars now. I’ve got everything I need, so I’m not buying any more. Honest. Ask my wife, I don’t have a problem… The fact that I’ve had to force myself off eBay to write this column because I’ve developed a small obsession with the idea of an old Gibson 345 with a trem means nothing, it’s purely academic.
The more astute among you will have spotted that all the above is a clear lie. One that most of us tell ourselves on some level with alarming regularity, and on a subject for which there should be some sort of 12-step recovery programme.
One of the biggest bonuses of practising hard is that, eventually, you may be able to play guitar for a living, and instantly your niche obsession with what metal the screws for the scratchplate on your ’68 Strat are made of becomes the holy grail of small businesses – a tax write-off! As tempting as it might be to go crazy with the credit card with this as an excuse, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern during most of my work in the past few years, in as much as I basically only use two or three guitars out of choice, all the rest are basically once-a-year guitars/mandolins/ ukuleles/banjos/12-strings, and so on, in case I get asked for them. I’ve noticed that guitars‘go to sleep’if you don’t play them for a few months. On the last three major film projects I’ve worked on (Bridget Jones’s Baby, the forthcoming Harry Potter film, Fantastic BeastsAndWhereTo FindThem, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Grimsby), I’ve pretty much exclusively used three guitars: my Burguet 1A classical, a stock Gibson 339, circa 2014, and a Martin‘John Mayer’steel acoustic model.
With acoustics especially, I’ve noticed this phenomenon of them‘going to sleep’if you don’t use them and recently I’ve discovered an amazing bit of kit that really helps open them up. I bought my (brand new) Burguet classical around six months ago for about £2,700, so while not a concert-style classical costing 10 times as much, it’s a very good instrument – and superb for recording as its sound is more directional than the huge-sounding concert models. However, when I got it home and played it next to my old Antonio Aparicio, which I’ve had since university and played to death, it was slightly lacking life. I would have been a little disappointed about this were it not for a recommendation from a colleague who plays classical guitar at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, so he knows his onions. His suggestion was a ToneRite, a small vibrating device (ooh-er), costing about £100 from my memory, that you attach to the strings in order to simulate years of play over a week or so. Sounds unlikely? My guitar probably increased 50 per cent in volume and harmonic richness within a few days, rather than a few years.And before you ask, I’m not endorsed by ToneRite; this is just an honest recommendation from one guitar addict to another.
I guess the point I’m making really is that if you’re a player rather than a collector, really knowing a small collection of instruments can be a lot more valuable to you as a player than having a large arsenal of guitars that you don’t know that well. Obviously, you play and sound better when you’re comfortable, so then your bandmates will be more comfortable with you, whoever’s leading the session will be happy with you, and bingo, you get booked again!