A close family friend, Jack Herman, dropped off some of his creations for me to play with a few days ago. That's right, he custom builds guitars, and no, you can't buy them, I guess it's a labour of love. Although I will certainly be trying to swindle him into making me one. Comon Jack, you know you want too. I have here with me two guitars, the first is this Double-Cutaway Acoustic, which is my personal favorite of the two, even though it probably took WAY less time and effort to make. I'm just a huge fan of cutaway acoustics and this one plays excellent. Here is a video of me talking a bit about the guitar and a short jam at the end:



*** EDIT *** Removed offensive Fender comments.

The second guitar, and definitely Jack's pride and joy, is this "Ford Guitar" which he hopes to sell to Ford. I've seen the retarded wonderful Ford Acoustic that fender makes and is seen in some of the ford commercials, and this is a far better effort. Hey Fender, way to paint a standard Drednaught, you lazy fucking bastardswonderfully good people. God I fucking hatelove fender, I have a mind to stop by their headquarters and piss all over their office furnituretotally shake all their hands in respect. Anyway, a little bit about this guitar... The body is the Ford Emblem, with the ford writing done in hand cut aluminum. The headstock is the shape of a 57 T-bird hood and all the fret markers are hand cut in pearl or some other crazy pearl-like material I forget the name of. They are all different car emblems. From the first fret down:

* Cobra (Mustang)
* Bronco
* Cougar
* Falcon
* Standard Mustang
* Comet
* Thunderbird
* Some old ford I can't remember
* Ka (european)

Anyway, here is a video of me ripping out a blues jam to a David Gilmore style track I downloaded from bluesjamtracks.com. Hope you enjoy. I will probably post some more videos with this guitar, this is just a trial run. This is literally like my 3rd time jamming to this track so i haven't really gotten too crazy with it yet. *** EDIT *** Video set to private in order to prevent someone from potentially building a clone guitar and Jack getting potentially screwed. Leave a comment if you want to see it.

It's been a hell of a long time since I've had the motivation to record anything but tonight I got a hold of some new jam tracks and decided to lay down some lead improv.

This first track is a Bluesy-Jazz track, got it off some jam track site. Worth the $2 download in my opinion. Using my custom patch for the lead, rectifierish, nice delay. Used my Ernie Ball JP6, magnetic pickups only. I call it the Blue Jazz Botchathon because there are some painfully obvious botches in there.

David Carrick - Blue Jazz Botchathon

This second track is from the same site, slowing it down a little. This was on my 2nd or 3rd take of this track. Started out with my custom clean patch using my piezo bridge. Kinda pretty sounding. Of course you know me, the clean didn't last very long. I probably should have kept going with it but I ended up going to my lead patch. There are some botches in this one but fewer than the last track. I call this the silky water bottle jam because I was entranced by the patterns in my water bottle on every bass note.

David Carrick - Silky Water Bottle Jam

Hope you enjoy.

Before I go any further, if you haven't heard of Dream Theater, or if you think Dream Theater sucks, you should probably smash/destroy whatever reproductive organs you might have so that you don't populate our planet with your slingblade-seed. I recommend a 3 pound dead blow hammer, or brass mallet for this task. You can find these at your local Princess Auto.

Moving on... I have been an extremely loyal Dream Theater fan for quite some time now. I started listening to Dream Theater after Metropolis Pt. 2 came out, right before Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. These albums altered my universe. This is when I decided to take up guitar. Most people start with Nirvana songs or some kinda shit-sauce-surprise songs by Green Day. I started with trying to learn stuff like "Peruvian Skies" and "Overture 1928" - This is probably why I have a fucking bizzare technique and structure to the stuff I play now. Anyway I derailed my own blog post, my point is: John Myung is a fucking cyborg.


Cyborg in Leather Pants
I've listened to the entire Dream Theater discography I don't know how many times over, probably in the thousands. Each current member (and the previous members) are all insanely talented muscians. John Petrucci is certainly my hero and the best guitar player alive, and when I "define" guitar player I include the entire gammut of criteria including compoisition, technique, emotional expression, haircut, etc. I've listened to pretty much everything ever recorded featuring John Petrucci, and I've seen him live 5 times, with Dream Theater 4 of those times, and I've watched all his live DVDs... and believe it or not, I've heard John Petrucci make a *small* handful of mistakes. You can catch the extremely rare open string, or just a botched note, or even just some *slightly* sloppy playing. It's extremely rare mind you, but it does happen. Because John Petrucci is flesh and blood, and makes mistakes just like the rest of us.



Not so with Mr. Myung. This guy makes no mistakes. I've actually met all of Dream Theater after a show (see image above featuring me looking like a moron, and Greg looking like, well... Greg). When speaking to each member I asked them how many mistakes they made during the show - When I spoke to John Myung he said "oh. I made one mistake" in this extremely monotonic voice, however, when I asked him "what mistake?" he basically trailed off with no explanation. I believe this is because his positronic matrix wont allow him to lie. The truth was he made no mistakes, this was a ruse to convince me he is actually human. When I shook his hand, he nearly broke a few of my fingers with his freakish death grip. He is the only "human" I have met (aside from Popeye) who's arms are larger in diameter from elbow to wrist than from shoulder to elbow. And we all know Popeye just has large tumors on his forearms. I believe John's forearms are actually jam packed with microprocessor controlled hydraulics which allow him to play ten billion notes per second with no mistakes.

If you still don't believe me, have a listen at everything ever recorded featuring John Myung, if you find a mistake, send it to me, please. If that STILL doesn't convince you, pick up his instructional video. I believe its called "I'm John Myung and I'm actually a transformer, robot in disguise - Watch me play bass guitar and explode your mind with my fucking amazingness". In fact, here is a picture of John Myung learning some new Dream Theater songs.



John Myung, you might be a cyborg, but we still love you.

Well here's a new jam... really mellow and very slow backing track that it seems I can get carried away with... so yeah, this is like six minutes long. Sorry.

Backing track is two clean stereo with middle magnetics with a pleasant chorus. Lead is a little too hot now that I hear it but blah, its a jam track... Warm overdrive with nice delay and reverb with a little wha here and there.


Nap Time

Enjoy or whatever.

My friend Jessica has been feeling pretty down lately, this makes me feel pretty down too. I recorded this tune for Jess, it's not one of those gay cheer-you-up songs.

A Sad Jessica is a Sad Dave

Backing track is a stereo clean with center pickup selection on the magnetics. Lead track is a tweed crunch at low pedal volume with strong delay and reverb volumes. Kinda reminds me of an Opeth tune. Standard E tuning on my JP.