DAVID SOLWAY ON THE PERFECT GUITAR:

I continue looking for the perfect guitar, by which I mean not a high-end Gibson or some unaffordable vintage specimen but one that is kind, hospitable and forgiving of my errors of execution. My three relatively inexpensive Fenders are viragos, buzzing like a nest of wasps unless my fingering is absolutely impeccable. My La Patrie is a real beaut, but don’t try to bar in the key of F unless your wrist and index finger have developed muscles of steel. When I venture on my Epiphone, my playing can sound like a poor man’s version of Jimmy Nolen’s “chicken scratch” technique, grating and chanky. Of my two (now discontinued) Ibanez lovelies, long the favourites of my seraglio, one has grown a little testy and unpredictable over time, but the other still treats me with approximate tenderness, taking my technical waywardness more or less in stride and generally accepting my peccadilloes with grace. When I cue her up, a song will sometimes sink deep in the pocket. Yet even she has her unresponsive moments, exacting her nuptial revenge when out of sorts. Perhaps, as Jimmy Buffett warbles in “Margaritaville,” “It’s my own damn fault.”

I recently came across a third Ibanez bashfully secluded on the rack at Steve’s Music Store in Ottawa, of different shape and glaze from her predecessors but with the same sweet action. Naturally, I could not resist her appeal. The quest for an ideal consummation, of course, is asymptotic, but the search continues.

I’m happy to have a few instruments I keep for general playing around the house, and my Roland VG-88 and VG-99 when I need something exotic to sit in a track or for a solo, such an electric sitar, 12-string or nylon string guitar, or an emulation of Roland’s classic early 1980 guitar synths. For playing my software synthesizers, the new Jam Origin MIDI Guitar VST plugin is pretty darn cool, but its tracking isn’t as fluid as the all-in-the-box VG guitar modeling systems.

Incidentally, David ponders the origins of the word “axe” to describe the guitar — I believe it comes from the phrase jazz men used to describe their horns during the big band and bebop era.