Car Porn and Racket all in one.
Today, let's celebrate Aston Martin.
I could write reams on the history of these beautiful cars but instead I'll simply give you a link to their own history page and you can check it out if you want to.
Today we are here to ogle …
To gaze in wonder and to sigh and moon over pure car porn.
Let's start at the very top.
I give you that most rare and perfect marriage between England and Italy, the sublime quintessence of elegance that is the Zagato-bodied DB4.If that doesn't make your heart leap with joy then you have the soul of a tax collector.
We've seen this before but I for one am not going to resist posting it again.Feast your lucky eyes on Sir Stirling Moss's LeMans DB3, still racing today, as is Sir Stirling himself.
A snarling beast enrobed in beauty.
A lovely line of Astons, from DB1s to DB3s, all with immaculate racing pedigree.
I just wish you could hear this.
How many cars make you want to fondle them like this one does?
The DB4 oozes grace and power.
Something they still manage to capture today, though with not quite the same charm.
The beast within.
It's what weekends are for.
"Nobody Does It Better".So … We've feasted our eyes; let's torture our ears … To the Racket!
Searching the archives once again for car-related music, I dug really deep into the past and came up with this recording of The Blind Willies playing Tom Waits' "Old '55".
Recorded in my dining room many years ago, this features Michael on my crappy old Yamaha keyboard playing "piano" and some overdubbed "strings", while I play my Strat straight into the desk.
"Straight into the desk" means just what it says on the box; the guitar is plugged directly into the mixing desk without being put through an amplifier so you get a nice "clean" sound and get to hear the guitar's natural tone.
To hear the same guitar played through an amp, try comparing it with this one from earlier in the Racket series.
Boring stuff for Istvanski now:
My old custom Strat has Fender Lace Gold pickups and a Bartolini active circuit.The first two of those lovely vintage Telecaster knobs do their usual job of volume and tone but the third one cranks in the active circuit so I can get infinite sustain and perfectly controlled harmonic feedback.
Cheaty, but cool!
The long note at the start of the second solo in song two is this knob turned up to about "3". It's great for songs like Boston's "More Than A Feeling", where you need to hold notes for bloody ages, or shove it up to ten if you want to seriously party!
That sucker eats valves for breakfast, though, so I use it sparingly as new sets of Boogie bottles don't come cheap.
The guitar body is refinished in Lotus Sports Cars "Opalescent Pearl" paint (it was originally white). Phil bribed security with chocolate, sneaked it into the factory one night and used around £150 worth of paint on the job. It looks beautiful under stage lights; all the gorgeous pearl colours wash over it as it moves. It's finished with a hand-applied cellulose lacquer; hard to get these days outside of vintage car restorers but sonically so much better than the plastic crap they put on guitars nowadays.
The neck's a deep, round-profiled flame maple and the fingerboard birds-eye maple, cut to my favourite 21" Les Paul radius rather than the usual 17" Fender radius and with Gibson fat frets.
The dot markers are abalone and get smaller as they go up the neck like my Martin D18; a more elegant solution than a normal Strat.
The switch below the middle knob cuts out the active circuit when I don't need it and a pull-switch incorporated into the same knob gives a cut in tone shaped to sound like Robert Cray (that dates the guitar for you).
The trem is a Kahler Flyer. They don't make those any more, which is a damned shame. Its a "cam" style trem rather than a pivot like the Floyd-Rose, so if I break a string it stays in tune so I can finish the song. It also means double and triple stop bends don't detune the upper strings like they do on a Floyd.
Combine that with a graphite nut and Sperzel Trim-loks and I can change a string mid song while still comping with my left hand.
Hokay … Boring stuff over. Suffice to say I love this guitar.
