Every so often we open the door of our office to work experience dudes. It makes us look good in front of our bosses. Plus the office hotties go goo-goo when they see us acting paternally to ‘da yoof´. We even have the young pluckers making us tea and restringing our guitars. It´s the perfect scam! (I so hope Lucy and Claire don´t read this…)
Ah yes, life is sweet in TG… But wait, what´s this? Apparently we have to dangle the carrot of ‘meaningful work´ under the eager snouts of our young charges, or it´s no more work experience for your favourite guitar mag.
With this in mind, we sent our latest sucker, er, ‘candidate´ off to Bristol Academy where he shadowed TG´s News Editor Nick Cracknell on a mission to find out what gear makes Bowling For Soup simmer.
His name´s Alex Ventura. He seems a nice lad and, more importantly, his dad is quite high up in the company that publishes TG. Needless to say, he´ll be getting a glowing report from us, even though he hasn´t made tea all day. Over to Alex…
“On Thursday 10 July 2008 I met Jaret and Chris from one of my favourite punk-rock bands, Bowling For Soup. TG´s News Editor Nick Cracknell thought it would be a good idea if I tagged along while he interviewed the guys for a couple of regular features in the mag. I´m glad he did!
“They say you should never meet your heroes because you´ll always be disappointed. Well, based on my experience yesterday ‘they´ are wrong. Chris and Jeret are two talented, funny and very nice guys.
“As they joked around while TG´s photographer snapped away, it became obvious that they´re really just kids in grown-ups´ bodies. They don´t take anything seriously, as Jeret said: “You can make anything funny by pulling your pants down.” I´ll probably just take his word for that…
“As Nick asked Chris questions about his gear, the BFS behemoth showed us round his set-up. His amp is one I´ve wanted for years, but so far haven´t been able to afford. It´s a Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier and it sounded amazing at the soundcheck. Jeret plays the same amp, so that´s a double thumbs up as far as I´m concerned.
“Although we couldn´t stay for the gig, the band sounded just as good in soundcheck as they did when I saw them live at Download in 2005. Like so many other punk players, Chris and Jeret prove you don´t have to be a virtuoso to sound great.
“Today was an awesome experience and Chris and Jeret are great guys!”
“A unique octave bass fuzz with a built-in, 2-voice ring modulator”: The Maestro BB-1 Brassmaster is a super-rare bass octave fuzz from the ‘70s that sounds great on guitar, sells for $2,000+, and Behringer just made a $69 clone of it
“Maintain a consistently optimal neck setup, playability, and string action, regardless of changing environmental conditions”: Has Furch just made acoustic guitar setups a thing of the past with its new CNR System Active neck?
