The bathroom and the guitar seem to interact as people ask me to publish a print magazine. I think that magazines will end up in the bathroom. Paper with T-paper, a conglomerate of a glossy and readable paper; one very soft and unreadable is the bathroom's library content.

In 1969 I was playing guitar in the bathroom and my friend Greg walked in playing his harmonica. He was a great player, and our improvisation mixed with the location and its fecal ambience.

The bathroom also sounds good with its hard and reflective materials. It's good to record the guitar in. It has a reverb that differs from other spaces.

Sorry, I've been writing a novel, what I think is the first guitar novel in existence. I know I must be wrong since there are novels about pianists and violinists. Surely I couldn't have written the first guitar novel. I mean, we have such a role in the history of music!

You can buy my novel, which will be published by PublishAmerica. It is called Reaganville. Hopefully, it will be in print by late spring.

I will also advertise it for you in the magazines you can carry to the bathroom. I will expect you to buy it and then write me by email. I will expect you to email with your, "now I know why you are such a -----."

So publishing a guitar website was secondary to my writing of this novel for a while. You can understand now why I have exited music journalism for a while. I had a foray into the world of "high literature."

I am pleased to write guitar articles, but it was catharsis to write Reaganville. Please forgive me. I am now ready to write articles about you, your music, your guitars and your generally high intellectual life of dedication to music and art. I've been bad because I've been in a dark place writing a 50% fake memoirs. I now ask the journalism goddess to forgive me.

My fiancée said that I should, for familial and legal reasons, not say "50% fake memoirs." I said, "who knows which is fake or biographical except those who's lives have been chronicled and they may read it or not." Ah, out of the mouths of babes comes such things and my Sally is a babe.

Buy my book please. It may be the first guitar novel, but correct me if I'm wrong. I have read a lot but have never seen a guitar novel. Then you could carry my words on paper to the bathroom.

You may ask, what is a guitar novel? A novel that has the guitar as the characteristic motto of a character. A place of the guitar where it is made traded or played. A person of the guitar may be a character in this novel and his presence is large. Stuff like that.

Things happen because of the guitar, and the guitar is present while things happen. The guitar carries something symbolic to the novel or some characters or character. The guitar is the battleaxe of the Baby Boomers. I was 54 when I finished Reaganville, and I am obviously a guitar man. I have actually not written a guitar novel but I've written a vast apology for the Baby Boom Generation and punished its main character for being such a Baby Boomer.

Also people of the guitar may have idiosyncrasies that are common because it is such an iconographic instrument of street connotations. It's bad-assed and defiant and it causes the main character of Reaganville to get cursed in ways that are self-motivated and magically realistic.

Reaganville, the novel, fully supports the luthiers of Paracho, and speaks a fairy tale of the origins of the guitar making industry of that village. They became a literary device in the novel only because it is such a wonderful place.

The luthiers there are great. I've had many Paracho guitars, and have joyfully dealt with the luthiers there. As spokesperson for Paracho I say to you, "Go. Go to Paracho, Michoacan, Mexico. Make a deal with the luthier on a fine instrument, and soak in the ambience." As a consumer advocate I say, "ask pertinent questions about how the guitar was built."

Classical guitarists can be bad-assed and defiant. What are we defying? Tuxedos #1, and then all of the cliques, faulty assessments, and just wanting to be the greatest and therefore unfair to other guitarists, or Machiavellian, or possibly playing bad material in poor taste with a lot of histrionics, any number of reasons to be a defiant classical guitarist. Silly, ain't it? It isn't silly at all. Or maybe it is!

The Pawar

I've been shopping around for guitars, and have played them all, and for me the Pawar is the finest and most unusually useful electric guitar.

I'm still saying that the Hill and Lucas guitars are the best classical ones, but the Pawar has to be the pick, for my taste, in an electric.

First of all you can get an electric guitar with a single coil or dual coil pickups, but can you really get both?

You can tap the double coil for single, but this pickup maker may claim that they had single coil tapping in mind, but they didn't. I mean, it was in their minds, but they were making a double coil pickup.

The two housings of the pickups in the Pawar house one stacked double-coil, and one single coil pickup make this an unusual and useful instrument.

Pickups, now made by Pawar and formerly from Duncan, can be switched for 20 sounds passively. I can't get over how all of the sounds are beautiful and useful, covering a wide range of standard electric guitar sounds plus.

This is the magazine that was . . .

This was a classical guitar magazine but now, with the simple fact that music is a world phenomenon, has always been, other forms of music have crept into the classical guitar, and made it part of a family by representing all that is. Great sentence!

It is obvious to a lot of us, but in the backwater of many places, that instrument of old men, and curmudgeons of parchment and ancient history, still has a separate place, and roosts above the more "lowly" fretted and stringed instruments like a powdered wig barrister in an English court. A lot of these fine folks have Prince Valliant haircuts and goatees. I have a goatee but am not PrinceValliant in the least.

So I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I have coined the phrase "compositional guitar" to identify the compositional precedent on all types of guitar, regardless of electric or steel, composition happens on these instruments, and what was the domain of the classical guitar, has, and has easily been a feature of these other guitar types, as the intent of the composer allows.

An easy example of the compositional electric guitar is Robert Fripp of King Crimson, an English progressive ensemble that has reigned supreme since the late 60s in compositional rock ensemble music. Clearly, compositionally, Robert Fripp has been THE master of compositional electric guitar, and the ensemble use has been as dynamic as any composer's work. There can be no more color to be had in Fripp's ensemble work.

With this new introduction, New Millennium Guitar dedicates itself to progressive guitar, compositional guitar of all guitar types, and looks towards new music to be discovered. We look for your music, dear reader, to review, and bring to a larger public attention.

As well, we are committed to the builders and luthiers, those who bring new product to our sonic world. In all categories of guitar and signal processing, we ask you to inform us as we inform you. There is no better interchange of information than the Internet, the repository of all information, good or bad, true or false, we stand to bring the good and true information to you. Well, it is our truth and philosophically, truth is in the eyes of the beholder.

We only sell what we laud.

This is no ordinary Online music store. As the world becomes closer, as bricks and mortar becomes bytes and graphic, New Millennium Guitar will sell guitars like art, like the artists we are, we sell with transparency. We carry nothing that we ourselves wouldn't use, which leads me to a subject hardly ever broached by those in the guitar magazine business: name brands.

Often I bring up the subject about the fact that guitar brands, those well-known brands of guitars that have captured the imagination of the guitar buying public for decades now, are not what they used to be. Their quality has slipped, and this has been a well-known fact of us deep guitar thinkers. They've even delegated their decent production into the banner of "Custom Shop."

I say deep guitar thinkers as sort of an oxymoron, and as a differentiation between the naked brand buyers and those of us that comb the universe for builders that actually touch an instrument in the process of being born.

You guys have got to snap to your senses. You may say, "well Eric Clapton plays one of those and it's good enough for him." Indeed, your naïveté is astonishing since you may have glossed over the fact that they pay Clapton to play this guitar, and most of all, it is handmade. Handmade for him.

New Millennium Guitar Corp is dedicated to the guitar in all of its ramifications, the music and the instrument itself. There is no one without the other, and the importance of the instrument can be borne out by this composer.

When I have a new instrument new music is forthcoming. The essential nature of the new instrument pulls cords, and pushes switches in my composer's mind, and there is music that I wouldn't have written on another guitar.

The Hill Signature double-top classical guitar is a prime example for me in that it has a considerable amount of sustain, and it holds it characteristic sound at low volumes. Most classical guitars, at low sound pressures, don't sound like too much of anything except a nylon stringed box. So what comes forth is music that may be more contrapuntal since a dying voice on one guitar is a voice alive on this one. I do laude the attributes of the double-toped guitars that I have seen but the Hill Signature is the one for me.

Innovation has come from these well-known makers. Taylor is highly innovative with purpose, while Martin makes guitars out of composites and paints them with cowboy scenes for no end except to sell a cheap guitar to a brand "idiot" with little money.

I've taken flack from gentlemen bluegrass heads for making the obvious known, but I am up to it, I swear. I love to banter, and lock horns with another guitar "thinker," but I am 35 years of experience with another 10 years slopping around in the primordial soup of my formative years of no brain. I've gotten a terminal degree in composition and performance from California Institute of the Arts, and rather than make a vanity CD, I chose to have pretty high-powered classical guitarists record my work.

Hooray for me to tell you that some of you are beating a dead horse. Brands are only as good as their instruments, and I'm afraid that they haven't lived up to the promise. They haven't even told you that their guitars, as good or bad as they are, are machined, and at best, committee made. Pay 10 grand for your handmade, "Custom Shop" Martin, pay 4 grand for your committee made.

Pay 3 and a half grand for your handmade, by one guy, Northwood and get a better guitar. So yell at me! I don't care. To get stroked is better than no stroke at all.

I'm enjoying myself and do ask you to help me further enjoy myself by sending me your interesting CDs and I will review them if I like them. If I don't like them you won't see me say that in "print."

Do you know the worst insult a composer can receive from another composer, after a performance of a work? "It was nice." We don't want nice, we want interesting, mind blowing, thoughtful, thought provoking, historically informed and highly cogent, you know, things of the mind and not of a wisp of a dandy's sensibility. This is the type of work we want to review at New Millennium Guitar Publishing. Nothing else will do for us except something that is wise.

Copyright 2006, new millennium Guitar Publishing Co., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED