Day 16

Music under the trees

Another beautiful day in Formentera. Bright blue sky and warm. Strong breeze from the west. Ibiza is covered in storm clouds but it is beautifully clear here. Since we have no mountains, any clouds just skid over us and the colours are amazing!

Yesterday morning we gave birth to complete guitars as we unclamped the fittings from the previous night. They now look like proper guitars, almost!

I resolved my previous frustrations with my ability to wind bobbins and created two fine pickups for a deep bluesy tone on my guitar. 7800 and 10500 windings respectively . . .

Screwup number 10 (actually I can no longer remember the number of mistakes I have made) became visible when I started to set the pickups in position on the guitar, and then realised I had routed the top of my fretboard to meet a twin humbucker pickup at the neck, but had changed choice of pickups since then. Fitting these P90's in the standard way would have left a nasty gap between the fretboard and the neck pickup, so the Professor came up with the ingenious solution of building our own custom pickup covers from rosewood, the same wood as the fretboard. So we routed these and the cavities. Very delicate half a millimetre accuracy stuff . . . .

Later, due to unavailability of the Professor (Christian, of 'exploding guitar fame, managed to drill two holes right  through the back of his beautiful Les Paul Smartwood. It is becoming more and more of a semi acoustic!), I took matters into my own hands and drilled an unscheduled hole. But it's in the right place and seems to do the right thing!

Eric spent the day routing the top of his neck in the appropriate shape to get the style of the bass and positioning of the pickups.

Eddie Van Halen (Luc's guitar) . . .

Before lunch, Luc sent me an unfortunate photo he had taken the previous day, where I was posing Chico, Eki's little dog and security guard, atop my guitar for a 'cute moment'. Sadly, the angle of this photo tells an entirely different story . . .

Eric and I had a pleasant lunch at Can Forn, although brief by Formentera standards.

We had agreed on a mere 90 minute lunch break to allow us to finish at 6pm so we could return to Casa Eric for a BBQ party with the rest of the crew. I marinated Pollo Formentera, chicken breasts infused in a magical concotion of olive oil, white wine, Hierbas, garlic, chilli, ginger, rosemary and local frigola herb. The resultant barbequed chicken worked out pretty good.

We ate and we drank under the trees at Casa Eric, and were regaled by the velvet voice of Alejandra from Buenos Aires, who is visiting the island (via Mallorca) for two days for a gig tonight (tomorrow? I am losing track of days . . ) with Eki. Wonderful voice, and an acoustic set which ended up in everyone having a few songs on one of two acoustic guitars with Eki thumping out on the big old double bass. A lot of fun.

Hierbas continued until late . . .

Then bed . . .

Bon Dia!