Auditions Round 2

2 more last night. The first was very promising. Had a gorgeous Schecter and a Traynor amp kinda like this one (I didn't know they were still around or that they even made guitar amps—I just thought they made crappy old mixers). When he was tuning up I brought up the fact that the husband of a friend of Emily suggested we learn Limelight. The guitarist clicks off his tuner and breaks right into the opening riff. I was one happy camper at the thought of finding another guy that could play Rush. He was very technical and used a variety of playing techniques. But his sound just sucked. He was using some smallish digital all–in–one stomp box, and I'm guessing he was using it to generate distortion instead of his amp. Some of his distorted sounds were like you EQ'd the guitar with a very deep V shape, distorted the hell out of that with a tiny transistor, then EQ'd it the same way again. Really nice guy. Seemed stable (runs an electrical engineering company).

The second guy was very personable and friendly right from the start. Big bushy mustache (think Jamie from Mythbusters), even a shaved head. Work boots, big fuzzy bombardier hat (it was around 0° last night), drives a truck at night hauling scrap metal. His axe is a Firebird (that page was broken when I looked). Had a solid state Fender amp. Not sure why he was using that, and he said he missed a tube amp. He was at the gig on Saturday to check us out. He came up after the first set, introduced himself, and complimented all my "crazy fills". When he was playing with us last night, I did some fill and he was hollering "yeah!". He just gets really into the music and you can tell that he's loving it. He had a nice sound and played really well. Nothing extremely EVHish, but a little more Billy Gibbonsish. Oh, and he also picked up a song on the spot that he'd never played before. Not just the chords and stuff, but the leads. Very Nickish that way.

I think we're all leaning toward the last guy. A few more to go. We never thought we'd get this many really good guitarists looking for this level band. Being that we only want to play once a month or so, we thought we'd only get dabblers who couldn't play all that well. But 3 of the 4 we've heard so far could play with nearly any band out there. Amazing.