Hello all – finally back from the (tremendously fun, albeit exhausting) 9th Annual Harp Guitar Gathering!
It’ll take a while to collect and gather all the photos from official photographer Chuck Thompson and all the other shutterbugs, so I’ll blog as I can, and in no particular order.
First up:
As you know, we planned a pre-Gathering trip to the Department of Diagnostic Imaging at John Thomas’ Quinnipiac University, where he has slowly been x-raying guitars (mostly Gibsons and Larsons) over the last couple of years (over 60 so far).
On Friday morning (Day 1 of the official Gathering), we descended on the very willing staff of diagnostic imaging professors (Tania Blyth, Shelly Giordano and Natalie Pelletier) with a total of ten instruments. Steve Farmer (with his big Gibson harp guitar) was my van partner and co-schlepper of several harp guitars gathered from Stephen Bennett, Stacy Hobbs and myself. Already underway when we got there were John and the Hartmans (Bob & Carol), doing three of Bob’s instruments.
John invited reporters from two different local papers who were pretty fascinated with what we were up to. They took photos and did brief interviews with most of us, and each ran a story the same day. Steve and I even made the front page!
It went very well – about 20 minutes per instrument. The three professors were amazingly quick, yet careful and thorough about getting the shots we wanted (top views and side views, the portions to be Photoshopped together later). And yes, there were some interesting finds, including one major surprise discovery.
John got up at 4 in the morning the next day to throw together his interesting (and hilarious) presentation for our first Gathering event segment at 9 in the morning.
More to come!
