I was shopping for a bass the other day and I came across the Gary Grainger Private Stock Bass.   I’m still a novice bass player so I’m just looking at the aesthetics of its assembly and tech specs.  I’m drooling at this point:  A) it’s a PRS and B) this Gary Grainger guy has a really great bio.

Oh, the pickups…”The instrument has an unusual pickup arrangement, using four single coils combined into two “separated” hum-canceling pickups”.

I’m not sure if you follow the PRS line but PRS are great guitars.  I wasn’t so sure about the bass.  As far as I could see, this bass would sound good.

A couple of weeks later a friend of mine was asking me if I ever heard of Acoustic Alchemy.  He’s a hard core guitar player and uses Acoustic Alchemy as one of the bands he listens to and tries to copy.  Well, they had a concert at Yoshi’s in San Francisco and he invited my family to join him.

We did and next thing you know, I see this bass on stage.  It’s the Gary Grainger bass.  I’m thinking, “Really?  Could it be?”  Sure enough, it’s Gary Grainger himself on his Gary Grainger Private Stock Bass.  I almost fainted.

I sat there excitedly watching his every move and hearing every tone that bass put out.  Yeah, there were the two lead guitarists who were the stars of the show but it’s all about the bass player, right?

We stayed after the show to meet the band.  I was nervous.  I’ve never been nervous like this before.  Here we are (Gary is the first one on the back row, I’m the fifth from the left on the backrow):

That was such an exciting concert.  Now I’m a big fan of Acoustic Alchemy.

References:

http://www.acoustic-alchemy.net

http://www.prsguitars.com/grainger/index.html

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