Clarky, haha, I heard someone in a store describe H&K as "the poor man's boogie" - i always find that funny....it just seems like the sort of self-centered thing that people would say when they have the money to burn on a Boogie when they think that you don't.

I personally find H&K's vastly more entertaining.

Some people think Boogie's are the best, some don't. I personally find this a good test; take a shit guitar and a really guitar, and play them both through a Boogie. They will both sound kinda similar, and it'll always give you that cool distortion.

Some people say "yeah that shows it's a great amp, it can make any guitar sound good" but I personally find that to be the wrong way of looking at it. To me, if an amp makes every guitar sound similar or the same, it's working too hard. It's sound is over-compressed, way too clinical and doesn't leave room for the guitar to get it's tone across.

I've played through a 190-pound H&K practice amp, and a 4000-pound Boogie rig, and I preffered the H&K because it allowed me to dictate it's tone and general vibe exactly how I wanted, whereas the Mesa/Boogie dictated the sound all by itself, which, to me, completely defeats the object of having a guitar with really high-quality pickups installed.

Master Yoda, this, I think, is where megarachne comes in....Wasps are evolving to be bigger, smarter, more aggressive and more resiliant to things that could kill them. Spiders will de-evolve back to Megarachne days, when we'll have massive things the size of small cats, that will spend their time hunting down and destroying entire wasp colonies.

Genocide, Steve Vai: Live At The Astoria is a great DVD, I love it. Some people have complained that it's too showy and not musical enough, but you go to see Vai cause he's a showman, so if you don't like it, you go see someone else, in my opinion! hehe. Indeed, there is loads of showmanship in there, loads of crazy stuff, but it's all good, and it's musically incredible, especially Virgil's Drum Solo. The second disc, the special features, is one of the best 'specials' discs I've seen, along with The Fifth Element. There's a decent amount of really interesting stuff on there.

shrodemama, touching post, and a good introduction! Welcome to t2j. I really hope someone can help with your request, and I hope it actually gets Joe's attention, cause it certainly seems worthwhile to me!

Best regards to you, your family and to justin's girlfriend!

Suzie, "I hate the way people have to play games, they can't just be straight down the line"......that is so true, I know exactly what you mean!

People always have to find a different way of explaining or describing something too, they always beat about the bush, as it were, rather than just saying what they mean.

Suzie, that's what I like to hear....retail therapy! hehe. I'm starting to get irritable about the whole guitar-selling thing. I cannot get rid of my Jem. I played it a couple of days ago for the first time in about a month.....I played one song then stuck back inside it's case......the only thing I really like about playing it is it's tremolo arm! And I really need to sell it but people get more and more tight-fisted with every hour that passes.

A couple of shops have told me they could help me shift it but i'd only get about 800 quid.....screw that, I paid 1800 quid for it new, I'm not loosing a grand on a guitar! Arrgghh, its so frustrating!

Delfino, thus proving that I was being a lazy s-o-b and didn't read your post properly! haha. Yeah headstock painting is all good, and you're right, painted fretboards don't work! It would chip off or scratch off, and it would generelly cause problems!

Bearing that in mind, my advice to you would be to see if you can get a good quality used JS!

Yeah I tried ebay and nobody bid on it....I wasn't even asking a ridiculous sum, only 1000! What don't I like about it? I dunno, my tastes in tone have changed, and my playing style has changed. Having trialed a friends JS1000 for a week, I realised that the Jem just didn't suit my needs, and I fugured if I could sell it I could afford to buy some recording-hardware, and pay off some debts! hehe

we really need an FAQ!

If you look on a US Dollar Bill, there's a broken pyramid - the top is lifted from the rest of it, and houses, yet again, The All Seeing Eye, which is displayed with bright light beaming from it. This is a nother Iluminati emblem.

Regards the Iluminati, they are like extreme freemasons. It's an occult thing (like phrydom said) of different 'orders'. There's 40 or 50 'orders', with 50 being the lowest - beginner-level, if you will - and 1 being the highest. People at the lower levels are quite normal and are just like any other freemason....they're harmless. People in the top-ten are extremists, indulging in some very nasty, dark hobbies. George W Bush, if I remember rightly, is 2nd order. There's only a few 1st order people on the planet, and they indulge in the darkest of hobbies, like sacrificing babies and general occult/witchcraft type stuff for which the KKK were famed.

Still, I don't think Vai is Iluminati, or if he is, he's low order, otherwise he'd be writing some pretty f*ck*d up music!

That really sucks that London has a JS drought. I'm sure that both GAK (brighton) and Nevada Music (Portsmouth) will have a JS1000 or 1200, and probably a 2000 kicking around cause nobody wants to buy it. ehem. I know that the place I go to in bournemouth has a JS1200 right now, but it's about 1300 quid.....their prices are higher than bigger joints like GAK, Nevada, Wembley GC and Soho Soundhouse, cause theyre a smaller company, but tend to have better quality stock.

A thousand bucks for a JS1200 with a case? It'd almost cost me that much to get the bus to the shop where i'd buy the guitar from! hehe, it's outrageous!

JustJack, igor's mail address is igorbelsky@hotmail.com

His new CDs, Equilibrium and Time Sensitive are definitely worth getting! On the whole, I still like Road Tested most cause I love every track on there. There's a few tracks on the new records which I don't like as much, and I find Equilibrium by far the better album, but they're still both cool.

Equilibrium has a couple of really special songs on it, and his tones are really nice......I believe the 2 albums are 20 quid altogether, which includes postage.

If you mail him i'm sure he'll get back to you.....it could take a few days but he's appreciative of his listeners!

DCK, no I haven't heard Steve Vai's music.....he plays bluegrass doesn't he?

I know a fair bit about the Illuminati tho....maybe I should put up an FAQ at illuminati.com?

PhryDom, er yeah I am a Vai fan......have been for 8 years, not gonna stop now.

Yes the Illuminati are very interesting, hence my decision to do research. They are also dark, twisted sons of satan himself, but not until they're higher-order. I don't think Vai is high-order, if at all.

He doesn't write f*cked up music either.......he writes arty music, which is largely zappa-inspired in it's whackyness.

Vai, like Zappa, is an enlightened soul able to materialise the abstract realm of thought through music........he's not a satanist. Just an artistic genius, who is committed to making mental connections on a level of consciousness that doesn't usually get used.

Some people obviously think he does write f*cked up music, but I urge those people to check out some death metal, the really dark sh*t, with titles such as "Tearing Entrails From A Virgin's C*nt".

I know, titles like that are disgraceful, but alas, I didn't make that one up. One of the guys at college when I was there was into that kind of stuff and often played it over the PA in the practice rooms.

sorry for double, but hey, it'll make the above message easier for people to pick out for their refernce, should they need to.

hoiguy79, Joe doesn't agree with the principal of instructional videos.....he doesn't find the idea of them too useful for anyone who wants to learn comprehensively. It's basically cause of the idea that learning from videos will wake you kinda stale, completely nonversatile......you'll be able to play licks from the videos brilliantly, but it won't help with much else. I think it's a personal prefernce, but I understand what he means!

Also, no the JS10th is no longer on sale 1st-hand. Ibanez made 500 of them, which were all sold, so the only way to get one is 2nd-hand, off ebay or from a magazine or something!

Montoya is my favourite tho. Him, webber and Raikkonen all have the balls to be aggressive against schumacher, but Montoya is the one who is least subtly about it. He doesn't care about Schumacher's status, and that's something sorely missed in the sport......half the drivers have the attitude of bowing in Michael's presence, which means they're never going to beat him!

LucySorets, thanks for that! The 777 info is interesting. I'd forgotten about that 'answers' thing from Vai's site too - from reading it again, it seems he is aware of the dark sides that surround all the symbolism he uses, I guess that's why he says "don't worry about the pyramids and numbers and things".

He doesn't want anyone trying to follow the same route he did and accidentally taking the wrong turn, and knocking on the door of satanism and the Illuminati. hehe.

The individual symbols in themselves, have no real dark meaning, but the all-seeing-eye within the pyramid is an Illuminati symbol, just like the one on the US$ bill.

Narface, my experience of EMG's is the Kirk Hammet set and the Luke Set. The KH's sounded a little thin and weedy, i guess they'd sound okay in a Les Paul through ten Boogies, but in his ESP they sounded a bit pants.

The Luke set were nice I suppose, but very compressed and clinical, and the 9volt battery that powered them played a large part in their tone.

Austin, Crossroads festival on DVD? awesome. Unfortunately, this means yet another problem whereby you walk into a music/video store and say "have you got the Crossroads festival dvd?" and they go tap tap tap on the computer and say "crossroads.....2000....Britney Spears et al".

and you wish you could get away with saying "no you f*cking moron, not Britney Spears. I guess you haven't heard of Eric Clapton?"

Ahh, these are the troubles I had when trying to find Vai's/Cooder's/Macchio's 'Crossroads' on VHS!

cuthbert, I can't believe you missed america's finest off the list for your argument......Laguna Seca raceway! What a beautiful track, it's a crazy circuit, and thrilling to see GT cars pounding round it.

By the way, I have to say, yeah the corvette and viper can corner, but not very well. However, Saleen's S7 and Ford's GT have finally broken the american rule of generally 'simple' engineering. Especially the S7.

cuthbert, cheers for the explanation. I kinda jumped to that conclusion as well, cause I just found a 'rare Golden FEL series" which is described as a preban 15-round model.

Narface, no probs, pleased I could help!

Why specifically the 9mm? It's kinda clinical. I like anything that's virtuous - Steve Vai, Joe, Rahzel the rap/beatbox maestro, Porsche for their precision engineering. Also the japanese for their swordcraft - at the period in history when the brits were making massive great broadswords out of lumps of metal, which were good for lumping their way through people and not much else, the Japanese were building lightweight, ultra-precision tools with the power and balance to cut through a modern-day lamp-post.

The mongols were building longbows 800 years ago which were as powerful and accurate as anything engineered today, and worked in the same way as todays compound bows, only they didn't use wheels and pulleys and stuff - they used muscle fibers from Ox.

And my interest also extends to Beretta for their competency in 9mm engineering, and Enfield/Acc Intl for the L96/338/Artic-Warfare rifles.......They are highly accurate, and I just appreciate anything that is so well designed, so completely thought-out, that it does it's job to such a high standard!

GODGUNSGUITARS, thanks for your feedback! I must reiterate, as I said to cuthbert, my purposes would not be to have something with stopping power. I also believe that if you're accurate enough, a 9 would suffice, cuz in self defence, you'll never be up against anyone in body armour.

Anyway yeah, I totally understand what you guys are saying. If I ever moved abroad, to somewhere where a self-defence firearm is a recommendation, i'd go for something more meaty. How about Desert Eagle 357?

But for simple target use, i'd not be so bothered about power!

On the laws in this country, I understand them and they do work, but we dont have the justice system to support such strict laws - A 30-something year old man had sex with a 12-year-old and got 2 months conditional discharge.

Just the other day, some bloke battered his wife to death with a home-made club, and got "life" but a recommended sentence serving just 14 years. It's fucked up!

I don't think there is any need for anyone civillian to own a firearm, but I do kinda see it as a sporting thing. I guess i'm kinda mixed on my opinions on it.

Tigger2, no unfortunately there's no real way of sending stuff personally to Joe. The only way to get it to him is if you meet him in person, before or after a gig or something!