I presume they must have discovered how thin the market for a 9-string still is and had had it in stock for six months or more. On entering the store, the manager and his assistant were pleased to tell me that, yes, the guitar was there and that this was my lucky day, since they had knocked a further $200 off the list price, even though it was clearly brand new and the tag hangin from one of the tuners said $1695. It was late on a Saturday afternoon, after I’d been attending a nearby function and I only got to the store five minutes before the 3pm close, without having had time to check, before leaving Brisbane, that the guitar was indeed in stock. The process of buying the RG9 was unnerving. But I then discovered the Ibanez RG9 for quite a bit less, and eventually found a Gumtree ad listing a ‘used’ on at a Gold Coast store for AU$1195. The first one I came across, by chance, whilst browsing a retailer’s website, was the Schekter C9 Hellraiser, but at almost AU$2000 this would involved risking quite a bit for an instrument that might be hard to sell if I didn’t enjoy playing it. I was thus naturally excited to discover that 9-strong guitars had started to appear. Whilst it certainly permits spectacular bar chords because the 1st and 2nd strings are then paired with the 8th and 7th strings, it didn’t appeal to me as it compromised the use one might otherwise make of the 8th string. Abasis tunes his guitar to reach the bottom E of a bass by dropping the normal 8-string tuning from F# on the 8th string. When I became aware of Abasi and the 8-string, things still didn’t seem quite right. Last year, while still unaware of the rise of the 8-string guitar and especially the role played in this by Tosin Abasi, my thoughts returned to this idea after I saw the first 6/4 twin-neck I’d seen in years (by Danelectro, in Music City in Cairns whilst on vacation there) and bought a secondhand Cort Artisan A6 bass whose range encroached further on a regular guitar. Greg Lake in Emerson, Lake and Palmer) or the Shergold 12/4 that Mike Rutherford played in Genesis (a version of which was my own first bass) never seemed quite right, given the overlap between the range of a guitar and a bass. The twin-neck 6/4 Gibson that some players used in the early 1970s (e.g. Not a Chapman Stick or Warr Guitar, despite my love of the use of these things in King Crimson). I had long wondered whether guitarists might one day be able to play a guitar that gave them the range of a guitar and bass guitar in one reasonably conventional kind of instrument (i.e. ![]() ![]()
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