NGD - inheritance guitar

[Armistice]

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No, not really... Buckle up, it's a story...


So anyway, back in May my mother died. She lost the will to live at 94. I got a text from my sister on a Saturday afternoon saying she was refusing further treatment and was going to be put into palliative care on Monday and perhaps I should come down and say goodbye. So we worked out the details of that, but by next morning she was already dead. I got another text to tell me. My family aren't what you'd call skilled communicators. Not a phone call. A text...

As soon as they stopped giving her antibiotics to keep the sepsis she'd been affllicted with at bay, she was gone. Can't say I blame her for the choice, it wasn't much of a life by then. My father died in 1986 so I'm now an orphan. And just like with my father, there was no "say goodbye" moment. Bang. Gone.

Six months on we're close to finalising the estate and unless one of my sisters has been plotting a challenge/coup I should be in for an inheritance perhaps by the end of the year, more likely early next year. The wheels turn slowly on such things.

So I've been thinking "What will I do with the money?" Various things - nothing major, it's not a fortune as she wasn't well off in the end when we sold her house and shuffled her into aged care - that house was pretty much all of her "assets" - but it's not nothing either.

Now I did think that even though I have a "stratocaster" it's not a Fender stratocaster, but a Swiss Levinson Blade stratocaster bought in 1993 which cost pretty much the same as an MIA strat at the time, and I liked better. I wasn't all that savvy about guitars and their history back then. It still is a great guitar.

And even though I don't have the actual money yet I was checking out strats on the local music shop's website and trying to work out exactly WTF Fender were up to with their model lines. There was a sale on the and the Ultra 2 line had just been released and I didn't really like any of the colours, based on the photos - the guitar shop had a white (Avalanche) one according to the site. But when I dug a bit deeper I found a Fender video of some black dude I've never heard of playing a Solar Flare coloured Ultra 2, and that changed my mind on that colour. Didn't like the other colours - white, black, red, blue - but in the video Solar Flare looked like Shrek had had unnatural congress with a gold top guitar in terms of colour. Sort of chartreuse, and metallic.

So I checked around all the guitar shops within a 2 hour radius and found that there was one in Brisbane, but the price wasn't as keen as my local shop, and I thought that there were probably a few around because it's all new and once they're scooped up, the colours will be hard to find, and pre-Christmas sale is on, so why not do it now? So off I trotted to my local guitar shop and managed to stand looking at a wall of guitars and just generally wandering around for 35 minutes being completely ignored as salespeople tried desperately to sell a number of small value items to reluctant shoppers, until eventually I just went up and collared someone and asked why they were ignoring me... I was in the shop while my GF was in the art supplies place a few doors down so I figured if she comes in and I don't have a guitar in hand then these guys won't be selling me anything.

The guy was very apologetic and got the white one down for me and I played it and the neck felt a little chunky, so he got me a pastel green Jeff Beck and a blackie Claptop one down as well to compare. Fender put 9s on their strats so they felt a little light as well. Anyway, I liked it enough and more than the other two - I'd never buy a <insert guitarist> guitar anyway but I told him it was the wrong colour so off to the counter we went, he found there were 3 Solar Flares in Sydney, offered me the same price as the on-sale white one and we did a deal. He suggested it would take "at least two weeks" for it to make its way up here, but a week later I got the text and yesterday I went down, gave them the rest of the cash, and here we are...

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Not to everyone's taste, colour-wise I'm sure, but I like it. In terms of features it's pretty nice. Tusq nut, satin finish on the back of the neck and headstock, anodised aluminium pickguard and back plate, whatever they call that thing where they shape the plate at the back and the body so you can get right up high no problems, luminous inlay dots on the side of the neck, S1 switch, latest gen noiseless pickups, quarter sawn neck and probably a few other things I can't remember... was pretty busy yesterday so I had a brief play with it and... it sounds almost exactly like any other strat.

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And while I was splashing cash around, I bought the pedal below. I'm never loving what happens to the Kemper when you turn the gain knob up. Patches sound fine at the gain setting they're created at, but twist that gain knob and it can get a bit fizzy and grainy, so I figured I needed a boost / overdrive pedal to push the signal a bit more into some of the cleaner profiles - especially with a new single coil guitar - so did some research and found a place in Melbourne having a 20% off Black Friday sale and ordered one of these... and it also arrived yesterday. It's from Xotic, and AH stands for Allan Hinds, who apparently is someone. I didn't buy it because of him, but because it seemed to me to be what I needed. Again, not much time to play, but liking it so far...

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As for the rest of the money, when I get it, well I was about to get a new car anyway - the Audi's into its 10th year now, so, also yesterday, I went up the range a bit and ordered a car as well as well as pick up my geetar. Yesterday was a BIG day. I may have ended up with this car anyway, but I hadn't quite saved up that much, and the potential inheritance decided it for me. So there'll be a NCD thread in Jan/Feb - it's not actually built yet. Apart from that, I'll shove some in the travel budget and do a bunch of upgrading of household stuff - pots, pans and the like, and stock the cellar...



YouTube of aforementioned black dude playing my guitar - you get a better representation of what it looks like...

[liv_rong]

Sorry to hear about your mother, man. Nice guitar though!

[Lt. Bob]

sorry for your loss man ....

Nice color on the guitar

[rayc]

Looks greener in the vid.
If it's what you wanted then it's ace.
New car n guitar...big sweep of vault in anticipation.
I hope expectations are met all around.

[Greg_L]

Yeah not bad for a strat. I like it. Congrats.

[WhiskeyJack]

I'm not a strat guy at all but there ~IS~ something very redeeming about this one. I think it is that cool color in contrast with the wood choice on the neck for me. Those do it. I am sure everything else will be notably stratty. Good find Amri though i think the hello kitty one is more your flavor.

Sorry again about your mom.

[Armistice]

I'm not a strat guy at all but there ~IS~ something very redeeming about this one. I think it is that cool color in contrast with the wood choice on the neck for me. Those do it. I am sure everything else will be notably stratty. Good find Amri though i think the hello kitty one is more your flavor.

Sorry again about your mom.

Cheers. I was toying with buying my mate (you know who I'm talking about) a Hello Kitty guitar strap while I was there... I mean they had EVERYTHING Hello Kitty in the shop - $149 for a leather guitar strap... I don't think so.

And I specifically wanted a maple fretboard as my Blade strat has one and my Burns has one - this is next level in terms of feel though. This line doesn't have rosewood - they've gone straight to ebony, which is a plus. A bad rosewood fretboard can be a pain - and I wouldn't have been comfortable ordering a guitar, sight unseen, with a rosewood fretboard. Or, indeed, a Gibson of any sort. But Fender have pretty good QC. This one is fine. It was even almost in tune out of the box. Maybe they unbox them over here and set them up, or something. Find it hard to believe that something built a few months back in the US made it all the way over here and stayed in tune. It was in a sealed cardboard box at the guitar shop, which we opened.

The black hardware and pickguard work well with this colour - not so much with the blue and red jobbies, though.

Yeah not bad for a strat. I like it. Congrats.

Apparently, the three metallic colours are supposed to be evocative of race car paint colours, or so someone in Fender Marketing says, anyway.

Looks greener in the vid.
If it's what you wanted then it's ace.
New car n guitar...big sweep of vault in anticipation.
I hope expectations are met all around.

It looks better in real life than in the photos - not as gold. I didn't see the point getting a "classic" strat, in terms of colour - there's a sunburst with a gold pickguard which looks quite nice but the white was a bit underwhelming with a silver guard and as I already have a blackie with the Blade, that was never an option.

Yeah, I'm probably adding to inflation / keeping people employed... hard to walk that line sometimes, wherever it is...

sorry for your loss man ....

Nice color on the guitar

Thanks LT. We weren't close. And I thought you'd like the colour...

Sorry to hear about your mother, man. Nice guitar though!

Thanks Liv.




We weren't close as I said above. We're a weird family. I keep trying to keep the conversation with my sisters going via email as we work through the estate (and indeed a year or so back when we were working through the house sale / aged care move). It's never me that stops talking. Neither sister is talkative, in two completely different ways. I wonder if they realise, once the estate is finalised, that we may never actually meet again? Because if they're not making any effort, then I get a bit sick of trying. We'll see...



INTERESTING FACTOID - when my mother died, there was the obvious question of where the will was. As it turned out, younger sister had a copy - I had no idea what was in it (although I had ascertained during the house sale / aged care experience that one existed). Elder sister was co-executor with some entity called Trust Company of Australia, who were also administrator. The will was written in 1993 - remembering that my father was already dead then. No idea why she did that but it turned out to be good advice from someone.

Anyway, who TF are Trustee Company of Australia these days? They don't exist any more. After some more detective work we worked out that their interest in estates etc. was bought out by a financial behemoth called Perpetual round about 2013/2014. So we contacted Perpetual - a hard enough task in itself as they're huge and where do you even start - they confirmed they had the official will and then we started reading through stuff on their website about process and COSTS... OMG, a licence to print money. Cost is a percentage of assets - I think it'll cost "us" (ie. the estate) mid $30K to administer one of the simplest deceased estates you'd ever come across. A refundable accommodation deposit, three bank accounts, no personal possessions of value. That's it. Simples.

So in talking to the sisterhood I expressed my thought that the fees were outrageous and I was going to investigate at some point, somehow, what, if anything, could be done about them. Mumbled agreement, or at least not disagreement... neither of them is used to being confrontational with financial services companies, but I worked for one for 25 years so I have an idea of how it all works. And then I remembered "Hang on, I know someone who used to work at Perpetual..."

That someone was the other half of the Jongleurs acoustic band I was in for half a dozen years. Small world! So I rang him up and had a chat, and then found that not only had he worked for Perpetual, he was the guy in charge of the project that assimilated Trust Company of Australia into Perpetual. Small, small, small, small world. I mean, we probably chatted about this project during breaks in band practice! As you do...

He gave me some ideas on the cost thing and said he still had good contacts and could help, but the sisterhood weren't interested, as I'm not an official party on the will, merely a beneficiary, I have no legal standing in the matter. So nothing to be done there.

Anyway, I'm off to edit a song... first new Honey Hunters tune should roll out of the hit factory within the week.

[Greg_L]

That greenigh gold is actually kind of reminiscent of the original GoldTop Gibsons. They had a greenish tint to their gold. Not as much as that Strat but it's kind of similar.

[JD01]

Sorry about you mum.

Headstock is too big.

[musicturtle]

I like that axe.

Sorry to hear about your mom.

Good luck with auto purchase as well.

[Greg_L]

That's a normal Strat headstock, not the big dumb 70s headstock.

[vomitHatSteve]

Condolences on the mother.

I like the way the axe looks, tho I too am in the "meh, strats" camp. (Honestly, I'd prefer the Hello Kitty with the humbucker most likely. (Tho if it's $150 for the strap, I must assume that it's $900 for just the guit and not for the whole bundle, which is a lot for a kiddie guitar!))

[Armistice]

Condolences on the mother.

I like the way the axe looks, tho I too am in the "meh, strats" camp. (Honestly, I'd prefer the Hello Kitty with the humbucker most likely. (Tho if it's $150 for the strap, I must assume that it's $900 for just the guit and not for the whole bundle, which is a lot for a kiddie guitar!))

Ha ha... I thought you'd like the Hello Kitty. $869 is the sale price of just the guitar. The tag says $979 is RRP. I'm going to... wild guess... assume it's not an MIA, probably MIM. For comparison the cheapest MIM strat you can get in the shop is about $300 more than Hello Kitty strat. Australian prices are a big topic.

Interestingly when I went back to pick it up they said after I ordered it they decided to get one for the shop as they thought it looked cool, and I assumed that was just "make the customer feel good about their purchase" sales talk, but no, they actually did...

https://www.mooloolabamusic.com.au/fend ... olar-flare

$204 more expensive though - back up at the cheapest price otherwise available in the country. Whilst everything in Aus guitar wise is really expensive, relatively speaking I got a great deal.

(Also, my Duesenberg I got from there is currently also in stock - https://www.mooloolabamusic.com.au/dues ... valon-blue - at their super duper 20% discount price, and that is actually a high number for Aus retailers to discount by, it's still $500 more than I paid 3 years ago, but then I knew at the time they'd mispriced it, given what the other shops were trying to get for them)

That's a normal Strat headstock, not the big dumb 70s headstock.

Exactly. I can't stand big head stocks and also the curly Stratocaster decal they put on them. Ugh... not a fan of Fender headstocks generally either but they are what they are. So very few decent headstock designs, particularly in 6 on the one side land.

I like that axe.

Sorry to hear about your mom.

Good luck with auto purchase as well.

Cheers MT.

Sorry about you mum.

Headstock is too big.

It's a small headstock. Insofar as I understand the history, the large headstocks were invented when Fender was bought by CBS, so that they could fit bigger branding on it. One of the design things about the current generation I actually like is that the headstock branding is small, straight, and discrete. Always disliked large headstocks on strats, even though that was what was on guitars in my formative years. You been eating the kids cereal again? Too much sugar making you see things as bigger than they are?

[JD01]

It's a small headstock. Insofar as I understand the history, the large headstocks were invented when Fender was bought by CBS, so that they could fit bigger branding on it. One of the design things about the current generation I actually like is that the headstock branding is small, straight, and discrete. Always disliked large headstocks on strats, even though that was what was on guitars in my formative years. You been eating the kids cereal again? Too much sugar making you see things as bigger than they are?

haha, no, I put a tele neck on my strat body.

[JD01]

Condolences on the mother.

I like the way the axe looks, tho I too am in the "meh, strats" camp. (Honestly, I'd prefer the Hello Kitty with the humbucker most likely. (Tho if it's $150 for the strap, I must assume that it's $900 for just the guit and not for the whole bundle, which is a lot for a kiddie guitar!))

In all fairness to the Hello Kitty guitar, looks like it was inspired by Jerry Cantrell. Single humbucker and volume knob, no tones. Its got heavy rock pedigree.

[Greg_L]

Speaking of hideous Fender headstocks....the Tele headstock is the worst of all time.

[Manslick]

I love the color. Really pops in pictures.