Wishing to frame my figure as a musician (not professional) I could define myself, since several decades, as an acoustic guitarist who has irreversibly trashed every kind of plectrum, sharing much of the free time with a classic ARIA guitar, bought used for 30,000 italian lire at the beginning of years '70.
At that time I met Antonio Grasso, a perfect marriage between the sacred and the profane, between the classical guitar (he was graduating at the Conservatory of Bari) and the glowing fervor of those days for rock-blues, in a dichotomy that saw him continuously transforming , a sort of dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde, easily moving from Asturias to Stairway to heaven playing, from the studios of Villa-Lobos towards the court of King Crimson, from scales and arpeggios to the amazing solo by Alvin Lee in I'm goin 'home (Ten Years After, live at Woodstock,1969) . The technique on one hand and the emotions on the other, an explosive cocktail beeing able to vouch for enjoyment and feelings without interruption, even in the quiet of one's own home and with a simple classical guitar in the hands: I soon succumbed to that magical charm, relentlessly choosing to remain forever an acoustic guitarist ...
I still remember the reward and encouragement of the early simple studies of the Carulli method, the perseverance in dealing with the difficulties of the first true piece for classical guitar, the Bourrée by Bach (Jethro Tull - Bouree) and of the intriguing Mood for a Day (Steve Howe - Mood for a Day), paid off by the small but perceptible and steady progress. And then, once again and even more, the fall in love at a glance for fingerpicking, blossomed thanks to the delicious Genesis (Jorma Kaukonen - Genesis), one piece, just to use the common way of saying, with an unequalled tradeoff between value and money for any guitar player wishing to approach to this style: I learned it, devouring the tablature, from the very beautiful collection of songs in the Manual of rock guitar by Andrea Carpi, 1980.
So it was that my honorable Fender Stratocaster made in USA (1973), bought for a business activity of some few years within a band (weddings, discos, piano-bar), soon fell into disgrace, sentenced to a rest period of twenty years spent playing acoustic only: furthermore, as if that were not yet enough, a Fender Strato replaced by my much more modest ARIA though, to my ears at least, has played very well until a few years ago ... More recently, because of the need for recording my playing, I had to choice to buy a good acoustic guitar, uncertain I'll have been at ease, having always played fingerstyle on the classical instrument's fingerboard. As an option, I'd have given a second life to my old Stratocaster which ultimately, while obviously not a better solution from the point of view of the fretboard, even more narrow, was already in my hands, neither I'd ever wished to get rid of it. In spite of the difficulties far greater in the ... Fenderpicking, and trusting in the additional expressive possibilities within range of the electric instrument, for a moment I preferred this last chance ...
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