this is my music room, condensed for sake of the photo. i started collecting instruments about a year and a half ago. i started with a cheap little acoustic yamaha my ex-fiancee gave me. pretty soon thereafter i met a good friend who brought his guitar over to my house and we started playing together. then one day he showed up with some tiny children's toy accordion he had from when he was a kid. and i think that's about when things got a little nuts. i really like the old instruments, as far as quality sound and performance goes, they just can't be beat. i think it has a lot to do with the amount of handcrafted care that went into making things back in the day. nowadays materials are cheaper and weaker, production is faster, and quality is watered down. not to say you can't get a good new instrument these days, but something about the old ones just trumps the new ones any day of the week, in my opinion.

in case you were wondering, the big church organ you see on the left in the photo is an estey H model pump organ, from 1930. it has two big bellows in the base, powered by alternately pushing two pedals with your feet to generate air to blow through the reeds. i recently acquired it, and i'm in the process of restoring it. the organ on the right is a hammond L-133, circa late 1960's. i'm looking for a leslie cabinet for it, to get that hammond B3 vibrato that hammond decided to cut back on for some reason after the B series. the weird triangle instrument sitting on the bench is a balalaika, basically a russian ukelele. it has 3 strings, and a really cool sound you just have to hear. the weird thing on the ground to the right of the mandolin is called an autoharp. there's a series of bars that run across all the strings that hold down different combinations to make various chords. the small wooden box with the keys and buttons on it sitting on the floor in the middle of the photo is a weird little compressed air organ i got from an old roomate. it has a switch on the back that turns on the small compressor. there's buttons on the left for chords, a major row and a minor row, and the sound that comes out of it is nothing less than eerie. and i'm sure you all know what an accordion is, but i just have to give a moment of limelight to my baby, affectionately named Serena, my late 50's italian contello. she was in the basement of a church for over 20 years, and came right out of her ricky ricardo tweed case sounding like new. there's something about these instruments that really make a shitty day seem ok, i don't know what it is, but they pacify me. in this digital age, where everything is plastic, pre-fab, and pre-packaged, it gives me something solid, true, and real, a feeling of authenticity that i can touch and interact with. i hope i'm blessed enough to own more and different ones as time moves on. viva analog!!!!

*not in photo - sonovox accordion by sonola, on loan to a good friend

- argentinian thumb piano, various kazoos, whistles, harmonicas, and homemade percussive instruments that also just wouldn't fit in the photo, i don't have a wide angle lens on my camera yet.