WAY BACK IN 1974, when I was in high school, I took a ceramics class from a teacher named Mr. Rafello. My specialty was ashtrays. The big perk of the class was that we had a community stereo. Students could bring music to play as we worked. After a month or so, Mr. Rafello noticed I was bringing albums by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers Band and so on. One day he pulled out a selection of his own: Django Reinhardt et Stephane Grappelli, a compilation of recordings with the Hot Club of France. The album jacket was covered with dried clay and dust, and featured an illustration of a debonair Django. "Jim, you should hear this," Mr. Rafello said as he put the disc on the turntable. It was like hearing music by divine aliens. I was knocked out: the shredding guitar phrases, the driving quarter-note rhythms, and a sound so real it was like nature.
Immediately, I stopped bringing in my own music and would play Django Reinhardt et Stephane Grappelli every day. After a few weeks, Mr. Rafello gifted the album to me. Of the small mountain of records I own, it remains one of my most cherished.
This story is from the August 2023 edition of Guitar Player.
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This story is from the August 2023 edition of Guitar Player.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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PRS
PREVIOUSLY PART OF PRS's Maryland-built guitar line, the SE NF3 was recently reissued in the company's offshore-produced SE series. The SE NF3 is so named for its Narrowfield Deep Dish (a.k.a. DD) \"S\" pickups. These unique PRS-design units have deeper bobbins to accommodate more windings and extra metal pieces between the magnets to yield a more powerful \"single-coil\" tone, while remaining noise-free because they are in fact humbuckers. A control set consisting of master volume, tone and a five-way blade switch allows the usual selections of bridge, middle and neck pickups by themselves and the neck-plus-middle and bridge-plus-middle combinations that allow the SE NF3 to veer into Strat-like territory in switch positions two and four.
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