Honestly, I'm more of a multi-instrumentalist/composer than a guitarist, so my guitars don't always get so much attention. My ASAT parks next to the DAW workspace; it's my default for when I'm in recording mode and looking to lay down a twangy electric guitar track. I've also got a Heritage H535 strung up with heavy flatwounds for a jazzier feel that gets the most use. But the Legacy has spent the last few years in a closet. I KNOW, SHAME ON ME!
I'm 40 years old now, and I've been playing since I was about 15. Late 80s...just imagine it for a second. MTV and pop radio owned America's music consciousness, and their guitar hero archetype was a poodle rocker in spandex, tapping and nosediving acrobatic solos while deliberately gyrating his crotch. Not my style.
For my brash, ignorant, teenage brain, whammy bars were for jackasses.
And then the rest of my life happened. I picked up piano and sax in my early twenties after falling for jazz. The guitar stuck around for a pluck whenever I needed a break from woodshedding for hours just to avoid sucking so conspicuously. In the late 90s, I discovered computer music, and I dove headfirst into the world of sampling, synth programming, and making beats. The guitar came out for a strum on the rare occasion that I just had to unplug.
In the early naughts, I fell into the Afro-Cuban groove. I bought a conga and started over, then another conga, a bongo, a shekere, a guiro, a whole stack of bells...the works. Then I got corporate job, got married, bought a condo, got divorced, and now...all of a sudden, I rediscovered guitar. I've always been able to sort of improve by osmosis on guitar despite not practicing much, thanks to my other musical endeavors, but I've never done much real exploration of the instrument since those early years.
Now I'm playing regularly, learning new techniques, importing the ideas collected from jazz, synthesis, and Cuban groove into my guitar playing, experimenting with pedals, different strings, amps and amp sims. I recently caught some videos of Bill Frisell and Jeff Beck using vibrato to great effect, and now I have to try it. The only guitar I've got with that capability is the Legacy, so out of the closet it comes, but I don't have the arm!
When I bought it, there was no arm, and of course I couldn't care less. But now I'll need one.
OK, here's where I need your help. My Legacy has the serial number CLF33373. Not sure what year that is, but I suspect it's early to mid 2000s, somewhere around the cutoff between the early vibrato arm and the current one. Which do I need?
