Your First Good *** ?

If you have a hobby of any kind, it probably required some kind of item, utensil, tool etc. in order to make your hobby doable, and you'll never forget the joy of getting that thing whether it was your first real leather baseball mitt or maybe if you're a women it was more along the lines of your first sewing machine. But you never forget that first great one—whatever it was. And if you don't still have it, you probably do have a picture of it.

This was my first really good guitar. It was a Daion Heritage-78 that I bought brand new in 1979 for around $400. It was a dynamite guitar for the money, with a cedar top and made of solid woods all around. It even had wood binding. The only thing they skimped on was the bridge-plate which was made of a kind of plywood. It did indeed crack eventually (though I got many years out of it first!), and I had it replaced with a piece of solid maple. Frets Magazine used this very model for all their string and pickup tests over the years. Daion was a great company, and the first to come out with a truly affordable guitar for the working man that was still a great axe. I played this guitar for over 20-years until I actually wore big ruts in the fretboard!

I have a couple of short recordings I made with this particular guitar, although niether is great sonically (I didn't have the best microphone for acoustic back then), but this is the better sounding of the two. I must have recorded it around 1990 or so. The bass gets a little boomy in places, but it ain't terrible. I think you can still tell how nice these guitars sounded. This pice doesn't have a name. It was just an intro for another tune (which I chopped off at the end). So here you have it—"The Nameless Daion Guitar Song."