So, I'll ask George Kaye--is there a significantly lower profit margin on Casios that relegate them to toy status? Cynics preach that profit drives consumer tastes. So I wonder . . . ?

About my past/current instrument setups: I started in '72 as a folk rock solo act armed with my old Gibson axe and Shure mic run through a metallic blue tuck 'n' rolled Kustom amp which I bought from the manufacturer a few miles away from my Kansas home of Ark City. That amp looked so cool. In '74, I duo-ed with a rock drummer who'd apprenticed with a touring swing band and could do it all. In '76, I added Crumar manual bass pedals and learned to play a fretboard with my hands and a keyboard with my feet. (Took three months in my basement to get the music into my shoes!) In '79, Bobby Wiley of Wichita KS got me into the NAMM in Chicago where I saw B.B. King demo-ing a "Lucille" in a booth with about 20 curious people milling about him; where I first heard of the upstart magazine, "Rolling Stone" which was enticing people to be photoed behind a carnival-esque mag cover with cut-outs for their faces; and where I bought the first model of the Italian arranger for guitarists called the "AutoOrchestra," a tempermental analog (duh! it's the '70s, Jim) pedal driven unit that I refused to bring to the stage because I didn't want to lose my drummer friend. Circumstances found me moving to Phoenix in '80 where I used two successive models of AutoOrchestras as a single act, then segued into Soltons (as the AO maker became Ketron). I've had three Soltons and, years ago, added a keyboard to the act to play either live or MIDI sequences I generate on Cakewalk (pre-Tune 1000 days). My hands are occupied with guitar playing and Solton button pushing and my feet are doing the left foot pedalboard, the right foot volume/4-switch pedal, and sundry effects/sustain pedals/buttons. When an occasional curious person looks behind the screen I have to block the distracting blur of my feet, I tell 'em it's just like driving a clutch car and they get the picture. A weird by-product of playing pedalboards for so many years is that, when I get scrambled and "lose" a song's chord structure ("What key am I in?!?!"), I just look at my feet and, 90% of the time, the ol' twinkle toes are right in the musical groove and I can get the guitar back online! I swear that the nerve ganglia of my lower extremeties are better musicians than my brain is!

Jim Henry