Omega

As a guitar player who is also a prog rock fan and an obsessed Rush fanatic, I have always wanted to get my hands on one of the Omega guitar stands Alex Lifeson uses on stage. You know, the stand that he sits his acoustic guitar on to so he cam play it without taking off his electric? Here’s a really bad pic of it, taken from the back row…

and here is a really bad pic of it with that lute thingie he played on “Workin’ Them Angels”…

And here’s another really bad pic of him actually playing the lute thingie while still wearing his Les Paul…

You can see why such a thing is beyond awesome for a nerdy prog loving guitar player, right? It allows you to play both electric and acoustic guitars on the same song without having to stop playing to take one off and put the other one on. It’s a pretty ingenious device.

I swear I used to see ads for them in guitar magazines back in the 80’s. Omega Stands. I never considered buying one then because I never had any money. I also never owned a decent acoustic guitar. When I started playing in a cover band back in 2003 I started poking around the internet looking for them but any search for Omega Stand just brought up pictures of Alex Lifeson playing “Closer to the Heart” or “The Trees”. I never had any luck.

Until today!

I found one for sale on sweetwater.com, a site I have to admit never having looked at before. It’s a K&M Performer Walk Up Guitar Stand – Acoustic and if it didn’t cost an amazing $300 I’d be pulling out my credit card and ordering one right now. I won’t though, because I would probably never ever use it. Even though I am playing in a band again, it would still be more trouble than it’s worth. It would just be a fanboy expense that would be better to be used for other things. Like repairs.

Both of my Gibson guitars need work. The pick up switch on the Les Paul Custom can’t select the neck pickup. It can do bridge, it can do both, but it can’t do neck. Also, the tone pot for the neck pick up doesn’t work. There are similar problems with the ES-335 Pro. The pickup switch works in all three positions, but there is something funky with the neck pick up. Either a wire is lose or there is so much dust that the contact is being blocked. There’s also lose/dirty connections for the tone pots as well. The big problem with the 335 is that the neck is slowly pulling off of the body. Either it broke off once before and wasn’t pushed in all the way when it was glued back on, or the glue is slowly, slowly, slowly giving up the fight. The neck broke off of my Les Paul once too, back in ’98 I think. That was terrifying. Even the repair guy I brought it to was afraid to work on it. It took him forever, but eventually he fixed it, and did a really good job too. It’s like new.

It turns out that the little guitar shop near my house does repairs. I was optimistic at first until I read their website. It says they do major and minor repairs. That’s good. It lists off some of the things they do. Wiring is on the list, which is good. Broken necks are not on the list, which is bad. The disturbing thing is that the list includes string replacement. Yeah. Maybe I won’t go to them.