Today’s Hot Gear Friday (with a nod to Anti-Strib’s “Hot Chick Friday”) is the Hamer Standard.

They say that, when it comes to people of the opposite (or, for some of us I guess, same) sex, we’re attracted to people we find “exotic” – different than those we grew up around.

I saw this first-hand a few years back. I grew up in North Dakota, where tall, blond, Northern-European-descended women are as common as wheat – like Minnesota, only more so. I worked with a guy on a project, an Italian from Newark named Vito. He’d fly in to the Twin Cities to work on a project – and as we’d walk about downtown from one meeting to another, he’d be in a constant froth; “Gawd, Mitch, I should move out here. How do you get any work done with all these tall gorgeous blondes around here?”

“Enh”, I said, remembering when I’d been flown out to the east coast, and spent a couple of days wandering about all bobbleheaded over all of the non-blond, non-tall, non-north-European women.

So if you’ve noticed that I’ve been focusing a lot on big, dense-bodied guitars – the Les Paul, the Yamaha SG2000, and today’s special, the Hamer Sunburst – then you catch the drift of the anecdote above. I’ve been playing light guitars for thirty years now. Fenders, like my old Jazzmaster, tend to be relatively lightly-built (although as Pete Townsend found to his chagrin, lightness can be deceiving – the Strat is nearly un-smashable; it can serve as an axe, as long as all you want to chop up is amplifiers), with fairly high actions. My other electric – a mid-seventies Ibanez SG – is a fairly light little thing. Sweet tone, sure (having a Seymore Duncan “Jeff Beck” pickup down by the bridge forgives a lot of sins), but that light build doesn’t retain vibrations…

…like an armored beast like the Hamer. Playing a Sunburst is to playing my Jazz like driving an M1 Abrams is to driving a dune buggy; both serve their purposes; one feels very different than the other.

And the Sunburst is right up there on my “things I wanna buy when I get an unexpected windfall” list…