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Amy Winehouse, Coldplay, Aretha Franklin LIMS, & Yamaha Clavinovas!

Good day to everybody, I must say it is nice to have Luke back in the shop up to his usual trickery and promotional madness!

News
Amy Winehouse mysteriously fainted yesterday and was taken by her father, Mitch to the famous London Clinic in fear that she had sprained her ankle - shock horror! News this morning is that she has been released and has recovered fully! What has happened to Amy Winehouse? She seems to have dropped off the face of the earth (musically) and constantly in and out of ‘rehab’.

Coldplay’s speedy selling album is still on the move after their first of 3 FREE concerts! Last night, they played at Brixton Academy playing tracks from their new albums along with the old classics like “Clocks”, “In My Place”, and finished an encore with an acoustic version of “Yellow”. The next concert is tonight in Barcelona, and finishing in New York on the 23rd.

Queen of Soul, Aretha Frankline is set to headline at the Newport Jazz Festival on 9th August along side the likes of Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Chris Botti and the legendary Herbie Hancock.

In other news…
I visited the London International Music Show (LIMS) last week at the London ExCel, which was the first year this event has been in full flow. I visited on Thursday, which was deemed “Dealer Day” although I saw plenty of Joe Public. All manufacturers were there and I visited most.

A few interesting things to mention:
I saw a rather interesting looking guitar on the Tanglewood stand, who have teamed up with Swedish Luthier, Michael Sanden to launch a very special range of Custom Tanglewood Guitars. The guitar I saw featured a rather strange looking fretboard where the frets were what can only be described as ‘wiggly’ rather than straight. This design has created a perfectly intonated guitar. On most guitars, the intonation is set by the angle of the saddle, which is also filed down in certain places to intonate the guitar. On this new guitar, the saddle is completely straight and all the intonation is set through the angle of each fret along the entire neck. This produces an interesting looking guitar, but one that is perfect tonally across the entire length of the neck!

I saw the brand new range of Yamaha Clavinovas and Personal Pianos. They are a vast improvement of the previous models in terms of sound and touch. They have also changed their mahogany finish, which now looks rather nice! I saw the new Arius YDP140, which comes in a rather lovely Dark Alder finish and Cherry.
After seeing how good these new pianos were, I arranged a meet with Malcolm, our Yamaha Rep to get some of these beauties on our shop floor, and as I write, he has just left me and on his way to Wear! So at the end of June expect to see the new range of Yamaha Clavinovas on the shop floor at both Cobham and Maidenhead shops.