10 PREMIER GUITAR NOVEMBER 2009 www.premierguitar.com
Have you ever felt
like you died and
went to heaven?
For us gearheads,
that dream sce-
nario might involve
teaming up with a
bunch of fellow gearheads and spending all day,
every day, checking out gear—amps, pedals,
guitars, strings, picks, pickups, speakers, cables,
etc. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Well folks, I’m happy to report that there
is hope, because my name is Gabriel
Hernandez, and I’m the newest editor here at
Premier Guitar. I’ve just joined a magnificent
team of fellow gear junkies that congregate
at the same office five days a week to put
together the finest guitar magazine under the
sun. I’ve long enjoyed this thing that Trent
Salter created 15 years ago and have a new
appreciation for what goes into each issue
and each day’s lineup of new online content
now that I’ve been here for a few issues. Yes,
it’s as fun as you imagined. Just imagine having gear in your office and noodling away all
day as you write and edit stories about, you
guessed it—more gear.
As you may have noticed over the past year,
this “Front of House” column is a page where
editorial staffers occasionally jump into the
fray with our own voice and address some
things of possible interest to fellow gearheads. I’ve been asked to do a sound check
in this space this month in order to give
you an idea of who I am and how I roll. As
you might expect, there are many common
threads among the staff members at Premier
Guitar and Guitar Edge and you, our fellow
gearheads, not the least of which is an outright passion for all things guitar.
I bet many of you can recall the moment when
music took your heart. I can trace my love of
melody and rhythm to the day my grandmother bought me my first radio. I was six years
old, and it was a cheap hand-held AM radio
with an even cheaper set of small earphones.
But that cheap little radio picked up the signal
to the only AM radio station in West Palm
Beach (at the time)—WPOM 1600—which
broadcast a combined rock/R&B format.
That unforgettable station introduced me to
the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Edgar Winter
Group, Marvin Gaye, The Jackson 5, Steely
Dan, and Smokey Robinson, among many others. My life hasn’t been the same ever since.
About the same time, I began to develop this
incredible fascination with guitars, and started devoting a huge chunk of my free time
away from school and baseball practice to
using my dad’s spare pieces of plywood and
his jigsaw to carve out facsimiles of my favorite models. I’d look at the photographs of
guitarists and their guitars in Hit Parader and
Creem and then draw their shapes (usually a
Les Paul) on the wood and attack it with the
jigsaw. Once the shape was cut out, I’d take
some paint and illustrate all the essential guitar details … pickups, knobs, strings, logos,
tuners, etc. Suffice to say I ruined quite a few
pieces of plywood, jigsaw blades and paint
brushes trying to get these creations to look
as authentic as possible.
My very first guitar was a basic Spanish classi-
cal guitar given to me by my ever-perceptive
grandmother, who then directed me to stop
using my dad’s tools. I absolutely fell in love
with that guitar, and my mom and dad eventu-
ally sprang for guitar lessons so I could learn
how to at least tune the thing up. Once I
started the lessons, though, it became pain-
fully obvious that a classical guitar was not the
proper instrument to produce the sounds of
Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” or Deep Purple’s
“Smoke On The Water.” So, next up was a
Marlboro amp and a Hondo II Les Paul-copy
electric guitar. Around that same time, a cous-
in in New York (you know who you are) turned
me on to the one album that turned my world
completely upside down—Led Zeppelin’s
Houses of the Holy. It wasn’t long before I was
listening to everything Zeppelin had put on
vinyl. Of course, the first rock song I ever mas-
tered was “Stairway To Heaven.”
From there, the rest is pretty much history.
I started playing in cover bands with friends
and eventually began a quasi career as a
starving, semi-professional musician that I
managed to sustain for the better part of
the next 20 years.
Somewhere along the way, I picked up a
journalism degree (go Gators!) and honed
my writing chops. I’ve covered a number of
communities, sports and industries but I must
say guitars are my first choice of subject matter. Perhaps it’s no surprise that my journey
involved moving to Nashville for a gig at
Gibson that involved writing and editing all
sorts of material about guitars and artists.
Fast forward to today. I’m now literally surrounded by gear. I couldn’t ask for a better
bunch of like-minded people to work with,
either. There is no middle ground here. And
there is no room for half-assed coverage of
an industry that is so dear to our hearts. This
is truly a labor of love—how many people can
actually say that they love what they do for
a living? Well, count me and my colleagues
among the few that can. There is a heaven on
earth, I just found it.
FRONT OF HOUSE
Welcome to Paradise!
Gabriel J. Hernandez
gabe@premierguitar.com
