Guitar Addiction - Feed your guitar habit

Hi, Its Paul here from Queensland Australia & I'm going to have a shot at a lens about guitar that could get out of control & go anywhere. I will add stuff as I go along & get half an idea how to do this lens stuff.
I have been hooked on everything guitar for a long time. Learning, playing, teaching, repairing, building, songwriting & recording. I love Jamming & currently play acoustic gigs with my life partner Lenore.
Our musical focus is getting out in nature & recording our stuff live where it happens complete with added local contributions from birds, roosters, wind, rain, & traffic. We've even had to time our recording in between passes of a grader working on the gravel road out in front the house where we regularly house sit & create our music.. We use a zoom H4 stereo digital recorder that we plug a pair of mics into & can pretty much fit our mobile studio into a camera case except for the microphone stands.
I used to be embarrassed about owning more guitars that I can play at one time, but I read an article by a fellow guitarist who admitted to having an obsession. Now I feel OK about it. I have an obsession with guitar & I can live with that. It will either heal itself & go way, or it won't, but I don't plan to go searching for a cure anytime soon.
As far as this lens goes you can all help by asking me good questions about guitar & I'll have a go at answering them, or see if I can point you towards the answer as I am a bit of an information ferret as well.
I am going to sign off for now so I can get this thing up & running so I can say I have posted my first article. I plan to add some photos & some of our music as I get my head around Squidoo. I'll catch you down the track a bit

Zoom H4 - the go anywhere digital recorder that I use for location recording & take a feed off the desk when we play live. The Zoom H4 also gets used to upgrade the audio on my video camera.
Digitech Jam Man Looper pedal which is great for guitar practice, catching ideas on the fly & songwriting.
Korg TM-40 Digital Tuner Metronome I like to have a tuner close at hand & I really use the tap tempo function on the metronome to nail the exact tempo when a song feels right. I find that even one or two b.p.m matters.
Bellari MP105 - tube preamp - basically allows me to add tube tone just about anywhere in the signal chain - have used it recording vocals - in line to warm up an acoustic guitar before it goes into the PA, in the effects loop of my Dean Markley amp to add a bit of 12AX7 colouration.
SHURE E3 Earphone/in-ear monitors. Compact enough for location recording & double up for foldback for live work. I don't have a wireless set up, just plug into a lead taped to the mic stand. We use a Y lead if two of us need to monitor the H4 on location if we are trying to get more control of the sound. Its easier to record without them, but the quality control can suffer.

If I am playing acoustic live it will be using one of these two guitars.
Yamaha APX 20 and Takamine TAN48C
The Yamaha guitar is has a stereo pickup which can split the strings and feed them to two output jacks. You can separate the three bass strings from the treble strings or split the strings odds & evens to different Jacks. I just use the guitar mono. With an ebony neck & maple back & sides it is a fairly bright guitar. The amplified tone is very bright & clean & I have to roll the treble right back to find a tone I like. The Yamaha has a shallow body that fits under your wing nicely, action is brilliant & if there is such a thing, I would class it as an acoustic lead guitar.
The Takamine has a bit of a story to go with it. I bought it on ebay near new for a bit over 1/4 of its new price without the pre-amp. My son asked me to email the seller & see if he could buy the pre-amp. It turned out that the seller had bought the Takamine & put the pickup into one of his other guitars & I scored a cheap guitar. A bit of a search on ebay & I had a replacement Takamine pickup & the guitar was back in action. I haven't got the original valve pre-amp but I wasn't that keen on it because of short battery life for live work. What I like about this guitar is the first time I plugged it in I didn't have to search for a useful sound. The sound was easy to work with straight up. One thing that did surprise me is that the sides appear to be solid rosewood but with the pre-amp out of the guitar you could see that it was laminated with a lighter wood core surfaced with a really thin veneer. It is a well behaved guitar with a reasonably full neck & it sounds good acoustically & amplified. It mics up well too.