As March draws to a close, today we announced the winner of this month's Ultimate Experience – a stunning Pursuit Myrtlewood guitar is headed to Glen from Tennessee! Congrats! We've also received this note from February's Ultimate Experience winner, Michael from Florida. He lost his home in Hurricane Irma. This is the second person to win a Breedlove this year after having their lives torn apart by a natural disaster. It is always rewarding to see good things happen to people in need.
“Hi Folks,
This is Michael Beason, winner of the February Breedlove Ultimate Experience guitar giveaway.
Wow, what a nice, easy-playing guitar the Pursuit Concerto is! Sweet, balanced tone, beautiful appointments, binding, rosette, all just gorgeous. The bass is particularly impressive, loud, but not boomy. The low action makes it really responsive, which is especially important for a fingerpicker like me. I play a lot of different styles, ragtime, blues, folkie rock, rockin' folk, story songs, talkin' blues, country, you name it.
This little Breedlove can handle anything I throw at it.
The L.R. Baggs pedalboard that came as the rest of the prize is amazing. I've never been a real gearhead, so I was almost afraid to open the box. I expected to find a bare board, and six stomp boxes, each in it's own box, all ready for a lot of head scratching and hours of work; trying to figure out the best way to chain them together, attaching the pedals to the board, probably having to call my friend Bob, who owns Heartwood Soundstage, for advice.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the box and found the Rockboard, totally assembled and hooked-up, plug-and-play ready, (in a great gig bag, yet!), so logically laid out as to be easy to intuit my way through, and that's saying something!
Thank you so much! What a great surprise to come my way, and especially at this rather challenging time of my life.
Without going into a lot of excruciating details, Hurricane Irma devastated St John and St Thomas, Virgin Islands, destroying our house and business on St. John, where we'd lived for 40 years.
My wife, Barbara and I, and our two dogs, survived by sheltering in the shower I had reinforced after hurricane Marilyn specifically to be a hurricane shelter of last resort.
My only playable guitar, an Ovation 1997 collector's edition, parlor size, was buried in debris under my wife's desk, not badly damaged, thanks to a new SKB case, and the sturdy desk. But even the new case couldn't keep the water out. The top, fingerboard, neck and head all had water damage, and the top started to crack.
We moved to High Springs, Florida, near Gainesville, and began to try to recover from all this. My father passed away, and while still coping with the whole situation, an infection in my foot blew up, turned dangerous, and put me in the hospital repeatedly all through this past Fall.
Finally, in January 2019, I had the two troublesome toes removed. By that point they were constantly painful and totally useless.
It was while I was recuperating from the amputation that I saw the story about the Breedlove Custom Masterclass Guitar Contest having been won by a woman who'd lost her house and beloved cats in the Camp Fire. I said to my wife, “I was kind of hoping to win that guitar, but it looks like the winner is someone who's had it as rough as us.”
It was just a couple of weeks later that I found the email notification that I was the February Breedlove drawing winner!
Wow.
Be well,
Michael”
