WARNING – LOTS OF GUITAR PORN AHEAD!
I own several nice guitars. Pretty much every one of them has a story that starts out “I was actually shopping for X, but I ended up with this Y guitar”.
The reason for this is that I sometimes have a preconceived notion of what I want but once I go out and start playing guitars I find something that may not actually be what I’m thinking of but that I connect with in a way that makes it very hard to not whip out my credit card. At the end of the day, any instrument that I end up buying usually is very resonant and is physically comfortable for me to play. As I reflect on most of my favorite guitar purchases it is typically the tactile and aural experience that informs my purchases more than anything else which is why I rarely if ever buy instruments online anymore.
Back in 2004, the month before my wife and I opened Premier Music we took a short trip to San Diego before we knew we’d be broke for a while with a new startup business to contend with. The hotel that we booked online happened to be across the street from Center City Music, which was one of the best Gibson guitar dealers I’ve ever seen. The specialized in Gibson and their entire inventory of hundreds of guitars was 100% Gibson products. Of course, we ended up walking in and I spent some time trying Les Paul standards out. I’d had a 1979 The Paul for a few years and I had always wanted to own a nice standard but I could never find one that made me as happy as my old walnut plank. I played 10-15 guitars, all 2004 Standards with ’60s necks and was about ready to head out when my wife pointed to a weird looking guitar way up on the wall and said that I should try it.
Because it was cool looking.
Not really my bag, since my preference for Les Pauls at the time was the stereotypical late ’50s sunburst kind of thing but we had it brought down from the wall and…..
oh shit.
Three notes on it and it was obviously the best instrument in the place. The setup was terrible (this was Gibson in the early-to-mid 2000’s) but the guitar was a monster. The only problem was that Les Paul Standards at the time ran about $2000 on sale at Guitar Center and we had just signed a commercial lease for the studio. Not the best time to spend the money. My wife was the one who talked me into buying it because she realized (after enduring an hour of mediocre Les Pauls) that this was a pretty special guitar. And it could still be written off on our taxes that year.
The guitar was a non-standard color (“late creme”) and so had sat on the wall for most of the year not getting any attention so the store cut me a really good deal on the guitar, and it went home with us. It ended up being my main instrument for the next few years’ worth of gigging until I took a short break from 2006-2009.
I have stories like this about most of my nicer guitars. I was shopping for an ES-175 for over a year when I stumbled across my 1971 Guild x500 in a local store. I was looking for a Gibson ES-335 when I bought my Paul Reed Smith last year. A student brought into his lesson a 2011 60th Aniversary telecaster last year that I ended up falling in love with and play regularly now. I owned a Suhr Classic Tele-style guitar for years that cost four times as much that I ended up selling after it sat on my studio wall for half a decade, rarely played.
For me, at least there needs to be some kind of special connection for me to buy a guitar. I’ve gotten great deals on some neat stuff over the years that end up in the case for a while and then sold. And I have some guitars that are with me for decades like my 1979 Tokai Springy Sound strat (now with a Warmoth neck on it) or the ’79 and ’04 Les Pauls. One instrument that I ordered custom from a builder that has had the same effect on me was my McFeely 454 guitar. I’ve owned several custom builds but at the end of the day, this is the only one that has become an integral part of my live performance life. It goes to every rock gig I play (which is at least once a week) and is played for at least half of every show if not all of it. Both of my Suhr guitars languished on the wall for a year or two after I received it until I realized that they should move on to more appreciative homes.
At the end of the day, the advice I give my students is to just go play lots of instruments and buy the one you can’t leave behind. I’m taking my sister-in-law Telecaster shopping this week to a local place that has a 1974 telecaster that has been calling my name for a month or so but was out of my price range (still gotta buy groceries for the kids, you know!).
Maybe I can sell a kidney this week…..
