This Too Didn't Pass Two

If you read this bloggy post and the updates you'll know that I bought the lavender Danelectro DC 59 but that it had a slight neck bend. After my original fix I had to lower two of the nut slots even more to make it in tune, which made one of the strings quite low. Playing it in my usual position (sitting on the floor of my basement, as is my want), the top horn would poke into my less-than manly chest. It still sounded great, though.

And then...

This past summer there was a Craigslist ad for a plum Mod 6 for $450. It ran for a good long while and I considered calling the guy up to see if I could come play it but I didn't want to waste his time. When it comes to electric guitar, I'm not even close to being qualified to play a $450 guitar, especially one that often goes for $600 on eBay due to it's rarity. Then the Craigslist ad went away and I settled for the $150 DC 59. And the boy was happy.

But not really.

Okay, I really was happy. I liked the DC59 plenty but it wasn't exactly a great player. And then a co-worker told me that the Craigslist ad came back. FOR $300!!! I am EXACTLY a $300 guitar player! The very next day, over my lunch, I met with the guy, gave the guitar an all-too quick look over, and handed over a wad of twenties.

Here it is! It's like a piece of modern art! After I spent an hour carefully cleaning everything (and spraying copious amounts of electronic contact cleaner into the switches to make them work reliably) it looks even better than in the picture (less dark, more sparkly). Even better, it plays like a dream and doesn't poke me in the chest!

So there I was with two Danelectro guitars in the house and only money for one. Fortunately Guitar Center has a 45 day return policy, even on used guitars! I couldn't believe it! It went back in a flash. The crazy thing is that if the guitar had been shipped on time I would have just missed the 45 day window. I'd say that was God giving me a tickle, which I need because right now I'm spiritually in cruise control. It just seems like nothing is happening and any prayers I toss up hit a lead ceiling. So this was a nice touch that He didn't have to do, a kind of "Hey kid, I'm watching out for you." Thanks, generous Diety!

This Too Didn't Pass

Well, I made the plunge.

It's probably been a full year that I've been yearning for a twangy guitar. I thought about building a telecaster for $110 (plus another $200 in parts to make it a killer guitar). I looked and looked but didn't find any seafoam green paint, which is the color I really want. None at the hardware stores, none at the craft stores, none anywhere. But the thing is, I find the telecaster shape, while classic, to be boring.

Then an ad server served up a Talman 302PM, which has the telecaster pickup configuration but an updated but retro body shape. Nice. But I've already covered this. The ad server also served up the Peavy Riptide guitar which also has the telecaster pickup configuration. To me it looks too gumby, but it's growing on me. Especially the price of under $200 used.

In the end, though, I decided on a Danelectro. Not only are they twangy but people consider them quirky, a little bit off the beaten path. And although my job/life has beaten me into a boring shadow of the potentially interesting person I once was, I still feel a bit different from most of humanity. Plus some reviewers said that Danelectro guitars lend themselves to open chords and have a nice glassy tone. Since I'm more of a folk-open chord-strummer than I am a two or three string rock guitarist, it seems like the Danelectros were made for me.

But which model? They have some far out designs! The Wild Thing is truly a crazy thing. But it's just strange for strange sake. They have some other models that are boxy but I don't like boxy. So I decided on the classic DC 59. They started remaking these in 1998 or 1999 and the latest versions have a recessed bridge (for greater sustain) and New Old Stock pickups. New they go for $400 and if you're lucky you can find a used one for $250, although they normally sell for about $300. Plus they come in seafoam green!

Just when I thought I had things settled I was reminded about their Mod guitar, the first guitar shape that ever caught my eye. While I like the DC 59 it's a bit too, er, normal for me. It's too symmetrical. And DUDE, like, Jimmy Page played one on Kashmir. The Mod guitar, however, is asymmetrical and to me it's perfection. The problem is that they only made these for a couple of years and they are quite rare to find, especially the six string version. This is where I kick myself because for weeks there was a plum Mod 6 for sale on Craigslist just thirty minutes from home. However they wanted $450 for it. If I was only going to have one electric guitar in my life I could justify $450, given my current skill level. But not for guitar #3 so I never even drove over to play it and now it's gone. So I started checking the interwebs to see if a Mod would show up and their current price. It seems $400-$500 is the range, which is a bit too much.

And then it appeared on the Guitar Center site: a lavender DC 59 from 1999. For only $149! I called the store to ask a few questions about the guitar.

"Is the neck straight?"
"It's good."
"Are the frets worn?"
"They're good."

It went on like this. I really don't think they knew what they had and priced it too low. There was another lavender DC 59 on the same site from another store for $250. Now lavender isn't my top choice of color but it's better than black, white, or red. And this model was made in Korea, which is better than China. And the cord jack is on the face of the guitar instead of the side, which I don't care for. But hey, for $150 it's almost priced like a garage sale! How can I pass it up? So I called that store and it was a snafu getting it ordered. So I called the companies 800 number and they too had problems with their "draft" system. So I called the local store and they had problems but they took my information and said they would work on it and call me when the order went through. Which they did.

It's now been four business days since those calls and the site said three to five business days. Honestly I'm a bit skeptical that the guitar actually exists and that it's going to show up at my local Guitar Center. Will I get called today? Tomorrow? Who knows! Maybe never! Patience... who needs it?

Oh, and of course I found a clearance can of Pistachio paint at Walmart the day after I placed the order. Yes, I picked it up for $2. Who knows... maybe I'll need a project in a few years.

UPDATE It's now ten days since I ordered a guitar that was supposed to ship in 3-5 days. And still no guitar. Two days ago I called the local Guitar Center and they found something in their computers but still hadn't received the guitar and didn't have a tracking number for me. I was told that they would call the Laurel store in the morning when the manager was in and would call me back. They didn't call me back. So the next day I called them around 2:00 PM and after the usual story telling by me and they said that they would call the Laurel store and let me know what they found out. I said, "Nope. I'll call 'em myself."

I called and asked for a manager, told 'em my tale and he offered to look into it and call me back. I said I'd wait on hold. So I was on hold for about ten minutes and he came back on the line. "The guitar still shows as being in our inventory and I don't show that it was shipped out. Let me look at the security tapes and see what I can find out. You can wait on hold or I can call you back in about thirty minutes." This time I took him up on the offer.

True to his word, he called me back. Apparently on Monday when I ordered the guitar, the twin doofus team working the shift packed up the guitar into a Fender box but didn't label it or finish the job. The next morning an employee put this Fender box back into inventory/storage. The manager guy said that he would expedite the guitar to me and that I should have it on Friday. He also gave me a tracking number. I'm a bit more hopeful but I'll still believe it when I have the guitar in my hands.

UPDATE #2 I know you're all loosing sleep, wondering if I got the guitar. And yes, I did. There's a reason why it was $150. First off, Danelectro uses wide white tape for their decorative stripe and it was coming off the guitar at the neck joint. No biggie. I can replace it for around $10 if I'm so inclined. The guitar was covered with grime so the first thing I did was to clean it all down, using a toothbrush to get it all squeaky clean. Then I found that there was a problem with the intonation. I would tune the open strings but when I fretted a note it would be sharp. The culprit was the neck, a slight bow near the headstock. Just tighten the truss rod, right? Um... no truss rod. It turns out all I had to do was take a hack saw blade to the aluminum nut and lower the string grooves...ever...so...slightly. Now it stays in tune and has that lovely Danelectro chime! My only problem is that the pickguard is an eighth-inch thick and since none of my guitars have pick guard I'm used to digging the pick in really deep so I keep finding myself knocking up against the pick guard. I'm learning to modify my playing technique, which is probably something I should be doing anyway.

This Too Shall Pass Too

To follow up on my original G.A.S. (guitar acquisition syndrome) article, my sweetie bought me the top guitar back in 2007, the lovely natural finish monster that weighs a ton but sounds amazing. I would love to someday hear it played by a real guitarist! The only problem with it is that it has jumbo frets and I play too hard. I recently switched to heavier gauge strings and it has helped me quite a bit with staying in tune and not having the guitar sound “queasy.”

I still would love a Danelectro. Every now and then I search for used ones and they go for around $300. I missed the boat on a good investment, but maybe not because I kind of remember the clearance guitar being a seven–string. Maybe one day I will own a Mod or a 59.

The pawn shop by my work recently had the bottom/Artist guitar in. It was only $150 and was in great shape. However since I have two nice mid-range guitars I couldn’t bring myself to shell out $150 for a beginning guitar. It didn’t take long for someone to buy it.

Enter modern times.

Last summer I played a few times with a guy named Ricky who owned a half dozen or more Telecasters. Aren’t those country guitars? It turns out they aren’t and I soon started seeing Telecasters everywhere. Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, all your heartland rockers. I wanted that twang! I can build my own from BYOGuitars for $110 and have a decent guitar. Or I can add new pickups, new electronics, a Wilkinson bridge, through body strings, a better nut, copper shielding and have an amazing guitar. All it would cost is $270 (sarcasm) but it would be the equal of an $800 guitar when finished.

But there’s a problem. Aside from money and the fact that I think about guitars more than I play them. I’m not particularly fond of the Telecaster shape. It’s a classic but it doesn’t make me drool.

Then one of the ad-servers, based on my Telecaster browsing, showed me a picture of a Talman. It’s got a retro-Danelectro-Mod type body but with a Telecaster pickup arrangement. In sea-foam green!!! Sha-ZAM!

Speaking of sea-foam green, why are there two different shades from the same maker? The guitar shown above screams "That's ME!" but this one, with the same shape and pickup configuration, does nothing for me. Very strange.

Also strange is that they make a Talman bass guitar. I would probably use a bass more but once again it just leaves me cold. Is it the pickups? Is it the color? Should I get professional help?

Like most subjects of G.A.S., the longer I wait the less pull it has on me. But I enjoy the wanting. At my age there isn’t much that I need and very little that I want that I have any real chance of getting. A two week vacation with my family in the Smoky Mountains? I’d love it but it would cost five grand or more. Not in the budget if we want to eat and have money for medical bills. A house with enough bedrooms for every kid and one for my music stuff? A car that isn’t wishing it was ten years old? Pipe dreams. But two or three hundred dollars? I can scrimp/save that in six months, giving me something to hope and dream about the entire time. That is until a new guitar catches my eye.

Guitar Desire : An Introduction

And now it’s time for a new series, one that chronicles my involvement with electric guitars. No, not just in music but in wanting, owning, and possibly even playing one.

When I was a young teen I played keyboards. Hey, it was the eighties. There might have been magazines for keyboards but I didn’t know about them. What I knew about was Guitar Player magazine. I didn’t own a guitar and didn’t even really want to learn to play one… they were too complicated. No, I’d leave that up to Brad Owens, a friend of mine who could shred. Sorry, but I don’t remember what kind of guitar he had but I have a picture of it somewhere. It was white. But I would get the Guitar Player magazine each month and follow along with the music, following the lines of notes up and down as the featured guitarist did his thing.

Brad and I would sometimes drive to Music Manor, an independent music store (remember those?). He would lust over all the different guitars while I would look at the rack-mounted effects units and, if there was one around, the lone keyboard. All those things with strings sitting around the floor were ignored.

A couple of years later another friend, Roger, borrowed my brothers acoustic Yamaha guitar and learned it. Amazing! How do people learn these things!?!?! Keyboards make sense. The keys are lined up in a pattern and each one is a half tone higher than the next. Logical, eh? But the guitar… Insanity! I still had no desire to learn but once crucial thing happened: Roger suggested that I learn the bass guitar.

For a variety of reasons I didn’t take him up on the suggestion at the time. However in college another pal (hey, this makes it sound like I have friends! Unfortunately I do not. But that’s another series for another time) played a five string bass and once, at a live performance at the student center, he wanted to play the sax on a song and so handed me the bass. Wait… WHAT?!?!? He gave me a thirty second tutorial, turned down the high end on his amp, and very likely had me play open strings on some three-chord blues song. I have no idea of how well I played and really no way to judge. But between Paul’s lesson and Roger’s suggestion the idea was firmly planted. A year or so later I asked, and Paul allowed, me to borrow his bass to try it out some more. I had a bass sheet music book by one of my favorite bands, King’s X, and I wanted to try my hand at the songs. I don’t think it went well. And yes, I was in the habit of buying sheet music for instruments I didn’t play. I still have all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas plus a violin and piano set for Prokofiev’s first violin sonata. I just like following along, I guess.

Jump forward a few more years (1995ish) and I’m a young married guy in a very lonely marriage. I have no idea why but for some reason I had the urge to learn the bass guitar. As usual I just jumped right in without doing much research… kind of like the marriage. My purchase was a Yamaha four string natural finish bass from a pawn shop for $160. Someone has scratched, and then sloppily sanded off, something below the bridge. I didn’t even know how to tune the thing so I had to have someone come over who played guitar to show me. I was that green.

I learned to play, with “You Lord” by PFR being my first song. Again, I was so green I didn’t know that this was a pretty complicated song. Then I wrote “Lobster Boy” using every trick I knew: plucking, slides and hammer-ons. Within two months I was playing in the praise band at church and I learned that Roger’s advice has been very good. To this day, though I play other instruments, bass is where I feel the most at home, a place where in a group setting I have my voice.

Originally this series wasn’t going to include bass guitars but I see that they are insisting that they be included. How can I turn them down? Unfortunately I don’t think I have a picture of this bass and don’t even know the model number. Thinking about it, I don’t even remember what kind of pickups it had or even if it had one or two. So sad…

Note: It seems like I’ve touched on this subject once before in this here blog.

This Too Shall Pass

Four days ago I didn't know it existed. Two days ago I was convinced I needed it. Now the fever is passing and reality has set it.

Like most males, my toys are relatively expensive and unnecessary. You see, I've got a lovely $80 strat-copy that I've painted neon green and it matches my electric guitar abilities.

But then I saw this lovely creature, on sale for a mere $250 and a bargain at that. Besides, we just got our property tax rebate!

The first time I suffered guitar lust was this dandy DanElectro Mod:

A bit goofy and retro, I still think this one fits me best but it was a mega-blowout discontinued $100 at a time when $100 was $100 more than I had. And so I let the opportunity pass and they are no longer available except on eBay.

The other guitar that has held my attention for some time is the Ibanez Artist line which I find asthetically pleasing.

But as I said, the fever has passed and I no longer am under the compulsion to OWN STUFF. That is until the next issue of Musician's Friend comes in the mail.