Second, I thought that to truly master a musical instrument, you have to be able to build one yourself. I may be geeking out here a bit, but if Jedis had to build their own weapons in order to master them, it only made sense to build my own guitar and then learn to play it. Good thing I didn't have an overwhelming desire to play a harpsichord.
But years before I learned to build a guitar, back in 1999 when I was working in Thousand Oaks, I had gone into Guitar Center and bought a cheap beginner's Squire Strat. Not the ultimate guitar, but not a bad starter either. It cost me a whopping $99 bucks. Today that same instrument would cost a guitar noob at least $140. Along with the guitar, I bought a computer program that came on a couple of CD-ROMs that promised to teach me guitar so well that I would be able to play an entire song after only a few weeks of instruction. What they didn't tell you on outside of the box was that the song was Frère Jacques. But being eager to learn to play a guitar and becoming a rock god chick magnet outweighed my embarrassment of learning such a dorky song. After all, even rock gods had to start somewhere, right? I would have been just as ecstatic if I the first thing I had to learn was Marsey Doats.
The downfall of the program was that it emphasized incorporating rhythm into learning notes which entailed tapping my foot in time to my strumming. I don't know about you, but learning to play something as complex as a guitar is difficult enough. Throwing something in that requires additional physical coordination is for me like trying to learn how to tap dance while field stripping an M-16. The program wasn't very good and a few days of trying to play something as lame as Frère Jacques while tapping my foot became tedious and made me feel like an idiot. Not to mention that at the time I was staying with my sister so she was driven insane by my ham fisted attempts at playing and then mangling an already idiotic tune. I quit playing after about 8 days. I despised that program so much that weeks turned into years and it was over a decade before I even touched that guitar again. For some reason, either guilt or the fact that I have a hard time letting go of something for which I've paid over 50 bucks, I dragged that guitar along with me through three moves over 10 years.
What finally got me back in to learning to play was a confluence of several events that essentially kicked my interest into high gear. One event was completely random. Being somewhat bored one day and doing what I normally do when I'm somewhat bored, I came across something that caught my eye while I was surfing around the internet. It was a guitar shaped like a shark.
Flash forward a bit to around the end of the year in 2010, when a game called Power Gig came out whose gameplay was something along the lines of Guitar Hero except it used an actual 6 string electric guitar as a controller. I almost bought it. But at the time I had just gotten off of unemployment and had found a job in San Diego that kept me there for a few months doing some contracting work. I didn't have my own permanent place or a game console so dropping a few hundred on a game and console after starting a new job didn't make any fiscal sense. On top of this, I didn't even have a television to connect a console. As it turns out, Power Gig and the game controller/guitar were an immense flop, lost in a sea of music rhythm games that were saturating the market at the time.
Flash forward again a few more months to the beginning of 2011. Sometime around April, I stumbled on an announcement from Ubisoft about their release of a game called Rocksmith. What was exciting about this game release was that any guitar with an instrument jack could be used. Better yet, it was more of an educational tool than a game. Perfect. Even though it wasn't scheduled for release until September, knowing this sparked my interest in playing the guitar again. This knowledge, coupled with my discovery of the Jay Turser Shark, and the spoils of my new job formed an idea in my head: I would learn to play the Shark guitar using Rocksmith. It was so simple. Why wouldn't I want to learn how to play a guitar shaped like a freakin' shark? Unfortunately the JT Shark was a discontinued item. It was really hard to find them new. I would have lost hope if this were the year 1999. But it's not and there's eBay Alerts. So, after just a few weeks, eBay sent an alert message for a Jay Turser Shark. Better yet, the auction had a "Buy It Now" option. Without hesitation, I bought it.
By this time it was late June, and Rocksmith wasn't going to be available until after Summer. I had a guitar shaped like a freakin' shark in my possession. I did not know how to play it. This is where the last piece of the puzzle that would launch my journey to guitar rock god status fits in: Groupon.
I had excitedly signed up for Groupon when I saw that they were offering guitar classes at Guitar Cities in San Francisco. For a mere 98 bucks, I would get 6 lessons. Deal. That should get me started and learning the basics before Rocksmith is released. By the time I finish those 6 weeks of lessons, I should only have to wait mere weeks before I could start playing Rocksmith in the privacy of my own home. So I went to my first lesson, with my Shark in tow on the BART, on the 26th floor of California 101 in San Francisco. I had a great teacher named Nikolay who got me through the basics. Upon first seeing my unorthodox guitar he said that he had never seen anything like it, but he thought it was pretty damned cool. Then he asked if he could hold it so I handed it over to him. Now what he didn't know was that even though I didn't understand much of what I was doing, I did know that there was something very wrong about the guitar when I first got it. The strings seemed too high off the fretboard, even when I tuned it, the notes sounded wrong after I played the few notes I did know, and wasn't quite what I would expect coming from an electric guitar. I compared it to the aging old Stratocaster that I bought 12 years earlier which was in tune and had been set up correctly for me all those years ago by a tech at Guitar Center. So, after some trial and error, some fiddling around with the saddles, and a lot of back and forth comparisons to the Strat, I managed to get the Shark to sound right, at least to me.
So after handling it and actually playing it for a few moments, Nikolay said that the action was good, the intonation was spot on, and the neck felt really good in his hand. I had absolutely no idea what he meant when he said "action" and "intonation." None at all. I wasn't completely clear on what makes a guitar neck "feel good." So when he asked me if I had set up the guitar myself, I asked him what that meant.
"It means that you've set up the saddles so that the intonation is correct and that the action on the neck is low."
Still not quite understanding what he meant I just said "Yeah, sure, I did all that. Uh, I just fiddled with the saddles and made sure that the strings weren't high on the fretboard and that it sounded right when I placed my finger on each string at one of the frets."
"You've never done this before, have you?" Nikolay was on to me.
"Well, not until last night. It just seemed to make sense that a guitar string shouldn't be a quarter inch off the fretboard and it should sound right and not buzz when you place your finger on the 12th fret. Did I do it alright?"
"Yeah, you did pretty well for someone who didn't really know what they were doing."
The rest of the lesson was just basics; pentatonic scale, finger positions, that sort of thing, and as soon as I got home I looked up what it meant to set up a guitar properly and it seemed that my instincts were correct. Encouraged by Nikolay's assessment of my noob luthier skills, my interest in building an electric guitar was sparked now that I had a rudimentary understanding of what makes a guitar sound good. And that got me to wondering: just how hard would it be to actually build one?
Next time: Corina.
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