I’m glad someone (or something) finally got around to asking this very question. I don’t believe in the theory that starting anything that requires a lengthy and difficult learning curve is iinherently easier if begun at an early age. While the theory has been around forever, it has also been riddled with holes. The further back we step in time, the more value can likely be assigned to the theory, but our youngest of generations are very different from those who were in the same place forty or fifty years ago. Time has steadfastly moved forward but it could be argued that our young are not learning commensurately with the speed of change. The requisite skill sets have not kept up with the complexities involved in moving today’s ball down the field. It is my belief that getting started early, whether at guitar or any musical instrument, offers only the opportunity to have more combined time to learn over the course of a given lifetime and become highly accomplished at a relatively younger age – given the same amount of learning time.
For me, in particular, once I retired and made the conscious commitment in time and resources to become a solid player of both the electric and acoustic guitar, I knew precisely what I was signing up for. I’ve been at it, in earnest, for fifteen years now. Granted, I have been consciously proactive in living healthy and remaining active to mitigate the inevetable aging process and learning to play guitar is one of the things I subscribed to those fifteen years ago, to keep my brain functioning at the same level, if not higher, than I found it, awash with exhaustion and burnout from a demanding career in large project engineering.
But, after engaging in some smart things to remain smart, I recovered and have gone on to spend this period of my life working on my “creative side” by taking up writing to augment the guitar playing (on average, I play for sixteen hours a week and dedicate about the same number of hours to writing. I spent about an hour a day reading about things that interest me, which does not include the news or current events. I could say that my life post-retirement life has, almost to a fault, has been about learning. I do not recall having the wisdom to thoroughly “apply myself” at a much younger age. Since I’m sure that I’m not alone with having such a midlife epiphany, this would mean that our learning process takes years to develop and (prodigies aside) learning difficult things when we are very young comes far more organically than we’re constantly informed.
I cannot speak to childhood prodigies who, almost as if by magic, are fortunate enough not only to have some sort of major proclivity at something, but who have someone they’re close to be aware of it and point them in the right direction. And, I can only speak to learning guitar as my instrument of choice, but, just like anything else, there is a range when it comes to prodigies. I think it is safe to say that it they’re surrounded by music, perhaps dad is a lead guitarist for a very good local band and mom teaches piano, and, between them they have a large music collection from which to listen and play to, then any offspring they might have is invariably going to have a leg-up on the local competition. Perhaps prodigies are not so much born as such as they are steeped in a musical environment that gives them wings at an early age. I suspect that it’s nearly equal parts of having their brains wired a certain way at birth and soaking in that musical cookpot set swaying over a gentle fire. Again, I do not know enough on the study of childhood prodigies to fully comprehend the mechanisms behind it. But if we limit the conversation you young prodigies getting an early start, then of course they hold the vast majority of players starting at any age at a complete disadvantage. But these tiniest of tiny circumstances have little to do with my overall comparison.
This has all been leading somewhere because, at least for me, I don’t think I would be any farther along in my playing, if, say I began at 12 and was now 27, as opposed to my actual age of 64, with the same 15: playing years under my belt. I would put my own ability to think and learn up there with any of the younger people I meet. And, it’s not just me. I’d bet my last dollar that my 55 year old aerospace engineering wife could be counted on for the same thing, as could many of my professional friends of a similar age. I would guess that there are many middle -aged people who feel precisely the same way. As I’ve said, the cross-section of young people of today is simply not the same as those of the same age bracket three generations ago I see on a regular basis that without their smartphones, they are ill-prepared to supply answers to even the most rudimentary of questions, let alone have the thinking and, therefore , learning ability (and mental discipline) to take on something as daunting as learning to play a musical instrument.
The question asks “Why might adults have an advantage over younger people when learning a new instrument, like the guitar?”. My shorter answer is that adults have myriad advantages over younger people at learning many things, and they’re not confined to learning how to play a new instrument. If a child never learns strong “thinking” abilities (this takes years) they will be forever disadvantaged when it comes to “learning”.
From Antique Tortoiseshell to Italian Celluloid, to Epoxy Resin
Originally Posted to Quora
My favorite part of a guitar isn’t the beautiful woodgrain, ornate wood figuring, the shape and size of the instrument, or the nice appointments like a maple binding, or the style and colors of the back seam, it’s the pickguard the builder chose to use to augment the overall beauty and particular look of the guitar. Vintage style nickel “Waverly-style tuning machines are something else that immediately catches my eye.
Some years ago, when there was a shift toward more pickgaurd styles and a much broader range of designs and colors, I began to be curiously fascinated by them, particularly tortoiseshell guards. I spent some time researching the history and materials used over the last century.
The first tortoiseshell pickguards didn’t come from a tortoise, at all, but from the now endangered hawksbill sea turtle. What a beautiful animal. The practice of using this obviously gorgeous creature to make all manner of ornate things such as ladies hair combs, belt buckles, mirrors and hairbrushes, was first used over a hundred years ago. Pickguards from this era are so rare that I couldn’t find one online. These pickgaurds would be still attached but in very poor condition on guitars more than a hundred years old, and not many guitars from that period have survived. Other extremely old pickguards would have become detached from their guitars and would have been unceremoniously thrown away. I did load one photo of a modern pickguard for you to compare along with examples from my guitar collection.
Hunted for centuries, a CITES moratorium was placed in the early 1970’s on hunting, sale, or trade of this creature and it’s beautiful shell. Suddenly, the use of “tortoiseshell” became illegal, but I recollect seeing guitars from the late 70’s still adorned with turtle shell pickguards. I suppose, in practice. it took a few years for the moratorium to settle in on remaining stocks. The Hawksbill turtle has recovered but populations are still far from what they once were.
Since then, several materials have been or are still in used today, such as various forms of plastic including nylon and PVC. It wasn’t until the advent of “genuine Italian celluloid” after WWII that a material as beautiful as tortoiseshell began to make inroads and, within a decade, became the preferred pickguard material for the entire industry. Suddenly, all sorts of color combinations became available and every major guitar brand used nothing but high-quality celluloid acetate. You can see some of those different options in the photo showing celluloid sheets, from which pickguards are manufactured or made one at a time, by hand. Today, the number of boutique pickquard makers is growing and for prices ranging from $35 to over $100, a fair amount of money can be spent on buying a custom, handmade pickguard. These custom made pickguards can be absolutely beautiful and when the right one is chosen for a given guitar, it can give that guitar an entirely new look. The process for removing an old pickguard and installing a new one is not difficult but does require some focus and attention so as to not cause damage to the guitar’s finish. As always, you can reduce any angst you might have by taking the job to a qualified luthier.
As they say, “all good things come to an end” and, today, there’s a shortage of high-quality celluloid stock. For a brief period thirty-plus years ago, celluloid acetate was being made in the US, but environmental regulations made it impossible to compete with Chinese manufactured celluloid, which is where the bulk of the world’s supply comes from today.
With this shortage, inventors have been hard at it making hybrid celluloid -epoxy resin pickgaurds. All- resin pickguards are also being made.This may be the way the industry is headed, but to my knowledge no single manufacturing company is making them on a production scale. These pickgards can be beautiful to look at but have a rubbery, flexible feel and are about twice as thick as celluloid sheets. Some people love them and some haven’t gotten used to the idea. Prices range from $35 to around $70. Some of these makers have more experience working with this resin based material, so it may be worth spending a little more on a more established maker. Personally, I prefer celluloid but I do not know if the current shortage is long or short-term.
Here are some celluloid pickgard examples from my own guitars:
Examples of Various Celluloid Acetate Pickguards
I have switched-out the stock pickguards with some custom made pickguards on several of these guitars. I was completely happy with the stock pickaurds on others.
A Couple of Examples of Resin Pickguards, Resin and Genuine Turtle Shell Picks
As you can see, we’ve come a long way from using the extravagant shell of the Hawksbill turtle. It wasn’t just Americans that hunted the hawksbill, but indigenous people had coveted its shell for centuries. Among the most obvious uses for its shell was in making beautiful, ornate bowls. At that time, it must have seemed like the hawksbill’s numbers were limited. The real pressure on its existence was around the period of the civil war, on into the early twentieth century when their numbers declined enough to become noticeable. Tortoiseshell was also used in making guitar picks one at a time. I can’t say that I’ve followed the most recent trend in making “boutique” picks, but with celluloid getting more and more difficult to source, there are a number of changes in guitar pick materials some of which are very expensive (between $15 and $65) per pick. You can still buy a bag of your favorite picks for under $10, so this is going to be an interesting new subject, one that I will write about after I’ve learned a bit more.
A Fender Telecaster is a great choice regardless of where you’re at on your guitar journey.
I was so busy with a demanding engineering career and a number of other lifelong interests, I literally chose to wait for retirement before tackling something as immersive and time consuming as learning how to play guitar. But I’ve never done anything partway and knew that if I were going to play guitar, I would be pleased only if I became a bonafide guitarist, a player who would ultimately rank in the upper ten percent of amateur players. So, for my first guitar, I wanted something that could take me as far as I could go. There are obviously a lot of guitars that have the goods for such an endeavor, but I was drawn to the Telecaster in the same way the desert needs rain in order to thrive. I liked everything from the shape of the guitar which makes it comfortable whether standing or sitting and I fell in love with it’s lustrous and robust maple neck (it’s got ’52 specs). I also noticed right away how lightweight they were and this would make my aging back happy. The simplicity of the design was also appealing with not a lot to go wrong. I would be playing blues, country, and Southern rock so a Tele was ideal for the three genres.
About a week after I formally retired, I brought my wife along and spent the entire day messing around with all sorts of guitars. I hadn’t noticed it when we walked into the final store, a Guitar Center, because this particular Telecaster was obscured by a man-sized ad talking about the 50th anniversary of the Telecaster. In all, there would be twelve different Tele’s, one for each month of 2011. These were known as the “Telebration Series”. I knew immediately that the reclaimed redwood version was it and I needn’t shop further. At under seven pounds, it was wonderfully light, and the oil finish they’d used really made the woodgrain pop. I bought a nice twenty watt amp and everything else I would need to get started.
After setting everything up, it was quite late and I went to bed only to rise at 5:30 the following morning. I skipped breakfast and went right to work with the guitar. I played for sixteen hours that first weekend, my fingers painfully bloody and I knew right then and there that I was hooked.
I’ve come a long way since that initial purchase and now consider myself to be an advanced guitarist. I just turned sixty-four and have yet to slow down with the amount that I’ve always played…right around fifteen hours a week. I have nine other very fine electrics and eleven acoustics, but the redwood Tele will always be my favorite. It suits me now in the same way it did in the beginning, fifteen years ago.
So, yes, a Telecaster is THE right choice for a beginning guitarist or the expert axe-man. I can’t think of anything that could possibly make it a better guitar than it already is. In all those years, the only modification that I made was to swap out the ’52 pickups for some hotter Porter T-90’s. The thing just rips!
I recently acquired this 2011 Taylor GS-6 from a private seller in Idaho who rarely played it. The guitar is in mint or near-new condition. The build specs are shown among the linked photographs.
It has a beautiful sitka spruce top with abundant siking found throughout. The back and sides of the GS model are comprised of highly figured (in this case, flamed) maple. The flames, or “tiger stripes”, are relatively wide and well defined and the two piece back is bookmatched perfectly, making for an extremely elegant looking guitar.
While not as common as rosewood or mahogany, maple is considered to be an exceptional tone-wood. Though, as a general rule, it is a bit brighter sounding with “janglier” highs and lows (bass notes) having less depth. However, these are general rules governing the dozens of different tone-woods which can be used in the construction of an acoustic guitar. Like the various species of rosewood (cocobolo, Indian, the famed Brazilian, et al) woods that have a stiffer, denser composition tend to yield more cross-sectional strength per sample weight and this is what tends to make a guitar with a wider tonal spectrum with high highs and low lows. Maple is known for its broad and flavorful midrange. But the tonal characteristics of a given guitar are more complicated than when looking from a “materials only” perspective. Internal bracing technique, the overall size and shape of the guitar, and even the type of finish used are all contributors to the tone of any specific guitar. When ordering a custom build, many players choose old-fashioned hide glue over a more modern adhesive type.
I had never even played a maple back and sides guitar but have had it as “an itch to scratch” for many years. I had read what few reviews and listened to as many video clips as I could find on the GS-6 and determined that this make and model (a rather large guitar) wasn’t thought of as too bright. Different from what I was accustomed to, yes, but in only the best of ways. I probably have twenty hours of play time on the guitar and could not be more pleased with the tone or the playability. I can see it as having a place in my collection for many years to come. In terms of raw sex appeal, the GS-6 is one drop-dead-gorgeous guitar, the kind of guitar that says “pick me up” every time you walk by!
For more photos of the newest addition to my collection, click on the link inserted at the beginning. Located at Lonesome Dove, Texas, on the escarpment leading up to Texas’s famed Hill Country and the world renowned mecca for roots, blues, folk, country, and blues-blues rock music, Austin.
Collings AT-1 Dark Burst, Courtesy of Eddie’s Guitars
I was about to undergo my fourth back surgery and knew I was going to be laid-up for a couple of months, so I was setting myself up with things to stay busy until I’d recovered enough to re-engage with my usual activities. I’d wondered about these online guitar platforms such as the Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum (UMGF), Acoustic Guitar Forum (AGF), TDPRI (Fender Telecaster discussion group), and several others, so I did a little homework and became a member of the “Big Three” and signed on to a few smaller communities just for good measure. As you’d envision, they are essentially online chatrooms formed in the mid-to-late 2000’s, at the beginning of the beginning of the social media craze. As opposed to sites like Facebook and Myspace at the time, these were guitar-centric organizations intended for the express purpose of providing a space for guitarists to commune and post questions and answers about guitars. UMGF and AGF are for acoustic guitar players and TDPRI is primarily for electric guitarists who mostly play either a Fender Telecaster or Stratocaster. There are sites that are geared toward most of the major manufacturers, though, for a number of reasons the manufacturers themselves do not own the sites and seldom contribute. The owners of such sites are typically guitar afficionados who take it upon themselves to invest in and build platforms that function as a place where guitar players can exchange information, ask the forum questions, or provide the forum with answers or solutions to problems. Essentially, to have passionate, open discussions on their faorite topic. There is also a place on each site to buy and sell guitars and related gear, talk specifically about vintage guitars, review various makes and models, post sound-clips and favorite guitar videos, and discuss famous players and their styles and techniques. There is typically a cornucopia of information as guitarists help each other make decisions on what guitars to buy and what is the best available technology in related gear.
The year was 2019 and these forums had already been around for ten or more years before I joined at a time which proved to be the beginning of the end. People had begun to jump ship and spend their time on more socially driven social media forums such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The guitar forums were in a constant state of flux and people inexplicably began leaving in droves, defaulting to the most strident members, people who tended to be older and less inclined to leave the sanctity of their beloved forums or the warm and comforable nooks in there homes where they sit, tending to these sites at all hours of the day and night. I stuck with it for several years as it was still a place where I could contribute knowledge both as a long-time player and gear fanatic. I’d become an expert on “boutique” guitar manufacturers and vintage acoustic guitars, along with curating my own fairly significant collection of both acoustic and electric guitars. To me, this great hobby of mine was much more involved than just playing guitar and learning to be a better guitarist, it became something far more intensive and that meant learning everything I possibly could about guitars, from the origins of the first stringed instruments centuries ago to to modern guitars of today and everything in-between. Before retiring, I’d had a rewarding career in engineering and project management and, for many of those years, I’d been a competitive endurance athlete for which I was now paying the price with a rapidly degenerating spine. My lower back was going to hell in a handbasket forcing me to leave many of my beloved activities behind. By the time I joined these forums I was all but done for physically and would be needing some alternative oulets if I were to save my sanity.
I wrote my first blog just days before the 2019 surgery, followed by another blog the next day, but I was so focused on my recovery and the potential for getting some of my activities back, that I dropped my attention from the blog altogether. It would be four years and several brushes with death over some other severe health problems before I would pick up where I left off. My entry into the world of blogging started innocently enough. I would write a perspective on a new guitar I’d acquired, or write about my favorite guitar influences. There might be a simple post on what strings I use and why or which “boutique” brands I believe to be at the top of the heap. Boutique guitars are typically made by smaller builders with fewer employees who are talented and disciplined enough to use “Old World” processes, techniques, and tools while eschewing the use of automation in the construction of very finely crafted guitars. In other words, companies who employ skilled luthiers in making these guitars predominantly by hand, without the obvious production benefits behind using high-tech tools and machinery. There is a lot of space on these forums which is dedicated to comparing the various boutique brands against the best production guitars made by companies like Martin, Gibson, and Taylor. Aside from writing about guitars, I’ve written pieces nature, music, social issues, endangered species, some of my adventure trips, watches, cycling, skiing, what it’s like to be caught in the crossfire of the opioid crisis, and a host of other topics.
It was before I started my own WordPress site to become more formally engaged in writing that I was at all focused on guitar forums. For the first year, or so, I enjoyed contributing to these forums but somewhere into the second or third year, I began to notice a shift in the kinds of responses I was getting, which had gone from friendly and gracious to argumentative and downright combative. This is where you need to have an understanding of the inner workings of these forums. While there are ten’s of thousands subscribers, there are cliques that form and will come together like a beehive in order to defend any one of their group who seems to be having trouble over a particular topic or is doing battle with the posts’s author (the OP, or “Original Poster”) or someone else in the thread. If you are a poster and are having differences with another member, the next thing you know, there are a half-dozen other members rushing to the aid of the one and you find yourself in the sights of a clique. Put differently, what were once satisfying replies and comments to a particular post I’d written were now belligerent personal affronts. I believe what happened was that the site’s “trolls” were OK with me as long as I wasn’t answering more complicated questions, before I upped my game and had begun accruing more and more followers. It seems that I had unwittingly wandered into their territories and they wanted to put an end to it before they lost all-too-important “street-cred”. These kinds of negative responses weren’t targeted at me alone, but anyone who was writing at a higher than average level, both in terms of content, but also in terms of writing itself. For me personally, I’ve always enjoyed writing and, over many years, have become quite comfortable with the subject matter surrounding guitars. I had no difficulty in taking these people on and found it easy to put them in their place, without the use of foul lanquage or meaningless put-downs. But things got uncomfortable during my third or fourth altercation with one of UMGF’s most prolific and longest standing members, when he decided to really let me have it and got so worked-up that I believe he would have shot me if the whole of the internet didn’t stand between us. After the second or third communication between us, he began writing childish but incendiary insults and lobbing them over the fence. I had called him out and he had all-too-willingly answered the call. Before the trouble began, the post had fostered a good number of contributors and was an already lengthy thread with dozens of replies, so we’d already attracted many onlookers as well as the site’s moderators and the site administrator, himself, who shut us down and closed the post so that it was no longer accessible to anyone, including me. What happened in the next twenty-four hours is the real travesty. The administrator had edited the entire thread from the point where the argument started to where he had ended the post. He then reposted the thread. He had done much of his editing by deleting most of what I had to say and leaving out the ugliest comments made by my opponent, cleaning-up his mess while making me appear to be the uninformed aggressor. I wrote the administrator directly and gave him no quarter while delivering both barrels. He must have felt the sting because by the next day I’d been rewarded by having my membership revoked. I’d known that this was a possibility beause I’d read about being blackballed from other members of these sites, so this came as no surprise, nor did it come at a great loss. I certainly wasn’t about to let it get under my skin. But it made me wonder how the two people, the senior member and the administrator, could have become so close for the one to so clearly take the side of the other. There are similar alliances all over these sites, often between long-standing and prolific contributors and their “followers” who tend to gain confidence once taken under the wing of a well-known member. It’s probably not dissimilar to prison gang rivalries where a less powerful, more timid inmate takes a submissive stance with a given leader (or,”shot-caller”) and does things to prove himself worthy of joining in exchange for the “protection” of the leader and his henchmen. On some of these sites, a senior member may have been around since the forum’s inception and thus has the abundant gratitude of the site’s management and even its owner(s). Some of these folks will have gained such notoriety as to have thousands of followers at their beckon call…good little foot-soldiers in the fight over who’s more knowledgable, the relative newcomer or the tried and true old-timer. These senior contributors with ten or fifteen years of membership behind them tend to be of an older crowd and enjoy the status they feel within he fabric of the forum. To their credit, they are almost invariably highly knowledgable and better that average as writers whose aim it is to get their point across. Virtual friendships and allegiances between people who have known one another for firteen years online, but who have never actually met. Somehow, I just don’t “get” this but it is a dynamic that exists on every forum I’ve contributed to, When these battles come to a head, I’ve been swarmed by as many as a dozen “insurgents” borne out of a simple disagreement between two forum users. I couldn’t passibly keep up without typing so fast as to set my keyboard ablaze, so I choose the most eggregious offenders and take on their comments along with those of their leader. I am sure that this topic would be great fodder for psychiatric experts to tear into. The “why” riding the undercurrent of ill-fated personality types and their inevitable engagement when situations like this arise. In retrospect, I’m surprised at myself for getting as angry as I did at the time. Not unlike road rage, the root of the problem between the two parties is really quite foolish but it escalates disproportionately to the the reasoning beheind it. In my own defense, it wasn’t just the one thing that got me riled enough to don armor and step onto the battlefield, but the downward trend these sites were experiencing because, aisde from those particular moments while in the heat of doing battle, I got a lot of enjoyment out of reading an untold number of posts and contributing a fair number of my own. There’s was a lot of “good stuff” to be found there. But, as someone famously once said, “all good things come to an end”.
This same thing happened to me on another of the preeminant forums. I guess I must have a problem. ;-). Perhaps that problem is that I refuse to allow these trolls to control any of these forums by fear. Many people are fearful of putiing themselves out there only to be criticized by others. I have done my best to give them a voice even if it’s not a popular opinion that they’re attampting to peddle. The problem is that the more these forums become places where people attempt to validate themselves and the site’s seemingly continue to promote their “Good ol’ Boy” networks, the more people are going to leave and take their guitar-centric worlds with them. The greater problem is that once these forums reach extiction, there will be no place to go the obtain free advice on complex, guitar related issues and nowhere for the many thousands of us who enjoy belonging to a like-minded, music based community. I find this to be unfortunate because I enjoy helping people, whether it’s about which guitars bring forth the best overall value or what kind of guitar strap to use. More complicated questions are always welcome, and haing a place to write an essay regarding tonewoods and which ones work best for differing applications, is quite satisfying. In this respect, I know that I am not alone, nor am I alone in hoping that one day there will be a resurgence of such platforms. Unfortunately, there may already be too much damage done as to how I feel about these forums for me to regain the intense interest that I once had. Unless these forum owners soon do an about face to entice their members from moving on, the mass exodus from their sites will continue and I don’t see these sites as having enough articifcial intelligence to save themselves. The fact is, these guitar forums are already on their way to mass extinction and I believe they will continue to lose members because they are clearly making no efforts to keep them. In the conext of my own experience with these sites and being an extremely knowledgable resource who is forever eager to share that knowledge, it is the rest of the membership who are penalized when I’m forced out of the picture by management. If people are afraid to share their vast knowledge for fear of retribution from some silly “gang leader”, then it is the site administrators and owners who are culpable for allowing this kind of negative atmosphere to exist while on “their watch”. It is these people who owe ex-members an appology for not meeting their expectations of providing a safe environment for people to air their collective knowledge openly without having the “other shoe drop” when they’ve lauched yet another solid, well-informed post that speaks for itself. It is the job of the site’s owner(s) and administrators to maintain such a space which was their intention when launching their creations in the first place. There are obviously greater reasons behind the loss of popularity of similar forums all over the internet. Do people only want topical knowledge on a given subject or are there others out there, people like me, who lament the loss of site’s where significant amounts of information can be found and exchanged?
2011 Fender “Telebration” Series Reclaimed Old Growth Redwood Telecaster
It was something to do during the recovery periods associated with the number of major surgeries and health setbacks I’ve had during those same times. Now, I obviously have my own dedicated space, in part, to write about music and my love of “all things guitar”. I also contribute to a number of guitar-centric platforms on Quora.
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