Playing Guitar – Lessons from a Stone

If you could save only one guitar from a burning house, which one would it be?

Originally Posted on Quora

I hadn’t posted anything on Quora since around Thanksgiving last year, but jumped on to find a post I’d written at some point during that June or July. This typically fun to answer question was in my feed from one of the guitar-oriented “Spaces” for which I had been a regular contributor, so I couldn’t resist. As is often the case, I dove in a little deeper than I’d intended.

Though this question has been asked many times here on Quora and every guitar forum I’ve been on over the years, I never find it easy to answer. The proverbial “Burning House” guestion is quite different from the “Desert Island” question primarily because we’re talking about the complete destruction of a person’s guitar collection, whether it consists of three, or thirty guitars. Perhaps they have just one cherished guitar, in which case the question becomes easy to answer. I had a quick peek at another player’s answer and I feel the same way about my dogs as he does about his cats…yes, I would shout at the top of my lungs: “Please take any or all of my guitars while I go into the fiery house to fetch my dogs!”.

My ’66 Martin D-18 has certainly earned the right to be saved first, as it has already stoically survived sixty-years on the planet. But my deepest connection is to my very first guitar, a 2011 “Reclaimed Redwood” Fender Telecaster made from an appropriation of timbers Fender acquired when the famed Brown’s Canyon Bridge (built during the Gold Rush, in 1850’s Northern California) was being dismantled due to obsolescence (a narrow-guage railroad trestle bridge that hadn’t felt the weight of a train in many decades), neglect (as a national treasure), and obvious safety considerations (a high-risk accident just waiting for the last hiker to attempt a crossing).

The Fender “Reclaimed Redwood” Telecaster story is really quite fascinating, in part because it remains difficult to this day to separate fact from fiction. I’ll provide this summary : While a sizable fraction of the 500 Telecasters (and 500 like Stratocasters) were crafted from the dismantled Brown’s Canyon Bridge, there was some significant percentage that were crafted from “Reclaimed Old Growth” redwood timbers sourced elsewhere. There was no plausible explanation for the error and the story was essentially and quickly snuffed by Fender. There were more than enough timbers to craft the entire production run of 1,000 “Brown’s Canyon Old Growth Redwood” Telecasters and Stratocasters, so it remains a mystery as to what happened and where those “other” timbers came from.

Few people are aware of this, but these guitars are highly collectable, but it calls into question which guitars were actually from the Brown’s Canyon Bridge, and which one’s were not. If you’re a Telecaster (or Stratocaster) collector, this is something you should be aware of as the true value of these guitars is questionable. Taken as a whole, they have risen considerably in value. But, as a real Fender collectable and historical artifact (to railroad enthusiasts, the Brown’s Canyon Bridge was known worldwide and should have been cared for as a National Historic Landmark) these guitars have risen in value on two distinctly different levels. When this occurs with any valuable collectable item, the lower value is taken to be the correct one.

I googled the story using several different searches just now, and there is nothing that comes up (anymore) which describes the entire story other than a post I wrote for my blog a few years ago. The post is chock-full of great photos of my own Fender “Brown’s Canyon Bridge” reclaimed redwood Telecaster. Here is the link:

https://lessonsfromastone.com/2024/03/30/fender-reclaimed-redwood-telecaster/

My collection grew quickly from that first electric to many more guitars, both electric and acoustic, but that redwood Telecaster would have to be the one I would retrieve from the flames of Perdition. And not only for nostalgic reasons. It remains the best playing, most storied, and rustically beautiful guitar I own. It is also at least a half-pound lighter in weight than any other electric guitar in a collection of electrics curated, in large part, for weight. Though I do have a nine-and-a-quarter pound Les Paul, it is what I would refer to as a “statistical anomaly”. But who has a respectable guitar collection (on the electric side of life) without having at least one Gibson Les Paul?!

2011 Fender “Telebration Series” Old Growth Redwood Telecaster. The special neck plate supposedly separates the guitar from the others, as described. I have not been able to confirm this, but there was more information available online immediately after these guitars were launched onto the marketplace and I had read that there were two differing neck plates, one without the engraved redwood tree. Much of that early information seems to have been lost to time.

What is Your Best Guitar?

Originally Posted in Quora

Just last week I posted my favorites along with an invitation to see those of others. That post is floating around in “Quora-space”. But I never balk at the chance to do a “show and tell” with some of my guitars.

Favorite Acoustic

Gallagher BG-50 Appalachian Spruce and Sinker Mahogany

Favorite Electric

Fender Reclaimed Redwood 60th Anniversary Telecaster

These guitars represent my favorites from a collection that took me fifteen years to build. I would be hard-pressed to call them my best as I have several guitars, both electric and acoustic, that I vacillate over as being my “best guitars”. That may sound like semantics, but, at least for me and the way I view my guitars, “best” and “favorite” have different meanings.

Gallagher is a small but rapidly growing brand based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Started in the mid-1960’s by J.W. Gallagher in the small Tennessee community of Wartrace, just a short drive from where the company is headquartered today, in Murfreesboro, just thirty minutes from Nashville. At some point (around 1965) he had been approached to build a few nice guitars but, at the time, had no plans to make the switch to guitars from his core business which was focused on crafting fine, Victorian-style furniture. Since he was already well-versed in the art of fine woodworking, it wasn’t difficult for him to build his first acoustic guitar and have it turn out to be a darned good one. I don’t recollect just how this next fateful happening occurred, but sometime soon thereafter, one of his initial builds landed on-stage one night with none other than Doc Watson, arguably one of the best bluegrass players in history. Doc immediately fell in love with the instrument and offered J.W. the opportunity to sell the guitar to him on the spot. The guitar had a small crack in it, so J.W. did Doc one-better and built him a one-of-a-kind guitar which incorporated some design elements that Doc had requested. The guitar became known as the “Doc Watson” model and has been a mainstay for Gallagher Guitar Company ever since.

J.W.’s intention was never as much about growing some megalithic guitar company as it was about being a one-man-show while building the best guitars he was capable of producing, one guitar at a time. He went on like this for years and eventually had his two sons come of age and come to work in the shop, but, other than a regional bluegrass following, they were struggling with where to go with the company as J.R. was fast approaching retirement. Unfortunately, his sons elected to follow their own paths, but just in the nick of time, good fortune smiled upon Gallagher Guitars and, in 2019, while keeping the Gallagher name and vision for utmost quality, the company was acquired by a local couple (the Mathis’s) who have since made all the right moves and Gallagher has grown into a brand that is competitive with the best boutique brands on the market today. David Mathis is president and CEO and it is his vision, combined with remaining true to J.W. Gallagher’s wishes, that provided the necessary spark to turn the embattled company around. If you’re a fan of high quality acoustic guitars but you haven’t heard the name, you will.

The Fender was part of a 60th Anniversary celebration of the Telecaster, one of the two most iconic guitars in guitar history. It was one of eleven other limited edition designs, one for each month of the year in 2011. The lot of them was referred to as the “Telebration Series”. It was my first electric guitar and though I have others that are dressier and more expensive, I have a unique bond with this one. The only mods I have made were to replace the black ”Bakelite” pickguard with one made of fine celluloid faux tortoiseshell, and swap the Fender ’52 spec pick-ups for a much warmer sounding set of Porter Nine-T’s.

While I own guitar models made by many different brands, the Fender Telecaster has remained my favorite. I prefer its natural shape and size, its 25.5″ scale, the one piece maple neck option, its ease of maintenance, and outright simplicity and tone. I find the famous Telecaster tone to be extremely malleable, able to cover ample ground across a wide range of music, from country, to classic, Southern, and contemporary rock, to blues and, my favorite genre, blues rock. By design, it is an historically lightweight and well-balanced music making machine which is suitable for hours of playing without the usual fatigue associated with much heavier guitars.

After fifteen years of buying, selling, and trading guitars, I have managed to maintain a good-sized, high-quality collection of the best of them. I am thoroughly satisfied with what I’ve curated and have no real plans to remain in the buying and selling game. It was tremendously edifying while it lasted, but my algorithm for collecting was heavily dependent on having a healthy and competitive market to work with. With the arrival and extended duration of COVID there were literally millions of “impulse purchases” and when most of those guitars landed on the used market between four and six years ago, the overall market suffered a point of over-saturation and prices for both used and new guitars plummeted, leaving individual “traders” such as myself with no outlet for selling and acquiring with any kind of margin. I had used highly targeted “buys” and profitable “sells” to pay for my post-retirement hobby and entire collection, without the usual cash outlays.

Those days are gone and the market still hasn’t recovered. For those of you with the desire to start your own collections, there’s never been a better time to buy. However, should the need or desire arise to sell any of those acquisitions, you will invariably lose money in the process. It is very much a “buyers” market but selling has become a “no-win” endeavor. In my case, I was fortunate enough to both enter and exit the buying and selling game at precisely the right time and walked away unscathed and holding a fine, eclectic collection of both electric and acoustic guitars.

The best analogy that comes to mind is being heavily engaged in playing the commodities market during one of its better windows of opportunity and having the knowledge and forethought required to read the signs and time your exit without ever encountering a loss.

Why do some guitarists find that their playing dramatically improves with a high-quality guitar like a Gibson Les Paul?

Originally Posted to a Guitar Forum on Quora

The possible reasons may not be as tidy as summing them up in the belief that a new, high-end guitar is the root reason as to why many players sense an immediate increase in their abilities. But this is more likely due to that new “high quality” guitar having had a good setup and a guitar that is well setup will invariably feel, play, and sound better, play better. For one thing, a new, well-setup Les Paul is likely to have a lower, more playable action because the string height has been adjusted to meet that objective.

An additional reason this dynamic occurs so often is because a Gibson Les Paul is aesthetically beautiful and made from high quality materials (virtually any player at any level will feel a magnetic-like pull to pickup that new Les Paul and play it for hours more each week than they were on their “old guitar”. Put differently, it is almost guaranteed that the “Power of Suggestion” has more than a little to do with why the player “feels” as if they’re “playing better than ever”, when it could just be that he or she “believes” they’re playing has improved dramatically. Since the dawn of the Gibson Les Paul in the early 1950’s, and possibly more than any other guitar, the LP has been known to have this incredible effect on guitarists everywhere!

Last, but certainly not least, and for any combination of reasons, the guitarists in question do, in fact, experience a pronounced “lift” in their playing. The Les Paul is arguably an incredibly good guitar and, though, like any long-standing and storied manufacturer of high-quality guitars, Gibson has had its ups and downs in product quality, the “ups” have far exceeded the “downs”.

My “Cardinal Red” 2024 Gibson Les Paul 50’s model from the “Custom Colors” series, which was released for that year only.

Who wouldn’t be “drawn-in” and return time and again to play such an extraordinary piece of “Eye Candy”?!! It didn’t make me a better player but it does compel me to pull it out of its case and play it – a lot!

The Story Behind Pickguards

Originally Written for 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 pickuard 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 pickgaurd for you to compare.

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.

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 acetone 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 pickgusrds 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

Thanks for reading “my walk down pickguard lane”.

The Story Behind Fine Pickguards

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.

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.

Thanks for reading “my walk down pickguard lane”.