Fender – Lessons from a Stone

The Allure of the Guitar

Originally Written for Medium – Edited and Expanded for this Post

I didn’t start playing guitar until I retired twelve years ago. I had just moved from my long time home in Southwest Colorado to my last job as regional director for a large engineering company in Pennsylvania. I’d been having back trouble for years, but it was during that move that things got serious. I was more than a little concerned about starting a new, high profile job while my back had begun to spiral out of control. I had seen enough specialists over many years, including a recent visit with a spine surgeon in Durango, to know that I would now be in need of a major corrective surgery.

I began my new post and could immediately tell that it was going to be hell. Loads of responsibility and pressure trying to turn water into wine. By now, I was in serious need of seeing a pain specialist and getting some help with the quickly deteriorating circumstances. Soon my situation became untenable. I’d come from Colorado a well conditioned athlete and mountain bike racer but now it was all I could do to sit through my fourteen hour days. The company had located a wonderful home for our two-person, two dog family and we moved in. But I was immediately in need of finding a place closer to work to mitigate the fairly long commute, which meant more sitting. By far, the most uncomfortable thing I could do to my body was to sit for long periods. The walls containing my life were collapsing all around me. I finally found a pain management clinic that would squeeze me in. Unbeknownst to me, there was a war going on and it was called the “Opioid Crisis”. At least in Pennsylvania, with some of the harshest laws covering the transfer and sale of oral opioids, it was like playing musical chairs and when the music stopped, I would be left standing without a chair. Clinics were booked solid and doctors were being forced to discern how much pain a given patient might be in while interrogating them to see if their pain was real or whether they were exhibiting “drug seeking behavior”, which closely mimicks being in severe pain. I was refused by three clinics before a doctor agreed to take me on as a genuine pain patient. At this point, I’d only been in Pennsylvania for three months and was already fighting to be able to perform well enough to keep my job and all that I had gambled when I left Colorado. The country was deep in the throes of a major recession, largely due the “House Mortgaging Crisis” which had been two decades in the making, and virtually every industry, including mine in oil and gas, was hurting and solid engineers in my particular field (natural gas development) were being laid-off left and right, which is why I was forced to make such a faraway move at such a bad time for me and my rapidly declining spine. I had lived and worked hard making my way in Colorado for thirty years. To me, it was the end of an entire way of life. Just a few months prior to the move, I had simply gone in to see our local family doctor in Colorado and was, with no trouble at all, given a prescription for the very same medication that I was now fighting for my life to renew. I was fortunate that I’d found a pain clinician who, after seeing X-rays, an MRI, and a CT-scan could see how badly I needed surgery, as my lower lumbar spine was completely decimated from years of concussive sports. He wrote a script for just enough medicine to just take the edge off so that I could at least get a few hours of sleep at night and continue working while attempting to locate a reputable spine surgeon. But, make no mistake, the pain was still bad enough that I could barely sit at my desk, let alone travel to and from Houston, something required for my new position as the company was headquartered there, and I reported to the CEO.

It was at this time that I was compelled to find something pleasing to concentrate on to keep my mind off the pain. Since I’d always looked to numerous mountain sports and activities for stress relief and to maintain a semblance of work/life balance, but was now having serious difficulty with short runs and was forced to exchange my runs for short walks, what I was looking for was something immersive enough to help me relax and fend-off the profound associated stress and vastly debilitating anxiety. I had been saving two time-intensive passions to dive into after retirement as I’d done just enough of each over my working life to have a burning desire to take them up when I finally had the necessary time to commit. One was to learn to play and become an accomplished guitarist, and the other was creative writing. As a function of my career in engineering, I had become a highly proficient technical writer, but since taking some literature and writing courses in college, which I had enjoyed immensely, I had had an overwhelming desire to one day pursue creative writing as an avocation. This, too, would have to wait until retirement as becoming an accomplished creative writer doesn’t happen overnight. I decided to continue to put the writing on hold as I wasn’t yet ready to retire in earnest and had hoped to get my back under control and continue working for another four or five years, but I thought that learning to play guitar would help get me through this very difficult period and would be something that I would continue pursuing while finishing up my working life.

No sooner than I had made the decision, my wife and I went to the nearest Guitar Center while I spent an entire Saturday working closely with the store’s assistant manager who, himself, was a gifted and regularly gigging guitarist. We had found a surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh whom I believed could do the work but my surgery wasn’t scheduled for another two months. I needed this change in my life in the same way the desert requires an occasional rain to sustain its own extremely beautiful life force. Years ago, I’d played a bit of acoustic in college and decided that I would initially pursue electric guitar. By the end of the day, I had settled on a very limited edition “Old Growth” redwood Fender Telecaster, the very first guitar to have caught my eye on that momentous day, a good quality tube amp, and everything I would need to get started. Even with the severe pain, I felt an overwhelming sense of elation! We got home and, though it took me two hours to get everything setup in the manner I was instructed by the uniquely helpful and super-knowledgable Guitar Center employee, I got everything set up to be able to play the next day. I went to bed completely exhausted from what had been a long day considering the horrible condition I was in. Exhausted, but full of hope and desire.

As worn to a nub as I was, I couldn’t wait to wake up the next morning and try my hand at playing. That day turned out to be epic as I played until my fingers bled (I’m being completely honest about that!) and played went on to play some more. It was nightfall before I quit for the day. I remembered more than I’d have thought from my bits of playing acoustic guitar in college and found something I’d never known about myself. I could play by ear. I never knew what that meant until I played to a bunch of old favorites and turned Pandora to a blues-rock station where I attempted to play lead along to each song and found myself putting together many of the notes and fitting them in nicely to match the lead guitar on the song. As with all things, there is a spectrum when it comes to playing by ear. Let’s just say that I could do it well enough to thoroughly enjoy what I was doing. Most people spend months, or even years, working on music theory and learning basic chords before enjoyment takes the place of frustration. For me, frustration would come much later when I’d gotten to be a reasonably good player but I was now attempting more complicated things, so the learning curve slowed and got steeper. Time was coming up on my surgery date and the surgeon had instructed me to prepare myself for a long and painful recovery. I was thankful for getting into guitar when I did because I would need it for what would end up as years of chasing pain and having other surgeries, six in the course of the following twelve years. I was forced to retire during the height of my career with just a few more years to go before I could retire “comfortably “. Times got pretty rough and I’ve all but completely lost myself at times, occasionally falling into deep despair from the pain and associated depression, but as bad as things got, I continued to play and began expanding my newfound avocation into buying, selling, and collecting guitars to an extent that my fascination with the guitar would become an obsession. I would read about the history of guitars and learn all about the market for vintage acoustic guitars by Martin and Gibson. I became an “enthusiast” and an expert on vintage acoustic guitars all while my playing continued to get better. I’ve been playing for almost fifteen years now and have developed an equal love of playing acoustically. Today, I’m roughly 50/50 with equal time playing both electrically and acoustically.

The 2011 Fender “Old Growth” Redwood Telecaster I purchased that one fine day at Guitar Center

Aside from problems with my back, I would have a half-dozen major health issues to contend with, three playing out as near-death experiences. Several of the presiding doctors over the gruelling period have made wonderfully compassionate observations as to my inner strength, resilience, and unique ability to endure under the most demanding of conditions. I have spent long periods of time where it was only by the grace of God, support from my family and a very small circle of friends, and my love for making music that I made it through. I had three major surgeries in 2023 alone. One, another spine related surgery and two that had to do with other long-term life threatening illnesses. In the aftermath, I had to relearn how to walk and, on most days I still use a cane to get around. But through it all, there were my guitars standing at the ready to help me through the worst of things. Then, there is my wonderful wife and three fine dogs. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to live mindfully and being thankful for the things that matter most.

But nothing has gotten me through these difficult times like remaining positive and playing the guitar like there’s no tomorrow. It wouldn’t be a stretch for me to say that my love of guitar and making music have saved my life several times over. When I occasionally reflect on all that has transpired, I can only hope and attempt to draw strength from what I have already accomplished as I am currently battling bladder cancer, the one remaining illness that I have yet to conquer. I was diagnosed in mid-2024 and had two surgeries and a failed form of frontline treatment, yet I still had a seven month period of remission only to have it reappear. Over the last six months, I have had two more surgeries to remove two more tumors, the most recent was just a month ago. This time, it was the smallest tumor yet, caught early. I have a follow-up “scraping” surgery in a month (to make sure my surgeon gets all of it), and have just begun a second, less efficacious form of treatment called systemic immunotherapy. It is given through an IV for two-to-three hours at my oncologist’s clinic in Austin, every third Friday for a period of twelve months. I do not know if I have enough gas in my tank to beat this last, most pernicious illness, but I’m going to give it everything I’ve got left. I still have “places to go, and people to meet” and am not nearly done with the things I hope to accomplish in my lifetime.

As always, good thoughts and prayers are more than welcome and are always deeply appreciated…from the bottom of my heart!

Some of the guitars from a collection that has taken me fifteen years to build. The most important pic to me is the last one. It’s a shot that my wife, Genie, took of me and our pure-golden-hearted little girl, Sage. RIP 2021 Age: 15

Thanks for reading!

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.

Guitar Pick Mania

Things seem to be changing quickly for one piece of gear that many guitar players take for granted: The lowly guitar pick.

A Few Examples of Boutique Guitar Picks Credit: HoneyPicks, Charmed Life, D’Addario

By now many of you are probably aware of the burgeoning market for “Boutique” picks which burst on to the scene and broke the price barrier from around a buck per pick (we’d buy ’em by the bag of twelve or twenty) to over $40 per unit when “Blue Chip” picks came out five or six years ago, using some high-tech proprietary material borrowed from the high tech and aerospace industries.

Not to be out-done, all sorts of entrepreneurial-types have joined in the fight for market share. New materials such as galilith/casein which is derived from a protein found in milk. Other pick makers are using acrylic, glass, epoxy resin and the list goes on to include graphite, kevlar, and carbon fiber. While the big name manufacturers such as Fender, Clayton, and Dunlop are still using tried and true materials like celluloid, Ultex, Tortex, nylon, PVC (and other forms of inexpensive plastic), they are also launching their own pricey picks (like Dunlop and it’s “Prime Tone” line and DAddario selling its branded casein). The big brand’s new picks run from around $6 to $20 per unit. The new boutique brands claim theirs to be superior and more costly to make (often, one at a time by hand). These picks run the gamut from around $20 to over $60, per. These alternative picks have many of their own designs and dimensions. Most offer standard sizes like Fender’s 351 teardrop and other sizes that mesh with what we’re accustomed to seeing, along with some of their own.

I’ve played dozens of picks over the years and experimented with both the feel and tone. My go-to pick is the yellow Dunlop Tortex material, shown above (twice) in the Fender “351” shape, medium-heavy thickness. These picks were bought well before the boutique pick craze began a few years ago. I’m currently awaiting two from Honey Picks (photo at the top) and their proprietary”Bee Keeper” material “found deep within the Appalachian Mountains”. Seriously, that’s all the information their website supplies. These come in at $20 each, or about middle of the pack in price. I’m quite curious to play them against some others in my collection, including my Tortex picks. For you non-guitar slingers who might be reading this, the pick is typically the very inexpensive tool that connects you to your very expensive guitar and, there are discernable differences in tone and playability moving from pick to pick. You have a hard, plastic feeling material striking the strings, so things like stiffness and density come into play (NPI). This all makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why, by chance, would a more expensive, more difficult to resource material inherently sound better? After all, this is the way this whole thing is being spun. Put differently, there’s certainly some good marketing going on here in planting just the seed of the idea into the brains of the guitar playing public, and allowing the idea to germinate and grow.

I will do my best to give these new picks a fair and impartial chance at romancing my “well-seasoned” set of musical ears. After my experiment, I will report my findings back here. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to go out and purchase a dozen picks from the bigger names in the business and expand the experiment to include them. However, if these Honey Picks do the job and, particularly if they do it well, I’ll likely buy more from the various brands and, again, report back here to amend this article.

The biggest change that I’m finding (other than a good case of sticker shock!) is with the depth or thickness which typically runs from around 1.4 mm to 3 mm, or greater. The points are thinned and “speed beveled” for a smooth attack, but the part you hold remains thick. The original premise (as with Blue Chip) was to get as close as possible to the sonic qualities of genuine tortoiseshell which was all the rage until the Hawksbill sea turtle (not a tortoise) all but reached its demise. The misnomer over the two species has been in place and is only now, decades later, being corrected. The turtle had been hunted for centuries by indigenous peoples all over the world but when the Victorian Era came into full swing over a hundred years ago, everything from lampshades to women’s brush and mirror handles, and later, guitar pickguards and picks, pushed the turtle to its limits and a worldwide hunting and manufacturing ban was put into play. At what was the eleventh hour, Hawksbill turtle would get a permanent stay of execution.

It took some time, but with the advent of celluloid (thought to be very close to tortoiseshell in looks and feel), guitar manufacturers again had their pickguard material of choice. On it went for pick guards over the last eighty years, but it is now rumored that there is a coming shortage of celluloid. When fine Italian celluloid hit the market in the 1950’s, it was being manufactured for all sorts of markets and, among them were not only beautiful looking pickguards to protect the area of the guitar, whether electric or acoustic, that is located below where the sound hole would be. The other guitar-related market was for the guitar pick. One of the prime selling points for celluloid was that the new picks sounded and felt very much like the original tortoiseshell picks of yore. Once celluloid became established as the new market go-to material, much as is the case now, companies began throwing all sorts of materials at their own brand of pickguards, from various forms of plastic, nylon, PVC, Ultex, and dozens of others all with the claim of sounding much like genuine tortoiseshell. I think what happened was that some of these materials didn’t sould like tortoiseshell at all, though they did have a pleasant tone when played. The benchmark for “sounding like tortoiseshell” sort of fell by the wayside and it became more about how these materials sounded relative to one another. Dunlap became the leader in introducing alternative materials to celluloid. One of the new “boutique” materials is epoxy resin. You can buy a resin pickguard todoy but it will be from some guy making them in his garage. As far as I know, no one manufacturer has come along to make them on a production scale.

There are a couple of things that make the validity of a $50-plus pick sounding and performing any better than the vast array of a bit suspect. I live in the middle of nowhere but have ordered and now had the chance to test several of these new picks for myself. Aside from any opinions that I provide here, there are currently any number of internet reviews and YouTube comparisons if you haven’t already queried as to what “all the fuss is about”.

If you’ve bought into the idea or A/B’d a few, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. I’ve also never used a genuine turtle shell pick as a baseline. I have no idea if this is driven by “everything vintage being better” or if there’s some truth behind how great they sound and play. I do know that they weren’t thick!

Endangered Species – the Hawksbill Turtle

Findings

So far, I have tried just three different boutique picks and chose my trusty medium stiff (0.73 mm) DuPont Tortex pick as a baseline. Tortex Price: less than $0.50 per pick, purchased at 32 picks per package. Tested were the Honey Picks “Bee Keeper’s Stash” a proprietary material from “Deep within the Appalachian Mountains…”. Price: $20 per pick. Second, I tried a beautiful acrylic material from Clayton in a thickness of 1.2 mm. Price: $15 per pick. And, third, I tried Dunlop’s entry into higher priced picks, though at $13 for a pack of three ($4 per pick) they are far from the picks from Tone Slab or Blue Chip which range from $30 to $60 per pick.

Of the ones I’ve tried, Dunlap’s “Primetone” in the large, triangular shape, with a nice right hand bevel and a thickness of 1.4 mm has become my new pick of choice. Thirteen bucks for a package of three. I’ve been using one, almost daily, for about two months. While it took me a week to become accustomed to its less bright, but more even across the tonal spectrum sound, it was worth the effort. I’m glad because after initially dismissing it, I gave it an even longer, more intensive second chance. It’s got great grip and for me is the ideal thickness and stiffness. I don’t foresee myself changing picks again, but it could still happen with the two or three picks I’ve yet to order.

To be continued…

Is the Telecaster the Right Choice for my First Guitar?

Originally Posted to Quora

2011 Reclaimed Redwood Telecaster

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!