Playing Guitar – 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!

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”.

What Advantages Might Adults Have Over Learning to Play Guitar at an Early Age?

Originally Posted on Quora

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”.