Last year I rekindled
an old hobby. In my 20s I dabbled in
playing guitar. My wife and I were
living in Japan near Tokyo and one day walking by a guitar store I decided to
go in and look around while she went shopping for her stuff across the
street. When she came back over to the
guitar store to let me know she was finished shopping she found me examining a
very pretty blue Stratocaster knock off.
It was made by a Japanese company called Fernandes and it was very
lightly used (as in probably not played beyond the time it would take to
develop enough calluses to not be painful anymore) and only cost about 10,000
yen or less than $100. So I got it and
taught myself the pentatonic scale in the first position, and eventually got 3
chords I could play haltingly. Then, we
moved back to the US and sold the guitar cheap.
Chances it would have made it back to the US unbroken were low through
our moving company and it would not have been worth it to ship. (I thought at the time, though it might be
worth more money today.)
So last year as I
turned 50 I decided to take up guitar again.
I got a $300 Epiphone Les Paul Studio and I have been playing pretty
much every day since. The big advantage
now over then is that I have the WWW and You Tube video lessons for free. My wife also paid for a couple hundred
dollars' worth of lessons which were helpful.
And after a year of playing I realized that this guitar buying problem
that so many people seem to have is a real thing. I had to have another one.
This year I became a
multi-guitar owner and I went all in.
For as long as I can remember I wanted to own a Les Paul. An actual Gibson Les Paul was out of the
budget range last year so I got the Epiphone.
I'm not sorry I did, because it is a great little guitar with a lot of
promise. I can upgrade the pickups at
some point and the rest of the electronics, etc. But the other one I always
wanted was a Fender Telecaster.
A little back story is
in order here. My wife and I have a
tendency to try and get Christmas and Birthday gifts for each other that are of
equal value. So in the past she had got
some Coach hand bags and I have got a pair of Bose Noise Canceling
headphones. She'd get a nice ring and
I'd replace my old Bose Noise Canceling headphones. Well a few years ago she became a fan of a
Korean pop group called TVXQ. She has a
bit of an obsessive personality so she became a super fan traveling all of the
US and Asia to see them and calling it a Birthday/Christmas gift. And I would replace my Bose Noise Canceling
headphones. (OK, last year I also got a
$700 leather jacket on our trip to Florence Italy, but that was more of a
souvenir. And she got a much more
expensive ring because apparently Florence is famous for that too.)
This year I decided it
was time to cash in a bit and I was going to get a new Telecaster. I set my sights on a $600 made in Mexico Baja
Telecaster that was originally $800 because it had some in-store damage. Two color sunburst, with the classic 50's
style bridge assembly, etc. But my wife
said, if you pay a little more then you can get one that isn't damaged. That got me to thinking. A little more than $600 is $800, (all numbers
are rounded up) but a little more than
$800 is $1,000 and that goes from a made in Mexico to an American made
Telecaster Special with "better" pickups.
Then I started doing a
little research on how much a trip to Seoul, South Korea costs, which is where
my wife went to see the latest concert of her K-Pop boy band. That convinced me to push for the more
expensive option, get the guitar I wanted (within reason) and I started my
search in earnest. Transactional as
Hell, I know, but fair is fair right?
This search went on
for months. I learned as much as I could
about Telecasters and as often as I could I'd go to Guitar Center (GC) and play
whatever they had in stock. They had a
two color burst American Special that I was pretty sure I was going to buy but
I compared it against everything they had.
I played a Deluxe Nashville with three pickups and a nice twang, but I
didn't like the colors. I even compared
it to the Squire Classic Vibe and though I liked it, I still had in the back of
my mind that I wanted a made in America Telecaster or one made in Mexico if it
was actually better than a similar priced American made.
One day the whole
family was at the mall at the same time and my wife and I decided that it was
time to buy the guitar. So she came with
me to GC and we grabbed all the Teles in contention for my $$$ and brought them
into the room with all the expensive guitars (most of which are locked up) and
started comparing them to one another. I
was playing them through a nice Tweed covered Blues Deluxe Reissue and they all
sounded great. I even had a used
American Standard in there that up to that point was the best feeling one in
the bunch but the electronics were a bit crackly. It was hard to choose, so I decided to pick
out one of the unlocked "expensive" Teles to compare it with. It was butterscotch blonde and the neck felt
smooth as silk. Not too chunky for my
hands and it sounded great! I kept going
back to it as the new standard that all of the other ones were compared
to. Finally I thought I had narrowed it
down to the $1000 American Special but they didn't have the color I wanted so I
said I was going to have to order it.
My wife wanted to make
sure that if we're paying that much money I am really getting what I wanted so
she started asking questions. One of the
questions she asked was about the neck I kept commenting on. I had been told that I could get a nice
statin like finish with a little bit of sand paper so she asked about
that. I showed her the difference
between the neck feel of the Special vs. the feel of the expensive one I had
been comparing it to. Then she asked
about the color. I said, I want a blonde
instead of the two color burst and the Special blonde is OK. A little lighter in the pictures I had seen
than I really wanted. I pointed to the
Butterscotch Blonde I had been comparing everything with as the ideal color I
was looking for. So she said, it's
$1,500 but it's everything you are looking for so why not get that?
SOLD! And that's how I walked out of the store with
a brand new American Professional Telecaster in Butterscotch Blonde. So now, I'm all in and probably not going to
spend too much money on guitar gear for the next year or so.
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