In Praise of Less Expensive Instruments

Several weeks ago, I was killing a little time in the "try the acoustic guitars" room of a certain big box music store. I go into one one of these every so often just to see who is building what, and identify the current "show off how good I am" riffs being played (to a given value of "played"). Over the years, there have been changes, and observation is a harmless hobby.

As so often happens, a parent type had brought a couple of kids in to try out guitars with an eye to buying the kids something to learn on. To his credit, the salesperson started out with guiding the kids toward less expensive, but still well-made instruments, but Mama wasn't having any of it.

"I'm paying for private lessons with a top flight instruction person and I don't want my children to be embarrassed going into the process. I don't drive a second rate car, and I don't want my children to be handicapped by second rate guitars"

This way-too-wrong-on-way-too-many-levels statement was delivered in that Orange County mega-WASP accent that could cut glass. It slipped occasionally, so I think she was a transplant, but the general effect made Ann Coulter sound smart.

So here we have these two elementary school students, who had to be shown about pushing the strings down, deciding on their instruments based on the label, the price tag, and how they looked when the kids struck poses in front of the curiously ubiquitous full-length mirror one finds in such places. At the end of the day, Mama sunk a couple grand into instruments that were (a) likely to gather dust in closets within a few months, (b) were not any easier to play than instruments costing a fraction of the final prices, and (c) were probably NOT going to be the investment instruments that payed for these kids' college.

I know people who have more invested in guitars and other instruments than they do in the house that keeps the rain off them. Great. I collect sunrises. sunsets, memories of people, and WAY too many books. OK, the books are more a matter of accumulation than collection. But instruments? I like the unusual, and the sounds of the variants to what has become the absolute-no-kidding-only-way-a-guitar-should-look-and don't-even get-close-to-this-jam-with-that-thing school of thought. I think the most I ever was asked to pay was $480.00 ..... and we settled on $325.00.

Would I like to pay 5K for something that has a famous label and is an EXACT duplicate of what Leadbelly played in the slammer? No. If I had the money, and I could go back up the line to sit down for an hour or so and WATCH Leadbelly play just about anything? Oh yeah. Also an hour with any of a number of folks who are no longer with us. But absent those possibilities, I have better things to do with the bucks. Besides, I have had the opportunity to spend time with a fair number of folks from whom I learned a lot, and I'm not sure my memory is up to keeping all of them straight. Maybe the impulse is more a matter of wishing these people were with us again.

But please listen to me, parents: above a certain basic level, you can't buy a better sound. If your kid has talent, or the motivation to practice, or a talented teacher, or the ability to go watch people play and come home and work out how they did that, or any combination of the above, that's worth more than all the abalone inlay in the world.