Hi Everyone,
I’d like to give you a glimpse into Guitar Repair World from a personal perspective.
Today I lost one of my favourite customers. He died after a long illness.
He was pedantic to the point of obsessiveness about string-spacing at the nut, to the point that he bought a Stewmac Spacing-gauge so that we could talk on equal terms!
During the fifteen years that I knew him he must have bought at least thirty guitars, and brought them all into me to make new bone nuts according to his own specifications. Sometimes he’d come back the next day and ask me to cut a new nut with 0.020” difference between E strings.
He had a collection of various 000-size guitars (Martin, Larrivee, Mills, Fylde, Eastman etc.) that he was forever getting me to tweak and modify. Eventually I realised that he was hoping that I could somehow morph them all into one single guitar, presumably the guitar of his desires...
He was in my shop at least once a week, always with some almost, but also perhaps not quite, sensible idea about modification or about a possible new guitar that he sought my opinion on.
He was what almost every other business on Planet Earth would describe as a "pain in the proverbial", and would send the staff scattering to the tea room!
It was mainly a dialog thing - he spoke in riddles and aphorisms whilst I tried to converse in elementary physics, so there was always going to be some essential disjoint there. But we somehow, always seemed to reach some kind of understanding.
He was hard work, but good work! At some point in the weird dialog would find common ground! And, importantly, after I did what we agreed on, he would then enjoy playing his guitar.
Very eccentric, individual to the extreme, but he always laughed when I pointed out any possible folly that his ponderings had uncovered.
This is an obituary of sorts.
I miss him already.
Farewell my crazy friend.
EWAN JAMES R.I.P
