Why do you play / build guitars?

[franz]

I teach interactive media in a vocational high school (The image above is from a photo shoot we did for our school yearbook). I spend my days teaching, and occasionally running from, an incredible group of young people. It’s a great career, but dealing with teens can be stressful, even when they are great kids.

Playing guitar has always been my get away. Turn up the amp, rock out, tune out for a while. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of guitar building - I’m hooked. I can barely wait to start playing a guitar that I know from the ground up.

I rock out in my office to get away from a hard day. What role does guitar playing / building play in your life?

[Deleted]

I have been playing guitar since I was 12 years old. Started playing music at the age of 9.

I was playing in my first band at the age of 15. That band hired me to play. At the age of 15 I was playing in night clubs all over CA. By the age of 16 I was making anywhere from 750 to 850 a week playing music. (wish I could make that now)

Now I am 55 and still love to play my guitars. It's only been a shot time that I started to build guitars. I build or rebuilt my first one from a guitar I got off E-Bay that turned out to be a junker. The wife was mad at me and I was mad at myself for buying it. So I almost used it for fire wood. (400 dollars worth of fire wood) But the night I was so frustrated for being taken I found Guitar Attack web site. If it were not for finding the web site that night it would have been fire wood.

So after reading about the builds on the site I rebuilt that Tele. and I have got to say it has turned out to be one fine guitar. So now with 7 guitars being built by me and two of them from scratch and the 3rd one on the way I got to say I am now a guitar monster. (the name my wife gave me) I love too take a piece of wood and take it from nothing to something. Now I too can play something that I made with my own two hands. Guitar Attack has been a lot of help. It's a place where there is a wealth of info.

A word of caution: If you build one there will be others!

Building like playing has given me something in life you can't get from other things in life. It for me is more than just an Item it is a part of my life and when it is my time leave this world I hope my guitars will live on and give someone else the chance to fall in love with the music and the guitar. ;D

[irishrover]

ive been playing since i was 5. both my father and uncles were in a pub trio in ireland. ive been around music my entire life. i started doing my own repairs because i just couldnt afford to go to a shop lol and it just stemed to building from there.

[dnic]

rover, what is this? Tiocfaidh Ar La! Gaelic? And if it's clean can you share it the rest of the class.

About why I play/build guitars I could write a book. I will try not to take to long.

A few influences, The Moody Blues, The Beatles, Alvin lee, Humble Pie, Don McClean, Cream, Zep, CCR. The Airplane. The very short list. I don't know at what point or age I thought,"wow the guitar is what I like". But it was definitely solidified when Boston came along. Man what a gas, screaming, soaring guitar work just blew me away.

I didn't start playing until I was 23 years old. That is lesson #1 In "how NOT to become a rock star".

So I play guitar because I love the way it sounds and it pushes some inner button that makes me smile.

"Don't give a ---- about some trumpet playing band, it ain't what they call rock and roll." M.K.

I got into building about ten years ago when a friend of my sons needed help with a high school senior project. (needed to graduate) He wanted to build an electric guitar. I had a cabinet shop in the garage and loved guitars so I said yes. I read David Russell's book on acoustic building, a great book by the way, not a lot of help with electrics but the neck info was useful. That guitar was a scratch build except for a pre slotted fret board and a two way truss rod. The body is from alder I had on hand and is four pieces. Two side by side then doubled. The neck is a maple 1x4".

The first guitar. I also built the window seat, heck I built the house.

After building boxes (cabinets) for years, that guitar was the most fun I had ever had working with wood. As you know there was no turning back.

Including one parts Tele built for another of my sons friends my total guitars built to date is eight. With two more in the works, One is the poplar build posted here and the other is a travel guitar that I've spent maybe 30 min. on. An acoustic is not to far off but it will not be your normal acoustic guitar. Think neck thru acoustic. I have my reasons.

So I build guitars because they are there, and I have have one more inner happy button that needs pushing.

dane

[irishrover]

dane,ist gaeliage. the irish form of gaelic. i speak it flueltly. it means "our day will come" its a quote by bobby sands.

the biggest driving force as far as influence fior me to learn electric guitar was angus young. maybe thats why ive got so manny sg's lol

[cknowles]

I've been playing guitar since I was 10, I'm 46 this year.
My major influences were Paul Simon, Peter Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan. So I spent most of my guitar playing career playing 6 and 12 string acoustic finger style.

In more recent times I started playing guitar at church, and while my Epiphone EJ-200 was a nice loud guitar for around a camp fire, it became a liability in an amplified setting. I decided to go electric and bought my first kit in 2005. I soaked up all the info I could from many websites inlcuding GuitarAttack. And so, now I'm hooked on building and repairing guitars.

I've built 2, one from a kit, the second from parts, and I've done some repairs on several others as well. This spring I intend to start my first scratch built, we'll see how that goes...

Chris

[shattered]

Mar 30, 2009 13:49:26 GMT -6 irishrover said:

dane,ist gaeliage. the irish form of gaelic. i speak it flueltly. it means "our day will come" its a quote by bobby sands.

Good to know! My family's been here since shortly after the famine, so I really don't know much of the language at all...except the important stuff like 'Go hifreann leat' and 'Pog ma thoin'.

I started playing just because it was something I thought I'd really like. I had a dream when I was little in which I was playing a red guitar. As an adult, something made me recall that dream. What really freaked me out was the fact that I owned a red guitar at the time...

When I was in high school, a friend of mine showed me how easy it was to mod a guitar by helping me rewire and add a pickup to mine. It was all downhill from there!

[Mach Twang]

I've always loved music, I was involved in choir from an early age all through school, swing choirs, madrigals and a doo wop group group called “Venus and The Velvetones”. I even took a stab at the Sousaphone in the fifth grade but had more fun making my friends laugh at the incredible farting sounds I could produce.

In junior high school was when my attention turned toward the guitar for one simple reason, GIRLS. Oh yeah baby, chicks dig guys with guitars. Well, since it wasn't easy, my first guitar spent more time under my bed than in my hands.

Well, we fast forward a few years and I'm now fresh outta boot camp and assigned to the fleet combat training command in Virginia Beach. I come walking out of our berthing complex and see this guy sitting on the steps holding an acoustic guitar, he says “Howdy” and rips into the opening of Hot for Teacher! I was stunned, then hooted wildly when he was done and introduced myself. We became fast friends and developed a teacher/student relationship as he taught me the basics. As well as an extremely talented picker, he was a walking library of music and it seemed that he knew every song in the world or could at least fake his way through. Over the next few years we became inseparable, the ships we were assigned to were in the same fleet so we shared port of call together and played countless hours on countless beaches. He would play and I would bang along as best I could and sing. Good times... We are still good friends to this day and stay in touch.

When I got out of the USN I took a job at a factory and severely injured my left thumb, so playing was out of the question for quite a while, but I had been bitten hard[/b] by the guitar bug. Thanks to the VA, I was able to get a part time job at a small recording studio as a cable monkey. This studio was located in the back portion of a warehouse and the front portion was small guitar shop, Dave's Guitar. This was when I met Dave Rogers and took an interest in learning how to repair and maintain guitars. I figured if I couldn't play for now, fixing them at least let me be in close proximity to them! Dave is a gem of a human being, always willing to answer my questions, let me watch him work and just let me hang around and be a pain.

While working at this studio I met this girl when she came in to record a few demo tracks with her band and I fell in love with her. We hit it off immediately, we both liked the same kinds of music, same kinds of movies, pop culture, books, cats and most importantly... guitars. Although this is where one of our differences lie, she's a Gibson Girl and I'm a Fender Guy, but we've managed to work it out. We are still together some twenty years later with three cats, eleventy billion books and movies and a nice lil collection of things with strings. Ain't life grand?

[irishrover]

dane,we have been here since 2000 lol music is just a part of me and repairing/building started as a necisity and grew into a passion/addiction/hobby lol