Guitar Envy

As I’ve mentioned many times before on sknoblog, I taught myself the guitar a while back, so I’d be finally able to actually perform some of my songs without electronic crutches, should the need, desire and/or opportunity arise.

I’ve survived all this time with two guitars :

1. A beat-up electric guitar that I bought for roughly 2 dollars (10 francs at the time) at a flea market. This momentous event is immortalized in the song « Maubert » which you can listen to here.
2. A classical guitar that an ex-girlfriend won at a raffle (strung with steel strings!). It’s a cheap chinese job, which I kept in exchange for an ironing board when we split up.

The electric guitar is nearly impossible to tune, and I’ve had the hardest time recording the classical guitar with a contact mike.

All this time, I’ve been fantasizing about getting a decent guitar (in the 300-500 Euro range), but I don’t have a lot of spare cash, and have a hard time allowing myself any material gratification (paging doctor Freud). I would get an electro-acoustic nylon-string guitar, or maybe one of those nice Ibanez ArtCore electrics.

But then it occurred to me that while I was waiting to make up my mind and splurge, maybe, one day, I could afford a crappy electric that might stay in tune for the duration of a song, or a crappy electro-acoustic classical guitar that might not be better than the one I have, but that I could record with less hassle.

So last Tuesday or Wednesday, I logged on to eBay for the first time since I bought my Casio organ a couple of years ago, and started bidding on a whole bunch of guitars.

I ended up buying an electro-acoustic nylon guitar for 57€, slightly over the 50€ budget that I had in mind, but reasonably so.

I received it yesterday. No miracles for the price, but it ain’t worse than my current classical guitar, and it is much easier to record. It’s got a built-in amplifier, volume, bass, mids and treble knobs, and all I have to do is plug a jack in it to be up and running.

(That’s the new one, on the left).

So I now have 3 crappy guitars, but I’m happy. I have a few Euros left on the PayPal account that I used to pay for the new one, so I might just try and buy a 50€ electric guitar to even things out.

Stay tuned (ha, ha).