 More on my mother's guitar...
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May. 19th, 2009 @ 12:31 pm 
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I managed, after some swearing, to restring it last night. (Note to people considering taking up guitar: steel-string guitars are a hell of a lot easier to restring, which I would argue is a genuine benefit for new players. Strings break and need replacing, strings wear out, it's the way things are and ever shall be.) Later that evening, I tuned it, as well. The built-in digital tuner on my steel-string doesn't pick up the sound of my mother's guitar at all, so I tuned the low E on hers to the low E on mine, then tuned string to string from there.
Several of the pegs - which, you understand, are ancient - were unbelievably stiff to turn. My fingers ached from the effort, I couldn't get the first string all the way to tune without having to change hands. Finally, finally, I had the last string in tune to its predecessor, and attempted a chord...
... and flinched at the hideous, discordant sound that resulted, because it had taken long enough that the low strings had gone out of tune. (e.g. more than about a minute.) Oh, the wonder of nylon strings: first the slippery little fuckers are a bitch to string on at all, then they're not even vaguely playable. Oh, classical guitar, how you taunt me...
Anyway, after discussing the stiff pegs with my mother, and also noting the dry-looking wood of the fretboard, I called my preferred Guitar Dudes and queried what to do about stiff pegs and dry fretboards on a classical guitar that's around half a century old. The suggestion, to my surprise: get it serviced. (Which they're happy to do, rough cost estimate $35-40.) I discussed this suggestion in turn with my mother, and we're agreed that she'll transfer me the money to pay for it (it being her guitar, etc) and I'll get it serviced by my Guitar Dudes soon. (I shall be taking it in at some point when I don't think it's likely to rain on me in transit; the hard case means I can feel comfortable taking it on the bus, but not getting it rained on.)
Mum says she had noticed the pegs getting harder to turn; I said that it's got to a point where I'm not sure she, with her mild arthritis, would be physically capable of doing it. I'm stronger than she is and not arthritic, and I can only just, barely, manage it at all. (Especially on the high E string. That peg does NOT approve of moving.) If the pegs themselves need replacing, that's a permitted change; they're peripheral to the essence of The Guitar, but it's something we both think would be best done by experts. Who presumably have some kind of liability setup, in any case, but who can also be expected to know what the hell they're doing, and have done it before, and so on.
Oddly, I find it much, much easier to tune Mum's classical guitar string to string than my own steel-string acoustic-electric. I'm not sure why - it can't be familiarity, because I hadn't tuned it in many, many years, and I was tuning it for the first time, where I've tuned my own guitar many, many times now. Maybe the harmonics are just more pleasing to my ear. (I do love classical guitars so - I borrowed my mother's so I can practice fingerpicking and the like because of that very love. It was either borrow my mother's, which she doesn't play at the moment, or else end up spending lots of money buying one that I won't like very much because it won't live up to my mother's unless I spend about five thousand dollars. Spending five thousand dollars is silly when I can just say: "Hey, Mum, can I borrow your guitar for a bit?" and get the guitar that sounds so beautiful and that I love so very, very much.)
While I'm at the guitar shop I may not be able to resist the urge to ask how expensive/difficult it is to get a guitar neck, sans body, from a guitar that's been broken or something, because I have conceived of a deep and powerful desire to build an oil can guitar of my very own one day, but I have Principles and would have difficulty bringing myself to murder even the cheapest and crappiest of guitars just to repurpose the neck.
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