Guitars Going Away

Wow, my boss told me I could go ahead and start taking some pictures again! He did limit my subject matter to things I am going to sell. Nothing fancy here photography-wise, but it did feel good to have a camera in hand for a couple hours again.

This is the first in a string of this type of photography I will do, as I have a need to part with some guitars. Any of you who know me are well aware of the fact that I have played guitar since high school. My very first job was detasselling corn, and I took almost all of it and bough an Alvarez Dove acoustic guitar. That was stolen from me five years later, and I replaced it with an Alvarez professional model which I still own. I have played that guitar A LOT over the years, and it is now needing a visit to the guitar doctor for some repairs.

A couple times over the years I tried to find a replacement for that guitar, but it has an amazing sound and plays really nice so it was hit or miss on a real replacement. In 2012 I got active again in music after several years off while I went to school and then studied for IT certifications. At that time I knew it was really time to get my poor old baby off of being my main guitar. I had basically replaced it was a nice Ovation but then started comparing sound and decided it was not really the one.

This started in December of 2012 when I bought an Epiphone Les Paul Nightfall at Guitar Center. While I was there, I went into the acoustic room and they had a new Alvarez Artist series mahogany cutaway with pickup and I sat down and played it for a while. It sounded so much better than my Ovation that I started looking around at the other guitars they had and began comparing the Alvarez to the Taylor and Martin guitars that cost another thousand or more than the Alvarez. The Alvarez had better sound to my ear, but I did not have enough money to buy it that night.

That guitar was long gone by the time I came back with money, and it is a sad thing but Guitar Center could not tell me when they might have another Alvarez in stock. Sorry, but that is stupid. They are more than happy to take your money and get one on order but no play first and then buy. I found that very frustrating and there are just no Alvarez dealers around that stock much of anything. It also got me thinking about just what model I would want to get.

Alvarez MC80 all solid wood Masterworks Classical guitar.

All I had ever played really was Alvarez dreadnaught size non-cutaway acoustic guitars with spruce top and either mahogany (my first one) or rosewood body (my baby). I don’t include the Ovation because it is so different sonically with a carbon fiber body. Acoustic guitars come in a number of different sizes, and many different types of tone woods. Without having ever played anything besides a dreadnaught, I had no idea what any of the others might sound like. And so I went of a journey of exploration to find out what my version of the ultimate acoustic guitar might be.

While I kept trying to explain this to people, non guitar players just do not seem to get it. And most guitar players have GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) so even people who get it just look askance at you when you say it is a temporary thing. I had almost all of the guitars I bought shipped to my work, so people got quite a kick out of my walking from receiving back to my office with another guitar every few weeks. I would get a guitar, play the heck out of it for a while just to see how it sounds compared to the others, and then get another and do the same thing.

On an Alvarez Masterworks, even the binding is solid wood.

Over a several year period this resulted in me having way more guitars than I need or have room for. My house has been jammed full for way too long now. For the last couple of years I have scarcely played guitar while I was working and concentrating on learning photography. When I retired last fall, I started to play some again and have at least worked back to having callouses again. I also completed the journey and found the guitar that is my new baby. Now there are a whole lot of extra guitars I need to sell and I will be taking pictures so I can list them for sale.

Alvarez 5221 12 string that needs work.

A new set of tuners is in order for this poor thing.

All four of these are now listed on Facebook Marketplace. One actually sold while I was writing this!