Back in July, I was at work stumbling through some of the piles of junk that my boss has a habit of collecting when I first laid eyes on Juliet. She was…to put it bluntly, hideous.
But really, all that she needed was a little make over and a good repair. Nothing I wasn’t determined to do. She started off without any of the pieces a guitar really needs to be, well, a guitar. The big problem was that the bridge had been ripped out. But that was nothing a replacement wouldn’t cure along with a set of bridge pins, a saddle, and later – after the glue I had used to attach the bridge had started to separate from the body – five small bolts, five nuts, and three washers. Well, all of that and a little help from my grandpa, the magician of power tools.
Of course, lastly came the strings. In the end, the total to fix it only came out to around twenty five dollars, thanks mostly in part to the eBay.
But I wasn’t set out to just fix her. Ever since I was little, I’ve always had a large place in my heart for music. I first put my hands on a guitar when I was six or seven years old when one of my mom’s boyfriends let me down into the basement of his awesome bachelor pad and showed me his room mate’s band’s gear. From the moment I wrapped my little hands around the neck of this old electric Fender, I was hooked.
However, he and my mother broke up soon after that and she was set in her ways when it came to me playing any sort of musical instrument if it wasn’t for the school band. I wanted to at least play drums but in her eyes it was a boy’s instrument so I suffered for some time with reed slivers from both my clarinet and my saxophone. It was…a scary experience to say the least.
Well, time went on and I eventually moved out of my mom’s house and moved in with my dad. And he could really care less what I do as long as I’m not getting tattooed, arrested, or pregnant. So I was quick to make the switch from clarinet and percussion in my high school band. But when I stumbled across my broken, Made-in-China, needs-a-make-over, Regal, I knew it was a sign that I needed to learn to play.
And this whole blog is really just my way of keep details on this whole experience. Mostly because I can but also because, well, it’s fun.
xoxo
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