GP columnist Scott Mathews challenges your guitar lust.
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A friend of mine has a private equity firm that owns a couple of the world’s largest guitar brands,GP columnist Scott Mathews challenges your guitar lust.
A friend of mine has a private equity firm that owns a couple of the world’s largest guitar brands, and he told me that any given player actually owns an average of between seven and eight guitars. I was taken aback, as that is a lot of guitars!
Now, I understand the professional-musician realm quite well. We sometimes tend to amass a large variety of guitars, ostensively to offer more choices of sound, mood, and texture to our work. We simply need to have the right tool for the job—at least that’s what I tell my accountant when she gives me “that look.”
But when I visited my summer place just this past weekend, I discovered I had some fine guitars there that I hadn’t missed—or even thought of—for an entire year. This made me think a bit differently about my collection.
The fact is I don’t need a ton of guitars. I simply enjoy the thrill of getting and playing them for a while before moving on to others. That’s not fair to these wonderful instruments, and it reminds me of the Neil Young song “This Old Guitar” about his Martin that once belonged to Hank Williams: “This old guitar ain’t mine to keep. It’s only mine to play for a while.”
About the same time, I had just finished a book about Jimmy Page where he discusses using less than five or six guitars in the studio during his entire career in Led Zeppelin. But just listen to all the textures and sounds he got out of that small collection! His go-to acoustic was a low-grade Harmony, and one of his favorite electrics was a cheap Silver-tone. On top of that, he used even less amplifiers throughout his Zep days.