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Leaving the Nest

Writer's picture: AdminAdmin

Updated: Feb 7



There comes a finite point in time when you finally realise that you might just have a few too many guitars, and perhaps your descendants might not share that same enthusiasm - they will have enough issues to deal with after finding all their Christmas gifts of years gone by stuffed in the back of a cupboard. Guitars are meant to be played, so what to do with them had became a real quandary.


How did it build up to that level? Well a few years back we embarked on a Strat building project, aided and abetted by my dear friend Ron who appears rather frequently in this blog since he suffers from the same affliction - a throw back from our touring years stringing up and fettling guitars for the rich and famous.


From a bad ebay habit of buying stuff, and having built the Guitar Shed at the bottom of the garden, a fairly extensive collection of miscellaneous bits had been amassed, a neck here a body there, each of which had its own story, we felt that those stories needed a continuation. These bits and pieces became the basis of the project. "Lets make some guitars - I bet we can build a Strat for fifty Quid" we said. One sage observer said "Well you gotta love the cheap ones too!" A lot of thought and discussion ensued, mainly drinking beer and telling tales of rock and roll, but ultimately we got down to it and the thing began to take shape, swapping necks, wiring pickups, polishing the rust off old hardware, and then lining up the mongrel bits into an order previously unimagined. All of a sudden a dozen decent playable instruments popped up out of the blue. With enough love and care and attention, you can forge a good playable instrument and we had skills based on a wildly mis-spent youth. So a few to keep, a few to give away to friends who wanted to learn to play, but still rather a lot.


So what to do with them. The initial thought was to just put them back on ebay, but there was a rule in the Guitar Shed that no money ever changed hands, so better than that, we thought a really good conclusion would be to get them into the hands of kids who wanted to learn to play but couldn't do more than the internet equivalent of looking in the shop window on a Saturday morning.


So I set about contacting music charities to try and find homes for them. It turns out that its really easy to give away classical instruments to music centres, but offer guitars and the charities just sell them off, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the exercise - these needed to be played. So I called around a few people trawling for ideas. And then The Nevster entered the frame.


Neville and I shared an office back in my Master Rock Studio days in the early 90's. Now as a board member of Wiltshire Music Connect, the out-going music education hub for the county, he and his colleagues wanted to offer a legacy to a few of the most promising young guitarists they had been supporting over the years - young people who would otherwise never be able to afford that great starter electric guitar. So, through their tutors, five of the most promising students will be given one of these creations on a long-term loan basis, and with as many words of encouragement that we can muster, you never know where that can lead.................




















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