So for the first time ever, all of my guitars are in the same place - I had to close up the office up and all of the hidden secrets had to come home and there are only so many that you can smuggle into the house under the cover of darkness - Kookie took the Hammond, that had appeared in the Lounge overnight, when she came down to breakfast quite well, all things considered. All now up in the hastily prepared new music room formerly known as the loft - lines of cases all so neat and tidy standing on their ends, everything in its place - it will never be that neat again. So it was time to play a few, line a few up do the comparisons, decide which ones to take down the the shop to set up/modify/reassemble in a different order, swapping a few necks out and all that good stuff that you do to achieve perfection with a mainly partscaster collection - now that's what I call working from home (I appreciate that I'm fortunate). But the problem was that I didn't know which one was in which case, such was the speed that the move was done in. So time for labels. Since the household is still in Lockdown, and being traditional, I ordered up some nice white cloth camera tape (£2 for the tape and £4 for the shipping but that's the way of the world at the moment) and set to work with my indelible marker pen. All was going so well, and the cases were going back in in the order that I was going to work on them for ease of access in true OCD fashion - I had a plan. But then I opened one case and found this candy apple red strat with gold hardware and I thought "I don't recognise this - Is it a loaner that i've completely forgotten to give back to somebody?" On closer inspection I saw the fret markers were put in exactly as I would put them in (upside down and badly) and it had a few mods done exactly as I would do them, the slightly offset Gilmour switch in Black - it even had the "knocked up in the shed" decal that I apply to the back of the headstock of every build.
I had undoubtably built this guitar. So being very sad, I went to the even sadder spreadsheet that I keep, that has my inventory of guitars pedals and amps (and cables even) that notes roughly what I spent on each one to the nearest two pence, and more importantly what pickups went into what, as that is the easy stuff to lose track of. It just wasn't there. I don't feel guilty about not remembering it, because it's a Strat - i'd never forget a Tele, but its existence is a complete mystery and has completely thrown the coming month's swap around plan into turmoil. An extra tape measure is one thing, but an extra guitar?
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