PATRICK OGLE: Hi. I'm Patrick Ogle for Gearwire, and I am here to speak once again about the Chicago School of Guitar Making. Isn't that correct? I'm here to speak about the Chicago School of Guitar Making and it's classes on guitar repair and maintenance.

Last time, I talked about the first class and that was, you know, basically an introduction and I talked about adjusting the truss rod on this guitar and how it made it better, and I also discussed a little bit about how when you're taking a class on guitar repair and maintenance, especially the one that we're taking at -- it's in here in Chicago, don't bring your best guitar. That's my opinion. Don't bring like some really fantastic, you know, guitar because you don't want to screw it up, and I'm going to demonstrate one reason why you want to do that because in the second class I brought this guitar again.

Now, the first class they adjusted the truss rod. I didn't do it myself. Instructor Ian Schneller did and it did seem to make the guitar play a little bit better, which was nice, and you know this is a $100 auction-site buy. It's nothing special but it's you know I thought I would use it to fool around, and he did it and he made it a little bit nicer, and then he also suggested lowering the saddle to bring the action down a little bit. So, in class number 2, first of all we talked about some of the stuff related to electronics and knobs and things like that that was very interesting but a little bit lost on me since I don't have -- I don't really fool with electric guitars so much, but afterwards I decided it was time to lower the saddle.

So, I took the saddle out and I filed it a little bit. Now, most people who aren't lazy would say they file it, the put it back in, they put the strings back on the guitar, and then they would see what it sounded like, and that if it needed to be filed a little bit more, they would do that but that's not what I did. What I did was I filed it and I said, "Yeah, maybe I should file it a little bit more," and then I filed it more, and then I said, "Well, maybe I should file a little bit more," so I filed it far far longer than was necessary and part of the result is this.

[PATRICK OGLE PLUCKS A STRING]

That's what it sounds like when you improperly put a saddle into the bridge. I can't even tune this string. I'm hoping that it gets through because I can't -- there's no tone to it. It's like I don't know what note that is. If it were a constant across the whole guitar, the cacophony would be -- it might be magnificent but it's just that one string so it's sounds more like this.

[PATRICK OGLE STRUMS ALL STRINGS]

Yeah. Not good. So I botched it, and one of the reason I botched it was because I was lazy. I didn't -- I should have put this back in after I sanded the first part of it off, and it probably would have been fine. So what has to be done now is that probably it has to be a new one of these put in, and whether or not it's even worth bothering with, I don't know.

Second thing, I want to revise something I said about not bringing your best guitar. I'd also say don't bring your worst one because this is my worst one, and I brought it and boy there's not much you can do with it. That's the problem. It's like you can tinker with it too much and improve things and learn because there's just -- the truss rod's kind of iffy and so you might want to -- heck you might even want to buy something half way, you know like a new off the rack cheapo guitar that you can fool with. That's kind of if I had to just do it over again, that's kind of what I would do with in the school. So, that's that for the second class: Patrick messes up his junkie guitar.