PATRICK OGLE: Patrick Ogle for Gearwire, and I'm talking again about the classes, the guitar repair and maintenance at the Chicago School of Guitar Making taught by Ian Schneller, and these are just my impressions of the class and what you get out of it, and there have been two before this and I talked a little bit about this guitar and how I screwed it up by being a lazy sack f crap, and -- but that's okay. Screwing things up is kind of -- it's how you learn. If you don't screw -- you know I mean if you're, "I'm a little bit afraid to touch the guitar," then that's the problem. Even the junkie ones because I just -- you know.

By the way, I have an amusing story. I'd -- so after that, I've brought in a guitar I like a little bit better, a Takamine Santa Fe that I have. I forgot the exact model number but it's a parlor size. It's a 3/4 size guitar, not really a parlor size, but I brought I in and there was a buzz on one of the strings and Ian said, "Well, change out the string."

Okay, so now I've been playing the guitar for like 30 years but more than 30 years and I've restrung many, many guitars but the other day, he had shown how they restring guitars like they basically take the guitar, they put the string in, they line the little hole up, they put it in, they turn it, and it goes around over once and then under the rest a couple of times and then it goes right on. So I'm like, "Wow! That's way faster than how I restring a guitar!"

So, I'm sitting there with a Takamine and I said, "I want to do it their way." Bam! I snap the string right off of the guitar, so I have to go over and say, "Um, I popped the string off of the guitar. Can you give me another one?" so I put it on. Bam! I popped the string off of the guitar again, so then I say, "You know what, I'm going to go back to my way of stringing the guitar, which at least for me is more effective." I mean their way is actually it will take you half the time and it looks better and everything is good, but I'm just set in my way so I had to change it, but the interesting part is I just took the old string and kind of manhandled the back onto the guitar, and the buzz was gone, and so we had thought maybe it was the string.

You don't want to start with fooling with stuff on the guitar when it might just be the string. You don't want to start adjusting the truss rod and doing all this stuff to the guitar because, you know, why do that if you can just change the string? It could be just a string, and instead of that, it was just some kind of weird thing, and he kind of laughed and said -- Ian Schneller laughed and said, "You know, it kind of works that way sometimes."

It illustrates something I think is important when you're taking a class when you don't know what you're doing, you can learn about what adjusting the truss rod does with the relief on the neck, and you can learn how to do intonation which they had taught us there. You can learn how to change the saddle. You can learn about what you need to know.

Filing the nut is another thing that they showed us how to do like if you have a buzz on this string, right here on the string on the string on the first fret and that's the only place you have a problem, chances are it's the nut. And, but most of the time it's not that clear cut. There's some buzz, there's something wrong and figuring out exactly what it is, especially for somebody who is just learning how to do it, is trial and error, and you have people that have been doing it for many, many years, and for them they can narrow it down to a number things just like that but you're not going to be able to. Even if you have been playing for a long time, you're just not so you're going to have to go through the rigging roll, and even the people that do know what they're doing, when they narrow it down they're still wrong sometimes, so don't be afraid to be wrong, and that was my experience in the second class.

So basically all I did was I popped two strings off of the guitar while putting them on like I was 11, and then I made the problem go away by putting the original string that we thought the problem was back on the guitar. It sounds like not a lot accomplished but I felt a sense of accomplishment that I even touched the guitar. I was actually figuring out what size of wrench fit into the truss rod of that guitar, and that's as far as I went. So, more next time after the final class at the Chicago School of Guitar Making.