PATRICK OGLE: By this time, they have probably already run articles -- videos in Gearwire about Specimen Products in the Chicago School of Guitar Making, where I am one of the students at a four-week class on guitar repair and maintenance. And because of the nature of the class, I don't mean that they don't necessarily want you to, you know, blab all the details of the class because they have to have a class that they want you to take, and if I were to tell you everything that went on in that class, you should still probably take the class anyway because I would get half of it wrong.

Even if you know a lot about guitars, and there were people in -- the range of students in the class is great because there were people that are like they're looking to do it for a career and there are other people who are avid players, and there are people like me who are kind of, you know, I may have been playing for a long time and I can't fix my own guitar for my life so I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn more about guitars and learn how to -- to maybe fix them.

My thoughts on how you prepare for this class is I don't think you really need to prepare much when the people are going to come in and just start from the bottom up, explain how guitars are made, what's in them, etc., etc., but I would say don't bring your best guitar. I brought this guitar that's why this guitar is sitting on my lap. I bought -- this is like a 100-and-something-dollar purchase. It's a Harmony Sovereign, and a lot of people are playing these guitars these days. They have a big body, they're relatively cheap, they're usually fairly old so the wood's nice. They sound pretty good. This one is not like a great one though. This is not like an American-made one from like the, you know, the 60s. This is a Korean made one, still all solid wood, still a decent guitar but, you know, it has a bunch of problems. It's beat up. It looks like somebody dragged it behind their car, but I would still say take a guitat that's probably something you could screw up on. That's just my opinion. I didn't actually do anything to this guitar yet.

But among the things I learned about guitars in that class are that, you know, you think of an adjustable truss rod for instance. Ian Schneller who teaches the class I don't think would mind me discussing how he presents why he thinks a reinforced neck without an adjustable truss rod is better, but he doesn't -- he gives you both sides of the story so I think that that works as well because he tells you what his opinion is and he strongly advocates it, but then he tells you the other side of the story as well, and this guitar is an illustration of that. The truss rod, when we went to adjust this guitar, it wasn't really in good shape; it wouldn't move. He had to take it off and grease it, and then it made only the slightest difference in the really high action on the strings on this guitar. But after he did it, he said, "Sometimes, guitars have a hangover and the next day, the action will kind of -- it'll get better," and I don't know who's -- but the next day or it was maybe a couple of days after, I swear to you the guitar did actually, a day or so after the truss rod was adjusted, the action went down a little bit more but still unacceptably high to really play comfortably, but it is a $100 guitar. It has some issues with the bridge as well that maybe if it could be lowered the action would be lower, but you know you don't want to spend too much doing that on a guitar like this.

As somebody who's pretty non-technical, I had my doubts about even -- you know, I signed up for the class enthusiastically, and as the class rolled around, I'm like, "What was I thinking? I can't do anything like this." But after the first class where mostly what you do is speak -- is talk, I think you feel more comfortable with what you're going to be doing and more enthusiastic about it.

They also offer one-day seminars and so people from outside -- I mean if you can't come here for four weeks for 2-1/2 hours and on Saturday mornings, they do have a one-day long seminar that you might want to look into at Specimen. I'm pretty -- After the first class, I'm pretty impressed with it. And one of the things he makes clear is that even if you're like me who probably is going to be a little bit nervous touching one of your nicer guitars and trying to fool with it, you know snapping the truss rod or something when you're adjusting it, at least when you need a serious repair with your guitar after you've taken his class -- hell, after you've gone through the first lesson of the four-part class, you'll know more when you go in to have your guitar serviced. And one of the things that doesn't get brought up in the class that struck -- that stuck in my mind immediately is there are a lot of people out there in the world who "repair" guitars, and they don't know what the hell they're doing, and they screw your guitar up. Usually, they don't irreparably screw it up. You can bring it to somebody else who knows what they're doing and they can repair the repair, but just after being in the Specimen -- in the Chicago School of Guitar Making, just the first class you would have more knowledge to go in when you're having somebody set up your guitar, you could probably walk in, talk to somebody for a little bit 10 or 15 minutes about what you want done with your guitar, and from what they say back to you, you could tell if they were full of crap.

Even if you -- I mean I knew a bit about this before. I wasn't totally off the street, no ideas about guitars, but I would feel more comfortable doing that. I don't feel uncomfortable telling people they're full of crap in general anyway, but seriously, just off the street, you know nothing about guitars, you bought your first guitar, you're taking lessons, you take this class, although generally speaking you wouldn't take this class at that point, but if you did you would know more about what to talk to the person who's setting your guitar up and you would probably be able to see warning signs of people who don't know what they're doing, and that is a huge part of a class like this even more so than -- not more so but at least it's a big component.