Acoustic Guitar Decay And Warping
Jesse Greist has been talking about how to properly care for your instruments. Here's an example of what could happen when you don't. Although we've definitely seen much worse -- usually the result of purposeful mistreatment -- this acoustic guitar is in bad shape.
It's warped in a few places, and the strings are several years old. Still, this donated guitar sees a lot of use in Jesse's music classes. Check out what Jesse needs a spoon for in this video.
JESSE GREIST: I can show you this is actually a guitar that was donated to our school. It is a terrible guitar.
GRETCHEN HASSE: [LAUGHING]
JESSE GREIST: But we're very glad for donations, and so I don't mean that to sound ungrateful but this is the one that I use for doing practice with my kinds when we have songs to do and what not.
[JESSE GREIST STRUMS A FEW CHORDS]
It's fine. It's had the same set of strings on it now I think for three years. I want to say it's definitely since I've been here for two years, and we don't take care of this at all. We'd carry it around in the rain. You know, we beat the heck out of it so --
GRETCHEN HASSE: So what's happened to that after all that?
JESSE GREIST: Well, the strings are terrible. I mean they could desperately need -- I actually -- I'm willing to bet that if I tried to change the strings, these pegs here, these bridge pegs probably are not going to want to come out for anything. I bet that they are just stuck in there. You can see how this one's kind of shaved off. I have no idea how we would get those out of there, because when you leave those in for a really long time they tend to kind of get glued into place. And even if you loosen the pressure on the strings, you know, I sometimes have had to use pliers or a spoon as like a leverage tool to pry those things out. But even on my guitar, when I change strings, sometimes they're stuck, and I imagine these after being in there for a couple of years are not going to want to come out.
It is warped. If you look, it's got some warping on the body of the guitar. The back of it has got some -- Where was it? There was some -- There was one spot where it was kind of smashed in a little bit. It's got some chips out of it here. So yeah this is definitely a beater as they would say in the auto world I guess.
GRETCHEN HASSE: And what's the guitar that you use?
JESSE GREIST: Like I say, it's a Seagull. It's got a soft varnish on the top, so it actually gets a lot of scratches in it, but it's a beautiful wood. The lower tones are just gorgeous on that. It's got a rosewood neck, really, really nice beautiful neck, and I use medium strings on it, medium-gauge strings, and they tend to hold up really well here.
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