PATRICK NETTESHEIM: All right. My name is Patrick Nettesheim. I’m with Guitars for Vets. Guitar for Vets is an organization. We go with the slogan, “The healing power of music in the hands of heroes.” And really what that is all about, the heroes in this case are veterans of United States Services. And basically, what we do is a vet or somebody who would qualify for a program needs to be a veteran. They need to have suffered some sort of trauma whether it’s physical or mental or, as most cases are, both. And then in conjunction with Cream City Music of Brookfield, we are able to by guitars at wholesale prices and then pass them on to the vets in various VA hospitals that are working with us.

Now, we give these guitars to the vets and then we hook them up with guitar instruction, five lessons and then they can reapply for five more lessons. And it is a non-profit organization. We’re starting in the Milwaukee area but we’re branching out here to Chicago, and we hope to be national within three years, and then from then on maybe we can start helping the allies as well.

We’re a really new program. We started last May. We incorporated in August, and the way this all came about is that gentleman back there, Dan Van Buskirk. Yes, yes, with the all [SOUNDS LIKE] sheep and sheen in the background. He served with the United States Marines in the recon unit back in Vietnam. Dan is a student of mine. I’m a guitar teacher, and we’re talking about one day how much it’s helped him deal with some of the psychiatric trauma from serving in the jungles in Vietnam and how therapeutic we thought that would be to get that into their hands, guitars into the hands of other vets, and so I decided we should call the company basically what we do, Guitars for Vets. It’s meditation in motion.

We deal with guys with spinal injuries, quadriplegic, but we also deal with people who have full use of their hands and their body biologically speaking but mentally they’re somewhere else, and this helps them get grounded, brings them back, and it’s a type of therapy that’s outside of the prescribed therapy they’re going through in the hospital and stuff. They’re doing this just for them, and they’re not being judged on progress or lack thereof. In the traditional sense of the word, just how good they feel from actually doing it.

We have a deal with the company here that’s doing all these Gretsch Guitars, Warp Drive Music. They have a music store in Brookfield, Wisconsin that’s called Cream City Music, and they sell us -- Right now, we’re basically doing Oscar Schmidt Guitars, a division of Washburn, and we buy them at wholesale through this company and it saves us a ton of money.

You know, it’s really amazing for the price, the money you pay for them. The quality control is pretty good.