My acoustic guitar is not the sharpest instrument in my closet. It’s… “acoustically challenged.” But when I bought it, one feature stuck out to me – a popular selling point – It was free.
It came from the dumpster in my alley. My in-laws were in town, and as we drove by, my mother-in-law spotted it. My father-in-law stopped by the side and pulled it in his window. I was in the passenger seat, so he handed it straight to me.
It was missing a few things:
- Pins to hold the strings at the bridge
- washers to hold the tuning pegs at the head
- strings
Worst of all by far was that the neck was very bent. It was bent badly enough that the strings wouldn’t make any sound; they were pushing too tightly against the frets. I could see that someone had tried to file down the metal frets where the neck bent, to put some distance between the strings and frets, but the neck was at much too sharp an angle.
With a bent neck, the guitar was irreparably out of tune the higher I play on the fret board, but I was certainly not going to just throw it back in the trash. I must admit that I actually tried filing the frets myself, but it became clear very quickly that it wasn’t going to make a difference. So I tried the opposite; instead of filing away the bend in the neck, I raised the strings. The nut, which holds the strings in front of the tuning pegs, was already very high, and had a bit too much height, so I didn’t think I could raise that.
Instead, I raised the strings at the bridge… With a pen.
It still jangles a bit, but there are two problems with this method: first, of course, I lost a pen. And second, this actually changes the distance between the head and the bridge of the guitar, so I can’t tune it accurately “by hand;” I have to use a tuner. Oh well. The pen isn’t too big an issue, because, though I’m poor, my wife regularly finds pens on the ground in the big city, so we have many more than we need and they’re all free. I’ve been listening to a lot of music that the U.S. government recorded during the Dust Bowl, and it seems like nobody could tune back then anyway, so I’ll just pursue this style of music.
My ghetto guitar…
If you want to see it in action, I just posted a couple songs to my YouTube account and on the record label.
