Guides

My guitar collection honestly seems to change every month, for the most part due to my obsession with scrutinizing eBay on a daily basis for rare lefty gems.  However, what doesn’t seem to fluctuate is the size of my collection…

Last week I watched a video on YouTube where John Mayer’s guitar tech showed us around his live setup and it just blew me away how much excess baggage there was.  The guy travels around to every gig with at least FORTY guitars and only plays 10-15 songs at each concert. I’ve always kept a very steamlined, minimalist setup and so it just baffles me why some people seem to feel the need to have such a large collection of instruments.

For the longest time I was a one electric, one acoustic guy and really didn’t see the sense in having anything more than that.  Mostly this was because I was trying to survive on my limited student budget and couldn’t justify anything over what was entirely necessary.  I was content with my simple setup where nothing was surplus to my needs.

Invariably I would end up stumbling across something I wanted to try on eBay, and seeing as I am an impulse buyer I would more often than not pull the trigger.  Every time something new entered the LeftyFretz collection the balance would be upset and one guitar would end up being played far more than the other.  I had to choose between having a rarely played guitar or facing another semester living off beans on toast – it always seemed a no-brainer to ditch what I didn’t need.  The balance would be restored and my two guitar setup remained the mainstay for my entire university career.

Now that I am in a position where I can afford to buy more guitars than I need my mindset still has not changed.  If I buy a guitar that does not get used every week it goes back on eBay where it will find a better home.  Waste not want not and all that jazz…

Here’s a sum up of what I have now and what I have earmarked…

Last month I wrote an article describing why restringing a right handed guitar for a lefty was a bad idea.  I received a handful of amusing comments back from readers who recalled many of the troubles they had when they first started playing guitar and restrung their dad’s old right handed model upside down.  These comments got me thinking…

How hard could it be to design a guitar that could be played by both left and right handed players?  It’s probably the most rediculous idea I’ve ever had, but hey, wouldn’t it be fun to try and design something like that?!  Well I spent a lonely evening in Photoshop and came up with the ‘2-in-1’ .  Please don’t take this idea too seriously, it’s just a bit of fun…

The Premise

This is a guitar that through some very minor adjustments could be set up for either left handed or right handed players.  It would be aimed purely at beginner players and would be the only left handed guitar in the world that any store would be happy to stock more than one of.  The guitar would be mass produced and would be priced at the lower end of the market to make it appealable to new players who don’t neccessarily want to spend too much on a new hobby.

Imagine walking into a music store as a new lefty player and asking the salesman what left handed guitars he has in stock. “Oh, well I’ve got a couple of Strat copies in black, a Les Paul copy in black, and I think there’s a Tele copy somewhere, it’s black “.  Your heart sinks.  “But wait, I’ve also got these 2-in-1 models, if you give me 5 minutes I can switch them to being left handed and you can have one in any of these 10 colors I have in today “.  Woot!