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Neil,

After a 10 year break from attempting to make a noise on my guitar that pleases me while I built an airplane I'm finally back. Being local and recognnizing some of people and businesses that you feature on your site here I was excited to take the plunge and join your target program. Were going to see how good your video teaching skills are because believe me I'm mechanical and thick headed when trying to learn this stuff, but I'm cursed with loving it none the less. Anyway, and to the point. Back around 1997 or so when the guitar bug was hitting me hard I decided I needed a really good guitar to motivate me while working thru the stage of driving people from my house when I practiced. At least the feel of it and the sound of it being quality was supposed to help me, in theory as I reasoned it. So I found my way to a small specialty guitar store in Saratoga that sold Santa Cruz and other high end accoustics with a check book and a wife that for some reason wasn't fighting me on this journey. Not being able to play a lick, literally one of the owners from what I remember played Chet Atkins's Windy and Warm on every accoustic guitar in the store while my wife and I listened for what we perceived to be the sweetest sounding of them all. When we got it down to the top three guitars we turned our backs to the musician and closed our eyes. We then listened again to each and decided that I would leave with a JOMV made by Dana Bourgeois. The musician who helped with our purchase told us that is was by far the best instrument in the store at the time and that he had been playing it when nobody was around. So finally my question. Was that you? It has been a long time now, at least 13 years and stumbling onto this site has me wondering. Anyway, thanks for humoring me with this question and I hope to finally learn something about playing and make that beautiful guitar sing to the world.

Best,
Bryan

Hi Bryan,

Wow, this is amazing ! That just happened to be somebody other than me !

Kidding aside, I haven't seen you in the forum before, so welcome to the party.

This is an interesting post, from an original perspective.

You never know, the stars may be aligned to get you a more intelligent answer than this one.

Good luck !

Pierre

Hey Brian,

Welcome to TG, brave call to buy top end straight off. Something I wish I'd done way back in time, I might have stuck to it had I done that.
If this turns out to have been, Neil I'd watch out he might just say I've been looking for that guy who never paid for the 'subliminal' lesson....

I just called Neil on this story .. he is currently setting up for a special gig he does privately once a year .. so he will be responding later .. stay tuned and welcome to tg

cheers

matt

Now you made me curious too,,maybe they filmed it..lol...welkom from the Netherlands,,,

Thanks for the welcome guys. Regarding buying high end from the beginning, well my experience has been in life that junk just feels like junk. While this is true with most things I think with guitars it may have not been correct with machines now making exact copies of the one neck that was made to very tight standards. There are a lot of great feeling guitars out there for a lot less money. As for the sound, well mine sounds great when somebody who knows how to make a pleasant noise with it holds it for a few minutes. I'm really hoping for a break thru sometime soon but it might take an instructor to sit with me and hit my right hand with a ruler to loosen it up every minute or so. My lessons were in bluegrass where my right hand became welded so to speak at the wrist. Oh well, it's still a lot of fun. As I look thru the songs on this site I'm anxious to start learning some of them. This is the kind of music I wanted to play all along.

Bryan welcome and let me say I couldn't agree more with you. I took a different approach, buying "modest" guitars and quickly becoming dissatisfied and trading up. I didn't get to Santa Cruz but my current Taylor is a beautiful guitar and although it is beyond my ability I just love to play it. I never get to blame the instrument, it's all me. Keep playing mate.

Bryan,

Hi from sunny Sydney. If you stick with this site and take full advantage of all it offers you'll be making that beautiful guitar sing before you ever would have thought possible. Don't forget to upload videos of yourself playing so you have a record of your progress. And make sure you load some pictures of your guitar real soon so we can all drool over them.

Good luck on your journey.

Once you've checked out the free stuff, seriously consider joining TARGET.

Have fun.

Michele

michelew wrote:

Bryan,

Hi from sunny Sydney. If you stick with this site and take full advantage of all it offers you'll be making that beautiful guitar sing before you ever would have thought possible. Don't forget to upload videos of yourself playing so you have a record of your progress. And make sure you load some pictures of your guitar real soon so we can all drool over them.

Good luck on your journey.

Once you've checked out the free stuff, seriously consider joining TARGET.

Have fun.

Michele

Thanks for the kind words Michele. So far I'm liking everything about this site. The material looks great, it is put together well and the people on the forums seem to be very friendly and supportive. That's not always true on the internet. I'm trying to navigate myself thru this site as a total beginner because there has to be some things I missed the last time I dove into music because I never progressed even though I practiced and played hours a day for years. So I've left any ego at the sign on screen and have started with the beginning lessons from the differing types of guitars and how to hold a pick and assuming nothing. Can't wait to make a noise others want to listen to, or at least don't wince when I get my guitar.

Hi Bryan and welcome to TG,

I am sure your guitar came from our store, the Los Gatos Guitar Gallery, which I ran with some partners in the late 1990s. We set out to be a boutique store, mostly carrying hand built guitars by small companies and solo builders. This was how I came to meet people like Mark Blanchard and Ed Claxton, among many others. We also carried Santa Cruz Guitars and ones built by Dana Bourgeois. I particularly remember the JOMV as it was an exceptional guitar. It seems certain that I would have been the one to play a bunch of different guitars for you, or any other customer, but particularly for a beginner who couldn't play anything yet.

I am glad you found your way here and hope we can quickly improve your playing.

Neil