Q: Do you do guitar repairs? (this one always cracks me up)
A: No. I'm quite clearly a fruit and veg merchant. The broccoli is very good this season. If you're looking for guitar repairs, try Tesco...
Q: Are there any repairs you won't tackle?
A: As I get older, and pass the point where I have more life to look back on than I have to look forward to, I find myself becoming reluctant to get involved in long, time consuming repairs that I might not live to see the end of.
Other than that I will tackle most things that don't exceed the capacity of my workshop facilities. However the words "I know it's not worth very much but this guitar is of sentimental value so can you fix it for me please, I don't care how much it costs?" are guaranteed to bring out the beast in me as the customer's sentiment is inclined to evaporate the moment they see the bill for what will inevitably be a long and arduous restoration journey from a pile of matchwood to something that might fetch fifteen quid on E-bay, if I'm lucky...
The other words guaranteed to send a shiver down my spine: "my dad tried to fix it with some superglue..."
Q: A lot of the stuff you say on your website is different to what I've read elsewhere on the net. Why should I believe you over everyone else?
A: You shouldn't believe anything that isn't supported by a credible rationale. If I say "this is how you do it" i don't expect you to believe me unless I also tell you why you should do it that way. For every person on the internet with an informed opinion there are a dozen more wishing to propagate a personal opinion (often armed with a commercial agenda) and for each one of these there are a dozen more happy to copy and paste misinformation from other sites. What you should do is train yourself to be a critical thinker. Read, analyse and understand what you are reading. There is a lot of knowledge out there but knowledge without understanding is like a baby with a loaded gun. I'm fairly confident that if you do this you will arrive at the same conclusions I have...
Perhaps most importantly, I am not trying to sell you anything (except perhaps the legitimate fruits of my labour and hard-earned skills); if I was I could just pocket the money for those locking tuners you've read about on some forum and send you away happy with your new gimmick, but none the wiser that you've wasted your money, or pay Buzz the licence and sting you for a few hundred to fit a shelf nut to your guitar and go home a little richer for having bought into the myth.
Know that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable.
Understand that you don't put it in a fruit salad...
And always remember Sturgeon's law; "90% of everything is crap"
Q: Do you fit the Buzz Feiten System?
A: Er, let me see: No. I take it you haven't read this bit of my site yet then.
Learn to tune your guitar to equal temperament. It will build character and give you a sense of acheivement. Check out the tuning procedure published by the Guild of American Luthiers reproduced here GAL Tuning protocol
Q: What's the deal with all the Ruskin quotes?
A: John Ruskin was a Victorian Art Critic of some notoriety who nevertheless had a lot to say about quality and value, two concepts we have lost sight of in our modern culture. Such is the extent to which our markets are saturated with cheap goods of high quality foreign manufacture that our perspective of a commodity's worth has been steadily eroded to the point where someone can regard a £300 guitar as "expensive" and remain oblivious to the man-hours of labour that such an instrument represents and what its true value is, were it not for the unfathomable economic gulf separating the prosperous northern hemisphere from the emerging economies of China and the Pacific Rim. Increasingly people from the developed nations expect to get something for next to nothing while being strongly resistant to giving anything away themselves. Just watch Bargain Hunt, you'll see what I mean...
