Handmade music
What finally got me over decades of “someday…” with the guitar, and gave me an unexpected window to where good parts of humanity still thrive, wasn’t YouTube, or a teacher, or an attitude adjustment.
It was a luthier in a small local shop.
I took my humble acoustic guitar to be restrung and adjusted, made a lame joke about our love-hate relationship, and he said it sounded like I was fighting the guitar. He took the time to have a long, wonderfully inefficient conversation with me about my experience. He suggested lowering the action, making the strings a little closer to the fretboard. He said I’d have to pick more lightly and fret more accurately to prevent the strings from buzzing against the fretboard, but developing that light touch and accuracy is what you want when you’re learning. He predicted I’d be back in six months to ask him to raise the action when I started playing with more confidence.
He was wrong. I was back in seven months.
From the day I took it home, I felt a new resonance in the body of the guitar. I wasn’t fighting it anymore. Whatever sorcery he’d done with his feeler gauges and truss rod adjustments and re-intonation, the tone from those rare moments when I played it right was the reward that kept me going, that no digital experience could have duplicated.
The world of handmade music, handmade anything really, has been with us for centuries, and it’s doing just fine. We’ve been able to press a button and hear pre-recorded music since the introduction of mass market radios, but the people creating and maintaining and playing instruments by hand still thrive. We may be in small shops and sending notes into the air in our bedrooms or through headphones that no one else will ever hear—or writing low-traffic blogs :)—but we’re creating and supporting each other. It’s not efficient, not monetizable at scale. Just human.