Guitar School Adventures Episode 2: Cutting teeth and braces.

Week two of school was all about acoustics. Sides, backs, tops, braces, maple, spruce and rosettes. I was just in a haze of nervousness and fear. The wood for the tops are so delicate you are in constant fear of scratching the hell out of it, which you do. Its an inevitability. Bent the sides with a process involving water, heat and a fancy jig. Shaping the head block and end block was simple but doing the same for the braces was a different story. Focus is key and its easy to feel like youve completely destroyed the whole thing. Luckily the school is never short of replacements to reshape if you mess up. I fell behind slightly, not because I wasnt as good, it was really only because I was a little more cautious. Once the sides were on however I ran into a bit of a snag. A device called the "parabolic" sander is designed to evenly sand the tops of your sides to the proper radius. I made the mistake of reading the calipers wrong and sanded about .050 of an inch farther down than was required. May not seem like much but when you hear "50,000ths of an inch" it sounds like a HUGE screw up. All it means is that my guitars body will end up being a little more narrow than everyone else's. By the end of the week I was sanding and shaping the braces I glued on. Im told next week we will be "Boxing" up the guitars, or in other words, putting the top and back onto the sides. Im looking forward to that as long as I get a chance to finish my braces without any added pressure. Saturday I took a pickup winding class and got the chance to wind my own P90 pickup for my electric. The class was super informative but two guys outside of the school came in to take it and they were a couple of boobs. By "boobs" I mean they were the worst combination of arrogance, ignorance, self-centeredness and awkwardness. Every word out of their mouths was about the gear they owned, obscured boutique guitar companies, how good (they believe) they are at guitar and just general one-upmanship. It was the most annoying thing. Trying so hard to come across as all cool and knowledgeable when in reality they were just a couple of nozzles. Wasnt too bad, I did get a P90 out of the deal! stay tuned for episode 3 and more boob nozzles. -G