Having acquired some form of arthritis/tendonitis earlier this year, I stopped playing guitar. My haggard n tattered old classical guitar was collecting dust while an old friend of mine was toughing out homelessness post retirement age, with a lot of talent and no guitar. I passed it on to him and he put it to use. On that note, if there’s anyone out there who’s interested in helping this fellow, please contact me.
With some progress made in mitigating the tendonitis issues, I began searching occasionally for cheap nylon string guitars on craplist. After a reasonable week I had enough cabbage to consider a good deal. How does $50 sound? One typically doesn’t get much of a classical guitar in that range unless deranged generosity is involved.
I decided to have a look and when I did, I had second thoughts. But I’m not fond of kicking people’s tires and for the price, I suspected I’d not find anything better. I gave the fellow $50 and took it home. After attempting to tune it, I considered putting it in the trash bin. The bridge was and still is high enough that if made of wax, it would melt and come crashing down onto a pile of dogshit on the Aegean shore. But the nut was worse.
Aluminum to the rescue. I had made the first nut from cumaru, but I couldn’t stop envisioning the sawing effect of the strings when tuning, so opted for something stronger. The sound would probably suffer, but frugality knows few limits and the experiment would be free. I cut a sliver of scrap aluminum and sanded it to size. I used the smallest files I had to carve the grooves. Everything was done uncompromised by skill or professional competence.
But it worked. Kind of. The sound is somewhat dull and the strings are imperfectly seated. The improvement, however, apprehended an unwieldy chunk of debatably useful firewood and yielded a functional instrument. All that, and I’m making foul noises once again.
The occasional guitars I’ve owned have all been short lived and of either poor quality or post apocalyptic condition. My practice has been intermittent and often discouraged by my aversions to their sound. This guitar is a good example of that. It’s impossible to tune to my ears, but I suspect I can still squeeze some progress out of it.