twelve_strings nomme i learned on six sit quiet losing tune i invent dust place them on the strings to unlearn to rewind begin 030731 ... raze this guitar was built in japan in 1977. he bought it from value_village seventeen years ago. he left it at my house not long after getting it, for at least a day or two. i remember strumming the chords to "the ballad of el goodo" and "be my baby". as guitars go, it wasn't anything fancy, but it had soul. if it came with a case, he didn't use it. he left the guitar leaning against a wall wherever he was living at any given time for anyone to play. some drunk person would always pick it up and break a string. it became a running joke: the twelve-string that never lived up to its name. sometimes it was an eleven-string. sometimes a ten-string. for his nineteenth birthday i got him a new set of strings, and for a moment it was whole again. that lasted a whole week or two before someone got careless and broke another string. at some point in its life the guitar either fell or was thrown into the detroit river. i'm pretty sure it also caught some of the embers from a bonfire some other night. a few days ago he brought it over and left it here for me to borrow. kind of felt like making a full turn. but really, i think he just couldn't get any use out of it anymore and thought maybe i would because of the way i play. the pickguard was hanging on through sheer force of will, the glue or adhesive solution having lost most of its hold a long time ago. it was so curled in on itself it looked warped. the action was so high about all you could do was play it with a slide. fretting a chord was almost impossible. the intonation up the neck was awful. two strings and a bridge pin were missing. there were cobwebs inside the soundhole. there's neglecting a guitar, and then there's this. i brought it to the guy i bring guitars to when they need work. "who gave you this guitar?" he asked me. "a friend," i said. "he's not a good friend. give it back." you know it's bad when someone who can find a way to salvage a broken pair of studio headphones tells you a guitar is a lost cause. i'm nothing if not stubborn. i messed with the action until it was low enough to play comfortably but not so low that the strings buzzed. that helped. then i found an extra bridge pin and replaced the two missing strings. all it needs now is a new pickguard and a little cleaning, and it'll be unrecognizable from the mess it was when it came to me. it's still not a great guitar. it's never going to be. but it's got its soul back. all it needed was a little bit of affection. 170723 ... nr re the above: it's interesting that the store clerk would assume the friend was a man. not the point of the post, i know, but something i've been thinking about often, especially related to musicians and instruments. 170725 ... raze in hindsight, i actually remembered that moment wrong. what he said was, "this is not a good friend," without assuming gender. just my brain getting a detail not quite right. 170725 ... raze four years later, that guitar is still here. i consider it partial compensation for everything i had to pay for and put up with through the long mess that was my friendship with the person who once owned and abused the poor thing. maybe he feels the same way, since he's never asked for it back. after cleaning it up and making it as comfortable to play as it was ever going to get, there was one thing still bugging me. that pickguard. it looked tacky, and even a generous helping of gorilla tape wouldn't get it to stay put. it kept sticking its goofy face out no matter how many times i pushed it back into place. i thought i'd peel it off, scrub away what i could of the glue beneath it with sandpaper, and replace it with something nice. i asked a luthier about making a custom pickguard. he said it would run me two hundred bucks. all that for a strip of material worth about as much as a bag of doritos and ten minutes of work to cut and glue it. so i gave that a miss. i found a nice sheet of tortoiseshell online for less than a tenth of the price he quoted me. it was a glorified sticker, but to the eyes and fingers it would look and feel the same as any other pickguard. when even the coarsest sandpaper was having trouble with the stubborn glue residue and starting to take some of the finish off, i traced the shape of the old pickguard onto a thin piece of cardboard that came with a wall calendar. the cardboard stand-in served as a guide for how to cut the new pickguard. the full sheet was a little too small for the hummingbird-style design of the guitar, so the very top of the piece i cut didn't quite touch the side of the fretboard the way it was supposed to. i left it like that. i think it gives a guitar that was already imperfect a little more character. the strange thing is the instrument itself. it's become something of a secret weapon for me. it's still not the most comfortable thing to play. it starts to hurt my fretting hand after a while. there isn't much body to the sound. there's nothing special about its tone. but there's something about the thinness of its voice that just works. every once in a while it's exactly the glue a song needs, and nothing else will do the job half as well. maybe it was meant to end up here all along. 210806 what's it to you? who go blather from