Flashes of Panic

I tend to have more (and, generally, better) guitars around than would be expected for a musician of my talent level and infrequent practice. That’s another story.

Today I broke a string on an acoustic I don’t play very often. (Bigger, louder, and a wider fret-board than I prefer, none of which make it a bad instrument.) I knew there were quite a few string envelopes in the case, so I pulled out the lot to see if I could find a replacement.

As I went through the stack, I learned a bit about how the guitar’s previous owner had kept it. Aside from two complete, unopened sets of strings, there were three packets with incomplete used sets in the envelopes. (You can tell a used string because the end without the nut is crimped where it was coiled around the tuning peg.) The label on each was turned back-out and marked with a date.

SEPT 8
1973

(in red felt-tip, fading to orange, with a zig-zag double-underline between the month and the year)

6 MÄRZ 1974

(in pencil, with the same underline under the whole line and a hurried rock-and-roll dash to the handwriting—the umlaut on the A firmly added)

July 1978

(Royal blue felt-tip, just a step away from calligraphy, with sweeping descenders on the J and 9, a European one-serif 1 and a serif on the lowercase l)

Assuming I haven’t forgotten anything I did with this guitar while it’s been in my care, that July 1978 may indicate the strings I just replaced. (N.B. It’s also possible that some of the strings went with another guitar.) In which case, those strings made it almost thirty years. That’s not half bad.

Rather than just replace the broken string with a single used one, I opened one of the fresh sets and replaced the whole set, putting the old ones (except the broken one) in the empty envelopes as I went. Then I labeled the packet with today’s date and added it back into the stack.

The guitar sounds ghastly now, because I didn’t wind the new strings to full tension yet; I’ll let them relax a bit overnight and tune it next time I have a few minutes.

Now Playing: Secretariat from Miles from the Lightning by Jeffrey Foucault

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