I was reunited with a wonderful old friend at the Spring Campout in Turlock last month, the first Bluegrass instrument I ever bought. It was such a pleasure to once again hold in my hands and play the very instrument I had learned to play Bluegrass music on. My old axe had been very well taken care of by my good friend Bill Barnhart. Bill and I started learning around the same time and we have spent many an hour swapping tunes. Bill started as a guitar picker but he joined a band that needed a mandolin so he learned how to play mandolin and i sold him my extra one. Now I play a little guitar so Bill and I can switch off and mix it up more when we play music together.
Most of my instruments have dings on them if I’ve owned them for long enough but Bill has taken very good care of my old original mandolin. I’m glad my Morgan Monroe circa 2004 found a good home. It still sounds good and it’s still fun to play.
I’ve bought a few instruments since that original purchase and I have learned a few things in the process when it comes to finding the right instrument. My Morgan Monroe mandolin was bought online because I needed a basic instrument that I could afford and I wanted to play Bluegrass. It arrived at my doorstep and all I had to do was punch in my credit card information. Easy.
As a new player i didn’t know any better but in retrospect the set up was all wrong with my first mandolin. It was playable and had a nice tone from the outset but the strings were too high and it hurt my fingers a lot when I played. Bill has the action set up nice and low now so the mandolin is much easier to play.
I know plenty of people who have bought good instruments sight unseen online but in general I don’t recommend it. If you know your stuff and you can set it up right maybe but for my money there is no substitute for the test drive. I learned this lesson when i bought a guitar for my daughter. We went to a local music store and we went through much of their guitar inventory over the course of about two hours. Juliet played a candidate guitar and if she liked it better than the last one, it went on the stand in place of the previous favorite. Then she auditioned the next candidate. In the end we ended up with a really great guitar at a reasonable price.
I envied that beautiful sounding guitar so much that I went back to the same music store a few months later and used the same process to find my own guitar. This time I was the buyer and the user. I played a lot of nice guitars, some of them more expensive and maybe more impressive from a name recognition standpoint. But in the end those other guitars that i might have bought instead didn’t sound as good or feel as good under my own fingers.
If you have lots of money and you want to collect fine instruments that don’t necessarily get played just buy it online. But if you want to play what you buy you need to play it before you buy. For me a brick and mortar music store is the best place to buy the instrument of your dreams. You have choices and hopefully an environment where you can play without too much distraction.
Music festivals like Grass Valley have instruments for sale. If you buy an instrument at a music festival though you have to be careful. I have seen at least one really good buy at Grass Valley but it was bought by a friend who I know is very discerning. In some ways a festival is the perfect place to audition an instrument. That’s after all one of the places we want to be playing the most. But make sure you can really hear and feel what the instrument sounds like. There shouldn’t be too much distraction.
It’s a great thing when you own an instrument that you are confident in and you know it’s the very best you can afford. But in the real world we all know that joy pales in comparison to the ability to make whatever instrument you have in your hands sing. If you want to sound good on your instrument the best strategy is to practice like crazy and just dream about that great new instrument you might buy to sound even better some day.
