If there's anything I hate...

[Larry Mal]

It's fucking guitar technicians. Man, I've never seen people work like they do. I can't wrap my mind around it at all. I would have been fired at any job I ever had six ways to Sunday if I worked the way they do.

Case #1: on November 3rd, I dropped that '65 Mustang I have off at a well known repair guy, he was to spray some clear on the body, sand it, finish it, put a new nut on. He at the time told me that he was taking it over to a person's house he does business with, who has a spray booth, thought it would take about a month. I had the idea I'd get it back in late January, truthfully.

On March 5, I contact him, asking politely about what's going on, any updates, he says at that point that he's been waiting for a warm day. Well, I guess. Except he had said a month when I dropped it off in November, we talked about the guy's house and the spray booth, and frankly, had I known we were waiting for a fucking warm day I probably wouldn't have left it with him in November, would I? He just hadn't done shit with it.

He could have at least contacted me and said, hey, looks like we're not getting a lot of warm days this, uh, December and January so it'll be a while. Or, you want me to put the nut on and do a setup and you can bring it back in spring?

May 3rd is the six month date of when I left it with him. I have a notification set on my calendar. I'll take it from him that date. I have no doubt that he won't have done a single fucking thing to it.

This is one of the "good guys" in this city.

Case #2: I took a guitar of mine to another shop, inquiring about getting the frets leveled. I measure them, I know I have some high ones. It's preventing the guitar from playing as I like. I also know that there's not a lot of room on the frets to be leveled, and that it might need a complete re-fret. I told them all as much when I dropped it off.

The guy calls me at works, says that he thinks it'll be fine with a full setup. OK, I say. I guess we could try that. That's my mistake right there- but, contrary to what you might think on here, I'm actually a pretty nice guy and only sporadically combative. So I go along with it.

So, he does the setup, and his method for getting around the high frets is just to jack the fucking strings up very high. No, that won't do. I tell him you gotta address the frets, man.

He pulls out his fret rocker, and seems surprised to find that there were in fact high frets. I don't think he even bothered to check into what I had said.

Then he tells me that in his opinion, there's no room for the frets to be leveled and that I'd need a re-fret. He also looks at the half degree Stew Mac shim I have in there and starts saying that might be causing the high action. He might be able to get the action lower if the shim wasn't in there.

This is not encouraging me, that this "guitar tech" doesn't know how a shim works. He also speculates that the high frets are because of the shim.

The one on the fourteenth fret? I asks him.

So I'm like, since I came in here, and wanted high frets addressed, and clearly knew that I might need a re-fret, why did I pay for a full setup on a neck that I might have to turn around and have all the frets ripped out of? What fucking sense does that make?

It's like if I brought my car into the shop because it wouldn't start, and you rotated the tires.

Anyway, I'm clearly somewhat at fault with the second one, since I could have been more clear and should have micromanaged the motherfucker and clearly he's only so talented anyway.

But it's like, every time I take a guitar to the shop. I'm never all that happy if it's done at all "quickly", and the guys that are at all talented are fuckups who take seasons to do their work. I mean I've like, literally, had my guitars in a shop I used to use for up to a year. I did like it when they were done, but come on.

I hate guitar techs. There's a reason why I learned to do all my setup stuff myself, with the notable exception of frets and finishing, which I might have to take a stab at soon I suppose.

Let's bitch about guitar techs for a while.

[Grey]

I'm assuming this applies to self-proclaimed luthiers and not just technicians? I once sent a neck off to a guy to have a replacement made, a guy who was "highly recommended and regarded" on the west coast. The promise of a few months turnaround time ended up becoming 3 years and change, and the neck he made for me when I finally got it ended up being wrong in just about every concieveable way possible, included being completely the wrong size for the neck pocket, at which point he blamed me for "not sending him the whole guitar" (which he never once asked me to do in 3+ years of exchanges) and which was irrelevant anyway since he had the original neck which I had sent for the express purpose of copying the dimensions and color matching the original finish. (Which was also wrong.)

I used to be one of those guys who'd roll their eyes when people started talking about waiting years to get a guitar back, like how could you let it go that far? Now all I can do is hang my head 'cause i've got no room to talk. When you let yourself get into that kind of a situation I guess you start telling yourself that "well i've invested this much time in it, better to just keep waiting" and it just keeps getting longer and longer and before you know it months have turned into years.

[Larry Mal]

I mean, I've been using technicians in this town at various places and the only guys that I know will do the work well take forever. And I have to take time out of my day and after a few months or half a year has passed to start calling them, pressuring them. When they get it done, I do like it, though.

But I vowed last time was enough. I just don't like the frustration of it.

I remember when I used to have one guitar. It was always set up perfectly. Maybe I should just kind of do that.

And it's like I don't really care how long it takes necessarily. It's the total lack of communication about it all. Pick up the phone. Send an email. I haven't forgotten you.

That really counts for a lot, and guitar techs, luthiers, whatever the fuck they call themselves, don't seem to know any way to communicate.

[windmill]

Why do you always tell me it will be about 2 weeks ? ( multiple techs)

I ring up a couple of days before the 2 weeks are up (a lesson learnt after actually going to the shop), to be told "oh its been busy here,can it be another two weeks ?".

Ring up again in two weeks, same response !

Ring up again in two weeks " Yeah should be done by then" Occasionally there will be the third repeat.

Go down and pick it up.

I know I am a nobody and you have to keep your regular clients happy but if its going to take a 6 -8 weeks tell me

I even say "I know your are busy, but I do live a long way away so I don't mind if it is going to take 4-6 weeks, can you just tell me when will it be done?" and the response is always "it'll be about two weeks"


Usually happy with the job done tho, so nowadays I factor this into my expectation of the time it will take.

I have at least a two hour one way trip to any guitar tech because the local bloke strung the two weeks out for two months and when I went into to get the guitar he pulled it out of the case and looked at it, for what appeared to be the first time, and said in a condescending way "that after several attempts the problem couldn't fixed".

I'm with Larry on this one

[mackerelmint]

I had one guy take my guitar and skip town. He was also one of the "good ones".

I got no real love for guitar techs.

[Larry Mal]

Did you get it back?

[Larry Mal]

Oh, I also forgot to tell you all one part! So, the guy who has the Mustang, who I finally contacted four months into it, I sent him a message using the usual method, a text message. I could see by the read receipts that he'd seen it and not bothered to respond for a day or so, no real big deal. A little annoying, but I'm numb to it from guitar technicians.

But one morning I wake up and see his responses, and first among them is, "What is J 4?"

Well, the reason he asked that is because one of my kids got to my phone, and managed to fire off a message to the guy- he was at the top of my message list- that somehow said "You are J 4", which didn't mean anything (it was probably my two and a half year old), but it probably looked pretty creepy.

Maybe next I'll say, "You are J 5", then, you know, I'm coming to get my guitar back dude it's been half a fucking year.

[PixMix]

^I would take that mustang back. Seriously, between November and now there were at lest 15 days in which you could shoot nitro from at least from 11am-4pm. Plus if you accept to do a job, find a spray booth and do it. I'd be nervous to leave it that long and add an extension on top of that.

[mackerelmint]

Did you get it back?

Nope. If I ever come across that guy, I'm gonna tear him limb from limb.

[Larry Mal]

^I would take that mustang back. Seriously, between November and now there were at lest 15 days in which you could shoot nitro from at least from 11am-4pm. Plus if you accept to do a job, find a spray booth and do it. I'd be nervous to leave it that long and add an extension on top of that.

I mean, he has a spray booth at his disposal, and that's how I come to remember the conversation so well. As I was at his place, he stated talking about going to "K's" house and using the spray booth there. I later thought it was odd that he talked about "K" as if I knew the guy, or should know of him, and oddly enough I did know of him since "K" has offered to make guitars for an old friend of mine in the past, and me and my friend talked about the relative merits of those.

So I do know of "K", but there's really no way the tech could have known that, he just assumed it, and happened to be correct. Or maybe the community here is much smaller than I assumed. Regardless, the conversation was very clear in my mind, he was taking the guitar to "K's" place where I happen to know is a spray booth that functions all year round. Or he decided not to for whatever reason, but I could think that would warrant some kind of communication to let me know that in mid-November we had decided to wait for warm and dry weather at which point I could have made a choice to leave my guitar or collect it. "Warm and dry" not being anything you would expect to coincide reliably in St. Louis until late April, really, although you'll get a day or two here and there.

And I probably would have collected it, since I have a '65 Mustang that I've literally never played other than ten minutes or so to evaluate it and find out what work I needed done on it.

Like I say, any option would have been fine, I'm a nice guy. But I would have thought that after a third of a year that some kind of communication would have been called for. And at half of a year, I'll be good and pissed off, probably finding no humor in the situation, and I'll not be charitable that day. However, after I righteously blow my stack, I'll still have a guitar that is not in playable condition, and the process will start all over again.

And that's my ultimate point: guitar technicians fucking suck.

[rank]

[quote="Larry Mal"]Or he decided not to for whatever reason[quote]

Maybe he remembered he has one of K's guitars he is working on & it hasn't been a year since he has had it so he can't go over there.

[Larry Mal]

Right!

I'll hang tight for a while. This guy typically works pretty fast, and maybe he's taking his time in order to get everything just perfect. I would like it to come out of there looking showroom new so no need to rush.

It's only if I contact him after six months and absolutely no progress has been made that I'll get upset. Even then, I'll only be upset at the lack of communication. If I had ever received any notice as to the state of the project after a half year then I still would be fine with everything.

[blackbox]

It's really difficult in my experience to find a luthier that's comfortable with Jags and JMs. It's like they spend all their time learning how to setup strats, teles, and gibsons. I've been searching hard for someone, anyone, in Northern California who I can trust with a pro Jaguar setup...still looking.

[caldera]

After having mostly neutral to bad experiences around this city, I've located one shop where the tech work will be done well and more or less in the time frame they give. There's another that has a good reputation but takes longer. I'm currently trying a third shop that is expensive, but it is a shop where their main business lines are building high end acoustics as well as doing repairs, so I think the work quality there might be higher. They seem to know what they are doing, given their clientele and the fact that they have been around for decades, they probably know how to run a business.

It seems like you usually won't get good service from a guitar tech, although you might get good quality work (eventually).

We have to hold people accountable if we want them to deliver. I've pulled a guitar from a shop that told me 2 weeks and when I inquired at 2 weeks and at 4 weeks, they told me it had not been started. I give specs in writing, and I have demanded refunds from the owners when what I asked for was not done. When I get good work I leave good reviews everywhere online. When I get back work I leave bad reviews and I tell every player I know about it.

[InLimbo]

I have an old Tokai Tele with a maple fretboard neck that needed a refret - bad.

I called up supposedly the dude of all dudes in town, told him wanted I wanted (didn't even give him the option of trying a setup), and he was like, "well, I might be able to do it? Refretting maple boards is a hard thing to do, requires a little bit more care and work of the finish and it being fragile". Not knowing any better, I said I "understood" He quoted me $500, but couldn't figure out when to make an appointment, and told me to call back. Called back a week or so later, no response. Repeat for another week, no response, regardless of message or not. In hindsight, this was the best thing that happened.

Decided to shop around a little bit, and there's a guy really close to my place, and he builds guitars from scratch, finishes, them etc. Both electric and acoustic, even double basses and violins. I made an appointment, walked in, and the guy and I talked about what I was looking for, introduced me to the shop, showed me what he was working on, his tools, and then we talked about random stuff for an hour. He priced me at $250, and told me any guitar tech / luthier worth his salt would know how to work around the finished fretboard and that $500 was robbery. He also said he could make a compromise on the 7.25" radius and could bring the frets themselves closer to 9.5" - no extra charge.

The funny thing is, he worked UNDER THE OTHER GUY learning the trade. At least his customer service habits didn't carry over too much.

2 and a half weeks later, I get a call, saying that my guitar was finished, and that he took care of broken switch tip, but not to worry about it. Needless to say, I gave the guy $300 for the work and now he's got a customer for life. I've pointed several other people I know, all of which have been highly impressed.