Less is more, or just another justification to go out and buy another guitar?!
I’ve had the Dillion Phoenix up for sale for a few weeks now. I had a starting price of $600 and a buy it now at $800 because I didn’t really want to sell it. It’s a pretty guitar. I like the look of it and for the most part it’s just been on display in my lounge room since I bought it in 2016.
One of the main reasons why I put it up for sale though is the guitar isn’t so fun to play standing up as it’s got pretty bad neck dive (when you let go of the guitar the head of the guitar dives down so you have to hold the neck up to play it), which is quite common apparently on guitars with an offset shape. The guitar is the heaviest in my collection too and that’s not great as I play standing up, sometimes for hours at a time.
The listing was up for 3 weeks before someone reached out about it. This guy wanted to come over and inspect the guitar which is a fair call, but had me a little worried for some reason as he was pretty short in his messages and I couldn’t get a read on the guy and so I started to wonder whether it would be a safe thing or not to have some random come into my house to “test my guitar”.
End of the day he was an older guy who didn’t talk much, and when I tried to chat he just couldn’t hear what I was saying, so it didn’t take me long to realise he was pretty deaf! I showed him the guitar and plugged it in for him to play with and legit he just played chords for at least 15 minutes, maybe more. He might have had frail hands as he wasn’t quite able to hold the chords down on the fretboard, but he still strummed away anyways. I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing; I’m not a guitar shop, and it only takes a few minutes to tell if an electric guitar works or not (and the guitar works perfectly fine!), but it seemed like he was just really trying to make sure he liked the guitar enough to buy it.
He ended up buying the Dillion. Turns out he’s got a huge collection of guitars, and when he saw my upside down Hendrix style Squier he scoffed at it and said he wanted to do the same but would never disrespect Jimi by using a Squier! Interesting guy and an interesting experience. I had been thinking (I mentioned it on a Monday Morning Rant a little while back) about guitarists who own a lot of guitars but can’t play well. Each to their own for sure, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about and not really a situation I want to get myself into. IE: Ultimately I respect (and envy!) a person who plays the one guitar really well, over a person who has a collection of amazing guitars and plays mediocre at best.