Black is the color of my true love's hair, and my guitar. Also, my epiphany about Epiphone
Off the CUff
Until about two years ago, I had a bias against guitars with solid-color tops, like green or blue. Natural finishes were fine.
I mentioned that in a piece two weeks ago and my friend Marlena asked why.
This came from my experience as a guitar teacher. I gave guitar lessons after school from the time I was 12 until I was 20.
During that period I got to tune a lot of students' guitars and found that if the guitar was painted or dyed to the point that you couldn't see the wood grain, it was a good sign the guitar was made more for looks than playing.
This was generally born out by actually playing the guitars, which many times would emit kind of a buzzing, thudding sound.
I preferred guitars with a tight wood grain on the top, with a natural or sunburst finish.
It would have been nice if parents of prospective students had asked me in advance what type of guitar to get.
Instead, many would go out and get the $20 special from Sears and Roebuck, and justify that by saying, “If he/she learns to play that, I'll get him/her a better guitar.”
Problem with that is that most of those guitars just weren't playable.
When asked, back in the late 60s and early 70s, I would direct folks toward Alvarez guitars. They made a very nice, very playable entry level guitar. I was always happy to see a student show up with one of those. I bought an Alvarez guitar for my granddaughter a couple of years ago. It is a pip.
I regret, however, nagging a parent about his daughter's Sears guitar. She was one of my first students, and she had some ability, but no one could coax a decent sound out of her guitar. I took my little 12-year-old self-important ass to see her father when he came to pick her up and explained that she had the ability to play, but she really needed a better guitar.
They never came back. My mother explained to me that it was very likely the Sears guitar was all the man could afford. Fifty-six years later I still feel bad about that.
It never dawned on me that over the decades, guitar technology had gotten better, and that a solid-color top was not necessarily the sign of a badly made guitar. I think I've established elsewhere that I can be kind of a dope.
I was surprised when I played a jet-black Takamine 12-string guitar a couple of years ago. I was prepared to really not like it. Instead, out of the seven or eight guitars I tried that day, it was hands down the best sounding and most playable of the group. To this day I am stunned when I open the case and see that gleaming beauty sitting inside.
My all-time favorite acoustic guitar finish is tobacco sunburst. There are other sunburst finishes that I like, but the tobacco finish is by far my favorite.
It started like this: When six-year-old Robert's parents decided he should take guitar lessons, they bought him a nice, natural finish steel-string guitar.
Little Robert loved that guitar, for a week. Then he saw the exact same guitar at the music store, but with a sunburst finish. Oh baby.
The music store, where LR was taking music lessons, agreed to trade even and LR loved his new guitar even more than the original. It started a lifelong trend.
Since then I've had various makes with that finish, including aYamaha, Washburn, and Epiphone. My all-time favorite was a Gibson J-45. It was an awesome guitar. It got stolen when I was 22 and it was several decades before I felt like I could afford to replace it.
A few years ago I started dwelling on the notion that I really needed to replace my J-45 with another. The price had jumped a ton. I started saving money, and sold one of my two motorcycles, which gave me enough money to buy the exact guitar I wanted.
And then I hit a snag. There was not a new Gibson J-45 with a sunburst top to be had in the United States. That was freaking frustrating.
I agonized over this for a while. Then I started reading about this Epiphone equivelant. Epiphone is a Gibson brand, and I read about the specs being nearly identical on the two guitars. The main difference I could spot, is that the Epiphone did not have a gloss finish, plus it cost about $2,000 less.
I bought one. The model number is AJ45ME. It is awesome. Honestly, I still wish I had gotten a J45, but this guitar is so good, I can't imagine coughing up the difference in cost just for a slight improvement in tone.
Plus, it has a sweet tobacco sunburst finish. It looks great next to my black Takamine.
My first solid-color guitar. I had to overcome years of misconceptions about a solid finish.
This is me playing my Epiphone AJ45ME for the first time, I think.