Guitar shopping!

[Here's the post I have been unsuccesfully trying to get posted from home. Hopefully this will work...]
That was all day Saturday and what fun it was. Of course, it wasn't shopping for another guitar for me but for My Friend Vicki. MFV is the mom to Noah's old girlfriend and an English professor at our local Weber State U, just down the street. We got aquainted through the kids and over the years we have gone hiking and to baseball games together and I helped with some landscaping projects in her yard as well.

And every now & then we get together over coffee just to catch up and visit, which is what we did Friday afternoon. During our chat I disclosed my newfound love of (trying) to make music on my guitar. Turns out Vicki is a guitar player with much better skills than mine and she was excited about my efforts. Heck, she immediately wanted to build a repertoire of songs so we could start performing together at the local coffee houses!

Anyway, we ended up in my backyard with my 2 guitars and she gave a better lesson in an hour than I've received from the lady I was paying since February! We had a great time and she schooled me quite efficiently and thoroughly and we are going to do it again regularly.

Saturday morning she rang me up early and wanted to know if I wanted to go guitar shopping. Seems that the guitar she owns had either grown larger or her arms had grown smaller because it just didn't fit her comfortably as she tried to practice. And she wanted a new guitar... So of course I tagged along, just for fun to see what she might find.

We went to Guitar Center first where she quickly became nearly overwhelmed with the exotic choices in their acoustic room but after a bit found 2 guitars that she couldn't choose between, this Eric Clapton signature Martinand this equally nice Gibson guitar. In the end, the Gibson's color didn't impress her and she didn't like the rather muted sound of the Martin so we left empty handed and headed to the other 2 guitar stores in town.

At Bert Murdock's we found more guitars but a much more reasonable price range, at least for my tastes. And there was an Ibanez there that she loved the sound of and that the store would be willing to discount because of a very small scratch on the front. The linked guitar isn't exactly the model she liked but I can't find a link to the model she seleced with the satin finish and the inlaid wood ivy vine on the neck and mother-of-pearl inlay around the sound hole. She didn't buy it the first time because she wanted lunch and to visit the 3rd store in town, both of which we did- had lunch and visited Music Village. Nothing there really grabbed her and in the mean time that very pretty Ibanez had been soaking into her brain.

We talked. I suggested going back and dickering for a better deal on the Ibanez. The tiny scratch certainly wasn't a show stopper and took the pressure off her for the first, inevitable scratch. She liked the looks and the sound, especially after I had plugged her into a nearby amplifier.

We went back, she dickered, the manager counter-offered and then sold her the guitar, a hard case at the agreed price and a new set of premium strings at half price, then installed the strings as part of a very reasonable deal.

Later we went off to a women's league hockey match where another friend was competing and finally I got home about supper time. What fun!

I didn't buy any new guitars but I have to say that I was tempted to replace my beautiful blue Ibanez that I bought just a few months ago. I saw its twin brother that received an Emerald City paint job that is really a knock out. The picture at the link truly doesn't do the color justice, its just fabulous and I've always loved green colors. I won't be swapping but if the green model would have been on the hook when I was shopping, I'd have it instead of the blue one.

Now I just have to figure out what's wrong with my Blogger connection at home!