Korean Telecaster Copy - No Strings Attached

Korean Guitar: No Strings Attached (until I came along)

It’s a great day for a barbeque, and I can’t wait to have a big juicy burger with all the fixings. By a landslide, today has so far been the very warmest and the very sunshiniest day.

Dad’s in charge of the grill, and I just returned from the almost stifling atmosphere inside the two-car garage. It was so hot and stuffy inside that stick-built structure I figured all the mechanisms of my vintage Olympia typewriter must be more than sufficiently thawed to endure hammering-out a few dozen, unfrozen letters. It’s probably not a good practice to subject a good many things to freezing and thawing conditions, especially things with complex allotments of intricate parts like typewriters, and even more especially those spools of inked ribbon that carriage key style typewriters employ. Yet I’m pretty sure it survived the near-arctic temperatures from inside the unheated garage. It’s a tough old bird, that German made, multi-colour Olympia fully mechanical typewriter.

Okay… this article was originally supposed to be about my new electric solid-bodied Korean-made guitar. It’s been my thing lately: finding stuff in the garage to take digital snapshots of for an online show-and-tell. I didn’t find this “SLEDGEHAMMER” guitar in the garage, but I did find some acoustic strings to string it up with.

As far as I am concerned, there is only one correct way to wind the string of a stringed instrument onto its peg, and it’s a somewhat exacting thing to do -- in that you don’t want to “wind-up” with too many or too few complete wraps around the post when the string becomes taught. Overlapping a string in a pointless attempt to, “lock it into place, man” is beyond the pale to anyone who knows better, and stubborn people who cannot grasp the sensibility of not ‘locking’ a string - by stupidly overlapping the windings (tension continuity and freedom of movement) are just the sort of guitar players who fruitlessly, unwittingly perhaps, insist on keeping their guitar strings in jail… locked-up. It’s not my bag, dig? Any serious jazz guitar player will agree, and it’s my charge to bring other guitar players to the light when it comes to metal dynamics.

Even a super-expert like me slips up sometimes, but that’s a good thing for the illustrative purposes of this article. I just about nailed the E-String with three complete turns around the string. The A-String has too few, and the D-String is overkill. More than three complete turns is just an overkill of kinetics, but too few complete turns can be sketchy:

While it might be true that I may not be the best guitar player in Canadian Canada, other people would consider me to be very, very, very good at playing guitars really, really, really well. For your listening enjoyment, I have included an off-the-cuff video of my new electric guitar being played acoustically... plus me: badly singing a little impromptu verse at the end!