So I have this one guitar we call the thin body, it's about an inch thinner than my standard model. This one has Madagascar Rosewood with an Adirondack top and paua purfling with a cutaway, I was originally going to leave it because of a flaw it had but I finally just finished it and got it ready to go a few weeks ago (it had been sitting a case wating to be polished for about 4 months)... (btw KTM-9 polished just fine after long drying periods
)
Anyway...
Because of the workload I have a friend who used to setup professionals guitars do the setup for me, well he was adjusting the truss-rod and putting more and more pressure on it and his hand slipped and he put a ding in the top. Mind you I had just polished it up and it was ready for HB...
So instead of telling me he took it to a shall we say famous builder over in oakland (his initials are E.S. but I didn't want to seem like I was 'dropping names') to have him look and see if he could fix it before I found out (more about that later). This builder spent the better part of 20 minutes going over the guitar in detail commenting on how much he liked the guitar and finally called his assistant in, strummed and open E chord and when it died off said "Now, you don't really need that much sustain".
My friend laughed because he's a very accomplished player and sustain is something that I actually try to build into my guitars and something that he looks for, it tells me that the guitar has good balance (to my ears at least) and that's it's not overbraced.
The long and short of it was that I finally pried out the info after it seemed to take a REALLY long time to do the setup and he was avoiding the issue, he took it to a shop in Santa Cruz to get the ding repaired because he was afraid I would stress out on him
I told him 'It's just a guitar, stuff happens and I could have fixed but let's see what this guy can do, our friendship is WAY more valuable and what did E.S. say again?'
It's very satsifying when a real player likes your work, it's more when someone who's been building for so long likes it. The only comment he had was for me to put a pick guard on it or it will get killed at HB. I had intended to after setup anyway..
So excuse me if I walk on the clouds a bit, on my very first fanned fret Kathy Wingert came by and played it for a while and she had great comments for me, *that* little episode put my rear in gear and caused me to really focus hard on getting good at building. It's things like this, and seeing work from people like Lance, Woolson, Mayes (who I'm convinced is not human) and others here that make me driven to do my best.
So beyond the funny story I just wanted to say thanks to those who take the time to respond, give out advice and share. It makes building easier when I have people who I trust I can go to for advice, even if I don't always listen
Cheers
-Paul-