Buy cheap guitars. Seriously. I do have the expensive ones… at home (9500 km away) but I decided not to bring any of them cos it’s always very annoying to take a guitar through the airports and I wanted to do a little experiment. I wanted to buy the guitars at my destination to prove myself that I don’t really need them so much to make music.

So I walked around downtown a bit and found three shops and finally bought an ok spanish guitar in a little shop downtown Puebla where they didn’t even tune the guitars. After playing anything that vaguely resembled a guitar I chose a Tres Pinos (never heard that brand before) that costed 3000 MXN (that is 226 USD at today’s exchange rate), the other guitars I tried don’t really deserve to be named so, a bit frustrating. The Tres Pinos doesn’t sound as nice as my Alhambra back at home but it actually plays quite nicely, although it detunes pretty quickly.

Later on I found another area of Puebla that actually has loads of nice guitar shops but I don’t regret having bought that one since for the price I won’t get much better quality.

A week later I spotted a red wine coloured Yamaha with two humbuckers sitting in a pawn shop near home. I went in, asked the price and the clerk let me test it… in a Hi-Fi stereo system. It sounded ok to me so I bought it for 1400 mexican pesos, about 105 USD. The guitar in question is made in Taiwan and has a few scratches but other than that seemed ok. Once back in the silence of my home I found that the guitar made quite a lot of noise that makes it quite unusable for recording. After some poking I found that the problem was a faulty tone pot. So yesterday I ordered some replacement pots from eBay and I’ll attempt to replace it, wish me good luck. In fact I feel a bit excited of trying the surgery to see if I can actually fix it since killing it wouldn’t be a huge loss. Although having to do so much work for fixing a 105 USD guitar seems like a lot it’ll still be good practice. I probably wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about doing it to a more expensive guitar.

A couple of weeks later in the same shop I saw a black Yamaha bass guitar and repeated the same procedure. This time I paid 1800 pesos, around 135 USD and this time I made sure that the guitar had no noise by cranking up the volume at the shop and thoroughly trying every possible pot setting.

The good thing about buying them second hand is that I won’t get too attached to them and I can just resell them at a minimal loss when I leave without even worrying thinkint twice about it.

Of course I miss my nice guitars back home which sound better on their own and feel very nice to play but since I’m not going to record classical music and at the end of the day both the electric and bass guitars are going to the DI’d through the soundcard into the sequencer to be processed by a bunch of digital VST plugins and sit in the middle of a mix I don’t think being cheap will make such a big difference to the end result.