One down, two to go (guitars, that is)

I have finally decided to take on the all-important task of cleaning, restoring and re-stringing my guitars. The plan is to FINALLY put my sweet sound board and condenser mic and guitars into use and do some darn recordin' folks!! :) Yeah I've been putting it off, and it's a lot of work to get the guitar back into action so I've been delaying it and making excuses and always way too busy watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to spend some freakin' time on my sweet guitars to make them pretty and happy again. So now back to work, and it is looking good already.

A few nights ago I got the old strings off my electric and realized that it has a truckload of tarnish on the gold hardware on the guitar. Problem? Well it looks gross, I think. A lot of people think this is "cool" apparently, and gives the guitar a "worn" look. I just think it looks messy and needs a cleaning. Problem is, so I hear via the "internet" is that "cheaper' guitars (this one was only $700?!?!!??!! Come on!!!!!!!) that have gold plating have a very thin gold plating, and apparently this doesn't last too long and then becomes gross looking (thus the problem). I can't imagine a gold cleaner wouldn't fix it, but apparently that makes it worse (or can) and will just strip it all off. Crap. So apparently a slightly wet towel is the best solution. Hmm. So that is still TDB what to do there. :)

My acoustic-electric was much kinder and less fussy. It is my fancy/awesome/i love it guitar, so although it has gold connectors they are of much higher quality and gold-ness than the electric, so 5 years after purchase they look brand new and gorgeous. I spent a bit of time cleaning the frets that were a bit messy, and polishing the body, but after that it looked pretty good. Re-stringing Acoustics always freaks me out because the plastic pins that hold the strings in the end of the guitar seem to jump and I already freak out worried that a tight string is gonna fly off or break and poke me!! haha. Anyway no big problems, but had a few jumpsof the plastic holders and had to push them back in before re-stringing. So that one is all done now, mostly tuned. Looks like I need a new 9V battery for that though. I should also probably get a chorus pedal eventually. I wonder if I should sell my old Punkifier pedal, that was cool but that's kinda old school now. Looking on Ebay looks like no one has it, and I bet someone random is looking for it. I've always wanted a Wah pedal so maybe I should get one, or at least I need to get my recording going again and get more serious about practicing guitar.

I have to look in my classical case and see if I have classical (nylon) strings, not sure how recently I re-strung the classical but it definitely sounded the most decent out of the 3 guitars, so I must have done that one not too long ago. The electric and acoustic-electric were really in need of a tune-up, so I'm glad to finally be spending the necessary time on these.

So tonight was pretty awesome, on my bike ride home, Jacob and Kat drove by in their car and were like "Hey, what up!" and then they invited me for a glorious dinner!!!!!!!!! I helped out a bit and we made rice and chicken stir fry in tomato sauce and sauteed broccoli with garlic and then a peach and blueberry cobbler for dessert. It was freakin' awesome.

Then tonight just some chillin', and spent a couple hours getting the guitars rolling. I am psyched to start playing a lot again.

Anyhoo super busy day tomorrow at work, and this week has generally been quite busy, but really awesome and I've accomplished a HUGE amount of stuff, so I am super happy and this week has been really awesome. Also Sarah invited me to Pineapple Express last night and so Diego, Sarah and I went to it and it was pretty hilarious. Next week is Siggraph and it's gonna be totally amazing.


My acoustic-electric (blue, left) and electric (sunburst, right)