Sunday was the first time I got back to practicing since traveling to the Canadian Rockies for vacation last week. Traveling plans didn’t allow for me to take along a guitar, and there wasn’t one available to me while I was out there. And I would not have had time to play anyway, as every day was filled with an amazing and breathtaking (literally) hiking/sightseeing experience.
As great as the whole experience was (and it was great), the long and short of it from a six-string perspective is that I didn’t practice for a full week. And man, what a difference a week makes!
Late Sunday morning I sat down to practice and was astonished at how much ground I had “lost.” I had been getting relatively smooth with all my new chord changes before leaving town, but today I was finding myself searching around and grabbing the wrong strings. Or, on the occasion that I found the right chord, I was dulling out strings to produce more of a thud progression rather than chord progression as I played along.
Gradually, after just sticking with it and REALLY slowing things down, I began to get back in the groove a bit. After about 45 minutes or an hour, I think I got back to roughly where I left off last week.
Later in the day I caught up on some shopping, as well.
I had planned to go back to Mandolin Brothers on Saturday. I want to take my D-28 in to compare with the Collings D3 in the same room at the same time. And of course I’m also curious to see what other instruments they may have gotten in since I was there last. But, having just arrived home from our trip on Friday night, there were many things to take care of and Saturday got away from me before I had the chance to venture to Staten Island.
On the plane home from Canada, though, I had finished reading Clapton’s Guitar, a book about master luthier Wayne Henderson written by Allen St. John. In the back of the book is a listing of several vintage guitar shops around the country, including Lark Street Music in Teaneck, NJ. My cardiologist had mentioned this place to me once after seeing the Martin Guitar logo on the back of a jacket I wore to a checkup, but I had forgotten about the place. Late Saturday night I checked the web and found that Lark Street Music is open on Sundays. So Sunday after a late lunch (still a little off schedule from our trip), Suzy and I headed off to Teaneck to see what I could find.
While not as jaw-dropping as Mandolin Brothers, Lark Street is still an outstanding guitar shop. I played Martins, a Mossman, several Gibsons, including one from the year of my birth and another that sounded better but looked as if it might fly apart at any moment. (Of course, that’s probably why it sounded so good.) I tried out my first Blueridge guitar, a very pleasant surprise, and several models made by the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, by far the best of which was a curiously small-bodied baritone guitar.
The two guitars that stood out to me were a Martin and, again, a Collings. The Martin was an OM “Negative,” which I had never heard of. It’s a limited edition guitar with black body and white appointments, the most oddly striking of which is the white fingerboard. At first glance I dismissed it as flash, but eventually I took it off the wall and found that it had a great feel and a very nice tone. If there were no Collings guitars in the world, I would have been mighty tempted by this thing.
But of course there are Collings guitars out there, and the D2H I played at Lark Street was a real winner. Perfect feel and outstanding tone. This guitar rivals the D3 I placed on hold at Mandolin Brothers. I don’t think it’s quite the D3’s equal, but it’s extremely close. Once one of these guitars is in my hands, I just can’t seem to let them go. Beautiful, beautiful instruments. I can’t wait to get back to Mandolin Brothers to play that D3 again….