The $369 Guitar That Ruined Everything

I want to be clear about something right up front: I do not own nice guitars. I own guitars. One of them was made in America, which I mention not to brag but because that is literally the most impressive thing I can say about my collection. I have a really nice acoustic, but I’ve seen bags of specialty coffee that cost more. These are not instruments that need their own insurance rider. These are instruments that need someone to actually play them, which — and here is where the story gets embarrassing — I have mostly failed to do for a solid decade.

For ten years I have owned guitars the way some people own treadmills. They hung on walls. They sat in closets. They were, and I mean this sincerely, beautiful pieces of art that I looked at the way you look at a painting in a hotel lobby — with vague appreciation and absolutely no intention of touching it.

Then my friend David M. took an hour out of his incredibly busy life and did something radical. He showed me how to hold one.

I need you to sit with that for a second. I’m a multi-instrumentalist. I’ve been a professional musician for going on two decades. I have been nominated for Grammys. And a guy had to take an hour — an hour he did not have — to show me how to hold a guitar, how to intonate it, how to do the very basic things that turn a piece of lumber with strings into something you can actually play. David, if you’re reading this: that hour changed everything, and I owe you at minimum a really outstanding dinner, or possibly a small monument.

The guitar in question is a Squier 40th Anniversary Telecaster. Black and gold. Three hundred and sixty-nine dollars. And when David showed me these things, it had been sitting dead stock for three years and seven months with the original factory strings from Indonesia still on it, which — for those keeping score — means those strings had been slowly oxidizing for longer than some marriages last.

Here is what happened next, and I am not making any of this up.

In the process of finally setting up this guitar — this $369 Telecaster that had been patiently waiting in a corner like a dog who still loves you even though you forgot to walk it for three years — I learned how to file a nut. I learned how to intonate. I learned how to adjust pickup height. I learned basic ground soldering techniques, which is a phrase I never in my life expected to say out loud and which makes me feel like I should be wearing a welding helmet and nodding knowingly at other people in welding helmets.

I learned that I really, really like flat-wound 11s on a Telecaster, which, for the non-guitarists, is the string equivalent of deciding your vehicle of choice is a 1972 Cadillac — heavy, smooth, and possessed of a tone that suggests it has been to places and seen some things.

I also learned that my neck pickup is a little boomy. And here’s the thing: I’ve lowered it. I’ve lowered it a lot. The boom remains. The boom is not interested in my opinions. The boom has its own agenda. If anyone out there has advice on taming a boomy neck pickup on a Squier Tele without buying a whole new unit, I am genuinely, desperately all ears.

But here’s the thing about a $369 guitar that you’ve set up yourself: there’s a freedom in it. You can hang out with it on the couch. Your dog can knock it over and it’s not a cardiac event — it’s a Tuesday. If you break something, you’ll fix it, and in the process of fixing it you’ll learn how to fix it, which is a beautiful little cycle that expensive guitars absolutely do not offer because when you break something on a $2,000 guitar you don’t learn — you just sit on the floor and make a sound like a tire losing air.

And I’m getting good now. I’m actually getting good. I look forward to bringing this guitar on vacations, to family things, to the beach. Maybe even on a stage one day, which is a sentence that would have made me laugh out loud three years ago but now feels weirdly possible — dangerous optimism, probably, but earned.

I should tell you: I don’t play in standard tuning. With my short sausage fingers on a Fender long scale neck, standard tuning and I have agreed to see other people. I live in DADGAD. Sometimes EBEABE. Occasionally I’ll throw an E-flat on top just to see what happens. These are not the tunings of a person following a curriculum. These are the tunings of a person who has perfect pitch, decades of music theory, and absolutely no idea where a standard G chord shape is, and who has decided that this is completely fine.

My one regret — and it’s a real one — is that I didn’t do this sooner. I spent years assuming I couldn’t play guitar. Just assuming. Never got a lesson. Never asked someone to show me the basics. I am a person who has designed the music for video games that millions of people have played, and I was defeated by the concept of holding a guitar, which is something actual children do successfully every single day.

So thank you, David, for the hour. Thank you, Fender, for the Squier. Not for your Custom Shop masterpieces or your American Professionals. Thank you for building a $369 guitar in a factory in Indonesia that, with a little love and some flat 11s and a filed nut and about four years of unjustifiable neglect, plays like it knows a secret.

I don’t have nicer guitars. I have this guitar.

And it’s perfect.