Build Your Own Acoustic Guitar – BYOA 19 – Graham Taylor

Graham’s second guitar

Graham came on our Build your Own Custom Guitar course a while back and made a Tasmanian Blackwood bolt on guitar with all the bells and whistles. This time it was to build an acoustic guitar and he opted to keep it simple except for the cutaway and Tasmanian Blackwood rosette. I’ve mentioned before how it always surprises me how many folks come back to build a second or third (and sometimes even more!) but as you can see from the letter of ‘complaint’ written just before finishing his acoustic, Graham seems to have a particularly bad case of Baileyitis:

I am contacting you today to make my feelings known about the level of service your company provides and the damaging effect it has on both my sleep patterns and my mental stability.

1. Your service is far too friendly and accommodating.
2. I have been diagnosed with BGCWS (Bailey Guitars Clinical Withdrawal Syndrome).
3. Contact with your company has results in OGBC (Obsessive Guitar Building Compulsion.)
4. I have suffered major loss of personal time from trawling YouTube in search of videos about routing, wood working skills, guitar building skills and the tonal qualities of wood.
5. The service you offer has resulted in many lost hours of sleep, whilst I lie awake designing guitars in my head and wondering about wood combinations.
6. The hours of sleep I lose over product design are minuscule in comparison to the days I devise ways of extending time spent at Bailey Guitars.
7. Finally (only because 7 is my lucky number) is the weeks lost spending time locked in a small cell in the local police headquarters for petty crimes committed in an attempt to garner money for my next fix!

I hope that, as an ethical company, you are happy that you have changed my life forever with no hope of recovery or rehabilitation.
I can only hope that the newly designed bass, the spalted maple LP style, the “335”, another acoustic and a variety of other projects you have somehow planted in my head, are the final guitars I have to build.
I have now fashioned a hat from tin foil and am wearing this as I type in order to protect myself from the Bailey Brain Bug and will make a point of wearing this headgear on my next visit when I reluctantly come down to your workshop to finish my acoustic.
I would like to say that I am looking forward to my next visit, but I find lying very difficult as you well know.
Reluctantly yours
Graham McDonald Taylor

If like Graham you have always wanted to build your own guitar take note: We are currently setting dates for 2014 so check our online shop where you can view dates and courses and book yourself in.