Help on Laramie Guitar
brendan o'mahony
I recently went into one of the top guitar shops in London because I
thought it was about time that I bought a decent acoustic six string to
replace my ageing Laramie. I started off by trying guitars in the 200
pounds (300 dollars) range and worked my way up through the price ranges
until I got to 1,200 pounds (about 1,900 dollars) where I found a second
hand Guild guitar which sounded pretty much the same as my Laramie. How
can this be?
I tried practically every well known make available and they had a very
good selection in the shop - Gibson, Takamine, Yamaha, Sigma, etc. but
none of them sounded as good to me as my own Guitar until I tried the
Guild.
In the end I decided to leave the shop as I could not see why I should pay
this amount of money to get the same sound as I got from my own guitar
which I bought about 15 years ago for 23 pounds (35 dollars) including a
soft case!.
How is it possible to get this sort of sound from a cheap mass, produced,
Korean guitar? My guitar is modelled, I think, on a Gibson Hummingbird.
It is sprayed in a Cherry Sunburst colour and has plastic, rectangular
fingerboard inlays. The label inside the soundhole reads 'Laramie by
Rosetti, Model No. 9714, made in Korea'.
I would appreciate it if anybody could give me any information about this
guitar and how it is possible for it to sound like a Guild.
PS there is nothing wrong with my ears!!
Bren
DALENET
show in the USA) playing a _classical_ guitar he had bought in Brazil for
$50. He said it was now his favorite guitar, then played a set of Scott
Joplin ragtime tunes that demonstrated why it would be his favorite.
Marvellous sound! He went on to say that noone should expect to go to
Brazil and buy one like it for $50. He had played _a whole bunch of 'em_
before he found this one and bought it instantly. Most of the others had
varied from junky to passable.
The point is: there are so many factors that determine the sound of any
acoustic musical instrument, you can't predict how any individual example
will sound. The higher quality makers will get it all right more often
than the mass-producers of low-priced instruments. BUT...even the big
names fall short sometimes, and the low-priced ones occasionally turn out
to sound just great. It's at least partly a game of percentages.
So, CONGRATULATIONS, you apparently have won the great guitar lottery and
found one of the exceptionally fine examples in the low-priced category.
We should all be so lucky at least once!
Play on, and enjoy every minute of it.
Happy times,
Dale Owens
PS: Does anyone know if Chet ever recorded those Joplin pieces?