Six-String Me

The Six-String Nation guitar got me thinking about what I would put into a little guitar to symbolize my life and heritage.

Let's start at the start in the dusty little West Texas town where my parents grew up. About the only things that grows out there are mesquite and cedar trees, which some luthiers use for bottoms, tops, sides and fingerboards, although I'm not sure the species you'll find in West Texas are the proper ones for guitar-making.

Baseball was the sport I enjoyed the most and was the least bad at so my custom luthier will have to work some Louisville Slugger into this guitar, maybe in the bridge.

For fret wires, how about melting down the key to that old MGB that I used to love, except for when I hated it for breaking down at rush hour. Also, I spent a few summers working at a refinery and a fabrication yard along the Houston Ship Channel so could you make tuning pegs out of burned welding rods? And I spent enough money at the orthodontist to buy a couple of high-end Martins so maybe now I can get some use out of my kids' old braces.

To represent the college years, I think a pick guard fashioned from a polished armadillo shell would be a real eye-catcher. I'd like the fret markers to be shaped like longhorn silhouettes and you could make them out of beer bottle caps.

So far I've only covered about half my life and I think I've come to a dead end. This guitar has nothing about my profession, the places I've lived in the past 25 years, my wife, children (other than their braces). I'll have to give this some more thought because I'm having trouble coming up with tangible things that represent them -- at least tangible things that you could work into a guitar. Maybe I'm just more complex than Canada.