Have Guitar, Will Travel

After weeks of itchy fingers from having no guitar, and now that we've settled into a place for the next little while, I finally decided that it was time to get myself one. My original plan was to scour the local music stores and find something relatively inexpensive that I could just noodle around with, but which would still work for when TRS comes over in the fall to play some shows. Unfortunately, playing left-handed makes for a somewhat unique challenge, since each music store will usually only have a couple of them, so that limited my options pretty severely. In fact, I only found one lefty guitar that I was remotely interested in during my travels. It was a Squier Strat, which is what I had in mind originally, but it was the lowest of the low-end guitars, and frankly I wanted to get something slightly better than the "beginner" model.

So, having scratched the original plan, I decided to check on eBay, and found two prime candidates that I spent the better part of a week debating over. Ultimately, mostly for weight reasons (I prefer lighter guitars), I decided to go with this one: a Hagstrom F200-P. It arrived two days later, and it's a really fun guitar to play. Feel-wise, it reminds me a lot of the Eastwood I picked up in the fall, only smoother. One minor setback is that I still don't have the tremolo arm for it; the company who sold it to me only had a right-handed one, so they called Hagstrom who is apparently shipping me the proper arm, which I'm hoping will show up this week sometime. Anyway, I'm back to playing regularly again, although I still feel like I'm just getting myself back into shape after taking a month and a half off from playing. It doesn't seem like a long time, but when you go from playing almost every day and going to band practice every week to not playing at all, it really does make a difference.

Awesome!