Dave Jones Guitar Repair

06/25/2022

I’ll be playing with the Mott’s Creek Pickers tonight at Sun Harbor (6-9).

05/05/2021

Another “lefty” conversion. A Yamaha FG-335 this time.

10/30/2020

Food for thought (and your ears).

This video is about The Ultimate Acoustic String Comparison - One guitar 4 guages of strings. We compare Extra Light vs Custom Light vs Light vs Medium strin...

10/10/2020

I had an interesting project recently. The customer had inherited a 1975 Martin D-28 L from a friend who had passed away. The L stands for left-handed and he, being a righty, wanted to be able play it (what his friend would have wanted). This meant that the nut, saddle and pickguard were oriented upside down. There were other issues: the bridge was cracked between the pin holes (it needed to be replaced), the pickguard had shrunken back and was distorted (not uncommon for Martins of this age - the black “potato chip” in the one picture) and there were 3 cracks in the top caused by the shrinking pickguard. There was also a small section of loose binding and the first 3 frets were quite worn. The original pickguard was attached to the top before finish was applied so I filled the void with lacquer and sanded it level with the surrounding finish before creating and applying a new pickguard (thank you Frank Ford). I added a second mirror-image pickguard to the top and now it looks like David Crosby’s Woodstock guitar. Here are some pictures of the process.

03/13/2020

If you have some of these in your guitar case - Get Rid Of Them (and don’t eat them). I believe they ship with the case to keep it dry on its way to the guitar company (I don’t think most cases are made by the guitar company). The guitar doesn’t need to be dry. In fact a relative humidity between 40-50% is what guitars prefer (5 out of 5 luthiers agree).

01/27/2020

I have recently had the privilege of working on a very special guitar. The components aren't special - in fact the most valuable thing on it is probably the Gibson-embossed neck position mini-humbucker. It's special because it was assembled and (more importantly) played by Luthier and Guitarist, Ernie Trionfo. Ernie passed away in 2019 and before he passed, he gave the guitar to his good friend, Danny Eyer. Danny asked me to do a few things to make it a little more suited to his style while keeping it true to the "original". I realized as I was working on it that it had never been worked on by anyone else - Ernie would have done it all. The "Ernie-caster" is a true relic. All the wear and tear came from years of being played and played and played some more. In the photos you can see the wear on the finish, the formerly black chrome hardware and you can even see the scalloping of the fingerboard from Ernie's fingers. So cool.

01/27/2020

Does size (String Gauge) matter? In this episode we test whether guitar string gauges actually make a difference in your guitar sound. Rhett Shull, Dave Onor...

12/25/2019

Merry Christmas.