Look out Cletus thars a white truck comin up the laneway...

Sorry this is such a complaint but there's a luthier mentioned somewhere down the page...

Well what is there to say about really expensive guitars except that some people can obviously afford them, (perhaps not here?) for the rest of us its just too depressing. When you could get a really good handcrafted guitar for 800 or a thousand bucks or so, that was a lot of money but conceivable; now that it's more like $3,000 and a grand might get you an "entry level" guitar from a maker that started small and is now a small factory rather than a shop...

But if I did have the three grand, it wouldn't go far from home. It would go to Oskar Graf just down the road, who is every bit Grit Laskin's equal as a luthier if not as an inlay artiste. Kind of makes me happy just thinking about it. Don Ross and many other serious talents play Oskars guitars.

A friend of mine, against my advice, bought an overpriced (IMO) D-28 in lousy playing condition, paid Oskar $600 to recondition it, took it to Michigan and sold it to Elderly, tripling his investment by the time he converted the proceeds back into Canadian dollars (its about a 3-2 ratio these days), and _then_ ordered a guitar from Oskar. Boy I wish overpriced Brazilian D-28s grew on trees. The dramatic difference in the dollars is having mixed effects: it's a major reason for the success of Seagulls (and the various other brands made in La Patrie Quebec) down there where you're all saying, oy vey such a bargain,; that's good I guess; but all the Martins and other good guitars are going south because there is such a buck to be made in flipping them currency-wise. (Something which shrewd Yankee carpetbaggers have figured out.) The same is true for used tractors incidentally. Possibly Cletus wuz here.

Bill