I started with a Martin Bb Tenor saxophone (according to the factory, made 5 years before I was born), added a King Eb Alto Sax and a Selmer Bb clarinet sometime along the way in high school.

Unfortunately, my kids have played all of the above - without good maintenance - so the pads have all fallen out and they are all currently unplayable. The above is somewhat irrelevant since my teeth all fell out and I couldn't play them now anyway.

I acquired a "full rack" of p'whistles (C, G, D, A, F, Bb, ...) somewhere during my early festival days, when I was noted for never missing a note while sipping my beer and not dropping my cig.

Somewhere else along the line I picked up a fairly full set of harmonicas - currently missing only a good C to be able to not play very well in any key.

During the early years of festival going I got my first mando - a Washburn A style, and on one occasion got drunk enough to think I was playing it. Several in the campsite were also drunk enough to think the same, but when I sobered up the next day I found that it was a totally recalcitrant instrument from which ordinary humans could not coax music - so I entered semi retirement in the mando performance area for a few years. (And enjoyed a little more music and a lot less "drunk" at the festivals.)

While on a work transfer from Kansas to Seattle, I met a sweet young thing who had an urge to visit her mother in Texas, so on the way to taking her there we stopped at my favorite festival in Winfield Kansas, where she became enamored of "music stuff" and bought a kit for a mountain dulcimer - which of course I was delegated to assemble. We tripped back from Seattle for the next three year's festivals, and then moved back to Kansas just to cut the travel time.

Her interest in "music stuff" led to a revival of my mando career, and ultimately to a much more expensive Vega F-style - currently unplayable because the knobs all crumbled and fell off the tuners.

Three mountain dulcimers, hand built. One new purchased "pretty" laptop dulcimer for the loved one. One (and possibly the only in existence) double bass washtub bass (two tubs). One no-name Chinese standup bass. One Washburn acoustic-electric bass guitar. A Stagi English Concertina (her venture into the world of chromaticity). And a couple of keyboards used mostly for notation input.

And my current number 1 instrument - a no-name all plywood A-style mandolin, currently sporting a bridgecap whittled out of a clothespin when the original cracked on the second day of last year's festival.

Fortunately, I only play for my own enjoyment - so I have none of that "acquisition syndrome" stuff to contend with.

John