Guitars are sentient beings.

You gotta get to know 'em before you buy 'em.

Try to remember a time before Amazon online shopping. Maybe you remember when, in order to “buy the best”, you actually had to drive over to Best Buy. Do you remember when Radio Shack and Circuit City were the best places to buy electronics? How about simply going to the Sears, J.C. Penney, Zayer's stores or the local mall to buy clothes? If you wanted to buy a record album, cassette tape or CD, you made a trip over to the local Peaches Records and Tapes or Mainstream Records. Now, all of that is either vanishing or gone forever.

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The way it used to be.

Prior to the advent of the internet and home computers, if you wanted to buy something, you had to go to a store to do so. Almost all of the big retail giants are long gone. Now, music stores are the next to disappear. It is a true and terrible shame that our society has evolved to this.

As a guitarist, I have owned dozens of guitars, bass guitars, amplifiers and other gear all of my life. The first music store I ever walked into was a store in uptown Racine, on Washington avenue. It was a mom and pop store that took up a small space in an old building. I don’t recall the name of the store, but it was a place my old man frequented all of his life. This where he shopped when he needed to get drum gear.

He brought my younger brother and I to that store a few times when we were just little boys. Eventually, the store owner died and the store closed. From that point on, we shopped at Schmitt music, also on Washington avenue, but closer to the lake. That store had a much larger space with a lot more instruments. To me, this was like a candy store, long before I had ever picked up a guitar. I remember waiting for my old man to buy his drum sticks, as I listened to the long-haired hippies jam Led Zeppelin on an electric guitar plugged into a loud amplifier, only a few feet away from me. Music stores equaled trying out instruments and playing songs.

When our family moved to the north side of town in 1971, we found out that there was a music store three blocks from our house. So, instead of driving to the other side of town to get gear, my old man simply drove down the street to “Pulice Music”. My old man, being a known drummer in town, knew the owner, Joe Pulice very well. It wasn't until I started taking guitar lessons at that store in 1976, that I truly began to understand the significance of learning how to play an instrument.

Playing the guitar became a spiritual freedom for me. If I needed picks, the owner's wife let me grab a couple of them out of the jar on the counter and give them to me for free. Or she might charge me a dime or a nickel. I saved up my paper route money and bought my very first electric guitar at that store. I had my eye on it for over a year. It was just over $100. I scraped up every penny I could find and walked out of that store with my new guitar. I must have taken it down off of the rack a hundred times, just to play it and make sure that it was indeed, my next guitar.

This brings me to the point of this article.

I have told hundreds of my students over the years that in order to buy your next guitar, you have to try out a couple dozen others first. Every guitar is made for someone. You just have to find the one that was made for you. The ONLY way that this can be done is to actually drive to the music store and try out ten or twenty guitars for an hour, then walk away. Maybe the next week you go to a different store and try out another twenty guitars. You have to try them all out. You have to play all of the guitars to find which one fits you the best.

There is an amazing joy and satisfaction to this process. You need to feel the guitar around your arms and your hands. You need to play the strings and play the chords. You need to see and realize the selection of guitars in order to compare what feels good to your hands, and yet, still fits your budget. You'd buy a new or used car at a dealership the same way. You have to take a few of them out for a test drive to find which one is your next car. There simply is no better way to buy something so personal. Hands-on comparison is the best way.

The online music stores of today want to take those experiences away from you. Buying gear online has taken all of the fun out of it. Even though you may have tried one guitar at a music store and found the same guitar online for a cheaper price, it's still not the same guitar. If you're shopping for guitars because of a budget, you should probably reconsider investing into something a little less personal then.

Sure, buying online is convenient, but at what cost? How could anyone feel any sort of personal or emotional attachment to something as important as a guitar, if it gets dropped off in a box on your front door step? You’ve never even played it - and yet, there it is, all wrapped up in plastic.

To me, guitars are sentient beings.

They have souls, they have feelings, they have energies and they have personalities. Buying a guitar from a music store is like going out on a date with twenty different people. Chances are, that first date might interest you in a few of those people, but you may not be interested in any of them because they simply don't look or feel right. You have to go out on a few more dates to find that perfect one.

I have always referred to every guitar I have ever owned or played, as having a female energy to it. "She plays well." or "She sounds amazing."

My good friend and band mate, Mike, builds acoustic guitars. They are simply handcrafted, insanely beautiful works of art. He built a guitar for me that is made of Leopardwood, Tigerwood and Zebrawood. It is the most amazingly beautiful guitar I have ever owned in my entire life. She actually has a name too. Her name is "Viki", named after the Russian glamour model, Viktoria Odintcova. That's how beautiful this guitar is to me. If my new "animal" guitar was human, it would look just like her.

I know, that probably sounds weird. but, unless you are someone who has been playing guitars all of your life, it might be a little difficult to understand that these musical instruments very much have a life of their own. The wood breathes like a human as it expands and contracts just like the heart and the lungs.

Every guitar I have ever owned has either been purchased outright at a music store or has been given to me as a gift. I have never purchased a guitar online, and I never will. It is far too personal of a thing for me to just buy a guitar sight unseen. The unfortunate reality is that, what I think in my antiquated ways, is very much in the minority. People buy guitars online by the thousands, everyday. To me, this is sacrilege.

Music stores are going out of business by the dozens because of this. Iconic decades-owned companies like Sam Ash, Guitar Center, Georges and many others are all on their way out forever. There will come a day, not too far into the future when there won't be any music stores to shop at. Right now, the online top dog for music gear is "Sweetwater". I think that if Sam Ash or Guitar Center could find a way to improve their websites to mimic the same sort of thing Sweetwater does, they might have a fighting chance to stay in business. Unfortunately, it may be too late.