Touring - Touring with a guitar?

Possibly the worst use of space EVER, but I was wondering if anyone has attempted it. I know Martin makes a cheap lil' "backpacker" guitar...

Even now I'm looking at a couple old acoustics I have around and wondering if I could build a lil hatch for the back to be able to store clothes inside...


I'm gearing up for a fairly long summer tour (Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, Great Lakes, Pacific) and am really not sure if I could go the 3-4 months without an instrument. I usually practice a couple hours a day.


Cheers...

Matt B

I know Marten make a full mahogany gtr, top and sides, that should stand up to the environmental stresses you will experience. Check it outl.

The Martin travelers guitar I tried sounds like a ukulele, maybe take up a different instrument like a recorder.

Have you thought about getting a guitar made for kids? Not some Playschool guitar, but just a full sized guitar made for kids. Back when I was in grade school (and about 4'6" tall), I was playing guitar, and I had a much smaller guitar than the other guys in my guitar group- those guys were in high school and college and had much bigger guitars than me, but I was just as legit playing as they were- we did a lot of competitions, and won almost every time. They do make some serious guitars for kids out there- I'm not sure what brand my parents got for me, but I'm sure a check on the internet and ebay would point you in the right direction.

Koffee

.....but lugging a guitar for 4 months??

oooh, i like the look of that. I'll likely be going bobyak as well.


yeah, the current plan is tampa, st. augustine, great lakes area, banff/jasper, pacific somewhere, portland, or. I'm not sure how long it'll take me, but I've taken four months off of work.


was this picture from a tour?

Hey, Fixer, when I visited San Diego last month, it did rain on the fourth day that I was there so SoCal does have rain.

Why not bring a mandolin, it is a common second instrument for alot of guitaists.

Even better...

bring an Air Guitar.

Lightweight, indestructable and won't get stolen. :)

and yup. four months. = ) i play quite a bit. here's a mp3, btw. http://redsk8r.jengineer.net/t1g0.mp3.


i'm actually now leaning towards getting a large trapdoor thing in the back of one of my beater guitars. got a few friends who do high-end carpentry, wahoo. maybe a sleeping bag would fit in there? would make it supported from the inside as well.

good comments though, except for that air guitar bit. who let THAT guy in here?! jeebus.

= )


cheers...

matt b.

Dont mess the guitar, putting a door in the guitar will make it heavier, and wont provide much storage space. Just put the guitar on the top of a trailer, and double wrap it. A 3/4 size guitar may be OK if you dont have fat fingers.

A classical guitar will save you a small amount of space and weight, Yamaha makes the nicest cheapies I believe. With all the supports in the back of a guitar I don't think you could get a very big oppening in the back of one, if you could I would forget the door part and just leave it open, it MIGHT improve the sound as well, see Willie Nelson's Trigger.http://www.willienelson.com/album/1/album1.html
there is another big hole in the back, but I couldn't find a pic.

I'd stay away from compromise instruments like the Martin backpacker, unless you absolutely must have six strings and a tiny instrument. Attempts to make a guitar with a tiny body always fail. The only way to make such a small instrument work is to get rid of the low strings and tune the whole instrument higher. After which, you can congratulate yourself for reinventing the ukulele.

A ukulele it a great portable instrument. Don't count it out. Though it only has four strings and re-entrant tuning, it is really just a little guitar. Same guitar chords work on the uke. Just a fourth higher. And there are some advantages. The limited range of the uke favors chord progressions over melodies, and are great for arranging tunes. Nylon strings almost never break, either.

And there have recently been some great and affordable ukes on the market. I like the Flea, a US made soprano uke (the tiniest size, smaller than most mandolins) that sounds and plays well, weighs almost nothing, and sells for less than $150 from places like Elderly Instruments.

http://www.TheBicyclingGuitarist.net/

Sounds like a good time to pick up the harp (harmonica). :)

Singing would be even better!

--J

The large thing strapped to the top of the back rack ain't actually a guitar but a rear stabilising fin to keep better balance on the fast downhills...

get a steel guitar. they're great sounding and they're durable. just keep it fairly dry.


http://www.musiciansstorehouse.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=RC-2&Category_Code=AG&Product_Count=24

You might want to check with Louis Little. He bought a guitar during an extended tour last year and carried it with him for the rest of the tour. He talks about the guitar in his journal on crazyguyonabike.com (http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/journal/?opts=300&doc_id=372&mtime=20040324163118).

-----------------
www.denisegoldberg.com (http://www.denisegoldberg.com)

How about an xtracycle?

Possibly the worst use of space EVER, but I was wondering if anyone has attempted it. I know Martin makes a cheap lil' "backpacker" guitar...

Even now I'm looking at a couple old acoustics I have around and wondering if I could build a lil hatch for the back to be able to store clothes inside...


I'm gearing up for a fairly long summer tour (Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, Great Lakes, Pacific) and am really not sure if I could go the 3-4 months without an instrument. I usually practice a couple hours a day.


Cheers...

Matt B


Yeah man, I met a guy on the careterra austral (some bad calaminas there...) in southern Chile who was riding from Usuhaia to Bariloche (2500 miles?) with a gee´tar stuffed in one of his front bags. Wicked. Makes a good sail too. Not a bad use of space at all - what do you need if it´s going to be warm? It´ll stop you loading your panniers with really useless stuff...like spare clothes.

Well, I would up carrying the guitar around on the Bob trailer. I had a sweater around it at all times I would use as a pillow at camp, and picked up a big backpacking raincover for the elements.

It worked very well, and it was actually a big help having those flat surfaces on top of the Bob... lots of places to stuff things between the bag and the guitar, on top to dry, the guitar made a great surface for scribbling and such.

Problem was I never played the damn thing. I had one day off on the Blue Ridge Parkway where it was really worthwhile, but other than that it was dead weight.

So, since the guitar was basically a gift to my from an old neighbor in Gainesville, I left it with the Cookie Lady.


= )



Matt


so far....
matt.crazyguyonabike.com

[QUOTE=Problem was I never played the damn thing. I had one day off on the Blue Ridge Parkway where it was really worthwhile, but other than that it was dead weight.
[/QUOTE]

I don't pull mine off to play it that often, only when I take a rest day or do a half day and feel like having a strum. At first I thought it was a pain in the arse, but now I'm really glad I brought it, especially not knowing how long I will be on the road.

Making a door in the back is actually a pretty neat idea and shouldn't compromise the sound The only thing that really matters is the top as proved by a top classical maker when he built a guitar out of Styrofoam with a spruce top and demonstrated that it sounded exactly the same as one built with rosewood back and sides. The other thing is try to find something small like a steinberger or risa headless electric plus some small amp like a smokey.

if you want to just play for a little while you can just walk into a music store and dick around for a while, I do it every now and then and they dont' seem to care,

I used to work at a music store and there were a few people who would come in regularly and just play for an hour and then leave, I never bothered them and the owner actualy yelled at the manager for giving one guy a hard time, even though it was after closing time and the guy was just practicing on one of our guitars,

fernandez makes an electric guitar named the nomad with a built in amp and speaker,

http://www.guitarshop.net/fernandes/nomad_dlx.jpg

What about an electric? If you really just want to practice rather than perform for other people then a small scale electric with a tiny headphone amp would do - a child size Strat copy is very small and you could even hack some of the body off to make it smaller. The necks on a lot of these things even unbolt if you had to make it really small for some reason. I don't think the inside of an acoustic is going to give you much room for storage.

thing is, acoustics don't weigh much at all. mine was five pounds. most of the small models i found only dropped down to a little over three pounds, not that big of a difference.


and storage? we're talking touring here. i'm not looking for "much room", just something. a place to put a pillow where it wouldn't need to be compressed. or a sweater. or ramen. pack it dense enough, pillow & blanket maybe, and you'd make the whole thing stronger.


the neck point is GREAT though. i hadn't thought of that at all. would be much easier storing two things 18" across then one thing over a yard across.


word...


matt b.

Also posted in the stickied thread...


The guit ended up staying with Cookie Lady. = )

go with a ukulele, you'll love it

I have often wondered about the possibility making a collapsible guitar that can pack into a small flat case. It would have to be solid body, maybe with a tiny battery powered amp. The neck could detach, and maybe also be hinged in the middle. Obviously the difficulty will be in making it stiff (and light)enough, and also easy enough to assemble. The idea is not to have someting that will sound fantastic, but just something to enable one to quell the urge to play and stretch the fingers a bit (and not be a pain in the butt to carry about - I've backpacked with a guitar once, and never again).
I'm sure there are probably 1000 reasons why it would be impossible....but in theory it would be nice

not mentioned yet but perhaps a violin? very easy to learn and very light and compact. I just started in jan and I am 33 years old. I felt like a kid again.!

I took my backpacker guitar on my last tour... It was okay, not too cumbersome, but I probably didn't play it as much as I thought I would...

Next time, I'm either taking the violin or the mandolin...

here's a picture of it sticking out the back of my rig...

http://www.strangerthanfact.com/tourva/day1/pics2/09day1enterbc.jpg

Just realized that its not immediately apparent: the guitar is on the back of the Bob trailer, strings down, neck pointing towards the rear. There is a shop rag tied around the neck where it rests on the fender of the trailer's wheel. There is a wool sweater wrapped around the body that doubled as my pillow. The guitar would come into the tent with me each night.


The flat surface of the rear of the guitar worked muuuch better than I had anticipated. It was a great place to bungee things, to slip things underneath the sweater, to lay flat to dry, etc.


Even though I didn't play it all that much, the effect of the guitar on others was amazing. No longer was I just a crazy guy on a bike, I had something that could make anyone laugh as soon as they saw it, something that brought me that much closer to just being some fella makin' his way along....






Also posted in the stickied thread...


The guit ended up staying with Cookie Lady. = )

HOw about a Melodica?
they come with cases too
http://www.larryhoppen.com/images/Melodica.jpg

ROTFL. I'm there dude. Screw the violin and mandolin for my next trip.