Eddie Van Halen Recovering After Hand Surgery : Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily

Hand surgery for a guitarist is extremely frightening...
"...During the last leg of our tour, I started developing pain in my thumb and my pinky. I didn’t think much of it at the time,” the guitarist says. “It got progressively worse to the point that about three months ago I wasn’t able to play at all. My pinky and my thumb were totally locked up and felt like there was something broken..."

 

Look at that... The editor of "Guitar Player Magazine" @GuitarPlayerNow is following me!

Hi, Paul T Maurer.

Michael Molenda (GuitarPlayerNow) is now following your updates on Twitter.

A little information about Michael Molenda:

341 followers
136 updates
following 375 people

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Best Buy Will Sell Musical Instruments - WSJ.com

This is interesting...   Best Buy getting into the market....   Hopefully their customer service in this area would be as good as the local little guy with better stock availability.    My biggest problem with the local music shops is they have very little variety and depth of stock.   My problem with the guitar center chain is they're very uneven across their stores in knowledge of the product.   

Also, how will Best Buy ensure knowledgeable staff?  Will they do Lessons? Rentals? Will have to wait and see.

Carvin GuitarTraq Discontinued!

So much for customer service and transparency in the operation. I think this amounts to, "We're taking along time to get the product out, so we're removing your ability to track progress and don't call us and ask either!". What do you think would happen if Federal Express or UPS turn off their package tracking and said "We'll call you if there is a problem!". Here is a snippet from the Carvin Blog:

"After careful consideration, Carvin has decided to remove the Guitar Traq feature from Carvin.com. Why? Due to the high volume of guitar and bass sales through Carvin’s Custom Shop, calls and e-mails asking why a particular instrument has not been started yet has affected the efficiency of our operation. Because of Carvin’s higher than normal volume of instrument sales, we are now quoting 10 weeks to build an instrument. It generally takes 4-6 weeks to complete an instrument, but due to the higher sales it is taking several weeks to start a particular instrument. This has concerned some customers who have placed custom orders and who have looked on-line to see that their guitar or bass has not moved in production. These factors led to the decision to discontinue Guitar Traq on-line."


I went to the Carvin.com BBS to discuss with other customers and to add insult to injury, the BBS admin posted the following notice:

"...and on a side note, the decision has been made, so there's no point in debating this. In order to ease this transition, the moderators have been instructed to delete any threads dealing with this decision."
For a product that can cost a $1000 or more paid in advance, you would think that I could call the salesman and ask him where my order is in production! Boy, my order better come on time and be spot on...

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