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| This is me playing my 1984 Guild Mark V Classical Guitar at a wedding in December, 2012Add caption |
A couple weeks ago I bought a used Ramirez R4 classical guitar. I have been looking for another guitar but good ones do not show up locally very often. I searched Guitar Center's web site and found four of these Ramirez guitars, one each at four different stores around the country. I bought the one from their Fairfax, Virginia store. These guitars sell new for $3,000.00. I paid $1,500.00. That was the price at all of their stores for this model used instrument. This one was made in 2007. The experience wasn't the easiest. I spent a lot of time on the phone with an inexperienced employee which resulted in a convoluted mess with my credit card. I had to call the card company and spent more time trying to get that all sorted out. All told i was a solid two weeks trying to make the purchase and get the guitar delivered to my local Guitar Center store in Syracuse, N.Y.
Finally, the big day arrived. I went to the store, opened up the box took it out it inspect & play it. It was a very nice looking instrument, appeared well made. I strummed a chord & it was out of tune, in fact the strings were loose. No problem, I began to tune. The first thing I noticed was the tuning machines felt somewhat cheap. They worked OK, just had a cheap feel. The ones on my 1984 Guild Mark V are vastly superior. After it was tuned I discovered almost every fretted note rattled or buzzed. There was no way you could play this guitar with a solid rest stroke. It was horrible. A closer examination revealed that once upon a time the bridge had lifted up causing an arched shaped cavity between it & the body. This cavity had been filled with some sort of epoxy or glue, and done poorly. My suspicion is that someone left this guitar in the sun or the heat and then initiated a home repair, botched it up and left the guitar in a most unsatisfactory state of playability.
The GREAT part of this story is that Guitar Center has a terrific return policy. The would have let me take it home to evaluate for 30 days. However, it only took 15 minutes in the store to discover it was flawed. So they cheerfully refunded (credited my credit card)my money. All of it. I didn't even have to pay for shipping or handling. That was terrific. My final feeling about the R4 is that they are probably a good instrument, however, I would never buy a guitar for $3,000.00 that had cheesey tuners like this one did. In fact, for $1500.00 you should get much better tuning machines.
