NGD - New Gift Day

Phostenix

Phostenix

Power User
Back story: My wife & I have been volunteering at a CPS shelter home for almost 2 years. Shelter homes are really the intake point in the CPS system. The girls are only there for a brief time (less than 3 months on average). Our house is girls 11-17 YO. There are typically 9 girls in the house.

One of the current girls owned guitars before she was taken from her home and she has no idea where the guitars ended up. One of the other girls had a guitar from a friend for a couple of weeks recently and this girl got to play again. Then the girl with the guitar got transferred out to a group home & the guitar went with her. So, our girl is bumming now, as you can imagine. She's very creative & I think it would be good for her to have a creative outlet through a guitar.

It just so happens that her birthday is in a couple of weeks, so I wanted to get a guitar for her (I got approval from the house manager to get one for her). She told me she prefers Les Paul style guitars to Strat style guitars, so I started searching for inexpensive LP copies. I ended up going with the Douglas Shadow Black from Rondo Music. $140 plus $23 for the gig bag. The bag is VERY nice. The guitar matches my expectations for a $140 LP copy. My only real issue is that they chamfered the ends of the frets a little too much and you can easily fall off the fret board with the high E string doing pulloffs & hammer-ons on a D chord. The guitar sounds surprisingly good, They have upgraded models with better woods, set neck, Alnico V pickups, etc., but this guitar actually has a good voice for clean to classic rock sounds (sorry, I'm not a metal guy, so I'm no guage of that). I spent a little time last night with it into my Trainwreck patch & was pretty impressed.

We'll see if I can keep a secret until her birthday. :)

Here's a pic:

GiftGuitar.jpg



Link to Rondo Music if you've never checked them out:
Douglas Shadow Black - RondoMusic.com
 
London John said:
If you PM me your paypal address, I'll match your $ and you can get her a little amp.
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Thank you very much for your offer. When the other girl had the Strat, I got them a Danelectro Honeytone battery operated amp so they could sit on the couch with it. I got that approved by the staff. I had planned to get another one of those for this guitar. I will have to get an amp approved by the house manager next week. Let me get back to you on this. :)
 
I'll donate £10 to the cause. There's no better feeling than putting a smile on a child's face. Pm me your details.
 
Phostenix said:
My only real issue is that they chamfered the ends of the frets a little too much and you can easily fall off the fret board with the high E string doing pulloffs & hammer-ons on a D chord.
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I'm sure a local luthier or repair shop could cut a new nut that would solve this issue.

Very cool story by the way!

A few years year back I answered an add on Craigs List where a wounded vet (now in a wheel chair) was looking for someone to donate a guitar to him as he had no money and spent most of his days in a rehab facility (bored).
I gave him an old Ovation Celebrity that was just collecting dust at my house. Man he was so happy when I dropped it off to him.
I hope this doesn't come off as me trying to 'one up' your story....your story just reminded me of this I thought it was worth sharing.
 
Update:

Our girl received her guitar yesterday and to say that she loved it would be an understatement. She's a big Greenday fan, so she told me that her new guitar is like the one Billie Joe Armstrong uses. :)

We met the girls (and staff) at a local park last night for a music event ( | Online At Anthem ) and she brought the guitar with her. Ha! She said she's going to take it everywhere with her.

The one family member that she might have been able to go live with died a couple of days ago, so now she knows she will most likely stay in the foster care system until she ages out at 18. The timing of the guitar gift was perfect. God is always at work in our lives. :)

One of the staff texted me some pics that this girl took of herself with the new guitar. I wish I could post them (we're not allowed to reveal identities of these kids), because they are amazingly cool. Seriously.

She's also talking about being able to go to Alice Cooper's "The Rock" this summer now that she has a guitar. The Rock | Alice Cooper Solid Rock Foundation

A Special thank you goes out to London John and Fabio for pitching in on this. The house manager didn't want to add more to this one girl's gift because of the issues it might cause with the other girls (anytime 1 kid gets something expensive that the others don't, it can create jealousy issues in a house of 9 kids). So, what I got approval to do is buy a small keyboard that will belong to the house and any of the girls can use it. I actually bought 2 keyboards - one for the shelter house that we visit each week and 1 for the group home where the girl we are mentoring lives. One of the keyboards has arrived and the other should ship early next week. We are working out the details of where they will put the keyboards & how they will handle their use. I'll post pics of those soon. :)

Here's a pic of what I wrote on the back of the guitar with a paint pen:
GiftGuitar2.jpg
 
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Things like this warm my heart. I wish I had seen it before so I could pitch in tbh.

Good on you, dude. Much respect.
 
I'm going to deliver one of the keyboards to the group home tonight. The other one should be here tomorrow & I hope to be able to take it Friday night when we go to the shelter house.

I like this Yamaha PSR-E333 keyboard. I got a factory return unit from Guitar Center online for $115. I'm tempted to get one for myself. :) It has a lesson tool built in to it that I've played with a little that is pretty cool. I got the factory return PSR-E243 for the shelter house for $80. It has a few less features, but I have my doubts that it will survive the environment, so I got this one first to see how it goes. :) They are going to have their handyman build a locking cabinet for it so it is protected when it's not being used. The group home will just keep the keyboard in the "office" of the house and the girls will check it out when they want to use it.

I thought keyboards would be a better house instrument (than a house guitar, e.g.) for most kids since you can typically start to play melodies faster plinking on a keyboard than trying to figure out fretting & strumming & picking, etc. on a guitar. Plus, I'm not sure how well a shared guitar would hold up.

As a side note, we took the girl we are mentoring to the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale a couple of weeks ago. They have a room where you can actually play some instruments and they have a fairly large floor standing harp there. I was amazed at how quickly she was able to make melodies on the harp and how therapeutic it was for her. Made me want to get a table top harp for the house. :) I don't know how well that would survive in a group environment, either, though. :lol
 
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bmgguitars said:
You're a good man. Thankful there are still people like you in this world.
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Here's what I tell the girls: Anything good you see in me is Jesus. :) Before I knew Jesus, I was a pretty angry, cynical, selfish, self-righteous jerk. I didn't care about kids like these. Through a sequence of things, God has placed us in these houses and given us a love for these girls. We're just trying to show them the love He has shown us. It's one of the hardest things my wife & I have ever done (the stories of many of their lives are truly heart breaking), but God is getting bigger, more real, and more glorious every day as we work with these girls and see Him working in their lives.
 
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You're a good man Steve. I have always been impressed by your integrity. Folks he wouldn't go to AXE-FEST 1 or 2 because he wanted to spend the money on the girls instead. I think next year your visit might be on me and Jeff Valenta (MesaGuitarGuy), just kidding Jeff.
 
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