Why Sweetwater’s Guitar Gallery gives you the reassurance of a brick and mortar guitar store with the convenience and value of shopping online
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Chances are you remember the first time you bought a guitar. Depending on your age and where you lived, that first guitar buying experience was probably done in a brick and mortar store, where you wandered the racks and stands searching for that one guitar that spoke to you, the one that would set you off on your journey as a musician.
For most of us, the huge benefits of price, convenience and choice that online musical instrument retail offers us is worth losing some of the more romantic aspects of guitar buying. But that being said, wouldn’t it be great to inject some of that back into it somehow?
Because a guitar isn’t a TV, a refrigerator, or a games console. While the consistency and quality of guitar making has remarkably improved across the board in recent years, these are still works of art made primarily out of wood by human hands. This adds a certain amount of variance that, frankly, is part of why we love these instruments.
The issue is that when you’re buying online, most of the time you don’t have anything more to go on than a picture that might well be a manufacturer’s product shot, and some basic spec. How can you make a fully informed decision about your dream instrument with such limited information? Don’t worry, Sweetwater has you covered.
Get Close Up
If you’ve browsed Sweetwater recently – and let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you definitely have – you will probably have encountered the Sweetwater Guitar Gallery. If you haven’t, this innovative and hugely useful tool helps bring a bit of the old magic of wandering a guitar store, turbocharged by the power of America’s favourite online guitar retailer.
The Guitar Gallery is a dedicated space at Sweetwater’s Indiana HQ where guitars are inspected, photographed, weighed and fettled into perfect playing condition by a skilled and dedicated team.
For one, this means that you can see pictures of the exact guitar you’re going to buy. When you visit a guitar’s Sweetwater product page, you’ll be presented with a list of guitars matched to their respective serial number. Each of these guitars has their individual weight listed, and also photos of that exact guitar taken so you can get up close and personal, and make sure that this is the perfect guitar for you.
That means from a weight perspective, if you’re like Adam Jones from Tool and you think that the heavier a Les Paul is, the better it sounds, you can pick the chunkiest, meatiest slab of mahogany you can find. Or if you’re of the school that thinks that any Strat over 8lbs is making you work too hard? Well the Guitar Gallery can let you find the ideal candidate to get close with.
It’s not just about weight however, the fact that each guitar is individually photographed also lets you really dial in on what your dream guitar is going to be – especially when you’re talking about guitars with visible wood grain.
We all know that no piece of wood is identical, and the Guitar Gallery celebrates this – while giving you a hitherto unseen level of choice. It’s quite the thing to be scrolling through every individual guitar of a certain model and finish until you find the burst pattern that is just perfect, or the top figure that speaks to you. They certainly never offered this breadth of choice in even the biggest brick and mortar guitar store.
And that, ultimately is the magic of the Guitar Gallery – it doesn’t just let you see the guitar you’re actually buying, it lets you find your guitar soulmate in a way that you never would have been able to before.
Handled With Care
But the Guitar Gallery is about more than just pictures and weights – it also gives you the piece of mind that an instrument has been inspected and checked by a real human being, who has treated the guitar like it’s their very own.
As part of the Guitar Gallery service, every guitar featured also receives Sweetwater’s rigorous 55-point inspection checklist to ensure that your guitar arrives with you in perfect condition.
The details of the inspection process is far too detailed to go into here (though you can read about all 55 here!) but rest assured that Sweetwater’s Guitar Gallery team will go over every inch of your instrument. They’ll polish it, clean it, ensure that the frets and setup are tip top, and of course make sure that it plays, sounds and feels just like it should.
The Guitar Gallery team is made up of professional technicians, inspectors, and luthiers, who have been trained by the big brands themselves about exactly what your guitar should feel, play and sound like. They also have years of customer feedback to draw on to ensure that they know exactly what you expect.
Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about your precious new guitar having a rough time before it gets to you, as every guitar is stored in Sweetwater’s temperature and humidity-regulated facility 24/7. So you’ll know it’s going to be in tip-top shape when it heads out to you.
Buying With Confidence
The Sweetwater Guitar Gallery is a truly game-changing innovation for guitar players: offering a level of choice and personalisation that you’ve never been able to experience at even the biggest and most well-stocked brick and mortar store, all without having to leave the house.
It takes away so much of the guesswork and potential for disappointment that often plagues online shopping. And knowing that a team of dedicated professionals has got the instrument in perfect condition before it leaves the store, you’ll just need to sit back and wait for the sweet moment you can crack open the box, and strum that first chord on your new favourite guitar.
Find out more at Sweetwater.com.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
