Last year my wife found a guitar at the thrift store. It had no strings and was covered in a hideous and unevenly applied coat of red spray paint. Despite the red veneer, cartoony images, no doubt doodled by some teenager, still peeked through. It was as dry as a bone and held little promise of playability but for the word “Taylor” engraved in the top. She snatched it up for me and brought it home.
Over the weeks to come I slowly resurrected it, giving it much needed moisture, ordering new bridge pins and finally replacing the strings. I came to find that it was in fact a “Big Baby Taylor”, one of their travel guitars given a bit more body. It had a sweet, straightforward tone.
The first song I played on it was in dropped D minor tuning , which required slackening the strings. As I had a lesson coming up I thought I would give it a quick tune back to standard and use it to teach. As I turned the tuning peg for the G string there was a sudden “SNAP!”, the dreaded sound of a string breaking. Frustrated, I put the guitar in its case and promptly forgot about it.
Over time, the same problem kept occurring with my other guitar. Every other time I would tune up from slackened strings the G string would explode dangerously. One day, fed up, I decided to take it as a sign. I restrung my nice guitar with the intention of leaving it in standard tuning, pulled out the thrift store special and began to write music with only five strings. My newly christened guitar, “Busted G”, quickly became my axe of choice.
All songs on “Waiting for Winter” were composed and performed on Busted G. On this album I use three different tunings and some related transpositions: DADAD, DGDGD, and DGDAC. The absence of the third string allows for open chord tunings that do not utilize the interval of a third, leaving the major/minor quality undecided.
