Sometime in late 1993 I found myself in giant music mega-store in Singapore (Tom Lee Music) shopping for guitars. It had been almost 2 years since I had surgery on one of my shoulders to repair some damage from a motor vehicle accident, and about 3 years since my forced withdrawal from a Classical Guitar University Degree program due to damage caused by that same car accident. In those 3 years I had done very little playing. What I had done though was a lot of travel and after being on the road for about a year I knew I needed to get a guitar.
Still in great shape despite the millage and use – Yamaha FG-421
Tom Lee was the first mega-store for music I had ever been in. The acoustic guitar section alone had its own floor and comprised about 3000 square feet of retail space. They had about 1000 instruments in stock and I spent two days playing through them all, trying to find a diamond in the rough so to speak. I knew I needed something well made that sounded good and played good, but would also be able to withstand the trials and tribulations of backpacking around the world. Most likely that was going to be a Yamaha guitar; I just needed to find the best one in the mid level price range (if I remember correctly was around 450 Singapore dollars) that I could afford. I had more money I could have spent – that same car accident that helped crush my music dreams did afford me some money to travel on, but I had to consider that if I lost a $450 guitar (which was very likely to happen given the travel I was doing) I would absorb the blow much better than if I lost a $1000 guitar.
What I purchased was a brand new, first production Yamaha FG 421. It was all laminate construction so no solid top, but it looked nice, had a few small extras (like white binding around the top and the fingerboard) and it played exceptionally well for what it was. It was perfectly intonated (another big plus) had a nice action, and sounded fantastic with no dead notes or fret issues. In fact it sounded better than many of the guitars that were twice its price. So I picked it up and it became my travel guitar and really almost the only guitar I played for the next 20 years.
The author playing his Yamaha FG-421 on a veranda overlooking Lake Toba on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia circa 1995 trying very hard to emote.
This is the guitar I played for all the acoustic guitar parts on the Original Stairway Project. It’s been around the world 3 or 4 times; seen the Himalaya; been down the Ganges; been up the Thames; been held and played by innumerable people from cultures all the world over and if I lost it today I’d be crushed.
What I think makes this guitar important enough to write about and what made it up to the task of being the guitar that I used on the Original Stairway Project was that it’s just a simple guitar. It doesn’t have an amazing soundboard or any tonal magic that you can only achieve by spending enormous sums of money on artisan or heritage quality instruments. It’s a player. Its mojo has been accrued through the act of by being picked up and played, and passed around and played, by countless people all over the world that I’ve shared this instrument with. The common theme that united all those experiences was the joy and love in the desire to create and share music together. How could I have used any other guitar for Stairway?