Play Responsibly: Guitar Makers Seek Sustainable Sound

With the environment and saving its future a great topic of controversy in recent years, everyone is trying to find the best ways to recycle, reduce waste, and reuse anything and everything they can. Everything is being cut back and changed for the better of our planet-- or at least, it's trying to be.

You wouldn't exactly think of guitars as causing forests to fall all across the globe, would you?

Having a guitar player in my family (my father), I know my fair share of info about the whole make and model and all that of certain electric guitars. My dad has what he calls his 'Holy Trinity' of guitars: a Fender Stratocaster, a Fender Telecaster, and a Gibson Les Paul with a sun burst design. The body and neck of his instruments come from the wood of a mix of mahogany, rosewood, and ebony. But the trees whose trunks and branches are sacrificed for the art of music and a beautiful guitar are becoming few and far between; even though it's been known for years now that these precious woods won't be available for use forever, 'purists' who demand the best quality wood for their instruments snub even the idea of synthetic materials being used.

The  current CEO of Gibson Guitar Company, Henry Juszkiewicz, is trying to make this a possibility. He and his colleagues know that they have the available technology to make a guitar that plays just as well-- if not better than-- the solid wood guitars. This seems blasphemous to others, but it may be a response by the company to the controversies caused by the company allegedly violating wildfire protection acts in the past two years.

In my honest opinion, albeit being the music lover I am, I agree with Juszkiewicz: We, as a species, have decimated the natural gifts the planet has given us. There isn't much left, and humans should be looking for alternative ways to continue making things. It's like that "what if" documentary I watched once on the Discovery Channel about what will happen when we run out of oil, and if electricity fails: we're humans. We may be flawed, but we built this world from the ground up-- the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly. We created all of it. And if we could make this, we sure as hell better be able to save it. We're survivors, even if the way the average American lives their life doesn't pay homage to that title. We'll figure it out-- some day.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/play-responsibly-guitar-makers-seek-sustainable-sound/248970/

Published 29 Nov. 2011

Term Two, Week Three. (Nov. 27-Dec. 3, 2011) Post One.