Being a musical noob, an aspiring guitar player / mangler with a whopping three weeks of superb yet less-than-sufficient tutelage under my belt, it’s only natural for me to “need” a second guitar.  After all, my first guitar is merely superlative, a gorgeous Epiphone Les Paul Standard PlusTop Pro Electric Guitar with the Honey Burst styling.  Surely, I need—dare I deserve!—something more.

Actually, though, I kinda do.  This year’s New Year resolution, like so many before, was to finally (finally!) learn how to play guitar.  I’d been intending to do so for more decades than I care to enumerate but for no explicable reason I just got on with doing the do this year.  I won’t bore you with a full list of my learnings to date but the big takeaway is that if I am to avoid becoming road splat on that big highway to non-suckalege I’ll need to pick up and play a guitar each and every day; every day, without fail.

So “What’s the problem, you ask?”  After all, I just told you that I bought a beautiful instrument (and in case you’re wondering, it was love at first sight!)  Unfortunately, my job tends to keep me on the road a lot, and my personal life even more so.  To take the next couple of months alone, I’m off to a 4-day trip to Huntsville in January, a 13-day trip to Seattle in February and a five-day jaunt to Lithuania in March.  Add in a bunch of personal travel (like the two weeks my wife and I will be spending in Sardinia next May) and the “away-from-home” ticker starts to ratchet up fast.  I’m guessing that I’ll be on road at least 60 days in 2017, if not more.  That’s two full months for those of you in the cheap seats.

I’ll be crammed into too many economy-class airline seats to take my full-sized ax with me.  [See, I’m already a cool enough musician to use rock-star words!]  Therefore, I need something else; something “travel-worthy.”  Luckily, I’m not the first bloke to be in this predicament.  Indeed, there’s an entire company devoted to building roadable guitars (Traveler Guitar) and the reviews are good (like this, that, and the other).  Check back next year and I’ll hopefully be able to tell you if the assertion is true.  Assuming, of course, I keep up with my practice, day by day…