Guitar Shops (remember those?)

[Barking Spiders]

Cheltenham's lost its two main guitar-led music shops. Soundhouse closed down its branch here in the early 00s to focus on its Gloucester store. Aroundaboutsound on the Lower High Street died a slow death, finally succumbing to the impact of Covid. Two other music instrument stores, both on the same street, also disappeared several years ago; Millennium Music and one mainly specialising in pianos and acoustic instruments. Then again Chelt's been one of the worst hit towns in the UK viz shop closures. Across the rest of Gloucestershire we've got 4 guitar shops left but it remains to be seen if they can survive the current energy crisis.

[Soledad]

A shout out for the remaining dealers in Denmark Street. They're slowly being edged out - a crying shame London is very close now to losing Tin Pan Alley.

Recently visited looking at US Strats (for a friend). Saw a mint 'pro' (2016) in No Toms on Denmark Street. Ticketed at £1295. After a multi-stage haggle, walked out with it at £1000. That's a proper good deal, great service, nice crowd. Feel like you belong when you go browsing in Denmark Street.

Sad days losing the real shops, I mean the specialists, independents. The big chains are just commodity supermarkets and that's about all we'll have left soon.

Well, there is Richards in Stratford u Avon, but in my experience he's a bit of a nutter

[EdwardMarlowe]

On 20/02/2023 at 14:06, Soledad said:

A shout out for the remaining dealers in Denmark Street. They're slowly being edged out - a crying shame London is very close now to losing Tin Pan Alley.

Recently visited looking at US Strats (for a friend). Saw a mint 'pro' (2016) in No Toms on Denmark Street. Ticketed at £1295. After a multi-stage haggle, walked out with it at £1000. That's a proper good deal, great service, nice crowd. Feel like you belong when you go browsing in Denmark Street.

Sad days losing the real shops, I mean the specialists, independents. The big chains are just commodity supermarkets and that's about all we'll have left soon.

Well, there is Richards in Stratford u Avon, but in my experience he's a bit of a nutter

His youtube videos are interesting - I particularly liked the ones he did about Vintage guitars, though I suspect he's not nice to be on the wrong side of (even if I share his frustrations about people having sometimes unreasonable expectations - "I bought this guitar for twenty pence and it's only 90% as good as that one at three grand - what a pile of shit!").

It's sad seeing Denmark Street go, it was so badly handled. I 'know' (online) a guy who was very involved in the campaign to save it. They had some successes (saved the building the Pistols rehearsed in and that Matlock and Jones lived in for a bit), but the level of shouting the developers do about celebrating its heritage is in direct proportion to the sheer destruction thereof they have committed. The really sad thing is I'm told they struggled to get some of the guitar shops on board until too late... 

Great place back a few years ago; at one time I used to be a semi-regular, unofficial 'announcer' for the host of a cabaret night there. Great, late nights in the Alley Cat, great afternoons window shopping. I bought my first bass there in 2001 - and a few years later a Bassman 1000 Silverface which I'll have to sell - damn thing turned out to be just too loud for home use, who'da thunk? Lovely, though....  So sad the old place is almost gone.

A lot of the chains aren't the same, though to be fair I've had good experiences in every branch of Guitar Guitar I've been in - I think it's now owned by the workforce after a buyout of the management? (The latter being the guys who went on to buy over Burns, though the website holding page has been updated - sort of - from "coming in 2020" to "coming in 2022" (which it still has in the headline, with 2021 in the text, so I don't hold out much hope of seeing those again.).