Hello!
Richard, from Budget Guitarist here!
The Budget Guitarist website was created with a mission – to become an online destination for guitarists who have a lifelong love of music, but not a lot of money. Other musicians are more than welcome here. I also have a YouTube channel.
This site is not merely about playing guitar and saving money. It’s also about how to stay positive and have fun with music, regardless of your income, level of ability, and musical goals. Music is supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.
We are living in a fantastic time to be a musician, but only if you play by the new rules and not the old ones. The world is full of talented guitarists and songwriters who are absolutely miserable, because they reached for the stars and fell short. I was one of them, and it took me years to fully understand why I was miserable and what I could do to change things. I learned to love music again, and one of my goals has been to spread the word.
I hope you enjoy the site. If you want, you can email me. If you put “budget guitarist” in the subject of the email, my filters will make sure your message doesn’t go to junk mail.
A comment about comments – I’m an adult. I am opinionated, I am knowledgeable, and I am sometimes wrong. But 95% of the guitar-related comment sections I read are awful. I don’t know why the comments section of something brings out the worst in people. And I’m guilty, too. I’m trying to get better. The comments sections are popular because it makes people think they have a voice, they have a say, their opinion is important. All of that is great, except that it only takes a few morons to pollute the water. It devalues the page. You watch a great video and you’re happy, and then you read the comments and it pisses you off. And YouTube is the absolute worst. Racism, gay slamming, 6th grade humor (and grammar,) jealousy, all on display in their purest ugliest forms. That’s not giving people a say – that’s giving negative people a platform.
There are plenty of websites where you don’t get to bash the author after every article. This is one of them. I’m not worried about social engagement, and I’m not writing stuff to try to appeal to an audience so I can sell ads. I have ads to pay for the hosting costs and maybe a set of guitar strings here or there. I don’t have comments enabled. If you want to argue about tonewood or whatever, there are plenty of other places on the Internet where you can fight.
The irony is that allowing comments is part of the “new rules” that I seem to be extolling above. But honestly, I did once enable comments on a page here, and the gay slamming and intolerance showed up immediately and I took it down. I’m a straight, white, married, educated 50+ year old dude. I have friends from almost every marginalized group. I won’t tolerate bigotry here, and I don’t have time to wade through a ton of comments and ban people every week. I’d rather spend that time playing guitar or writing. Wanna talk guitar? Email me! richard@budgetguitarist.com is my email. Copy that and paste it into your email client.
With all of that out of the way, thank you for visiting my site and tolerating my grumpy old man no comments rules.