Whammy Bar Surgery
File Under: Moments that no one in the hospital delivery room warns you about as you become a parent.
Last night my wife and I had to perform surgery.
On a plastic guitar.
More specifically, on one of the plastic guitars that is the controller for Guitar Hero III.
For those keeping score at home, our two little monkeys have had this game and the guitars that go with it since Christmas. Yesterday was the 16th of January. They went almost an entire month without breaking one of the two guitars that came with the game.
Actually, to be fair, I shouldn't say "monkeys". It was just one monkey. Gavin (age 7). He has a little too much Pete Townsend or maybe CC Deville or perhaps a little too much Joey Allen (guitarist from Warrant, hee hee) in him and has been pretty brutal to the whammy bar. Despite multiple warnings from yours truly that he was being too rough with the guitar and using the whammy unnecessarily he continued to have a little too much rock star in his gaming efforts.
What happened? He broke a little plastic piece inside the guitar that provides the friction/spring to the whammy bar, thus rendering it useless. Granted, the game is 100 percent totally playable without the whammy but anyone who has played Guitar Hero will tell you that the whammy is really, really, really fun -- especially on the "Slow Ride" and "Welcome to the Jungle".
So my wife and I got out the tiniest of screw drivers and managed to crack the guitar open, found the problem, and with her as surgeon in charge and me as the assistant, she crazy glued the mechanism back in place and its working again. We put it back together and the friction and spring were good to go. It also turned out that Gavin had slightly cracked the plastic encasing that the whammy bar itself screws into. I solved this problem by wrapping a thin layer of duct tape around the part of the whammy that screws into the guitar. Yes, there is nothing that duct tape can't help, fix or defend. Plastic guitars, your home after a terrorist attack... you name it, duct tape has it covered, baby.
I tested out the guitar with some Foghat, worked the whammy bar, and demonstrated for Gavin on when to use the bar and how to still have fun with it while being gentle. He got the message, has been grounded from his Nintendo DS and Guitar Hero for 3 days, and has promised that when he returns to his "band" that he will be take better care of the guitars. He's a good little guy and he understood it when I said the following:
"The guys in your favorite bands... Green Day, All-American Rejects, Kaiser Chiefs [Note: Gavin is a now a huge Kaiser Chiefs fan after playing "Ruby" in the Guitar Hero game!]... all those guys can afford to occasionally destroy one of their guitars because, hey, that's rock and roll. But you... you're 7, you live in a middle class family, and if you break it again you're going to have a whammy bar free experience."
And, seriously, who wants to go through life sans whammy?
That's what I thought.
J
Last night my wife and I had to perform surgery.
On a plastic guitar.
More specifically, on one of the plastic guitars that is the controller for Guitar Hero III.
For those keeping score at home, our two little monkeys have had this game and the guitars that go with it since Christmas. Yesterday was the 16th of January. They went almost an entire month without breaking one of the two guitars that came with the game.
Actually, to be fair, I shouldn't say "monkeys". It was just one monkey. Gavin (age 7). He has a little too much Pete Townsend or maybe CC Deville or perhaps a little too much Joey Allen (guitarist from Warrant, hee hee) in him and has been pretty brutal to the whammy bar. Despite multiple warnings from yours truly that he was being too rough with the guitar and using the whammy unnecessarily he continued to have a little too much rock star in his gaming efforts.
What happened? He broke a little plastic piece inside the guitar that provides the friction/spring to the whammy bar, thus rendering it useless. Granted, the game is 100 percent totally playable without the whammy but anyone who has played Guitar Hero will tell you that the whammy is really, really, really fun -- especially on the "Slow Ride" and "Welcome to the Jungle".
So my wife and I got out the tiniest of screw drivers and managed to crack the guitar open, found the problem, and with her as surgeon in charge and me as the assistant, she crazy glued the mechanism back in place and its working again. We put it back together and the friction and spring were good to go. It also turned out that Gavin had slightly cracked the plastic encasing that the whammy bar itself screws into. I solved this problem by wrapping a thin layer of duct tape around the part of the whammy that screws into the guitar. Yes, there is nothing that duct tape can't help, fix or defend. Plastic guitars, your home after a terrorist attack... you name it, duct tape has it covered, baby.
I tested out the guitar with some Foghat, worked the whammy bar, and demonstrated for Gavin on when to use the bar and how to still have fun with it while being gentle. He got the message, has been grounded from his Nintendo DS and Guitar Hero for 3 days, and has promised that when he returns to his "band" that he will be take better care of the guitars. He's a good little guy and he understood it when I said the following:
"The guys in your favorite bands... Green Day, All-American Rejects, Kaiser Chiefs [Note: Gavin is a now a huge Kaiser Chiefs fan after playing "Ruby" in the Guitar Hero game!]... all those guys can afford to occasionally destroy one of their guitars because, hey, that's rock and roll. But you... you're 7, you live in a middle class family, and if you break it again you're going to have a whammy bar free experience."
And, seriously, who wants to go through life sans whammy?
That's what I thought.
J