I asked my son Cody to teach me part of a John Mayer song last night.

All three of my sons are gifted musically, thanks in part to some good DNA, I guess. Listening to Cody play guitar from the other room sounded like a dream ... almost made the room look foggy. And when he started singing, he sound like -- just like Mayer -- and then he put some overtones into his voice, widening or thickening the sound. This was all natural without any amplification or modification, so he was altering his voice the hard way, I guess...

It had been a long time since I'd copied another player's licks from a mirror image position. My son saw that I was having trouble picking it up, so he turned side-to-side, and I could pick up a little more. Then I started improvising way up on the strings. This seemed to put him in a competitive mode. He changed guitars from a Yamaha classical with a cedar top and beautiful tone to a Takamine steel string acoustic. He sounded great with either guitar, but had a little more wiggle room on the Takamine's longer neck. By that time, I was playing single notes with a wide vibrato, and the combination of the two guitars was magical.

I was using a yard sale special no-name student guitar ($5 -- put it back together yourself) with $20 strings. That guitar was singing, sustaining notes like I'd never heard before on any classical guitar. It sounded like a guitar that should be valued over $1,000 (although it didn't look like it!). I remember using hide-glue to put the bridge back so it would sustain more, but I sure didn't expect this.

There's an old saying: "A good guitar player can make even a poor guitar sound good." Sometimes, though, I really think that it is the guitar.

My working on guitars is mainly a means to an end. What I really like to do more than anything is to play them. I would really hate to have a job where I had to work on guitars constantly but never got to play 'em.