Music, you’ve heard all the sayings about it, how it heals the soul, united the world, transcends barriers of land and culture. Everyone loves music, it has a way as Berthold Auerbach puts it, “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
The world over, people recognise it and indulge their precious children into music through one form or another; they send them for musical instrument classes or vocal training. Now amongst the most widely adopted instrument is either the guitar or the piano and the one thing these two instruments share in common (aside from the obvious about how they make beautiful sounds) is the fact that both are manufactured from wood and thus contribute greatly to logging/deforestation. I agree that beautiful music makes for a better world but a beautiful music at the expense of beautiful nature does quite the opposite.
For today, let’s focus on the guitar:
Obviously recognising the eco effect facts, there are now eco-friendly guitars available but what about those of us who already have a guitar? How can we play sustainable music with it? Well the one area you can focus on is the strings.
Firstly let us look at new strings – if you are currently out to replace your guitar’s strings then please turn to D’Addario. No I’m not advertising for them, I’m just laying the fact straight out. D’Addario is presently the only guitar string company that actually makes their own wire for manufacturing strings.
Guitar strings are conventionally manufactured through rather unfriendly eco-terms:
- 1. Uses phosphate to coat the wire
- 2. Involves a chemical cleaning process
- 3. Tin coating plating
D’Addario took all that into consideration and changed the way they process the raw steel into the final string, removing the need for the use of harmful tin and phosphate.
But if you have strings that you’re about to toss out, perhaps you can reconsider purposing them as follows:
- 1. Strings are basically wires. What has snapped and isn’t fit your guitar anymore, who is to say it isn’t good enough to hang a picture?
- 2. Give it to the artist. What is trash to you are art supplies for the inspired. You only have to take a look at these guitar string flowers to see the endless possibilities.
- 3. Do you love cheese? Well if you want wafer thin slices then I can assure you nothing cuts it like a wire –in this case a guitar wire.
