My Guitar: Chris Feener stays committed to his guitars
Chris Feener has changed out the parts in his guitar as many as 30 times.
Otherwise, he says it would "look like something recovered from the Titanic wreckage, just covered in green nastiness," a phenomenon he ascribes to how much he sweats when he is on stage.
The next time his guitar starts to get this way, he will probably be willing to change out the parts in his LTD-ESP MH1000 again.
In the eighth part of our summer series about musicians and their guitars, Central Morning's Leigh Anne Power spoke with musician Chris Feener about the committed relationships he forms with his guitars.
"I'm not the kind of person who has, like 400 guitars," said Feener. "I use the guitar as a tool until it disintegrates, and then I get a new one."
His current guitar came to him through a series of chance events.
Feener was working at a music store in St. John's in 2009 just after returning from Guitar Idol in England, when his future guitar was brought into the store.
It immediately caught his eye, but Feener was trying to save some money at that time and did not go for it right away.
He then received an offer from a band in Minneapolis, Minn. asking him if he wanted to join their group.
Feener was surprised to get an offer from far away. He quickly discovered that when the American band had seen Grand Falls-Windsor as his location on his MySpace page, they had mistaken him for living in Windsor, Ontario.
They went ahead with asking him to join their band in spite of the distance and set to work on sorting out visas.
Feener explain at that moment, he felt like he was on his way to being a millionaire and — even though that did not happen, at least not yet — it spurred him to purchase the $1,500 guitar he'd been coveting.
Half a decade later, that guitar is still the one he loves.
"It just sits well," he said. "When I pick it up, the neck, everything about it … it's just a machine for doing what I need to do."
The sound and feel of the instrument are more important to Feener than how it looks.
"It's in pretty hard shape. It looks fine from about 20 feet away, but otherwise it's in pretty hard condition."
Close to him on stage, Feener said it feels just right.
"I remember playing a metal festival in the Czech Republic … and it just really felt like there's no guitar better for me," he said. "That's happened a few times."
