I spent thousands trying to identify the source of my pain – it turned out to be my Fender Telecaster
By Mark MacLaughlin, Guitar World || It began as a sharp abdominal pain that I dismissed as heartburn. Almost a decade later I received the shock diagnosis that I had “Telecaster Rib” – a little-known condition that’s whispered about on guitar forums but barely acknowledged by Fender.
The cause of my agony emerged after a parade of GPs, masseuses, osteopaths, personal trainers and yoga instructors failed to get to the bottom of it, until one astute chiropractor recently identified the culprit: the Fender Telecaster.
I’ve never been a particularly accomplished guitarist. My high school music teacher told me I had no ability whatsoever after a ham-fisted attempt at 12-bar blues. But I found my form when my dad restrung his old acoustic upside down. I realized I was among the ranks of Hendrix, Cobain, Iommi and McCartney as a lefty.
That limited my choice of instruments to the dusty southpaw corner of music stores – and my range was already pretty limited by my budget. I worked my way through some pseudo-Stratocaster and faux-Les Paul cheapies before raising the bar to a beautiful blonde Epiphone Sheraton II in my late teens.
That guitar took my bedroom band into to the studio, where we recorded two tracks, the Mike Oldfield- and Johnny Marr-inspired Searching Souls and the bluesy Another Day. The producer impounded Another Day unless we gave him more money than we could afford, so we never got the recording. Searching Souls sounded great, but it was a little thin in the guitar part, so I went looking for a dirtier Graham Coxon sound.
The only Blur song the Epiphone excelled at was the haunting This Is A Low and I wanted the Pixie-like crunch-and-chime of Chemical World. When I sold the Sheraton in 2015 and bought a Telecaster I said goodbye to an old friend – and hello to a decade of pain.
I was playing for several hours a day, preparing demos for another prospective trip to the recording studio, which never materialized after our drummer moved to London and the rest of us simply gave up.
Telecaster Rib began almost imperceptibly. I began to notice my suit’s left sleeve apparently receding up my arm, revealing over an inch of shirt cuff. I thought it was poor off-the-peg tailoring, but every suit was the same. I couldn’t afford tailor-made suits, so I just dealt with it.
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Go here to read the full story. This “health problem” could be impacting YOU!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/i-spent-thousands-trying-to-identify-the-source-of-my-pain-it-turned-out-to-be-my-fender-telecaster/
Photo: Fender Telecaster w-amp | From Monton Guitar’s Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1231437452314851&set=pcb.1231438545648075