Maple Street Guitars

Maple Street Guitars

By Pappy

In a very pleasant part of Atlanta, GA, lies a great music store called Maple Street Guitars (conveniently located on Maple Street). It's unassuming on the outside, but inside it is stocked with a ton of cool gear that could satisfy just about any guitarist. No less than four walls are filled with guitars, two of which are mainly acoustics, one wall of electrics, and one of electrics and hollowbody electrics. But cool gear only means so much and it wouldn't matter if the store was staffed with a bunch of jerks.

Fortunately, Maple Street Guitars is not. The store is the epitome of a mom & pop shop and the owners are the best kind of mom & pop (I'll get to that in just a second)! I walked in about a half-hour early for the Taylor Find Your Fit event and the staff was more than accommodating to me. I asked if I was allowed to take pictures inside the store and, once approved, in a valiant display of unprofessionalism, whipped out my ancient iPhone and started snapping. Once I was done taking broad pictures of the shop, I started talking to a manager of the shop, Lindsay Petsch. I told him that I was fairly new to acoustics and we started talking about my previous Taylor interactions - mainly falling in love with an 814CE. We talked about some of the other wood options and he showed me a Built To Order (BTO) guitar that he configured that featured rosewood back and sides and a cedar top.

Let me say right now that Lindsay is a great guitar player and he did something you rarely appreciate: he played the guitar for me as examples before handing the guitar to me. With an electric guitar, this is a fairly useless exercise - just let me plug into an amp and leave me be, but with an acoustic guitar it sounds different when you're playing it and when you're in front of it. It's a valuable thing to do considering that you are going to be pushing music and tone out on your friends. You may want to find out if that's a pleasing tone. Much like buying a new car and sitting in the back seat. Sure, you'll never sit in it again, but you want to make sure your friends will be comfortable.

That's just being a good friend.

I was very impressed with the professionalism of the shop. I think stores like Guitar Center has spoiled the guitar playing community where you can go in and pull down any guitar, thrash around on it, put it back on the shelf and leave. Eventually this makes the guitars... well, they get beaten up. Then people go in, find a guitar they like and ask if the shop has one in the back that hasn't gone on the scenic tour of hell, fell off the trolley and dragged themselves back to the world of the living.

Unless you're buying a relic, of course (but honestly, you probably still want all the nicks to be factory-inflicted, not 14-year-old-shredder-inflicted).

What store wants stock that won't move?

But Maple Street Guitars goes out of their way to make sure their guitars stay pristine. They have removable pickguards, for instance, that they put on guitars so you don't have to worry about scratching them, and I was asked by one employee to move my sunglasses which were hanging off my shirt. At first, yes, that stung, but that's just me being selfish. Every single guitar on their racks looked brand new - even their used ones. If that means I have to put my sunglasses in my pocket, I'm totally fine with that. I got used to it pretty quickly and started to appreciate it.

It was as I was playing a guitar that I met a beautiful person, store owner Claire Petsch (Lindsay's mom). First off, Claire doesn't look like she could be Lindsay's mom. She looks young, her voice is jubilant, she's funny, she knows the guitar to a crazy extent (she's a classical guitarist!) and when she started hunting for a removable pickguard to put on the guitar I was playing, she said that it was so I didn't have to hold back.

That is the nicest way possible of saying "I don't want you to scratch my gear and leave without buying it."

In short, I developed a huge crush on Claire (don't tell her husband, George, another owner who is also a classical guitarist and guitar builder in the shop!).

The final stroke from Claire though on this crush canvas was when we were talking about the guitar in my hands. I'll go more into the Taylor Find Your Fit event on Wednesday, but (spoiler alert) I ended up with a 616CE in my hands and loving it. It's a bigger body so the lows are more powerful, but the maple tightens everything up and brings the highs through the mix. In short, it's the perfect guitar for me. Claire asked how I liked it and I said it got me with the octaves. They were well defined and when you added that quality to the lows and highs and cutting potential, it fits me like a comfortable sweater. She knew exactly what I meant and offered her opinion that as you get bigger in acoustic body size, you need a brighter wood to hold everything together. Yes, spruce and rosewood make a great combination, but on bigger body notes and intricacies start getting lost.

I agree.

Now, the whole purpose of the trip to Atlanta (not exactly a nearby place) was to find a Taylor for me - to educate myself, and this shop was completely OK with that. The whole staff seemed to be OK with this idea and I think it's brilliant. Some shops you visit, when you play the gear to see if you like this or that, once they get the sense you're not going to buy anything they go cold and you pick up on the vibe. The folks at Maple Street are more than happy to help educate you, give you advice, put a guitar in your hands, even show you to a private room so you don't have to worry about making a fool out of yourself with your "sub-par" playing (always a fear of mine) and then they'll leave you alone until you approach them. They're not trying to rush you through the shop.

The knowledge of the staff about the ins and outs of the guitar is commendable and I felt that even if Taylor wasn't about to host an event specifically to guide me to my perfect Taylor, that the staff could have done it alone. That's how great they are. They were explaining shapes and woods in ways that even I could understand and when I would say something about the tones or what I was after, they listened.

And they remembered my name. Amidst a store full of customers, they would pass by and ask "how's that guitar treating you, Russ?"

Also, my real name is Russ.

I really feel like I was taken care of while I was there by a staff that knew their stuff and even when I asked about ordering a custom guitar from Taylor they didn't blink an eye. They walked me through the process that I WOULD go through, were I to order one, and there was no pressure to do so. In Taylor's case, it's easy to order a custom guitar. You get a six-page packet with every option possible and their prices listed. You pick the options you want, add it up and then reduce it by X percent (the X being the percentage of discount the shop would take off).

Lindsay has a ton of experience ordering BTOs and will prove to be an invaluable source to me if I were able to save up for the expensive (but oddly enough, not astronomically high) price of the guitar and order it. With Lindsay's guiding hand, experience and style (he's got a pretty awesome mustache), I'm sure I would walk away with an amazing guitar on order.

If you are anywhere near Atlanta, you need to go to this store. I can't say enough good things about it as it is probably my favorite thing about the state of Georgia. I can't wait to find an excuse to go back.

-Pappy

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