Or maybe, you like collecting instruments. In that collection could pianos, horns, stringed instruments, you name it. Whoever you are whether you make a money playing gigs, you’re a classical nut or you just like collecting. They all share a common denominator. It can all be gone in less than a half hour.
What!?!?! You might say, but think about it is not all that out of the question. How many people lost all of their belongings in New Orleans when Katrina hit, including their instruments? What about fires? Or thieves? And let’s not for get accidents.

Whether it is in your house, a car, traveling or at gig. There are not really too many completely safe place for instruments and equipment. Thankfully there is something out there can help. Insurance.

Home insurance

You may say, I don’t play gigs and I am not a professional musican, my gear is pretty much always within my house. My homeowners insurance should cover my instruments. While many times this is true, homeowner insurance many times covers musical instruments, it is certainly not always the case.

Even if your homeowner’s insurance covers musical instruments, it is good know what the maximum is. Many policies will only cover up to $1000 for you instruments. For many of us it stops there. A $1000 should cover our instruments, but for other of us a $1000 doesn’t go very far.

Instrument Insurance

If this is your situation, it might be good to check into instrument insurance. I now what your thinking, sounds expensive, but depending on the price of your instruments and what you want to do, insurance can cost as a hundred dollars per year. Making it a viable option even for those who have less than $1000 worth of equipment.

There are many good companies that specialize in instrument insurance, which can customize a plan for your particular circumstances.

Things To Pay Attention To

Now, some things you need to pay attention to when looking for insurance for your equipment are:

1. Am I a musician by profession? If so will the insurance cover the cost of my rental while my instrument is being repaired or replaced?
2. If I am a musician by profession, is my recording equipment and computer insured?
3. Is my instrument covered under all circumstances? (Home, Car, Plane, Worldwide)
4. Has my instrument been appraised? Especially if it is unique or expensive is have the instrument appraised is essential.
5. Is my instrument insured for what it will cost to replace it? (Instruments are constantly increasing in price, you want it insured for what it will cost to replace it, not what it cost 5 years ago.)
6. Am I insured for liability if some trips over my equipment at a gig? (Yah, you need to worry about that.)
7. Can I get a discount on my insurance if I have a home alarm system. Many companies will give a substantial discount.

Not all of these apply to all of us, but if they do apply, we may not want to be caught with out this type of coverage. There are many companies that specialize in instrument insurance and the majority of them can be found on the Internet. If you are interested Google musical instrument insurance and you will find many options to choose from.

Now technology has taken it a step farther. To the point that technology is just as essential as picks, strings and tuning pegs, sometimes even fazing out these natural elements of a guitar. No I am not talking about Guitar Hero. While how the game was produced is pretty amazing and it is definitely a lot of fun, we all know Guitar Hero has yet create a real musician. No we are talking about something much more real.

Misa Digital Guitar

First we have the Misa Digital Guitar. While it has some completely new elements of its own and definetly strays from the original design of the guitar, I would venture to say this creation still classifies as an intrument. It is not quite guitar, but it definetly isn’t a Guitar Hero controller either.

This design has completely removed such elements as the strings, pickups and tuning pegs. It uses a touch pad for you picking hand to control the sound. It can be played using finger taps, drags and slides.

Every note on the fretboard is sensed, so as you guessed an actual knowledge of the fretboard, scales and chords is needed. This is a pretty cool little guitar like critter. I don’t think any of us would actually trade our real guitar for the Misa Digital Guitar, but I also don’t think any of us would say no to getting one. You can watch the video below to see it in action.

Gibson Robot Guitar

Our second digital guitar is the Gibson Robot Guitar. This guitar is a guitar through and through. Strings, pickups, the whole sha-bang. I guess the best way I can decribe this guitar is to call it the lazy man’s guitar.

We’ve all played with are guitar just little out of tune because we are too lazy to tune it, or played our guitar with five string because we are too lazy to change the strings, well at least I have.

Gibson has come up with a solution to this, the Robot Guitar. Yep it tunes itself. You simple switch it to the tuning you want (about 10 tunings including standard are programmed in), strum the guitar and it tunes itself. The Tuning machines quite literally turn themselves until the tone is correct.

Need to add new strings? No problem, simply put the string through the tuning machine, tighten the holding screw, cut the string and the guitar will bring the string to tension. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, personally I prefer to tune it myself, but it is pretty cool.

Gibson Digital Guitar

The last and my personal favorite of the 3 is the Gibson Digital Guitar. This one is really quite amazing. It literally gives out an HD digital output. That means it send a signal completely free from interference.

The Hex humbucking pickups can pickup the signals of each of the 6 strings individually and send a separate signal. That means you can record six separate lines at the same time. Change distortion, volume and tone for each individual string. This is a pretty sweet guitar and there are probably not too many of use that would trade our guitar in a heartbeat for this one. To see more you can watch the video to the side below.

That is why no one dreams of playing a $100 Walmart special (no offence if you own a $100 Walmart Special). Not everyone can afford a six or seven hundred dollar guitar, that is where places like Ebay come in handy.

Did you shutter when you heard me talk about buying an instrument off the Internet? I know I would have a couple years back. You might be surprised hear that you can actually feel pretty safe about buying an instruments from Ebay. It’s not that you can’t buy a guitar off other Online classifieds sites (and there are a lot of them, check out this list of free classified sites), it’s just that they don’t give you the security that Ebay does.

The trick is to distinguish from those trying to rip you off and those that are honest. This lesson is all about how you can feel confident about the product you are buying and the person selling it to you on Ebay.

The Description

The first thing to look at is the description and the pictures. They should tell you if it has any problems or scratches. It is important to read the description carefully. If the seller is going to trick you it is going to be in the description.

Here are some tips that can help you to determine whether or not you are being tricked by the description page on Ebay.

Is it Too Good to Be True?

If it seems like it is too good to be true it probably is. If you see a thousand dollar guitar for sale for fifty bucks, it is probably too good to be true.

One time I was on Ebay and I saw an ad that said they were selling 80 gig ipods for $15. I read over the description about 10 times before I finally realized he was trying to con me into buying a raffle ticket that could possibly win an 80 gig ipod.

My point is make sure you are paying $400 for a stratocaster, not a $400 stratocaster case.

Seller Feedback

Another very important thing to look at is the feedback and score of the seller. The feedback is the number with a percentage and basically it is a happiness meter. It represents the average feedback of each person that he has either bought or sold from. If the seller is tricking people in the description, people will give him a negative feedback, which will affect his overall percentage.

The feedback is located on the right hand side under the subheading Meet the Seller (Pictured below) this is the number with a percentage right next to the word feedback. It will say something like 99.7% positive.

Bad Service or a False Description Gets Bad Feedback

Different offences will rate accordingly. If the item comes a day or two late he might get bumped down to a 99% or a 98%. If the item has a false description it may get a 50% or lower and that will dramatically affect their overall feedback.

Number of Sales

Another thing to look at is how many times have they sold or bought on ebay. This is located next to the user name. In the case of picture above the username is Shoguitars and he has sold 1889 items. The larger number of sales and buys a user has the better. This adds power to the feedback percentage the seller got. Shoguitars has an average percentage of 99.7% from 1889 people. You can feel pretty confident he is not going to rip you off.

If you want to look more into the seller’s feedback and see individual feedback ratings you can click on See Detailed Feedback under Meet the Seller. This will show you the sellers record of comments and individual feedback percentages. You can see how many positive and negative ratings the seller got and you can also read why someone gave the seller a good or bad rating.

Hopefully these suggestions will help you in buying items off of ebay and help you to feel more comfortable with buying instruments off of the internet.