God damn, yeah, you are unfortunately.

Don't fuck with people's shit without asking wtf. Life isn't like TV, not every surprise is going to be appreciated.

Oof, this is a rough one. While I appreciate the gesture, that's a personal thing. That's like taking someone's favorite pair of jeans and getting them hemmed because they'd frayed at the heel. Sometimes the wear and tear is what we value.

Unpopular opinion but no.

Flip a coin, you might get a positive or negative reaction depending on how you frame it.

Yeah, you don't fuck with shit a person is that attached to because you think it "looks rough"

Yeah okay, how about I fixed your rounding error, huh? Huh?!

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yes, but longer.

anon: congratulations, you're being rescued

guitar: "..."

anon: please do not resist

Asshole: no.

Misguided: yes.

His reaction isn’t unreasonable. Misplaced well intentioned actions likely will not end as intended. Ultimately, she didn’t get it. She misunderstood what he loved about the guitar.

A worn appearance is often desired on old guitars. In some cases, it can even increase its value.

That, and the OP probably did what would be considered finishing someone's puzzle for them.

Yep. Literally all anon had to do was talk to him about it first. Communication is so fucking important. I would know because a lack of it was what ended my almost decade long relationship. Talk to your fucking partners, even if it's uncomfortable in the moment. If you don't you will be MUCH more uncomfortable later when everything explodes.

Yeah, absolutely. If you took something that I painted (I can't paint, fwiw) and had it touched up, fuck you.

fake: 4chan poster has a husband

I kind of have a hard time imagining such a thing being done with sincerely good intentions, how many people would really do that? Easy to imagine it as a way to exercise power over someone with a plausible pretense though.

As a guitar player, you get so much used to how the instrument feels in your hand while you play it that even something that should make it better ends up making it feeling worse.

That said, if the husband really loved that guitar the way it was, he could have brought it back to the luthier, have them undo their job. Stop playing it altogether was his decision and acting like that seems like a "punishment" for their spouse. That would be childish and borderline toxic behavior.

Gay: 4chan poster has a husband

It's like taking someone's tried and true Windows 7 machine and upgrading it to Windows 11.

No, that's nothing at all like a repair, that's a downgrade

Depends what “fix” means, but if you didn’t get ripped off for $200, yes.

Getting it professionally tuned isn’t unreasonable imo, especially if the neck/pegs are misaligned, but in no world should that cost $200 (and don’t try to fix a misalignment).

Once you start making changes that can’t be undone, you’ve crossed the line. Get it tuned, get a nice strap (with mounting hardware, if needed), get a polishing kit or nicer case, hell, even get a replacement bridge/pegs and tools for working with a guitar, but don’t make permanent changes yourself (or have anyone else do so). All of those together could be well over $200, but you’d describe that as a tuneup and buying accessories, not taking the guitar “to a pro to fix it.”

Caveat that some people don’t like non-musicians or anyone else even touching their instruments, but I’d like to think that would be obvious to a spouse, even one who might have assumed that permanent changes to an instrument they don’t own are okay.

I’m a non-musician and my husband has a somewhat beaten up, but favored instrument that he learned on, so I’ll send this to him to see if my instinct is right (for my relationship, which does not mean it would be right for anyone else).

Though tbf, even thinking it might be okay, I got my husband a new instrument instead of messing with his beloved one, just because it occurred to me that he might react like the husband in the OP, and I didn’t want to risk it. Of course, he could also have then felt guilty about using the new one because it’s not the one he loves and felt guilty about using the old one because I gifted him a “nicer” one. I was lucky in that he’d already branched out into related instruments and the new one could fill a new niche, so wouldn’t compete with the old, making me less worried about him feeling conflicted [I'm so sorry about that sentence, I’m imagining trying to structure it in German without nominalizing any of the clauses and… woof].

You're right, if there was actual damage to repair and it still plays afterward the husband is just being a petulant little shit

Nope, it was damaged and she got it fixed. Husband sucks and probably couldn't play for shit anyway.

Clearly a professional agreed that it didn't just look rough, the shit was damaged

This is projection

He didn't make this guitar, he found it, and it was damaged

The whole idea of "surprises" is complete bullshit. Social media has really over romanticised this to an extreme (big surprise! Big reaction video! Completely staged. Isn't that soooo romantic and adorable). When my wife gets a present, it costs quite a lot. I'm not going to take a chance of judging her taste, pick a brand I know nothing about and try to guess what she would like. We've got an agreement that we pick our own presents and make our plans together. No surprises bullshit. Might be boring by social media standards, but it's the best I can do.

I sent him the green text, and apparently he offered to fix a friend’s instrument in the past and got an earful. He would have been fine with me getting his old one fixed up, but he’s happy to have the new one

Worse, if somebody took your 64gb of ram Linux Thinkpad and gave you a chrome book

It literally mentions that the husband fixed it up.

Seriously though you're way too invested into a fake story.

It also mentions that a professional fixed it up, and the husband was not that professional, so he probably also did a dogshit job at that.

This is projection on your part, calm down

My fiance literally sent me the ring she wanted for our engagement.

Surprises suck, communication rocks!

Imagine bringing your kids drawings to a professional painter to get them "fixed".

Wife didn't see the real value of the guitar and ruined it, she made an asshole move.

As a fellow guitar player I'm not certain why this is being down voted so hard? Guitars are made to be modified, so anything that was done can be undone.

The interesting thing is that the wife said she only spent $200 bucks to get the guitar repair. Your mileage may vary, but in my neck of the woods $200 doesn't get you too much in the way of a repair. They would probably offer to give your guitar a 'setup' and a new pack of strings, near me that would cost around $100, maybe a little more. So whatever else they fixed couldn't have been too invasive, possibly new tuning pegs or resolved any wiring issues?

Everything there can be undone, a setup is the hardest as it would change the feel of the guitar. For the most part the 'feel', really only comes down to string height or 'action'. That's a quick fix for a guitar tech if brought back to the shop, hell a motivated amateur could probably probably figure out how to make that adjustment with a screwdriver and a Google search.

All that said I totally understand how the 'magic' of a guitar can easily be lost in the hands of a well intentioned but misguided guitar tech.

Cant you see how someone might value an instrument they repaired (and probably taught themselves how to do that) themselves a lot more than a store bought, flawless replacement?

There is value in doing things yourself, even if you could get always a better result by paying someone professional to do it for you.

You can't claim other people are projecting, when you are replying to everyone on this thread.

I can actually, seems like you don't know what the word means

It wasn't replaced, it was repaired. A professional repaired it. If he taught himself how to repair it then he must have done a shit job or it wouldn't have cost 200$ to repair after he was done.

Imagine your kid fishing someone else's abandoned painting out of the trash, halfway un-crumpling it and taking it home, then getting mad at you for smoothing it the rest of the way out and framing it for them. The wife was right, the husband is a petulant shit, you and your hypothetical children are dumb as dirt.

I for one don't like people touching my shit. Especially shot that I've already put effort into myself. Ask first before you do something like that.

The modern western version of "gifts" is really about pushing over-consumption. If marketers cannot convince you to buy something yourself, they can try to convince someone else to buy it for you.

I've always felt that gifts should be tokens. Symbols of good will, reminders of the relationship. Consumable gifts are great, especially when shared with the giver. Alcohol is great for this, but there's plenty more you can do. Small, inexpensive art prints or figurines.

I don't want someone else to buy me something I woukd want to research myself. My parents gave me a "snow thrower" for Christmas a couple years ago. Its a relatively cheap, Ryobi 40v thing- I do not own anything else that uses that battery ecosystem. My step-dad loves his, and I am it is great for their 2-car driveway, but my driveway can probably fit like 10 cars in it, and I would have rather saved up for something nicer myself. Now i'm in this weird limbo where I feel socially obligated to use it for several years at least before I replace it with something I actually want.

Maybe he's not doing it as a punishment. Maybe the spark is just gone now that it's not "his" anymore.

Firstly, they'll repair and/or make any guitar look better. It's their job so they'll do it. Secondly and more importantly, it isn't about if the guitar is damaged or not. It was clearly loved for what it was, it was probably more about the history of it than anything else.
It's really not hard to not fuck with other peoples stuff without their consent. And it's real sad that people like you exist that don't seem to understand that.

Oh you're one of those people.

I fucking hate people who think they are 'helping' me or 'fixing' things for me.

They tend to be condescending assholes who think they 'know better'.

Like no, bitch, I know what I like and I have chosen this deliberately.

Can't tell you how many people like give me shit about my home, my kitchen, my pantry, my bikes, my car, etc. These people tend to think nothing is worth anything unless it's the latest, greatest, trendiest, most expensive version of a thing. Like, apparnetly if I don't own a Tesla, live in a grey-white box, and own $10,000 bicycles or $1000 knives, I am 'struggling' at life or something

I also love how people like this insist that you must perpetually be in therapy and/or have a personal trainer... or you are 'not doing the work'. Just because you're a lazy loser who exercise or be mentally health without paying someone to do it for you, doesn't mean the rest of us live our lives that way.

Yeah probably the wife went to the guitar tech and asked "can you please make this better" and they gave it the classic fret leveling and crowning for a lower action and probably not much more for 200$. But the downvote mob already picked its side in this story so I'm not even gonna bother correcting them.

.ml in a nutshell

some poorly done repairs can be a downgrade

Electric guitars are little more than a piece of wood, metal strings, and a transducer. For a lot of musicians what matters most is the sentimental value of their model. What she did was basically rob the owner of that.

As I already said, a guitar tech can bring it back to its original state for free or a small fee in a matter of minutes. If you refuse to play it instead then its on you.

Another example that maybe makes it clearer coming to mind: warhammer is a massive business, for decades. But why do people like to buy unpainted little plastic models and then do a usually mediocre job themselves painting those, taking forever? They could just buy them fully painted by professionals, that would look obviously much better.

But the enjoyment and emotional attachment comes from doing that yourself. It is your little sci fi army even if their lines are smudged. You look at those figures and remember the hours spent painting them, progressively getting a little better with each. It is the same with the instrument, the husband fixed it up, spent a lot of love and effort on it, learned something in the process. Now thats all gone and instead he has some product.