TWO STREET MUSIC

2/28/11 is the date i dropped off my guitar. garrett is the man who did the work. the owners are nick and mark, the manager i don't know his name. i paid $134 upon completion sometime in early march. on march 13 i realized that there were holes in mt guitar neck that were left over from changing the tuners. i hired garrett to help me choose the right parts and he was advised that i was concerned about cosmetics as well as tone. i should have been told that these tuners, which i bought AFTER talking about them with garrett and getting his blessing, would leave holes in my neck. especially as there was another choice that would have left no holes. we had spoken about a bridge and i ended up not buying it because garrett told me it would show an ugly chunk of unpainted wood, so we decided TOGETHER, with disclosure and consultation on his part about the bridge. but this communication, which i was depending on did not occur with the tuners. additionally, his installation of the tuners i later found out was not done correctly. the sperzel locking tuners that were installed are designed to have 3 heights in descending order from the low E to the high e strings. garrett installed them randomly. i always thought it looked weird, but i have never seen these type of tuners before and it took a master luthier to look at the guitar and tell me they were installed incorrectly. this was not everything that was wrong but i'll stop here because all i asked for was a refund of my money that was for the tuner installation. they wouldn't give me my money back. they offered to put the tuners on rightly, but not to fix the holes. and in any case this was not acceptable. i was not about to let them monkey with my guitar again. i have a new luthier who just built me a guitar and i am very happy with his work, so i want him to do the repairs, which is my right when a professional outfit does blatantly shoddy work. i knew nothing and even i had a bad feeling about the way those tuners were on there. and i was even being cool by not pushing the holes issue at first (mainly because my email to garrett was not answered). it was only when i learned of the whole pattern of mistakes that i decided to assert my rights, and you know what? the manager actually used that against me when i asked for a refund, that i waited too long. but i didn't wait, i just dropped it when my complaint wasn't responded to. but there was a definite pattern of blaming the victim. no matter what i said it "proved" that the whole thing was MY fault, not the guy getting paid as an "expert". oh, and by the way, i bought an amp while i was there from nick i believe. he agreed to a price of $300. then after we agreed on that price he said he had to go "check something" and when he came back the price went up to $350. for some reason i ended up buying it for $325 after swallowing a lot of bile. this just shows their business practices. but truth be told, we had a verbal contract and he owes me $25. be warned, they are like used car salesmen. they must really be feeling the pinch from guitar center to be behaving like this to their customers.