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New England Music News

Guitars ‘R Us

For years, the retail musical instrument landscape has been relatively unchanged here in Greater Portland.

At the top of the heap is Buckdancer’s Choice, the undisputed king of stringed instruments and an original since 1976. Buck’s employs of seemingly half the professional musicians in Portland, and educated many who have gone on to inhabit the formerly smoky climes of the Maine music scene. Co-owned by Phineas Martin and Tim Emery, top guitar man in the countrified McCarthys and one of the smoothest players in Portland, Buck’s nearly doubled in size during the past six months, adding a pro audio recording equipment wing (in the St. John’s Plaza’s former Drum Shop space) to its array of acoustic and electric stringed instruments, various amplification devices, and lesson rooms.

Daddy’s Junky Music would have to be a close second, sponsoring a musicians’ meet-and-greet night where more than one local band has been formed and holding it down for those non-peninsula types who might find it easier to access the Pine Tree Plaza (oldest plaza in Maine they say, and they’ve been there since 1987). Daddy’s Portland outlet is managed by Ken Knudsen, who plays in a band called Henry the Horse that doesn’t gig out much but released a disc last year called Alchemistry Kit, which is kind of a space-funk thing. The Daddy’s chain has posts in Portsmouth, Nashua, Manchester, and Salem, New Hampshire, along with a string of others in New England.

Soon, however, Portland musicians will see an increase in the number of options at their shopping disposal with the opening of the Guitar Center in the Maine Mall-ish plaza directly across from the Ground Round in South Portland. Scheduled for a February 23 grand opening (complete with Elvis impersonator), Guitar Center is the 168th location for the country’s biggest retailer of professional music equipment. The chain is, says South Portland store manager Jack Hetherington, “the industry leader in everything that we do.”

Guitar Center employees wear matching shirts (red or black). The South Portland store is 12,000+ square feet, with separate rooms for acoustic instruments (cedar-lined), drums (Buck’s doesn’t do drums; Daddy’s does), and pro audio. The next closest Guitar Center is in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Hetherington came here from the Hollywood, California, store, but is in some ways returning to his roots. He attended Bowdoin — didn’t graduate, though: “I left to play guitar” — and his wife teaches here at a Waldorf School. There Hetherington met Peter Milliken, owner of Three Seventeen Main Street, the new music school in Yarmouth whose faculty includes Carter Logan and Jason Phelps of power bluegrass outfit Jerks of Grass (and who until recently taught at Buckdancer’s — dun-dun-dun dun!). Hetherington will be leading one-off classes in blues guitar at 316 and he has plans for Phelps hours at Guitar Center.