Our Daily Show Interview! Alton Music Exchange: Workbench Spaces, Music, and More!
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ALTON - Alton Music Exchange will offer workshops for guitar maintenance.
Located at 556 E. Broadway in Alton, Alton Music Exchange buys, trades and sells music equipment and offers rentals and music lessons. They will host four-hour workshops to teach basic guitar maintenance and repair.
“People love this instrument, and it’s therapeutic,” said owner Jared Unfried. “It’s grown beyond this quote-unquote rockstar thing. It probably was always more than that. That’s just the vision that some of us had when we were teenagers. You see this music for what it is, guitar-playing for what it is, and it’s this therapeutic way of life. It’s a medium to create. It’s a medium to be social with other people. And for those people who are into that, they have to be able to maintain the instrument.”
Alton Music Exchange has six workbenches with all the tools you need to perform this maintenance. For $10 an hour, you can rent the spaces to perform your own maintenance.
But once a month, Alton Music Exchange will also offer a workshop where experts are available to guide you through basic maintenance. This four-hour workshop costs $100 and will teach simple guitar repair.
“The workshops right now are basic setups all the way to maintenance and fret care and fret repair,” Unfried explained. “There will be other additional classes that dive deeper into additional repairs.”
Unfried compared guitar maintenance to “surgery.” He noted that it can be “very intimidating” to tinker with a guitar or take it apart. There are many skilled guitar techs in the Greater St. Louis area, including a few in Alton, who can do this work for you.
But Unfried also believes in the power of sharing knowledge and teaching other people. He thinks it’s empowering to learn how to care for your own instrument, and he hopes the workshops provide that wisdom to other people in the Riverbend region.
“Teach a man to fish. I’ve always been like that. Knowledge is something that we should share,” he said. “You get a group of people working on something, and knowledge is being shared whether they realize it or not. You’re sitting there and there’s someone who’s been doing something longer than you and you learn from them. I mean, that’s how you learn. That’s how you get better.”
Unfried hopes the workshops encourage more people to learn about guitar maintenance. He wants to see the “next generation” of guitarists rise up.
As Alton Music Exchange marks their fifth year in business, Unfried is excited to see it continue to grow. He emphasized that he wants to support other businesses and help them succeed, and he is thankful to live in a community where art and music are celebrated.
“The idea of competition, I don’t have that mentality. To me, we all rise together. Let’s do it together,” he said. “How can we help each other? How can we benefit one another? And how can we spread music? Let’s not forget that. Let’s not forget that the music is the purpose of this. I don’t do this every day to make a dollar or $100 or $1,000. Yeah, that’s a byproduct. You’ve got to pay your bills, right? But let’s just spread the music. There’s tons of music around here.”
For more information about Alton Music Exchange and their upcoming workshops, visit their official Facebook page or call 618-433-9252.
