Interview with Mark Hanson (sample)

Here is one of the questions that Jeff Desouza of Jackal Music asked Mark Hanson on May 2nd, 2008. To download the full interview in MP3 or read the entire transcript, Register for an account - It's both free, and painless! - takes less than a minute! Once you are registered, you can access the Full interview with Mark Hanson.

Jeff: Mark, here’s a question with regards to you travelling with your guitar. You travel with your guitar all over the place by air. Many of our subscribers are going be traveling at the end of August to a guitar convention in Nashville, Tennessee for the first Learn and Master Guitar seminar. They’re worried about traveling with their guitar. What advice could you offer them for getting their instrument safely there and back home?

Mark: A couple of things. First of all, when you go to Nashville, so many guitars go through there, my experience with the baggage handlers in Nashville are actually quite gentle with guitars because they know that these are valuable and they have a high respect for guitarists in that town. I’ve had two experiences, that may not be true for everyone, I don’t know, but I’ve had two experiences at the Nashville airport where that occurred. The best advice if you’re really concerned is to leave your really good guitar at home because then it won’t get damaged and buy something that’s moderately priced, put insurance on it so if it gets damaged, really badly damaged, it won’t break your heart and it won’t break your pocketbook. I think that’s kind of bottom line. Now I travel with my main guitar which is worth quite a bit of money so I have to travel with it. I can’t leave it at home. The first thing to do is to absolutely avoid putting your guitar on the conveyor belt. A lot of damage happens there. Unless you do what some of my friends do, which is to buy an $800 case that’s like a tank and then you just let it go and you don’t worry about it. However, when you get to your destination you have to carry that thing around and it’s very heavy. I prefer to have a backpack so I can put my guitar on my back and leave my hands free for whatever else I need to carry or just to keep from having to lug this heavy thing around and actually overwork my hand before I have a gig. So what I do is I actually have a Reunion Blues, very well padded soft case and I take my guitar to the airport, it’s on my back. I generally check in my luggage at the curb and those folks don’t ever give me any trouble about my guitar. I’ll bypass the ticket counter because I’ll get my boarding pass at the curb or on the internet beforehand. I go directly to TSA to the X-Ray machines and security and they don’t give me any problem with carrying a guitar in and I carry it all the way down to the gate. At that point I walk right on the airplane with it and put it up above in the luggage rack and it’s with me the whole time. A couple of thought on that. Most planes I fly are 737’s, 757’s, things with big luggage racks up above the seats so the guitar will fit in there easily. I will sit relatively near the back of the airplane so that I get on first so that I can get it up above. Now if I were as rich as John Denver was, I met him one time, he’d bought two first class seats, one for himself and one for his 12-string. If you can afford that, go for it! With the gas prices so high and airline flight tickets going up I don’t know if too many people are going to do that, but again, my strategy is to get onto the airplane relatively early so there’s still plenty of space up above and I don’t get stuck getting on last and then there’s nowhere to put your guitar. Another strategy that my good friend Guy Van Duser told me many years ago, he said when he flies with his guitar he always wears a tie, and it’s not so much that you wear a tie but I think that speaks about attitude, that if you are grumpy and demanding and arrogant when you come up to the people they’re going to be less apt to help you. So I’m friendly, I’m dressed nicely, and I’m just kind of walking like I expect that this’ll be fine. So those are strategies if I’m flying Southwest, you can check in online 24 hours beforehand and you get an A, B or C boarding pass and I always do my best to get in the A section so I get on with the first batch of people and there’s lots of room in the overhead for the guitar. Occasionally I will have to gate check it, meaning I can walk it all the way down the ramp to the airplane but then I can’t get it on the airplane and then a man will carry it and put it in with the luggage from the stewards and pilots and then they come and hand it right back to me at the end. Occasionally that will happen. I try not to let that happen but it never goes down the conveyor belt. I never check it at the counter and that’s how I deal with it. So far I’ve been successful.

Oh one other though, Jeff, if you think about what manufacturers do to get their guitars to their retail outlets they pack them in cardboard boxes that are specially designed to take the entire guitar case, their guitar and the guitar case, and they ship it UPS. Sometimes UPS or FedEx. Some places send it 2nd day, some do 3 day, depends on the manufacturer and they try to avoid having it somewhere over a weekend but if you want to do that, if you really want to send your good guitar and you’re wary about taking it on the plane like I do then go to the guitar store, get a box that will fit outside your case and pack it well and take it to UPS and insure it and have UPS send it because that’s the way all new guitars get shipped all over the country all the time.

To download the full interview in MP3 or read the entire transcript, Register for an account - It's both free, and painless! - takes less than a minute! Once you are registered, you can access the Full interview with Mark Hanson.