The $100 Guitar Wall, second in a series

This is a Yamaha FG-Junior (as an olde Gibfon fan, I love faying that) which belongs to my four-year-old.

We keep it in an open G tuning so that random bashing at least begins with a musical surface. The action is low and the scale is small. It is a surprisingly fun guitar to play.

I carry a travel guitar with the Hooties, an Olympia that had my Telecaster neck pickup installed by master luthier and Hootie consort, William Chapman of Columbia, SC. It's handy, especially for demo recording, and it plays fine since techs have monkeyed with it since I brought it on board.

The Yamaha has played smoothly since I found it in the window of a pawn shop near where my mom lives. Once again, I had to come back to get it, but was able to convice Smart Wife fairly easily that this guitar, at $45, was a really good buy.

It has been. The four year old pulls it out regularly. "We haven't jammed in a long, long time, Daddy." So we jam. They start as two-guitar jams, but he usually wants someone to switch instruments. So accordions and drums and slide whistles get added and dropped at whim, and we eventually start marching around the house.

And then, when he's all done, he knows to hang the guitar back up on the wall hook. Even though it has a big jagged crack running through its back, from an earlier, pre-hooked time, the four-year-old digs his time with this guitar and seems like a natural with it.