Ernie McMillen-The Guitar Doctor

30/09/2025

13/09/2025

Watch out for fakes!

Little opportunity to warn you lovely people out there. A customer just came in with broken strings on their guitar and offered up the “new ones” they just bought on Amazon. We’ve tried selling through Amazon and I can tell you there is no way a shop can make a profit selling through Amazon, so we just don’t. What you see there are fakes, and the quality is generally awful. If you want to know why strings don’t seem to last very long, that is the reason, it’s not Ernie Ball or D’Addario or any other big brand making bad strings, it’s cheap rip-offs made for fractions of a penny.

Telltale signs that might be useful to you the customer are those big jagged teeth on the packaging as opposed to a very fine sawtooth shape on the genuine ones. The hole for hanging them on a display hasn’t been punched properly in the fakes and overall you can see the print quality and colour of the packet is significantly different between the two. The writing on the back is also very different.

Save yourself all this trouble, and buy from your local guitar shop, be that us or any other. It’s not just about supporting local business, it’s actually about getting you good quality product that does what it’s supposed to.

06/01/2025

24/07/2024

HACKER ALERT!
Don’t pass on a reset code to anyone!!

I got a message last night on Messenger, asking if I’d got a code. Person then said they’d changed phones and were asked to get a friend to receive a reset code for their account password. I asked for proof of how they knew me, in case I was passing on a reset code for my own account. No reply. I tried to phone a mutual friend who would have that person’s phone number, but couldn’t get through. That person had had the same message, and had passed on the reset code, and is now locked out of their Facebook account by this scammer. The messenger account I was messaged from was a friend on Facebook who’d not contact me much, but their account was also hacked.

19/06/2024

TEMPORARY!

Work has built up a bit, so I need to temporarily close the doors to get through this backlog. Probably until after the election.

05/11/2023

Due to the amount of work already in the workshop waiting to be done, I’ll not be taking any new work for the rest of November. Anyone who’s already booked stuff in won’t be affected by this, but I can’t take anything new on until I’ve got some space back. Thanks for your patience.