Rock Island Sound — Local services in Town of Greenburgh

We bought my son a $300 guitar from Sweetwater's online for him to start learning electric guitar. There was a slight buzz. Sweetwater's said we could send it back to them and they would fix and send back. Or we could bring it somewhere and they would cover it up to $100. I liked the idea of using a local business so rather than call Guitar Center I started with Rock Island. I called to see if they could get rid of the buzz for the $100. The woman who answered was very friendly and assured me they could. So the following week we brought it in. There was a gentleman there and he said they would fix along with a set up and it would be $125. I was a little hesitant because the woman had assured me it could be done for the $100 that Sweetwater would reimburse. But this man explained that they would do a set up and fix the buzz and they had the best guitar guy ever who would do the best work ever. He also said he would send me an email telling me about the work they did. I never got the mail. Another week later we got a call that it was ready. My husband and son went to pick it up. The owner was there and told them the cost was $167 plus guitar strings. So they got me on the phone with the owner. I explained we were told $100 on the phone then $125 when we dropped it. Now he was charging $140 plus the tax which was $167 plus $14 for guitar strings. I told him that he should honor the price the employee gave me and not charge for strings because they never disclosed that would be part of the deal. He made excuses like those 2 employees are gone. That is not my problem. His other excuse was that he was so busy having now to work both stores alone. Again not my problem. Then he said he would take 10% off of the $140 and still charge me for strings. I thought he should have charged the original $125 that I was told plus tax and thrown in strings for free. But he wouldn't budge. We brought the guitar home and it plays really well. No complaints there. The biggest problem was the owner not taking responsibility for what his employees told us and making lots of excuses. It was very unprofessional and terrible customer service. We will never go back. It is a shame because I would prefer to use a small business, but next time we will head over to Guitar...

My experience was not good. RIS listed a guitar on Reverb dot com as "mint" and did not disclose in the writing that it was mint except for a 1 inch (approx) chunk chipped off the upper edge of the back of the guitar and a fair amount of light scratches on the back too. When I say chunk, I mean clear through the finish to the wood. A few days after I received the guitar I noticed the chunk and thought maybe I had done something to cause this, but then I went back and looked very closely at the pictures and you can see the chunk, but not not easily if you're not looking for it (photos were taken in a manner that did not show the spot head on).

To RIS's credit, they did offer to refund. However, I paid return shipping and the refund came about a week after they received the guitar back had relisted it on Reverb (which they have now listed as "very good" condition - two notches down from "mint"). The Reverb support crew had to issue notifications to them telling them to pay-up the refund and explained to me that they got no response to the notices sent. Reverb had to manually initiate the refund, which I have finally received. Kudos to Reverb for being on top of it.

Those are pure facts. I can back them all up with photos and documentation. I would not advise dealing with these folks unless you are buying at the register in their store. I would also suggest checking everything over very carefully.

They're lucky I did not...

In this impersonable world of online shopping and big box stores, we are lucky to have a small local store that provides repairs and setups by a real luthier in a shop run by a real musician (why should that be so rare these days?) There is also a limited but interesting selection of gear at nice prices. They are even a Strymon dealer. The other local store hadn't even heard of the brand (really). Lessons? Accessories? All there.

Recently I brought in a nice guitar for a setup and the results were so good I have been bringing these folks a piece weekly. They even recovered an electric standing dulcimer. It has been great to get all these items off the list of things to do.

I had an old Epi LP that I picked up cheap ($99 new) decades ago. Rarely played it. I took it to RIS recently with the intent to just replace a broken tuning peg to sell it. The tech noticed how badly it needed care and suggested a number of things to do. I hadn't intended to do things like that because I thought the guitar was barely playable, but agreed out of the trust these folks have built up over the years. When I got the guitar back, I tested it out and was astounded that RIS made this into a playable LP. Now I am not selling it and will be using to to play out for a while. Gibsons get to stay home and safe :) That speaks...