S.h.musical Guitar Store
near praghyan school, Amritpuram, Chandila, Gamma 1, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201308, India
S.h.musical Guitar Store feels less like a shop and more like an overstuck living room that happens to have hundreds of guitars on the walls. Wedged between a halal butchers and a vintage-clothing stall on Harrow Road, it announces itself with only a hand-painted wooden sign: “S.h.musical – open if the shutter is up.” When the corrugated metal is rolled away at 10 a.m. sharp, regulars wander in carrying takeaway coffees and unfinished licks in their heads. Inside, ceiling-high plywood shelves groan with every species of six-string: ’52 Teles burned butterscotch by stage lights, lawsuit-era Les Pauls, zero-fret Hofners fresh from Liverpool basements, and an entire row of Tokai Strat copies in colors Fender never dared—olive drab, Perspex orange, bruised violet.
Syed Hassan, the “S.h.” who started the place in 1993, usually sits on a bar-stool behind a Formica counter stacked with Bakelite knobs and schematics. A cigarette perpetually smolders in a scallop-shell ashtray, giving the room its perpetual frankincense-and-rosin smell. Syed will talk pickups or Sufi saints with equal fluency; ask nicely and he’ll switch the shop hi-fi from his beloved Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to your rough-mix demo without blinking. Repairs happen in a glass cube at the back, where his son Imran—polyester overalls tattooed with Iron Maiden patches—rewinds pickups and balances Floyd Rose trems under a surgical lamp.
Unpriced tags scare casual buyers: VG-, strong neck bow, refret ’08, £TBD. Prices are negotiated like jazz solos, call-and-response, sometimes stretching over months. Students leave deposits of thirty quid pocket-money; pros on tour trade rare overdrives for airline-fee cash. A cracked 1962 Burns Jazz that Pete Townshend reputedly smashed sits perpetually “not for sale,” used instead as the house slide-guitar D-string tester.
Every Thursday at 8 p.m. the stock gets pushed aside and twenty mismatched chairs form an oval for “The Quiet Jam.” Finger-stylists on eight-string fanned fret monsters trade passages with pensioners on parlour acoustics; volume must stay below 80 dB to avoid licensing hell. A kettle and an urn of strong chai appear from a backroom, served in cracked Drosselmeyer mugs. Those nights end when the last commuter train rumbles overhead and the fluorescent lights start buzzing like dying bees.
Someone once tried to franchise S.h.musical; Syed responded by adding a hand-written notice: “We don’t expand, we vibrate.” The store still measures barely twenty-five by forty feet, yet most customers swear it gets larger the longer they stay, silence thickening the air between suspended chords and unsold dreams.
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- Published: July 31, 2025
