Great guitar shop in Trondheim

It's damn hard to find a music shop where you've got a good selection of guitars, amps and whatnot, a decent workshop, knowledgeable staff and good service. Whenever you find one of these, count your blessings and make sure to let the staff know. Having played since the early 90's and having been around geographically speaking, I've been fortunate enough to locate a few really good guitar shops.

In Bergen, I was really happy with Hagstrøm Musikk where I bought my Ibanez S, but I never got any work done on either of my guitars, so I know nothing of the workshop.

When we lived in NC, I was fortunate enouh to find a great guitar shop well within walking distance from our apartment (quite a feat in the South, I might add); the Music Go Round at Crossroads Plaza in Cary. The store owner/guitar tech is a fantastic guy, who gave me some really good advice and traded me some parts to my 'S for a cup of coffee. I've forgotten his name, but Dude; U da MAN. A couple of months before we returned to Norway, my main man Joe was kind enough to take me to Guitar Center Raleigh on Capitol Boulevard which totally made me feel like a kid in a candy store. Joe also turned me on to Line 6 gear, which now is the only brand of amps and effects as far as I'm concerned. Good service, great people and a selection to die for. Before settling on a superb, black-as-night BC Rich Neck-Through NJ Warlock, one particularly metal-looking staffer handed me a Dimebag Darrel signature Dean guitar which had actually been owned and played by Dime himself. On a side note, I see now how Dime got his squeal on, seeing as how I needed a noise gate to control the feedback off of that SOB even at the lowest volume settings. Seeing as how I enjoy playing without uncontrollable feedback, I never went for the Dean. Looking back, this was two months before Dime was shot and killed on stage in Columbus, OH. I wonder what the value of that guitar has increased to now.......

When we shipped our stuff back to Norway and Trondheim, the transport screwed up the neck on my Warlock up something fierce, and I contacted two guitar shops in Trondheim - RIFF and That Other One, who shall forever remain nameless. After some runarounds and exceptionally bad service from That Other One, I stumbled into RIFF and got my Warlock taken care of. Audun is the man when it comes to taking proper care of pointy guitars. Last year, when I was looking for a new axe, I had narrowed my list down to four guitar models; the Fender YJM signature strat, the Jackson King V, the Ibanez JS1200 or the Ibanez Jem, so I looked around to compare prices and whatnot. The useless punks at That Other One tried to convince me to buy other brands in the same price bracket without any concern for how I actually like my guitars to be (even after explaining that I had narrowed it down to four models), etc, and one of them even tried to sell me one of his own guitars. While I was trying out gear in the shop. At RIFF, it was a different atmosphere - they did not try to interfere with my selection, but retrieved info whenever I needed it.

That pretty much settled it for me - I went for the Jem, and have used RIFF Trondheim exclusively after that - both for purchases and for repair/set-up. If you're a guitar player living in Trondheim and you read this (yeah, right), RIFF is the way to go. Don't even consider That Other One.