Luthiery

It Takes a Community to Raise a Luthier

The Challenge

Luthiery as a career, is a way of life that sounds very romantic but in reality is not an easy calling. If you want to make guitars that musicians will value, you need to combine the physical demands of woodworking with the artistic demands of sculpture, and you need to combine the technical demands of structural engineering with the the acoustics of transducer design. You’re trying to build a gorgeous ultra-lightweight structure that can withstand a hundred pounds of force for a century and yet vibrate so responsively that it will capture every nuance of a few grams of pressure and turn it into enough sound to fill a room. Every piece of wood you work with is unique and changes with temperature and humidity daily, and yet the guitar itself can only vary a few thousandths of an inch or you wind up with frets you can’t play or a soundboard that sinks. Actually, it’s not that difficult to build a basic guitar, because a lot of the tough problems can be solved by throwing more glue or wood or steel at the solution, but it is absurdly difficult to build a guitar that is light, stable, and musical.

You have to figure out what you need to know, and then earn that knowledge by doing it daily until it becomes an extension of who you are. In that way, it’s perhaps a little like being a musician.

 

  • Aged Romanian Spruce has a natural cinnamon color
  • Element over element - building up the monocoque
  • An accurate Selmer style pliage that functions as intended
  • Busato style back braces... sono bellissimo!
  • Binding for beauty and structure requires precision
  • Rich tones and textures in a Busato bench copy
  • Bent lining is a beautiful and solid soundboard foundation
  • A good finish is clear, thin, and hard
  • Checking the soundboard's structure with light
  • The first wash of finish reveals the wood's beauty
  • Bracing a textured soundboard in the traditional Italian style

“The whole guitar resonates, even the head and the neck – the whole thing is in perfect harmony.”

– Stephane Wrembel on OPB’s “Speak Out Loud”

The Community

Busato began building in the style of the Italians, without soundhole tonebars and relatively flat braces under the end of his fingerboard and this worked brilliantly for the small short-scale guitars of that era. As the music evolved and his guitars evolved longer scales, larger bodies, and higher neck angles, he seems to have began using excessively large soundhole tonebars to keep the soundhole area stable because the flat fingerboard braces were over-stressed. He later seems to have begun using arched braces under the fingerboard to offset the neck angle which is probably the “proper” way to solve that problem as it doesn’t affect the tuning of the rest of the soundboard as much. But his guitars from all three of those eras are unique and beautiful with incredible voices that were cherished by top artists of the time; including Django who wrote his last song “Anouman” on a Busato just before he passed away. Also, all three eras share a certain acoustic signature of range and responsiveness and cut that show their kinship to the work of Busato and the builders and apprentices he employed. So clearly there was some kind of concept or ideal toward which they worked that was greater than the variance of any one element. A person can often see this commonality of characteristics in the body of work of a great guitar builder. Torres radically evolved his lower harmonic bar throughout his career, and Fleta changed not only his bracing pattern but the wood with which he made the soundboard and yet I doubt that a talented player would mistake a Torres for a Fleta or a Busato for a Selmer. In the final analysis, a guitar responds like the builder and sounds like the player.

So it’s not as easy as it looks. Perhaps you won’t think less of me when you learn that I quit building about a year after I started. So it was bittersweet when my buddy Pete Krebs called and said: “Hey man, David and I are opening Djangofest this year and we want to play your guitars.” When I told him that I’d stopped building, he said: “Well, we’re heading up there Tuesday, so if you change your mind…” I remember getting off the phone and going out into the shop, looking around, and finding two half-finished guitar bodies. So I started building. I built for about 50 hours straight before I started to lose it. The guitars were essentially done and had a wash coat of shellac on them but they needed to be fretted. I was starting to hallucinate and I just couldn’t seem to remember what to do next. So I called Mike Burdette, who is one of the finest neck and fret specialists in the country. There aren’t a handful of people who can flawlessly fret two vintage jazz guitar necks in less than two hours… and it turns out we live close to each other… and we met at a pub on the other side of the city a few weeks before. Don’t try to tell me that fate isn’t playing a role somewhere in that series of events. So Mike came over, fretted those guitars, helped my wife pour me into her car with the guitars, and she drove up the coast to the jazz festival. Long story short, Pete and David played the guitars and I was again a luthier. For the second time in as many years, I found myself thanking Pete Krebs.

Thank you, Mike, Pete, and David.

What It All Means

So is this a “Luthiery” page, or not? How about your tonewood upgrades? Your views on Brazilian, Tortoise and Adirondak? Sorry, but that is all just marketing. The craft of luthiery has absolutely nothing to do with rare materials. The craft of luthiery has everything to do with demonstrating the commitment to solve the problems you encounter and having the support and feedback of good people in the community.

Antonio De Torres, Bob Taylor and Bob Benedetto all built guitars out of very common material and those guitars sounded pretty much like a Torres, a Taylor and a Benedetto. If it is true that the tone is in the player and not the guitar, it is also true that the characteristics of the guitar are in the luthier and not the rarity of the materials. Wood quality is important, and the wood I use is wonderful but the quality of the wood I use is a direct result of the people who find it for me. So again, it’s about people.

 

In summary,
It’s about people.