Guitarbench Issue 4 optimised for slower
Transcription
Guitarbench Issue 4 optimised for slower
GUITARBENCH P LAY E R S | LU T H I E R S | C O LLE C T O R S ACOUSTIC&CLASSICAL Issue 4 2012 DO YOU LIKE OUR MAGAZINE? Please consider subscribing for our future editions and help us stay in publication. Just Click Here! For commercial sponsorship: Just Click Here! Or, for more info: Just click here to email! GUITARBENCH EDITORSNOTE EDITOR: Terence Tan CO-EDITOR: Jessica Pau SALES/MARKETING: Jessica Pau PROOF READER: Doug Shaker Contributing Writers: Anton Emery WEBSITES: guitarbench.com Our Online Magazine: www.guitarbench.com Thank you for looking over the final issue of Guitarbench Magazine for 2012! The information and advertising set forth herein has been obtained from sources believed to be accurate. The publisher, however, does not warrant complete accuracy of such information and assumes no responsibility for any consequences arising from the use thereof or reliance thereon. Publisher reserves the right to reject or cancel any advertisement or space reservation at any time without notice. Publisher shall not be liable for any costs or damages if for any reason it fails to publish an advertisement. This publication may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Copyright ©2012. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Issue 3 Published by: T.TAN Photograph/ Art Work:T.Tan, E.Devine, C.Woods, T.Klassen, A.Manson, A.Emery, M.Doolin, C.Moore, E.Mcmeen, B.Tippin, K.Bonfield, M.Watts, H.Fleishman, Blue-g, J.Greven DO YOU LIKE OUR MAGAZINE? Please consider subscribing for our future editions and help us stay in publication. Just Click Here! We’ve taken your feedback over the past 9 months very seriously. As a result, we think that this bumper edition with added lessons from guitar supremos Ken Bonfield and Michael Watts and more featured guitar builds is our best yet. And we hope you enjoy it! Issue 4 also represents our last free edition as we move towards nominal subscription fees. Our magazine isn’t perfect but we’d like to continue to improve on it and to continue publishing content you’ll enjoy. To do so, we need your help to fund the publication! Please help support this magazine to stay in publication for 2013. Even a simple $5 subscription would tremendously helpful and appreciated as it would help us to continue producing quality articles for your enjoyment! We’re very happy to be able to offer some great perks as thanks for your donations, these are listed in the following pages. Terence Tan, Editor. CONTENTS INTERVIEWS Mike Doolin x-x Chuck Moore x-x El McMeen x-x LESSONS Celtic Guitar Masterclass with Anton Emery: Arranging Celtic Music for Guitar x-x Ken Bonfield’s Artistry of the Guitar: Maintaining the Beginner’s Mind Set x-x Tone Obsession with Michael Watts: A for Attack x-x FEATURES Knowledge: Soundholes x-x Tonewood: Cuban Mahogany x-x A New Era: Larson Bros reproduction x-x Andy Manson’s Sonic Beauty 1x-x Jay Lichty’s Cuban Mahogany OM x-x Bill Tippin’s El McMeen Signature Model x-x Alphomega: Completing a Master’s work x-x Workbench: Greven Guitars x-x Different Strings: Devine Ukulele 1x-x REVIEWS Paramita x In Winter x Red Planet x A N E W E R A? Tony Klassen’s Larson Bros. tribute The Euphonon Round Shoulder Deluxe. It is quite the guitar by Tony Klassen of New Era guitars! Tony says: “I love the tone the deep body offers. Especially on my Larson builds. Larsons tend to be very strong in the midrange and the deep body warms it up a bit without losing any of the punch in the midrange and trebles. Cocobolo is one of my favourite tone woods despite how difficult it is to work with. Very toxic and oily. The sustain with this wood is incredible and helps add depth to the bass response.” Photos courtesy of T.Klassen Some Specs 25.5” scale 1-3/4” nut 2-5/16” bridge spacing Ebony board, Bridge and Headstock overlay. Wide grain Adirondack Red Spruce top with a vintage top tint. Dark Cocobolo back & sides. 3 piece Mahogany neck with Indian Rosewood center strip. Deluxe peal vine in headstock. Fancy pearl inlay in pickguard by Larry Robinson. Icing on the cake! KNOWLEDGE Guitar Anatomy - Soundholes If you have been seeing a lot of interesting modern guitars with a lot of unusual soundholes, you may be wondering what they are all about. Your guitar probably has one big hole in the middle of the guitar. Although most guitars have always had, and still do have, one centred soundhole, that orthodoxy is changing. As with most unconventional ideas, there is much misinformation and conjecture about the purpose and effect of multiple soundholes. I shifted the soundhole to the upper bout initially in the eighties to increase the uninterrupted area of my guitars’ and basses’ tops. Later, after studying the research of Helmholtz, I experimented with dividing the hole into two, unevenly sized, smaller holes. To understand the double soundhole it is useful to first understand the function of the Harry Fleishman soundhole of a conventional guitar. The term soundhole has led most people to believe that most of the sound of a guitar comes from the hole in the top. In fact, if one covers the hole only the low register is strongly affected. This is because the soundhole is actually a low frequency port, not so different from the bass port on a bass reflex speaker cabinet. Each aspect of the design of a guitar contributes to its tone. However the cavity resonance is based on a simple mathematical formula and can be set independently of the “voice” of the guitar, though it will, of course, have some effect on the voice. We can either use the following formulae to calculate the Helmoltz resonance of the guitar’s body, or we can make educated guesses based on similarly sized existing guitars. The Helmholtz resonance is the natural lowest range of the cavity, in this case the guitar body. Essentially, it is the lowest note the guitar can support with an output that is balanced with the rest of the instrument. There are tricks we can use to fool the ear, but that is for another article. H =(C/2π) x (√a/V) H is the resonance frequency a is the area of opening V is the volume of the box, the guitar body. C = speed of sound = 344 meters per second (1140 ft./ sec) a = area of soundhole = pi X radius squared V = volume of air in guitar body Simply stated, (unlike the formulae above) a larger box has a lower resonance frequency, all other things being equal. The soundhole diameter is the second defining feature controlling cavity resonance. A smaller soundhole leads to a lower cavity resonance, which most people find counter intuitive. As we will see, this is due to friction, believe it or not! Multiple soundholes can be added up in area (up to a point) and each will have its own resonance frequency with the box. This is based on Helmholtz’ work (about 1900!). The total will also have a frequency. Done correctly, the combination will have an audibly deeper and flatter response curve than the individual holes would have had. Raising the resonance frequency improves miking and recording characteristics, but makes the guitar seem thinner to the player. Opening the access panel or having many openings can do this. Sometimes this less “bassy” voice is advantageous. Here’s what is happening, without all the math. When air is compressed in a cavity, the pressure inside increases. Once this force of air in the cavity disappears, the higher-pressure air inside will flow out. However, this surge of air flowing out will tend to over-compensate, due to the inertia of the air in the body, and the cavity will be left at a pressure slightly lower than the outside, causing air to be drawn back in. This process repeats with the magnitude of the pressure changes decreasing each time. This is what effects the sustain of low notes. What slows down this in and out flow of air is the friction of the column of air as it tries to go through the soundhole. Although it seems counter intuitive, a larger hole raises the inherent resonance of the cavity; a smaller one lowers it. People often cite Clarence White’s Martin, with its enlarged soundhole, as an example of a larger hole having more bass. In fact, it is the ability to play closer to the mic because of less bass that gives it that extra punch. All of the above relationships are separate from the effect of the mass of the top and back and the way they affect sustain, and reflection, as well as absorption of energy. By dividing the hole into two smaller, unequal holes, we may use the ideas from Helmholtz to both lower the range of the bass frequencies the guitar is capable of producing, and to flatten out the pronounced peak normally present in acoustic guitars. This is especially valuable in controlling the boominess or evenness of the low register. If the soundhole would normally be 78 square centimetres, we may divide it into two smaller holes, 31 and 47 square centimeters respectively. As discussed earlier the smaller soundhole will provide a lower cavity resonance than the larger, and the two combined will have the resonance of the original, combining to form an overall lower, flatter response than any of the three individually. You can picture three small hills, instead of one big mountain. An additional benefit of multiple smaller holes is the increased freedom to brace without the holes in the way. When I first began to move the hole I simply let the brace jump across the hole. Soon I realized that I could brace in new, more interesting ways, with more ability to control the voice of the guitar. By placing the smaller hole toward the treble side, that area could be relieved or cutaway to provide access to higher frets. By playing around with the soundhole sizes we can adjust the low register of a guitar, emphasize some frequencies, or reduce bass to improve the way the guitar sounds on microphone. There is a lot more to learn about soundholes; I listen forward to hearing what luthiers come up with in the future. Harry Fleishman is an accomplished luthier based in California. In addition to his work as a custom luthier he spends considerable time teaching in his world famous Luthiers School International. He can be reached at: fleishmaninstruments.com or by clicking on the image above! SPONSORS We wouldn’t be able to produce this magazine without their generous help. Please take a moment to view their services! TONEWOOD Cuban Mahogany Swietenia Mahogani Quick Facts Scientific name: Swietenia Mahogani Trade names: Cuban Mahogany Janka: 740 Uses: Back & sides, drop tops, necks Bling factor: Curl is uncommon. Availability: Very limited usually from storm downed stock. CITES status: listed in appendix II Natural History Cuban Mahogany is a very close relative of Honduran Mahogany but has a native range from Florida to Cuba and Jamaica. The semi-evergreen tree is slightly smaller than its mainland brother [S.Macrophyllia] growing to 35 metres tall. Status Due to intensive logging, Cuban mahogany has no longer been commercially available since the 1950s. However, a few small, well established plantations exist in its natural range and abroad. This issue’s model for Cuban Mahogany is a Devine Ukulele and a Lichty OM. Both are featured later in this issue, please read on! Photos courtesy of Eric Devine and Jay Lichty. Physical properties Cuban Mahogany is a light pink when fresh, oxidising to deep rich red. It is easy to work with hand or machine tools and takes a excellent polish. Compared to Honduran Mahogany, Cuban is easier to work with. It has a closer, finer grain and carves beautifully. It is seen in various figures, with curl, quilt and wavy grain, although these are now rare. Basic specific gravity (oven dry weight/green volume) 0.40 to 0.68; air- dry density 30 to 52 pcf. Janka side hardness 740 lb for green material and 800 lb for dry. As a tonewood… Cuban mahogany has a long history as a tonewood for necks as well as tops, back and sides. With easy workability and ability to take a beautiful finish, it is a popular tonewood for small and major manufacturers. Subjective tone… Cuban Mahogany tends to be denser than Honduran and hence has more rosewood-like qualities, with a better developed midrange and low end. Availability Plantations occasionally yield logs wide enough for guitar sets, although old growth timber is now on the CITES appendix II. Although raw timber trade is regulated, finished articles can be traded freely. SPONSOR FEATURE Luthier: Jay Lichty OM This guitar was custom built for Shohei Toyoda. He was the 2012 winner of Japan’s National Fingerstyle Guitar Competition for best player and best arrangement, all the while playing his Cuban mahogany Lichty guitar in the competition. Shohei had a very specific sound he was going for and Jay felt that the combination of Cuban mahogany and a Lutz top would be the right combo, along with an LR Baggs pick-up. Shohei was completely thrilled with his guitar so it all worked out great. Specs Back and Sides: Cuban mahogany Top: Lutz spruce Neck: Mahogany Binding: Curly maple binding Rosette: Redwood burl Headplate: Redwood burl Tuners: Gotoh 510 Options: side sound port, LR Baggs Anthem pick-up Photos courtesy of C.Woods Celtic Guitar Masterclass with Anton Emery Arranging Celtic Music For Guitar Welcome to Guitarbench Issue Four and the next instalment of the Celtic Guitar column. In this edition I want to look at the process I use when arranging tunes and talk about a simple arrangement of the South Wind. Arranging Celtic music for guitar can be a very satisfying endeavour. Many of these beautiful melodies are hundreds of years old, if not older. How can we respect the tradition of the music while giving them a new and fresh voice on the guitar? Let’s look at some basic musical and technical considerations. 1. Step away from the guitar. Once I hear a tune I want to arrange, I will find a recording of it on one of the traditional instruments. Usually that is something like the fiddle, flute, pipes or whistle. Ideally I like to listen to a fairly stripped down arrangement, just an instrument or two. It’s easier for me to hear the melody and what is going on. 2. Listen, listen, listen. I put the track on my iPod and in my car and, play it over and over. I want to get the melody ingrained in my ear to the point where I can hum or hear it without listening to the recording. Listening is also the best way to get the subtle lilt and rhythm of Celtic music under your skin. “Listening is also the best way to get the subtle lilt and rhythm of Celtic music under your skin.” 3. Now it’s time to learn the melody on the guitar, preferably by ear. Celtic music is a primarily aural tradition. Tunes are passed down from player to player in kitchens, living rooms, and pubs. Though there are many tune books available these days I find the best use of your time is learning by ear. Yes, the initial learning curve may be difficult. If I am playing in G and using the Orkney (CGDGCD) tuning I’ve got the root on the open fifth string, the fourth note of the scale on the open sixth string, and the fifth on the open fourth string. That gives me the key bass notes on open strings, leaving my left hand free to tackle a complicated melody. If the melody is difficult sometimes I will just drone a simple bass line. Once you get past that, you will be able to pick up tunes faster, easier to retain and a lot more fun to participate in a session. In a dark and crowded pub there is no time to go flipping through a tune book trying to find the right piece of music. If I can I like to vary it with chord substitutions, passing notes, and throwing in bass notes off the beat. If its a slower piece like a harp tunes or an air then we have room to add in a middle part or perhaps take more variety with the bass. Many of these tunes go by at a lightning quick pace, so being able to slow down a recording and keep it at pitch is helpful. Quicktime for the Mac and Windows Media Player on Windows have a feature to slow down mp3’s. If you want to spend a little bit of money on software like the Amazing Slow Downer allows you to loop a section of music, and will also work with a wider variety of audio formats. 4. Add in the bass part and inner voicings. Once I have the melody down on guitar I will start to map out the accompaniment parts. Most Celtic tunes are based around fairly simple chords and tend to stay in one key. So often I will just play the bass part that revolves around the chord changes. It can be handy to have some open strings available for this, especially on the jigs and reels. 5. Vary where you play the melody. Once I have a basic arrangement fleshed out I like to fine tune it. Perhaps some parts might sound better on a different string up the neck for a warmer tone. Are you playing most of the melody linearly, with consecutive notes on the same string? Perhaps some of that might sound better harp style, with consecutive notes played on different strings, allowing them to ring together like a harp. How can you best hold down the bass notes you need while juggling the melody? 6. Practice, practice, practice. After I get an arrangement worked out it’s time to get it into muscle memory. For me the best way is just plenty of practice time. If I am having trouble with a certain passage I will focus in on it and worry less about the parts that are easy. This is particularly beneficial when I am short on time. The South Wind I have tried to illustrate some of these things in my arrangement of the wonderful tune, The South Wind. It has been covered by a number of guitarists and I have heard it in both G and D. I arranged it here in G and it works well in the CGDGCD tuning without a capo. I have notated the tune once through, taking some varieties the second time through the A and B parts to illustrate the concepts discussed above. The first time through the A part I am just plucking the accompaniment chords along with the melody. Notice how the first pickup measure contains notes on adjacent strings. This is a small example of the harp style technique- be sure to let those notes sustain into each other. The second time through the A part starts at measure 8. Notice how I have chosen to play those notes on the third string up the neck instead of on the open 1st and 2nd string. Instead of plucking the chords this time through I have chose to appregiate them. An appregio is the notes of a chord played in sequence. So you pluck the melody note and then appregiate the chord, being sure to let the melody note sustain. Its just a simple thing but I think it adds a lot to the arrangement, especially on melodies like this one that are sparser. The B part starts in on measure 17. Instead of harmonizing that first G note with a G major chord I have chosen to substitute in E minor, the relative minor. This kind of substitution is common and darkens up the sound a bit. Measure 22 takes the melody up the third string and uses the open 4th string as a middle voice. Compare that to measure 10 where we play the passage harp style, with the addition of a harmonized bass line. The South Wind is a good tune to start with because it’s a relatively simple melody that can be arranged a number of ways. Experiment with other approaches, perhaps try a simple drone accompaniment, or harmonize it with different chords in a different key/tuning. If you have any questions feel free to reach me at http://www.celticfingerstyleguitar.com Anton Emery lives in Portland Oregon and plays guitar, flute, and clawhammer banjo. He enjoys playing at irish sessions around town, teaching students, and drinking far to much coffee. The South Wind CGDGCD Tuning Trad Arr. Anton Emery celticfingerstyleguitar.com j ° #3 œ œ ™ j j j œ œ œ ™ œ œ œ œ ™ œ œ™ œ ˙ œ œ & 4 ˙ ™ œ œ̇ œ œ œ˙ ™ œ ˙™ œ ˙™ ˙™ ˙™ ˙™ ˙™ ™ ˙™ ˙™ ˙™ 5 ¢⁄ D C G D G C 0 0 ° # & ˙ ˙ ¢⁄ 4 0 0 2 0 0 0 4 2 0 0 4 2 0 2 0 4 2 2 2 0 2 0 0 4 0 7 5 4 0 0 0 2 0 4 0 0 2 2 2 4 0 4 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 4 5 0 0 0 5 2 0 2 4 0 0 2 5 0 5 4 2 0 0 0 5 0 7 2 0 0 2 œ œ 2 œj œ 4 0 0 2 2 2 0 4 0 2 2 0 0 2 4 5 2 0 5 2 œ 2 0 j œ œ™ œ ˙˙ 4 0 0 2 0 2 0 0 0 œ 4 4 4 0 25 jœ œ™ œ œ œ œ œœ ™™ œJ œ œ™ 2 0 œ œ™ 5 5 0 4 4 j œ˙ œ™ œ ˙ 2 0 2 0 4 œ™ œ 0 0 j œ œ œ 0 2 0 2 0 0 0 30 2 œ̇ j œ j œ j ™œ œ œ ˙™ 2 ˙ ˙˙ 4 4 4 2 0 0 ° # œ™ & ¢⁄ 4 0 j ° #œ œ œ œ j j j œ™ œ & œ œ œ œ ˙™ œ ¢⁄ 0 10 0 4 2 œ œ œ ™ œj œ œ œ œ™ œj œ ˙ œ œ ™ œj œ œ̇ œ œ œ œ œ ˙™ œ œ œJ œ œ œ ™ œ ˙™ 15 20 j œ ™ œ œ œ̇ ° # œ œ j œ œ œ™ J ™œj œj œ œj œ ™ œ œ ˙ & œ ™ œœ œ œœ ™™ J ™ ˙˙ œ œ œ œ™ œ ˙™ ¢⁄ 0 0 0 2 j œ œ œ 0 2 0 ˙˙ ™™ ˙™ 0 0 0 0 Sonic Beauty Andy Manson’s take on Sonic Sitka In May 2011, I received a package from the USA containing a bookmatched pair of Sitka spruce boards. This was the introduction to my participation in a truly fascinating project. I was to be part of a group of luthiers chosen to each build a guitar to their own design using a soundboard from the same log of spruce. The finished guitars would then be subjected to technological inspection, catalogued and kept accessible for further reference over many years to come. A recorded study of the effect of age on the sound quality of guitars. This has always been a somewhat mythical appreciation without hard evidence. When I was first accepted into the project I experienced some apprehension as to whether I could come up to the mark, in such illustrious company. Well, the wood arrived and as soon as I felt it and heard it's life, the way became clear. I spent a bit of time visualising the potential, sonically and visually, and what type of guitar it could be. It had the stiffness to allow for a fairly large instrument, and enough voice to give a strong treble with plenty of space for the bottom end. Medium jumbo with cutaway, longish scale, .011” - .052” phosphors. Since the spruce was so lively, let's keep it that way, with 100 year old reclaimed Indian rosewood for the bridge and fingerboard. I didn't want to risk the 115 year old undocumented Brazilian rosewood stock I have. I'd recently used some “blistered” maple with success, which visually looks splendid and has a very compliant sonic nature, not to confusingly colour the spruce tone. An old Honduras mahogany door frame would make a nice lively neck, laminated with 5 mm black walnut in the centre. Some tulip wood I've had for about 30 years for the binding would make a warm link between the deep colour of the spruce,the pale maple and the rich red of the mahogany. Then, since I live in Portugal, olive root for the head facing, a strip of it inset between purflings around the sound hole and front edge, and a wedge of the same in the tail block inlay, just to finish it off. Antique gold “Gotoh” tuners with black buttons, ebony bridge pins with pearl dots, pearl dots in the side of the fingerboard and an ebony strap peg in the tail. Just a little pearl flourish in the twelfth fret, and, well, that seemed to be the recipe defined. I generally use cherry for the bridge plate, as I have a lot of offcuts (I use cherry a lot for back and sides), and it has all the right qualities. Sonically good, strong, and doesn't split out much when drilling the pin holes. As for gluing it all together, I've used “Titebond original” for many years now, so that's the adhesive. As a final touch, I've been favouring a mottled green “Corian” for nut and saddle of late. Wood looks nice with leaves on it. This material I find to have very pure sonic connection, without compromising the string and wood sound. You have to be careful with perfect bearing surfaces to avoid crushing, but then I guess that should be normal practice anyway. Sometimes I feel a harsh white nut and saddle stand out visually a bit too strongly. To maintain the theme and keep things simple, the truss rod cover to be of olive root, disappearing in the headstock facing. And of course the finish. My experience tells the best way to hear all of the wood is with an oil finish. I've been using a preparation of tung oil with some other natural ingredients (strictly no petrochemicals or synthetics) with excellent results. So that was the recipe. As to method, I would maintain my usual practice, not wishing to introduce any unknowns apart from the unusually stiff and lively Sitka top. Voicing the soundboard was really a matter of, as usual, listening to the wood while shaping the sound bars, placed as I would under normal circumstances, and continually assessing the stiffness in various areas while trimming the bars. I have to say, the whole process of handling that spruce kept me thinking “if only I could have an ongoing stock of this.....” Finally, on stringing up, the usual anti climax came over me, with a general sense of wondering what on earth possessed me to imagine I know what I'm doing. This always happens, then I shuffle off and drink coffee for a spell, returning half an hour later to find the instrument starting to wake up- sit down with it and run through my party pieces. This guitar turned out, over the next couple of days, to bring me to the belief that it is certainly the best I've made out of about a thousand instruments in over forty years. It is improving daily. I would love to keep it, but I would rather it went to someone who could really do it justice. Before that I have to make a recording of its response to a controlled stimulus. This a requirement for the “Sonic Sitka” project, and will be repeated periodically in years to come. The experience of building this guitar has been enlightening for me, and reassuring that my expectation from first touch of the spruce was realised. I now have to set an elevated standard for my work. I am grateful to Denis Merrill and Terence Tan for facilitating this. Andy Manson Portugal Photos courtesy of A.Manson SPONSORS We wouldn’t be able to produce this magazine without their Handmade American Guitars generous help. Please take a moment to view their services! theacousticmusicco.co.uk 39 St James’s St Brighton 01273 671841 Handmade American Guitars Over 50 in stock from £1595 The Acoustic Music Co has been offering hand made guitars and mandolins from North America since 2001. I represent over fifty luthiers, over 150 instruments in stock, a dedicated playing room and free advice. All instruments are on my website. These instruments are hand crafted by the finest luthiers working today. My shop, by the sea in Brighton, is open tues - sat 11 - 6. Prices from £1295. T H E I N T E R V I E W: MIKE DOOLIN Thanks for taking the time to chat. Can we start at the beginning- how you got into lutherie? I started out as a professional musician, but I’ve always modified and repaired my own guitars too. I rewired guitars back in high school, then over the years I gradually took on more involved tasks, such as truss rod adjustments, making nuts, setting intonation, refinishing, refretting and tremolo installation. So, it was repairs and modifications for a long time, mostly just for myself, and almost all on electric guitars since that’s what I played. Then sometime in the late 80’s I heard Michael Hedges, and that inspired me to want to play acoustic guitar. But since I was coming from playing electric guitars, I was accustomed to easy high fret access. Practically all of my solo repertoire was unplayable on even a standard cutaway acoustic, because the cutaways weren’t deep enough. So that got me thinking about a double-cutaway acoustic guitar, and since there were none on the market that were to my liking, I realized I’d have to make one myself. Happily, I’d been friends with Jeff Elliott for years, so he was the obvious choice to ask for advice. I got a copy of Cumpiano and Natelson’s “Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology” and, over the course of about 10 months, built my first acoustic guitar. This was in 1993. How have been things progressed since then? At that time I was working as a software engineer, but that career was not to be. The long hours of typing gave me chronic tendinitis in my hands, so I had to quit. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, as it motivated me to launch my guitar making business. I leveraged my computer knowledge to write my web site and do my own digital photography and ad design. The timing was perfect too, since 1995 was right about the time that everyone got Internet access and discovered the World Wide Web. I was one of the first luthiers to have a web site, and I was able to get a high search engine ranking. For years, I would come up in the first page on Google with a search for "Handmade Acoustic Guitar". I've also done a lot of writing, both online and in print, for the Guild of American Luthiers. That can really boost your reputation, establishing you as an expert simply by sharing your knowledge. I participated in online forums, I wrote an "Ask the Luthier" column for a friend's guitar teaching site, and I published a lot of how-to articles with the GAL. The best thing you can do with information is to give it away! Another factor in my early success was advertising in Acoustic Guitar magazine. I had exhibited at the 1998 Acoustic Guitar Festival, and the next issue of AG had a photo collage of exhibitors’ instruments, including a postage-stamp sized image of my guitar. That little picture led to a guitar order! So I immediately realized the power of targeted print advertising. I started running 1/8 page colour ads a few times a year in AG, and later in Fingerstyle Guitar, Down Beat and Vintage Guitar. Since that order, I've always had a wait list. Well, your guitars do have a distinctive double cutaway.... Yes, that was another important factor: I found a niche! There were already plenty of great luthiers out there building “a better Martin than Martin”, offering the kind of quality a factory can’t afford to produce. That is a niche in itself of course, compared to the enormous market for traditional factory guitars, but it was very well represented by that point. I offered a “better mousetrap” with a design that offered access to the whole fretboard, which also had a very identifiable look. Now, I don’t want all this talk of market niches to imply that this was the motivation behind my designs or my becoming a luthier. That part was kind of a happy accident. I came up with a design for myself, then wanted to build it for myself, and in the process got seriously hooked on the whole design/build process, and only later realized there might be other people out there who might want a guitar like that too. I’ve actually never built a nondouble-cutaway guitar, although many people have asked me to. My response is always, why? Why would you want to cut off access to a third of the fretboard? But that insistence on sticking with my design has had the effect of establishing trademark, which is important in marketing. So I guess I’m an entrepreneur in spite of myself. My guitars always have the doublecutaway, the spiral rosette and my headstock crest. Everything else is variable according to the style of guitar I’m applying that to - OM, dreadnought, harp guitar, etc. There’s probably another level of overall design appearance going on there too, in that I’ve always designed guitars by starting with a standard design and then modifying it by eye until it looks right to me. “So I guess I’m an entrepreneur in spite of myself. ” I’ll have a drawing on the drafting table for a week or more, shifting lines around, softening or accentuating curves, walking away and coming back later to look with fresh eyes, until everything looks settled and right with everything else. I like to think that even aside from the more obvious visual features like the double-cutaway, there’s some overall design sense to my work, some common thread of visual style bubbling up from my subconscious mind. At any rate, that’s the part of designing guitars that I find most compelling and satisfying. I suppose I’d have to ask- does that double cutaway affect the sound of the instrument, at the end of the day? I don’t think so, if you “do it right”. The upper bout of an acoustic guitar is pretty dead acoustically, there is a lot of bracing under the fretboard, so the loss of surface area of the top isn’t a problem. Similarly, the reduction of internal air volume has surprisingly little effect, which may be why there are so many different sizes of guitar bodies but they all still sound like guitars. I think the real issue with cutaways is the loss of structural integrity in the upper bout where the neck attaches. The shoulders of a noncutaway guitar are in the shape of a convex curve, like an archway or an eggshell; that’s a very strong structure. When you add a cutaway, you invert that structure into a concave curve, like a leaf spring, and lose a lot of that strength. That can translate into a loss of sustain and punch in the sound. I recover that upper bout strength with a pair of flying braces running from the neck block to the waist on either side. I think those braces could even benefit non-cutaway guitars, but for a double-cutaway they’re crucial. So that’s what I mean by “do it right” - as long as you recover that upper bout strength, the double-cutaway doesn’t affect the sound. Maybe you could share a bit more of your build philosophy with us? I'm surprisingly traditional in some ways. I didn't set out to try to improve the sound of the guitar, I think the best of the traditional designs sound fantastic, really no room for improvement there. So if you look inside my guitars you'll see Martin style scalloped X bracing on the steel strings and Hauser-Torres 7-fan bracing on the nylon strings. What I did set out to try to improve was functionality for the player (because initially that player was me!). First and most obvious of course was the double-cutaway, to give free access to the whole neck. But implicit in that design goal was for the entire neck to be playable in terms of action too. Happily, a secondary advantage to the doublecutaway is that almost all of the frets are effectively "on the neck", instead of the last 8 or 10 frets being on the fretboard extension over the body. This solved the classic "hump at the body joint" problem that's so common in noncutaway guitars. And then, the Adjustable Neck Angle System solved the last piece of the puzzle, making it extremely easy to maintain the action without ever shaving the saddle or paying to have a glued neck joint reset. The Pinless Bridge is the one other design change I’ve implemented, and I didn’t even have to invent that one since Jeff Elliott already had! There are several functional advantages to it: no pins to lose or wear out or get stuck in the holes, no holes drilled through the bridge to wear open over time, the string ball ends aren’t grinding away on the bridge patch. If you break a string, it simply falls off! I think most importantly, the rods are permanently glued through the bridge, top and bridge patch, so my bridges never lift up in back. All of that is more along the lines of my design philosophy. As to my building philosophy, how I actually go about physically constructing instruments, I'm somewhere in the middle between the "old world craftsman" and "modern engineering approach" schools. My two main mentors, Jeff Elliott and John Greven, are definitely the former, old-school woodworkers with tremendous hand tool chops who don't need much in the way of power tools or jigs to build world class guitars. I came to guitar making with very little background in woodworking (I got D's in high school shop class!) but with a natural mental inclination towards engineering. So I've always used power tools and jigs and fixtures to make the components of my guitars. I do love a sharp chisel or scraper and use them when appropriate, but I also do a whole lot with belt and spindle sanders, routers, table and band saws, and lots of simple jigs that attach to those power tools to make repeatable accurate cuts. On the other end of that continuum would be the CNC luthiers, who program the dimensions of parts into a computer for the CNC to cut. It's not that I'm morally opposed to that - I have my headstock logos cut by CNC laser - but it doesn't strike me personally as very much fun either. At the end of the day, I'm still flexing, tapping, scraping, chiselling, and otherwise hand-shaping things to final dimension, and above all, listening! To what the wood is telling me. “Above all, listening! To what the wood is telling me” And you’re pretty traditional with wood choices too? Yes, in as much as there is such a thing any more. It’s very lucky for us all that the voice of an acoustic instrument is the top (whatever percentage you’d like to put on that) because the tops of most string instruments are made of softwoods, which are plentiful and fast growing. Particularly in the northwestern US where I am, Sitka and Engelmann spruce and Western red cedar all grow nearby, and are readily available in extremely high quality. But the other traditional woods for guitars, such as Honduran mahogany, Brazilian and Indian rosewood, and African ebony, are in short supply. Would I prefer to use Honduran mahogany for a neck, Brazilian or Indian rosewood for back and sides, and African ebony for the fretboard and bridge? Sometimes, and happily I personally have put away enough of a stash of those woods to make all the guitars I’m likely to make in my lifetime. But I think we all have to get over some of the traditionalist mindset regarding wood choices, because of the reality of current availability and because there are so many woods available that can make fantastic guitars. I’d say the best guitars I’ve made have had either cocobolo or Madagascar rosewood back and sides; my best dreadnought had a redwood top and African blackwood back and sides; my favourite harp guitar has a redwood top and Peruvian walnut back and sides; I recently made an outrageous 00 model with a Lutz (Sitka-Engelmann hybrid) top; my bass that Esperanza Spalding is playing has Sapele back, sides and neck; my personal bass has a redwood top and zebrawood back and sides; my best OM had a Western red cedar top and lacewood back and sides. When I first got started 17 years ago, “alternative woods” was a huge controversial topic. At first, everyone wanted traditional wood combinations, but in a very few years that started to change. Instead of “just give me a spruce top and rosewood back and sides”, people became interested in what was available, and started asking what wood combination would give them the sound they were looking for. I think that’s very healthy, both from the perspective of conserving endangered species and of being open to the possibilities afforded by nontraditional wood choices. Again, the voice of the instrument is the top, and we have plenty of gorgeous top woods available to us. I personally think in more general terms about back and side woods. Heavier woods (Brazilian rosewood, cocobolo, African blackwood) give you more bass and sustain; lighter woods (mahogany, lacewood, even Indian rosewood) give more punch and separation; really hard woods (cocobolo, Madagascar rosewood) give an extra kick to the treble; more damping woods (Macassar ebony, zebrawood, maple) have a drier quicker sound. The neck wood is another variable - that red cedar / lacewood OM had an Eastern maple neck, which I think had the weight to put the bass and sustain back under the light weight lacewood body and bright redwood top. But these are all icing on the cake so to speak. The voice of the instrument is the top, and we’re all so fortunate to have available to us the plentiful, beautiful, sonorous softwoods to be the voice of our instruments. I noticed you've been moving away from standard 6 string flat-tops and more into Harp guitars? That led to orders from Gathering attendees, and of course I put them on my site and in my print ads so that led to more orders. Not moving away from 6-strings, I still make a lot of those, but harp guitars have become a big part of my business. That was another case of good timing on my part, completely accidentally of course. After attending the first three Gatherings as a builder I became interested in playing them myself, so I’ve built three for myself and one for my wife. I was a featured performer and teacher at the 9th Gathering last year, playing (coincidentally) my 9th harp guitar. I’m also featured on Harp Guitar Music’s “Christmas Present” CD playing that instrument. That’s the redwood/walnut harp guitar I mentioned earlier. Back in late 2002 Muriel Anderson came to town, and both Jeff Elliott and I showed up at her concert with guitars in hand. It was kinda funny really, both of us standing in line with our cases, hoping to show Muriel what was in them, he the master, me the student, but of course Jeff was as gracious as always and we both got back stage with Muriel on the break. She, in turn, played both of our guitars on stage in the next set! But then of course the next week she called Jeff to ask him to build her a harp guitar. Jeff had a 15-year wait list at the time, so he offered to consult on the design and have me build it. So that's what we did, Jeff designed the bracing and structural matters, I designed the visuals, and I finished it in time to attend the first Harp Guitar Gathering, at which Muriel was a feature performer. As an instrument designer and builder, I’d have to say that harp guitars are a welcome opportunity to try new things and let the design muse run wild. There isn’t much of a tradition to draw on there, particularly in terms of players or repertoire, but also in terms of the design of the instruments themselves. With creative souls such as Fred Carlson out there pushing the design envelope to the limits of imagination, it’s an open creative field. I haven’t done anything nearly as innovative as some of Fred’s designs, but I’ve definitely felt free to break with the Dyer/Knudsen tradition and interpret the design essence of the harp guitar in my own way. Similarly as a player, harp guitar is a wide open field. There's literally no playing tradition to copy! So at each Gathering we see how individuals have cast their musical personalities through the harp guitar. Speaking for myself, the first harp guitar I made for myself was an archtop F-hole (as far as I know, the only such instrument ever made), which I dubbed the "jazz harp guitar" and played Pat Metheny and Leni Stern tunes on. “As a player, harp guitar is a wide open field. ” The second was my "R&B harp guitar", based on the Gibson 335 design, which I played material such as Hall & Oats and Grover Washington Jr. on. Finally, I came around to realizing the beauty of the flat-top acoustic harp guitar (not that it wasn't obvious, but I was coming from a jazz and R&B perspective which are fundamentally electric guitar styles) and built myself one of those. But my take on that instrument is still rooted in jazz - it has 7 sub-basses tuned in the key of Eb, with sharping levers to let me get to any key from Eb to E. That's let me explore the possibilities of acoustic guitar with flat-key bass notes. Most guitar music is in E, D, A or G, because of the open bass notes available. With a harp guitar that has 7 subs tuned to Eb, there's no particular advantage to those keys. So it lets me play tunes like Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed" or Thelonius Monk's "'Round Midnight" in their original key of Eb (Major and minor respectively). Aren’t harp guitars difficult to constructeven from sourcing materials to the longer time on design and construction? Well, sure, and we have to charge commensurately. Tops are particularly hard to find since softwoods aren’t typically available at exotic wood suppliers. Backs and sides aren’t so difficult so long as you’re willing to work from raw lumber, resawing it yourself or having planks resawn into sets. A lot of us do that anyway, because you can get some gorgeous and unusual wood if you don’t rely on what the lutherie suppliers have available. I've bought all my cocobolo, Peruvian walnut, sapele, African blackwood, figured maple and mahogany as raw lumber and had it resawn by a mill nearby, which actually saves me a lot of money and gives me access to materials I couldn't otherwise get. Cedar and redwood are available as lumber too, you just have to wade through a lot of planks to find one that's clear and quartered. Spruces are much more difficult, but you can sometimes find cello top sets big enough to resaw for harp guitar tops. The design part is an opportunity really. I don't think I would have ever become a luthier if all there was to do was to recreate existing designs. There's a place for that certainly, particularly in the world of the violin family, and there are lots of very traditional guitar makers as well. That's a huge technical challenge, to accurately recreate a traditional design, and an important way to preserve traditions. I have great respect for luthiers who do that, but it's not for me. Harp guitars came along for me at the perfect time, when I had pretty much got my process down and my designs finalized. It was almost getting to be rote - another Jumbo, another OM, what can I do that I haven't done yet? - when I got the opportunity to really design a whole new instrument, and that was that first harp guitar. Once the design is done, actually building a harp guitar isn't that much more difficult than building a regular guitar. It's about like one and a half guitars. But again, we charge commensurately. Muriel wanted nylon strings, a short "requinto" scale, and 20 frets accessible, so right off there was nothing like that in the Dyer/Knutsen tradition. I guess it gets down to what you want to do with your time, what you enjoy, what your ambitions are. After all, nobody becomes a luthier because it's easy! It's not, and that's not even the point. We do it, or at least I do it, to create something beautiful in the world, to realize a vision. That was very freeing. I just started with Jeff Elliott's smallest classical guitar body shape, laid the strings all out where they would ideally be, and from there it was pencil and French curves on the drafting table, playing with lines and curves, shifting the soundhole off-center, working in all my usual design trademarks, and just trying to draw something that looked right to me. A very creative, very satisfying experience. With harp guitars would you say that player ergonomics come into play much more? Yes, certainly with regard to string spacing. The original Knudsen and Dyer instruments had the sub-bass strings spread pretty widely apart, making it more difficult to grab all the strings with the right hand. I space mine as close as is practical, so even with seven subs I can simultaneously sound the lowest sub and the high E on the neck. Add a bank of supertrebles to that, and there's no way you're going to be able to simultaneously sound the lowest sub and the highest super with your right hand, but you still want the supers to feel like a natural extension of the neck strings. Ergonomic problems definitely arise with the body shape too, and in some ways there isn't much you can do about it. The harp arm does limit the possible playing positions somewhat, and acoustic harp guitars are, by nature, big instruments. But you can still do arm bevels, wedge bodies, and relatively shallow body depths to help the ergonomics. My first harp guitar was in part a response to an ergonomic need. Muriel Anderson is just about five feet tall and under 100 lbs, and she was having a lot of trouble touring with the full-sized Dyer-style harp guitar that Del Langejans made for her, as nice as that instrument is. She literally had to have someone meet her at the airport to carry it for her in its flight case. So part of the reason she wanted a harp-requinto was so she could carry it on a plane and put it in the overhead compartment. It also just made sense to make her an instrument scaled to fit her physically. So that instrument is just about the size of a standard classical guitar, and it looks perfect with her holding it. Not to mention the weight of the tuners and the bass arm.... ...add in sharping levers and nut posts and you can have an awful lot of metal out there. I've always made my harp tuner posts and nut posts out of brass rod, since it's easy to turn on a lathe and is a nice gold colour. But brass is also relatively heavy, and way out there on the harp headstock every little bit of weight adds up. On my most recent HG I made those out of 7075 aircraft aluminium, and learned to anodize it and tint it gold. That made a huge difference, shaving 100 grams off! I also use open back tuners with wood knobs, both to save weight on the tuner casings and because the tuner post screw is accessible so I can replace the posts. I replace the tuner posts so I can make them a larger diameter to handle the larger gauge bass strings. I also save some weight by making the harp headstock out of Spanish cedar. It looks like mahogany but is much lighter weight. It's also rather soft and not as strong as mahogany, so I reinforce the harp headstock with two layers of graphite cloth. Graphite cloth is interesting stuff. It's only .007" thick and very flexible on its own, so you wouldn't think it could add stiffness and strength. But the fibres have no stretch whatsoever, so if you epoxy it to both sides of a sheet of wood, it makes the assembly amazingly stiff. I split the thickness of the headstock and epoxy it back together with graphite in between, and put another layer of graphite under the head veneer on the front. If you look at the edge of the harp headstock you can see the first layer of graphite as a fine black line running all around. The other layer is hidden under the binding. It adds practically no weight but a great deal of strength and stiffness. There's not only the bass strings to contend with, these days there are more folks looking at additional courses of strings or treble bank... Muriel had me build her a second instrument with super-trebles, and most of the inquiries I get are for HGs with both supers and subs. Come to think of it, other than that first one for Muriel, all of my harp guitar orders have been for both supers and subs. The only other subs-only HGs I've built have been for myself and my wife. I haven't felt attracted to super-trebles as a player, I guess the prospect of all those strings kind of intimidates me! “You typically need about 27 lbs of tension per string” From a design perspective, super-trebles are easier to deal with since there isn't typically a body extension to hold them, they're just strapped across the treble side of the body. I've been using zither pins for attachment and violin fine tuners for tuning, which are much lighter than regular tuning machines, so there isn't much of an issue with additional weight. What does become problematic is the additional string tension. A subs-only harp guitar is about like a 12-string for tension, but supers add another 8 strings worth, and that's getting way up there! You typically need about 27 lbs of tension per string, any lower than that and the string goes sharp when you first pluck it, it sounds like a koto. So a regular steel string guitar is carrying about 160 lbs of tension at the bridge, while a 7-sub HG has about 350, like a 12-string strung with heavy gauge strings. Add 8 supers to that, and you’re looking at 540 lbs of tension! I think that’s going beyond reasonable expectations for what a flat-top glued-bridge guitar is going to be able to hold. On that most recent instrument for Muriel, I found a way around that. She wanted another nylon string instrument, but she wanted steel supers. There's a huge design conflict there: do you brace it for nylon or steel? If you brace it for nylon, the supers will cave the top in; if you brace it for steel, the nylon strings won't be able to drive the top. But I realized that if I didn't attach the supers at the bridge, if I ran them all the way to the edge of the body instead, their tension wouldn't be applied to the bridge. They go through the tie block and over the saddle, but they're attached to the fine tuners all the way back at the edge of the lower bout. That let me brace the top for nylon strings with fan bracing, so the neck strings and subs can drive the top properly. This worked so well, I don't think I would do super-trebles the old way again. So no plans for multiple banks of super trebles? MD: Actually, I do have one order for a harp guitar with three super-treble banks, and it will use that same design of taking the supers off of the bridge. But I can't say any more about that project, it's top-secret! Ok, maybe we can talk a little about the announcement on your site about your retirement... Sure. The simple answer is that I came into some money, enough that I don't have to work any more. That's the kind of event that makes one ponder what one wants to do with one's life. I've been building guitars full time for 16 years, and working on them as a hobby since my teens. I've also been, at times, a software engineer, technical writer, web designer and a few other assorted things. Throughout all of that, I've always been a musician, since second grade in fact. I made my living at it through the 80's, but that's not an easy thing to do and it's gotten harder over the years. So I've usually made my living at something else. Now that I don't have to do that any more, I'm simply returning to the thing I've always wanted to do, which is play music. When they hear this, some people have taken it to mean that lutherie was not a passion for me, that it was nothing but a way for me to make money. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I'm still making guitars, designing jigs and tools, and writing for American Lutherie. I'm just not taking orders. I think that in my heart of hearts, every guitar I ever built, I was building for myself... and then I'd have to pack it up and ship it to its owner, deposit their check, and go on to the next one. That did give me a lot of experience building, but it was often hard to send those guitars away. Now I really do just build them for myself, and I get to keep them, and play them! That sounds wonderful- you can now concentrate on the stuff you want to build. But that means there is currently, no way we can obtain a new Doolin? Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s down to the hundred or so instruments already out there. There are a couple in particular that I’d buy back for myself if they became available! So which we your favourites you've had to let go over all these years? Well, there was this 12-string, curly black walnut with a sitka top. I've only built three 12-strings, and this was the third one. The person who commissioned it actually refused it! Didn't like the neck profile or some such. I later found out that he bought my second 12-string "used" right after that. Enough said about that situation... but I took the guitar back, per my policy of "first right of refusal", and sent it on to a dealer who sold it immediately. For me as a player, a 12-string is a bit of a novelty, so I don't know if I'd take the time and trouble to make one for myself now. But I'm a huge Ralph Towner fan, and that was a really wonderful instrument, so I wouldn't mind getting it back. There was also a Madagascar rosewood jumbo with a cedar top and dove inlays on the fretboard. It's the guitar I put on my business card and in many of my ads. My wife designed and cut the inlays. I heard that the owner sold it after a year or two, which kinda broke my heart. I guess that always hurts, when you pour everything you have into an instrument, doing everything the customer asks and everything you know will make a great guitar, and then they either immediately refuse it or sell it later. (To be fair to both my customers and myself, I’ve only had two instruments refused in 16 years of lutherie). I understand, there’s no accounting for taste and everyone has their own preferences and desires, and these things are a considerable financial investment too - I’ve had to sell a few guitars that I loved but couldn’t afford to keep. But it is ironic that those two instruments that I consider some of my best were not so highly appreciated my their original owners. Oh well. That probably influenced my decision to retire too. Maybe we could shift focus a little and speak about your musical career- what are you up to now? I guess the short answer would be, "all the same stuff, but more of it". I've been a sideman in jazz and R&B bands around Portland for the past 30 years or so, and I also have a fondness for duo and solo playing. My gigs are about equally divided between duos with singers in wine bars and coffee shops during the week, and big R&B horn bands in dance clubs on the weekends. The latter are high energy dance gigs, playing loud and fast, while the former are lower key and quieter but often more challenging since I'm sort of functioning as the whole band. My strengths as a guitarist seem to be in harmony and rhythm - the R&B bands like me for my rhythm playing, and my duo partners like that I can hold down a bass line and comp simultaneously while holding down a groove. I read fairly well for a guitar player (which isn't saying much!) so I do get calls for reading gigs. I'm the accompanist at a weekly vocal jam that has me reading lead sheets for jazz standards in funny keys (that's a great thing about working with singers - they put their tunes in whatever key suits their voice, so you end up playing in keys like Db a lot, and after a while key just doesn't matter any more). I'm also in the bands of several songwriters, playing and sometimes recording their original material. In between all of that, I'm working up solo repertoire on harp guitar, in anticipation of this year's Harp Guitar Gathering. I'm going to be writing material for a second album with David Martin, which we'll record this August. I'm writing and recording background music for a set of meditation CDs. And I'm writing and recording theme and incidental music for an upcoming film. And in between all of that, I'm practicing, learning tunes, studying chord voicings, transcribing solos... just trying to become a better musician. I don't have any ambitions for fame or to play with famous people, I just want to play good music well. I’ve been playing harp guitar for about 7 years now (although admittedly not as my primary instrument), and I still have to think pretty hard to keep the subs going. I only have a handful of pieces I can play on it. But it is a fascinating instrument. Composing for the harp guitar - is that harder than just six strings? Thank you for your time and we wish you all the best on your next album! I don’t think it’s much harder. It actually frees you up quite a bit in terms of what you can do with your left hand, when you don’t have to be fretting bass notes all the time. What’s hard is learning to play the piece once it’s written! And thank you, Terence, for interviewing me for Guitarbench! T H E I N T E R V I E W: CHUCK MOORE Thank for taking the time off your busy schedule to speak to us, Chuck. Maybe we could start at the beginning with how you got started? I moved to Moloka'i in the late 1980s and after building my house I found myself with little else to do. Like many of us that went through the hippie movement, I had learned a lot of the hand arts including pottery, wood carving, leather work, stained glass, jewellery making, even scrimshaw. So I had the hand skills but no focus. After a while I became known as the local fixit guy mainly because I had a bunch of tools and a whole lot of time on my hands and I was too foolish to refuse people. Folks would bring be all sorts of projects to make or repair in exchange for lobsters or a few hands of bananas. Some one once brought me a basketcase uke for me to look at. I don’t remember anything about it except that the neck was off, the bridge was gone and the top was peeling away. When I took it apart to repair, the inner mysteries were exposed and I knew it was something I could do. After all I’ve built my share of bird houses and cutting boards and even a dulcimer from a kit many years before. Since my tiny public library offered no clues on instrument building I ordered a Stewart MacDonald parts catalogue (I didn’t want to invest in a book at that point), figuring out the steps and putting the pieces together in my head. I immediately caught the bug (or flea as it were) and started building ukuleles from scratch using the most common materials I had at hand-coconuts! I made a couple dozen of these that were pretty awful but they fuelled my desire to pursue more traditional style instruments. This was during the pre-Internet days of the 1980s, and information on building ukuleles was scarce. Being as isolated as I was, my learning process was long and slow. What originally attracted you to Hawaii? I had little to do with it. Fate played a major role and I just went along for the ride. I've always had a love for tropical, exotic destinations and I would take any opportunity to flee the Bay Area where I was living and seek out remote palm laden beaches. In 1985 we had just returned from a trip to Rangiroa in the Tuamotu island group, looking at a small, rustic, dilapidated hotel that was for sale which we were considering buying. On our way home we stopped at crafts fair and at one of the booths I bought a raffle ticket to support a local canoe club. A couple of weeks later I received a phone call to inform me I’ve won first prize, which was a trip to Hawaii, any island of my choice. I’ve always felt that everything happens for a reason so we turned right around, jumped on a plane, and headed for Moloka’i which is one of the least visited islands in Hawaii. We immediately fell in love with the people, music, culture, and the Hawaiian lifestyle. To our surprise, we flew home with the deed to a small plot of land in our pockets and within a year the Matson shipping containers were packed and we were making our way back across the Pacific, this time for good. So being self taught in those days, on the least visited island in Hawaii, meant having to build pretty much from scratch? Breaking down billets? Billets? My materials were as rough and raw as life on Moloki’a was. A lot of the wood I used was scavenged and recycled. I lived on the beach and occasionally we’d get large Douglas fir logs or redwood slabs wash up on the reef after storms. Most of the wood guys then were bowl turners and I’d go through their piles. Sometimes a tree would blow down and we’d be out there with the chain saws. I don’t remember ever buying any wood. These were back in the days when everyone seemed to have a lot more time than money. Even koa at $4 a board foot was too expensive. I’d spend all day hand carving a set of tuning pegs from ivory, back when it was still legal. Some finishes were merely pressed kukui nut old, real old school stuff. I really didn’t know there was any other option. I made some pretty bizarre instruments. I’d look at a Kamaka ukulele and think it was pure magic, having no idea how they were made. I feel very fortunate to have never received any formal training. For someone who learns any craft or skill in isolation, there are no limits and no one to tell you, you can’t do this or that. “Lessons learned on your own are lessons learned well” Lessons learned on your own are lessons learned well. But the learning curve is sure slow. I think even with the best instruction and resources it probably takes a luthier upward of 100 instruments or so to start coming into their own and to begin getting a grasp of the total picture, of what’s happening on every level. Many of the techniques involved in this craft can be taught, but they can only be learned from experience, doing the same thing over and over again until you are successful. And there is so much to learn, from proper wood selection and seasoning to finishing and setting up. It just takes time and paying attention to your results. The intriguing thing about instrument building is that I still learn something from every one of the 500 ukuleles I’ve built. It keeps things interesting. Now, it’s very different, specialised tools and the ability to find an experienced builder to ask questions have changed things, wouldn’t you say? I moved to the Big Island shortly after I discovered the Internet. YouTube videos along with all the other information available made it a lot easier to discover and share information. One of the big benefits is that it also brought a lot of builders much closer, being able to talk story with builders in Atlanta and Portland and the far corners of the globe. One of the biggest complaints about the Internet is that it tends to de-socialize people. I think it’s had the opposite effect on me. I’ll spend a couple of hours every morning on the Internet talking with builders all over discussing everything from finishes to customers, and occasionally engaging in mutual luthier therapy. I was also fortunate to have moved in close proximity to builders like Bob Gleason and David Hurd. These guys were setting new standards in ukulele building and knowing them really rocked my world. We also have a fairly active builders guild here so there’s no lack of builders to exchange ideas with. With the strong Hawaiian music influence, positive peer support, and koa almost growing in my backyard, I really couldn’t ask for a better place to be. I understand you build almost exclusively with Koa? I have some that is as light as cedar and others that resemble ironwood. From my perspective it would be silly to be a Hawaiian ukulele builder working in Hawaii and not to be using koa. Koa has been the traditional tonewood for ukuleles for over a hundred years. It's even been suggested by some that it's not a genuine ukulele unless it's built from koa. Building by a specific set of numbers is impossible and every koa set has to be evaluated on it’s own merits. When customers contacts me they want and expect a koa instrument. If they had another wood in mind they'd be more likely to contact one of the many builders on the Mainland. Although acacia koa is found on all the major islands of Hawaii, the vast majority is grown right here on the Big island and it grows nowhere else in the world. How could I ignore such an amazing resource right in my back yard? While koa doesn’t excel in any one particular are, it performs quite well over a large spectrum, especially on small bodies instruments as ukuleles. The weight, stiffness and density of koa can vary greatly from tree to tree and board to board. With rare exception, the majority of my ukuleles are built using koa and I honestly don’t have much experience using other species of tonewoods. If Koa is so variable, would you say it might be better for an all Koa uke to be make from different pieces of Koa as opposed to a matched top/back/sides? I guess it would but I don’t get that far into it. Traditionally, Hawaiian ukuleles have matching tops, backs & sides. I do have some gorgeous koa that is too dense and stiff to build a complete ukulele from. In that case I’ll use it for backs and sides and throw a spruce or redwood top on it. I deflection tune my tops so that takes some of the guess work out of it and all of my all-koa ukes sound pretty much alike. And what do usually use for bracing and necks? For necks I’m using either Spanish cedar or Honduran mahogany. I like Spanish cedar because it’s incredibly light and strong. We also have a lot of toon (Australian red cedar) growing here and I find it’s properties to be somewhere between Spanish cedar and Honduran mahogany. Regardless of the wood used, every neck gets reinforced with a non-adjustable carbon fibre rod installed under the fret board. I also build in a tiny bit of relief. The carbon fibre rod is cheap insurance against the neck deforming against the string tension and environmental changes. Depending upon the colour of the koa body, I will sometimes tint the neck lacquer for a better match. I use traditional three fan bracing for my tenor tops, five fans for anything over four strings. David Hurd introduced me to carbon fibre and I’m currently using it as a bridge patch. (I also reinforce my sound holes and side sound ports with it.) I buy Sitka spruce billets and hand split them, later resawing them and running the bracing through the drum sander. Honduran mahogany is used for back braces. I use Titebond Original for all assembly work. I’ve been tempted to use hot hide glue but having a glue pot plugged in all day would be just another strain on my solar system. All building takes places in a climate controlled room where I maintain 70 degrees and 45% RH by means of a small room air conditioner and/or a dehumidifier. My rough wood and wood sets are also kept in this room. Speaking of which your workshop is solar powered, how does that affect the way your work process? People are impressed by how much I can accomplish being off-grid and on solar power. When you consider I run a full wood shop, my wife’s jewellery studio and a fairly good size house it’s really quite a challenge. Luckily we are blessed to be in a location where the sun shines on most days. Having to rely on the sun for my electrical needs really dictates the rhythm of my work schedule. What it means in my business is that I often have to juggle my tasks. “I’m constantly playing energy cop, turning this on and that off ” I have a 3,000 watt solar system, which seems like a lot but you certainly can’t turn everything on at the same time! The climate controlled room has to be maintained all the time and that draws about a third of my power at. When I’m spraying or running the drum sander with the dust collector on I’ll sometimes have to shut down the air conditioner while I’m doing that. I’m constantly playing energy cop, turning this on and that off. When bending sides I run directly off the generator because heating elements are hard on the batteries. I might devote rainy days to sanding or other less demanding task if the generator can’t keep up with my needs. Those are also good days to do book work, clean the shop or just go into town. Modern solar inverters and controllers are pretty much trouble free, requiring little attention. The weak link in the system is the storage batteries, needing to be replaced every 2 or three years. They also need constant maintenance to keep them charged. Because the storage capacity is limited it means I can’t work at night, which is probably a good thing. Other things like providing my own water collection system, cellular communications and broadband Internet service are cumbersome, unreliable and come with their own set of problems. Every day there’s something to fix. It’s a rather small price to pay however, in exchange for living where I do. In my shop I’m restricted to motors of under 2 horsepower so my equipment is a bit on the small side. I have a couple of 14” bandsaws, a 16”/32” drum sander, table saw, joiner, drill press, etc. The only thing I'm incapable of doing efficiently is resawing. I buy saw time and do all of my resawing off-site on a saw that's meant to do the job quickly and accurately. With koa being as expensive as it is, it's really the only option that makes sense. The set up I have is really quite adequate for a one man shop. If I had lots of power available, I'd be tempted to expand my business and then I'd have to contend with all the headaches of running a larger production shop. I like keeping things small and manageable. I'm proud of the fact that I do everything myself from selecting my wood to making kerfing, hand cutting my pearl and finishing. “I’m proud of the fact that I do everything myself from selecting my wood to making kerfing, hand cutting my pearl and finishing.” What finish do you favour? And what are you using at the moment? I think a good finish should be thin, hard, easy to apply and repair. Nitrocellulose lacquer fits all those requirements for me. I'm also fond of the look of nitro and the way it ages. I'm not going to argue the variety of finishes available to the luthier. I've tried most of them at some point and they all have their merits. As with anything else in this business, I think the choice comes down to finding a material and application schedule that suits who you are as a builder and choosing what it comfortable for you to work with. I spend a lot of time on my finishes and am proud of the results I'm getting. It's one of the areas where there is always room for improvement and at any luthier's gathering the discussing will inevitably turn to finishing techniques at some point. Between the spraying, pore filling, sanding and buffing I can easily spend 12 hours finishing an ukulele. Proper finishing requires more focus and attention than any other aspect of building. And speaking of finishing, your ukes often feature inlays and intricately engraved art..... Doing inlay work is an opportunity for me to get real creative. When I start the inlay work the instrument is almost finished. It's at that point that I can stop holding my breath and have some real fun. Inlay gives the customer an opportunity to personalize his or her instrument, making it truly unique theirs, whether it’s one of my ideas or one of theirs. While other aspects of building can become mundane, creating new inlay work is always challenging for me and keeps my interest piqued. One of the difficult parts is in successfully interpreting the customer's vision into an expression of shell, wood and stone that will satisfy them. Educating them as to what can and cannot be done has to be done from the very beginning. The materials I use are cold, static and hard, and blending colours is difficult. It's almost impossible to render things like rainbows, wind, rain, etc. Ideally, the process begins with a customer giving me some guidance as to what they want, and they usually trust me to complete their vision. I spend as much time in thinking about, designing and drawing up the patterns I need as I do in the actually cutting and inlaying of the pieces. This will often begin weeks or months before I make the first sketch and it's often difficult to come up with new ideas. I find the actual process of cutting shell to be soothing, almost meditative, in the experience. I can also tap into my experience as a scrimshander to etch details on the fossil ivories I sometimes use. About one week a month is reserved for doing inlay work and I welcome the change to do something really creative and different. I see the finished product as playable, functional art. So we’ve spoken about woods, your workshop and art, now is the dreaded construction part- with the modern ukes, more and more resembling guitars in terms of looks and construction, what is your take on the modern techniques (like say Kasha bracing?) I think every thinking builder at some point attempts to reinvent the wheel. But you need to remember, ukuleles are not guitars. When it comes to top bracing, there's only so much you can do with a sound board that's 50 square inches or smaller. Keeping in mind that most tenor uke string tension loads are under forty pounds the most important consideration is keeping the top light and responsive while making sure it's structural strong enough to last. If there's one common flaw I see in many ukuleles, especially amongst novice builders, is that they are over-built. A look at some of the old bench-mark ukulele, Nunes and Martins for example will show them to have a minimum amount of bracing. I think the standard rule of keeping it simple applies here. I applaud those who experiment with different bracing ideas in ukuleles. The ideas can be talked to death, but in the end there is no substitute to building lots of instruments in order to develop the sound you're after. At some point or other I've tried most of the more common bracing patterns. X-bracing and lattice bracing, while not very common, have their advocates in the ukulele world. And I'm not sure Kasha has ever lived up to it's initial hype, but several uke builders are incorporating that pattern and are pleased with the results they get. For me it's hard to beat the classical Torres style bracing for the unique "Hawaiian" sound I'm looking for in my instruments. I've always come back to the traditional three fan pattern for my tenors, two for my concerts and none at all in my sopranos. I've even given up on the idea of tap tuning a ukulele top. While it's an amazing thing to watch a guitar sized sound board come to life through tap tuning, I've never seen it successfully done with such a small plate such as one you'd use for an ukulele. Instead, in addition to tactile inspection, I deflection- test with a dial indicator and map out all of my sound boards (and to a lesser extent, the backs) so that I can repeat my results with fairly good consistency. So do you think it is the luthier’s job to bring out the very best in the materials or to follow as closely as possible what the player wants out of the instrument? Is there a happy medium between the two? My focus is to get the wood and materials to respond to the best of my ability in an effort to achieve the sound I'm looking for. The first responsibility I have as a builder is to myself. The advantage to pigeon-holing myself into building only ukuleles, built primarily of koa, is that I've spent enough time around the wood to know it intimately. Even at ten feet away I can get some pretty good clues as to how a specific koa board will react sonically. It's grain and colour are good visual clues of how it will respond, and if I get close enough to touch it, feeling it's warmth or coolness and the raspy tone it makes as I run my hand against the board will tell give me clues of its density. The choice of woods I have to offer, primarily koa, naturally limits the customer's options. A lot of customers need to be in total control of the building process, whether their ideas are right or wrong. Much of their input is based on what they’ve read or heard and has no substance in reality or in the luthier’s actual experience. I’m able to quickly spot them and I happily refer them to other builders. Almost all of my custom business is through word of mouth these days, many going to repeat customers or friends of theirs. They've all seen an heard my work before and they've liked what they seen and heard. Lately I've become less of a traditional custom builder in the truest sense of the term. I may be a bit unique in that I build every thing as if I were building it for myself, considering both sound and design. I tell customers early on that I will only build an instrument that excites and appeals to me, one that I would be proud to own and keep for myself. While I appreciate customer input, the final decisions are mine. Instruments of all types tend to be traded like baseball cards. No matter how many hands of ownership an instrument I'll build will change in the course of it's lifetime, it will always have my name on the label and I will always consider it mine. So I build what I want, and if the customer wants the same thing then we’re both happy. Life’s too short no to be doing exactly what you want to be doing. I’ve never had an ukulele returned to me because the customer was unhappy with it in any way. Does that make it hard to ship your ukes off to customers? I should clarify, I start building every uke as “if ” I were building it for myself. The sound, the design elements, the colours and materials I choose all stem from my own biases and preferences. The finished uke is a significant part of who I am and it reflect my years of experience as an artist and designer. At the same time, it’s very important for me to know as much as I can about the customer I’m building for including any hobbies or outside interests. I’m going to be spending a lot of time thinking about who the customer is while I build the instrument over the period of a few months. Because I take the relationship between myself and the customer very seriously it’s import to recognize whether or not we are a good match before the process gets too far along. If we aren’t a good match, the uke doesn’t get built. This doesn’t mean that I’m closed to any new ideas though. Some of my most creative designs have been inspired by customers and they’ve pushed me and have allowed me to grow even despite my sometimes initial resistance. I’m just not into harp ukes or hybrid ukes or carbon fibre ones, or transparent coloured finishes or LED lights as fret markers or inlaying your wife’s portrait in the head stock, or any one of a thousand goofy ideas I’ve heard. I just can’t see spending up to 70 hours doing something that doesn’t interest me. I learned a long time ago that the time in my shop that is best spent is the time I take in choosing my customers. Thanks for that Chuck, before we let you go, would you have any exciting projects on the horizon you’d like to share? That’s a good question. I haven’t had much time to think about what I’ll be doing in the future. Besides, when you are neighbours with one of the world’s most active lava flows you tend not to plan too far in advance! I have a fondness for the old days, the prestatehood days of Hawaii, what are sometimes referred to as Hawaii’s golden era when the island group was a far away, exciting and exotic destination. I’d like to incorporate more Hawaiiana inlay themes into my work, especially those representing the early days of air and cruise ship travel, the Pan American Clippers and Matson cruise lines. There is something very romantic about those times and those modes of travelling. It’s usually a mutually positive experience, one that both parties benefit from in many ways. I’ve made many close friends as customers and we continue to stay in touch over the years. Many will bring their families on vacation to visit the place where there ukulele was born. Making these close friendships is probably the most rewarding aspect of the entire process. So by the time I’m finished with the uke I’m ready to turn it over to the customer whom I’ve gotten to know fairly well and have becomes friends with. Still, there have been many unique ukuleles that I’ve wanted to keep, at least for a while. There’ve been a few where I’ve thought to myself “If I could build only one more uke in my life to keep for myself, this would be it.” But once these “artisan” ukes are finished my heart’s not into it anymore and those designs seldom get repeated. I haven’t run out of fresh ideas yet. I’m also a big fan of Hawaiian steel guitar and it’s been my intention to try my hand at building Weisenborns. Several years ago I started playing steel guitar so that I’d have a better idea of how to approach it. I’ve had the plans and the wood set aside, collecting dust- it’s just a matter of finding the time to do it. I learn something from every instrument I build , no matter how insignificant it may seem. I find that the more I build, the harder it gets, as I raise the bar and my personal expectations. My goal is to keep learning, to keep growing and pushing the limit in the attempt to make the next instrument better that the one before. T H E I N T E R V I E W: EL MCMEEN Thanks for taking the time to do this interview el. I was wondering how you started playing the guitar? I started playing guitar around 1965. My roommate Blake Swan in secondary school (Mt. Hermon School–now called Northfield Mt. Hermon), in Massachusetts, played guitar a lot, and I was inspired to learn. After hearing him sing and play “Sloop John B” approximately a thousand times, however, I did tend to steer away from that song. <:) (He did a nice job on it, by the way.) My mother got me a Gibson allmahogany guitar in 1965 (I believe it cost $50 back then), and I started learning some chords. I played almost exclusively in standard tuning for many years – up until the mid-1980’s. I do remember one song I did play in college, at Harvard, in G tuning, called “Mole’s Moan”, by Geoff Muldaur. I really enjoyed playing that song–by the hour! In fact, I have a clear recollection of playing that song for a friend from my Freshman Year, 1965–a really talented classical guitarist and brilliant student (and great swimmer) by the name of Marty Chalfie. I’ll drop my friend Marty’s name here, and give him some props, because he later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2008/ For many years I played guitar to accompany myself singing. It was not until the mid-to-late 1980’s that I got into the mode of doing guitar instrumentals. That process accelerated after I happened upon the wonderful CGDGAD guitar tuning, which I learned form the arrangements and compositions of the great British guitarist, Dave Evans. T H E I N T E R V I E W: EL MCMEEN And that started your journey into Celtic fingerstyle? Yes. Dave’s music, plus the music of hammer dulcimer player Joemy Wilson, who recorded several Celtic albums in the mid-1980’s that showcased the beauty of the music. I also want to give credit to my friend Caleb Crowell, of Montclair, NJ, who rode the daily commuter train with me into New York City and shared with me multiple versions of almost every Celtic tune I was learning on guitar. That approach and generosity really broadened my horizons and appreciation for the music. I should also credit the arrangements and, in some cases, instructional recordings of Stefan Grossman, Duck Baker, Martin Simpson and John Renbourn. I’ve noticed with a lot of the players that really credit someone physically sitting and imparting tunes to them- do you think that is an important part of the learning process? One can learn in many different ways. In the 1980’s I must have purchased $1000 worth of audiocassette lessons from Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop — lessons given by Stefan himself and some by other players, like John Renbourn and Duck Baker. Later those lessons became video lessons, and then DVD lessons –and now, in certain cases, direct downloads! http://www. guitarvideos.com/ Technology marches on. Those types of lessons were great for someone like me, who is predominantly an ear player and a pretty motivated selfstarter. They are the equivalent of having someone there with you teaching (but with infinite patience, since you can play the DVD over-andover-and over….). I must credit my friend Stefan with one critical hands-on technique he taught me. In the late 1980’s or early 1990’s, he showed me the “slowhand vibrato”, made famous by Eric Clapton–where you sustain and colour the fretted notes through a vibrato in which the hand moves the string perpendicular to the neck of the guitar, rather than parallel. That can be quite hard to do on acoustic guitar, because of the string tension and because one is not using the thumb as a fulcrum, anchored behind the neck. The fulcrum is the body of the player. You can see by the description that a hands-on approach is really necessary because it sounds like something out of a physics book or something! So is there any advice you might give someone looking to seriously play Celtic fingerstyle? I would suggest exploring DVD lessons, “Guitar Artistry” DVD’s and performance DVD’s (like the “Blarney Pilgrim” and “Ramble to Cashel” DVD’s) available through Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop: http:// www.guitarvideos.com/ I would also suggest the person listen to a wide variety of Celtic music by the greats out there in traditional music on other instruments – like fiddle, harp, pipes, Irish whistle, button accordion, piano – to see what grabs the person. It might be the slow airs and songs; it might be the dance tunes. What got to me first were the beautiful melodies, particularly in Irish traditional music. It was later on that I tackled the dance tunes. I understand you’ve had quite a few guitars and now even have a signature model? I have been a poster child for “GAS” (“guitar acquisition syndrome”), having owned, I would estimate, over 140 guitars in my “adult” (a relative term, in my case) life. We are blessed, in this day and age, with many talented and dedicated guitar builders, as well as the iconic American guitar maker, C.F. Martin & Co. El Mcmeen’s Essential Listening: Guitar: Pierre Bensusan Al Petteway John Renbourn Martin Simpson Steve Baughman Tony McManus John Sherman Tony Cuffe (RIP) Larry Pattis Other musicians: Alasdair Fraser (fiddle) John Whelan (button accordion) Liz Carroll (fiddle) My primary guitars now are: Tippin guitars and Franklin guitars I am very excited about the new El McMeen signature model guitar series by Tippin Guitars. The series is called the “Tippin Bravado Contour, El McMeen Series”. (See El’s signature guitar just after this interview!) Bill and I started with his excellent “Bravado” model to make a guitar that addresses the music of fingerstyle guitarists, including a shallower, contoured design (shallower at the bass side than at the treble), and a somewhat shorter scale (25.5, as opposed to the Bravado’s 25.7 scale). The result is a guitar with a quick response, plenty of volume and the trademark Tippin sound. After we did the prototype described in the above link, we decided to make the guitar a little deeper. I have ordered one in Brazilian rosewood. The guitar will retain the quick response but have a little more “air” and sound from the standpoint of the player, listening to the guitar from behind. Customers may choose the woods and “bling” they want. The photos on the above site show what Bill and I opted for on the prototype guitar. And do you think there is an archetypal Celtic sound or Celtic guitar? Groups: Bothy Band Solas Capercaillie Chieftains Cherish the Ladies Singers: Mary Black Moire O’Connell Gordon Bok Fingerstyle guitar arrangements of Irish and Scottish music are “faux” from the get-go (hey, I’m a poet!), since they aren’t in the tradition, but instead are attempts to render music originally done on other instruments. I think the field is wide open for guitars. I’ve heard music I like played on a wide range of guitars, from deeper/Steinway-grand-sounding-type guitars, to shallower models. It really comes down to the quality of the music, I believe, and even that can often be quite subjective. But there is a reason why alternate tunings are more popular with celtic guitarists right? Standard guitar tuning–EADGBE– is wonderful for many things, including playing in many keys, in closed (i.e., fretted) positions. Many guitarists, however, have found that alternative tunings afford them an easier means of evoking the sound of the harp, fiddle or pipes. (The CGDGAD tuning changed my life, not because it was more Celtic, but because, for some mystical reason, songs seemed to issue forth from the guitar every time I would pick a few strings! That started for me in the late 1980’s.) Here’s an example of the benefit of an alternative tuning. Standard tuning does not have an interval between strings of one step; the intervals are always greater. Other tunings, like DADGAD and CGDGAD, and CGDGCD (called “Orkney” by Steve Baughman, who does wonderful things in that tuning –and other tunings, for that matter!), have this onestep interval. That interval allows for a very harplike approach playing around the strings with that interval. Can that be done in Standard? Yes, and I understand that Al Petteway has been recasting some tunes in Standard, as did Seth Austen in the late 1980’s, as I recall. So, if you can use Standard to accomplish some of this, why go to another tuning? Each guitarist would have his or her own reason, so we can’t generalize, but I bet that much of it is the sheer inspiration that the particular alternative tuning has for the player. The guitarist wants to keep playing, and exploring, and making music in the tuning. The challenge then becomes, as Stefan Grossman says, to make sure that you play in the tuning, and that the tuning doesn’t play you! Thanks for that El. Before we let you go – maybe you might like to share with us about any projects you have on the way? I just completed my CD entitled “At-Home Picking…and Talking” a few months ago: http://www. elmcmeen.com/athome.htm It is available through the above site, and internationally though CD Baby: http://www.cdbaby.com/ cd/elmcmeen10 I’ve got some tunes I’m working on, but no plans for a new CD any time soon, frankly. I have been picking up my guitar teaching substantially. I have always enjoyed working with other guitarists on playing, arranging and composing, and am doing much more of that these days, since I play out much less frequently than I did before. Thanks, Terence, for giving me the opportunity to talk about guitars and music; much appreciated. FEATURE Luthier: Bill Tippin El McMeen Signature Model In the summer of 2009, I was discussing guitars with Bill Tippin. (I had recorded my CD called “The Lea Rig” with Bill’s OMT model.) What emerged from that discussion was the idea of an El McMeen Signature Model Guitar, which Bill and I would design and Bill would build! I was deeply honoured by Bill’s respect for my music and me, and was appreciative of having the opportunity to work with such an elite builder as Bill on a guitar with his and my ideas for a great fingerstyle instrument. Bill’s largest model is his Bravado. It is a great guitar, which can be played fingerstyle, flat-picked, or strummed. I prefer a slightly shorter scale (25.5, versus the Bravado’s 25.7 scale). In addition, I favour a shallower jumbo (such as the Jumbo model of Nick Kukich, of Franklin Guitars), with a quick response, even across the fingerboard, and with a focused bass and powerful projected volume. Bill came up with an idea that met my desires and still preserved the distinctive Tippin guitar tone. He designed a contoured body-- shallower on the bass side than on the treble side. (For my prototype, I chose Bill’s select Santa Maria mahogany for the back and sides, and a Carpathian spruce top.). Bill re-braced the guitar to reflect the contoured shape. He suggested a subtle black and abalone body binding, rosette, and back stripe. The bridge is Brazilian rosewood, beautifully sculpted. The fingerboard is ebony, and there is no name on anything but the labels inside. Specs Top: Carpathian spruce Back & Sides: Santa Maria mahogany (Cuban) Scale length: 25.5” Body depth: – 4 ½” on treble side, tapered to 3 5/8” on the bass Lower bout: 16 3/16” Standard nut width: 1 ¾” Body length: 20 13/16” Photos courtesy of B.Tippin Ken Bonfield’s Artistry of the Guitar Maintaining the Beginner’s Mind-Set Hello and welcome to my first article for Guitarbench. Here at Ken Bonfield’s ‘Artistry of the Guitar’ column we’ll talk about acoustic guitar; practice, performance, designing custom guitars, playing in alternate tunings, plugging in and sounding good, all sorts of stuff I spend my time thinking about and doing. It’s geared towards the intermediate to advanced player, but hopefully there will be something here for everyone and I hope you find it as interesting as I do. For my first column I wanted to address a foundational piece in any guitarist’s quest to learn new techniques or break through plateaus- maintaining a beginner’s mindset. Over the past four years I’ve had to go through my own journey in maintaining a beginner’s mind-set when in 2008 I started learning to play slide and in late 2010 when I got a harp guitar from luthier, Alan Carruth. I’d always wanted to play slide guitar; I’ve been a huge fan of Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Martin Simpson, Sonny Landreth, Lowell George, and the late Duane Allman since I first started playing guitar in 1974. Over the years I’ve bought and collected a variety of slides and unsuccessfully tried to add slide playing to my list- always with utter failure. This time however, I was determined to meet my goal. The first thing I did was analyse why I was unsuccessful in the past. What did I do wrong? Or, what did I not do? I’ve learned over the years in teaching workshops and in private lessons that when people say they can’t master a technique it usually means they haven’t done the work or spent the required time. But why? These are good guitarists, and not lazy people. Over the years I’ve chided them about that, but lately I’ve been asking folks why they don’t do the work. What’s stopping them (and me) from adding new techniques or breaking through plateaus? And their answers were telling; almost without fail they said that at this point in their playing if they can’t do it right away they’re convinced they can’t do it all. And why? Because they’re already accomplished guitarists and should be able to learn any new technique quickly. They think they just don’t have the slide ‘gene’ or the alternative tuning gene, etc. And that stopped me in my tracks-because that was also true for me. Hell, I get paid, not a lot, but I get paid to be a virtuoso guitarist-the kind people come out to see and say “Holy crow, how’d he do that?’. But when I took a hard look at it I realized that any new technique, especially one as different as playing slide, would take months of playing, many many hours to accomplish. Hours I’d not put in, and to wrap my head around that I had to become a beginner again. But what did that mean? To become a beginner again one must trust in one thing; that proper practice done over time will yield the desired results. The key phrase is ‘over time’. Think back to when you were a beginner and first learning to play chords, and then learning to move from one chord to another while maintaining the rhythm. Think about how many hours and weeks it took to do something we all think of as simple now. So, I made a plan. For the next 90 days I’d play slide guitar for at least 45 minutes every day-no less-more would be OK. And boy that first week was hard. I had no material to play, just an idea that I wanted to play in open D tuning and learn a song by my friend Brooks Williams, “Goodbye Walker Percy” a haunting blues ballad on his “Little Lion” cd. This song would be my primer for learning slide. I also started messing around with “Amazing Grace” a song I know quite well and have arranged in a variety of alternate tunings for fingerstyle guitar. And I plugged away; sometimes I could only play for 15 or 20 minutes at a time before I got bored or frustrated, but I would come back later in the day and play more; I always played for 45 minutes, staying patient and remaining confident that my plan would succeed. The 90 days passed and I was shocked, I’d written a half-dozen pieces-two quite good, and others were promising. The key moment came for me in April of 2009 at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, AR when I debuted my slide piece “My Magnolia” for 300 people. And they loved it. I’m not a slide master, yet, but it gives me tremendous joy, and another trick up my performer’s sleeve. And more importantly, my plan had worked. I’d gone from not playing slide, to entertaining a paying audience with an original slide tune. This experience buoyed me greatly when Al Carruth presented me with a harp guitar in October of 2010. It’s an 11-string with 6 standard guitar strings and 5 sub-basses. It was daunting at first just holding this guitar let alone trying to play it, but I incorporated my 45-minute, 90 day plan for the harp guitar and as again met with success-I performed my first piece on it in mid November less than a month later in a show I did with Larry Coryell, and again the audience LOVED it. But I also noticed things were different-in early January just passed 60 days into my 90 day plan I was feeling a bit lost, negative, and unsure of my direction. I realized then that the second, and probably most important component of maintaining a beginner’s mindset is keeping a positive attitude. I started talking to other guitarists who were having problems with a technique change or playing a new instrument or playing in a new tuning; and the common thread was negative self-talk. The words they were saying to themselves were holding them back every bit as much as their lack of time. Wow. So, over the next few weeks I kept a real close eye on my thoughts and made sure to clear out the negative thoughts as soon as they’d appear. It was hard at first; it took practice. I also made sure that when I picked up the harp guitar that I was in good mental shape for the work ahead-it was daunting at first-the harp guitar is just so damned hard, but I persevered and maintained a positive attitude. Now, it’s late 2012, and while playing the harp guitar is still the hardest thing I do, it’s not daunting anymore. I feel comfortable with the instrument, and when I pick it up I play it, it’s not work like it used to be. But I’ve also played it at least 1000 hours since I got it, and for most of those hours I’ve been locked in the beginner’s mindset. Again, the most fulfilling thing to me is that the plan worked. Lastly, as someone who has taught privately for over 20 years, I felt competent in teaching myself these new techniques. But I did ring up Brooks a couple of times for tips, and I did go to two Harp Guitar Gatherings, and I used them to ask questions, watch and learn from other players before I then applied them to my approach. If you maintain a beginner’s mind set, do the work, and keep a positive attitude and you’re still struggling; get help from a good teacher; that’s the last step in maintaining a beginner’s mind set; go to a good teacher. And there are some great teachers out there, and with the advent of Skype, YouTube, and social media you have an opportunity to hook up with a teacher halfway around the world if that’s the best teacher for you. So, become a beginner again: do the work, talk nicely to yourself, get some outside help, and if you do all those things I firmly believe you can accomplish any musical goal you set for yourself. Ken Bonfield lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts and can be reached at: kenbonfield.com or by clicking on the image of his latest CD to the right! SPONSORS We wouldn’t be able to produce this magazine without their generous help. Please take a moment to view their services! Tone Obsession with Michael Watts “I’ve practiced my tone for almost 50 years, and if I can’t hear my tone, I can’t play. If I can’t play, then I won’t get paid. If I don’t get paid, then I lose the house, you know? It’s like a chain reaction. If I lose my tone, I ...can’t do nothin’. I’ll just walk into the ocean and die, if I lose my tone.” - Miles Davis Hi, my name is Michael Watts and I am obsessed with the sound of the guitar. In particular the tonal possibilities afforded to the players of modern luthier-built instruments as well as the legendary vintage guitars of the past. The guitar is my voice as a composer and performer and has been a vital part of my life since childhood. From the ancient (I can still remember very vividly the sound and response of a 1929 Gibson Nick Lucas I played some years ago) to the modern ultra responsive thoroughbreds of luthiers such as Michael Greenfield, Jason Kostal, Linda Manzer etc, it is no exaggeration to say that I have “gone deep” into the sonic universe of the guitar. In this article I will be outlining some of my approaches towards generating a wide and expressive tonal palette in order to embark on the process that Frank Zappa likened to “air sculpture”, more commonly known as playing your guitar. I know, this magazine is about the guitar, and believe me, when it comes to guitar geekery I can hold my own, but I firmly believe that owning a an instrument is a privilege that brings with it responsibility. In this case the responsibility to make as musical a sound as possible every time you play your guitar. ADSR In order to further our understanding of tone it helps to have a preliminary grasp of the anatomy of a sound. Any sound, from the softest (think a gut strung 19th Century Martin) to the most aggressive (an EMG-loaded Les Paul perhaps, through a Death by Audio “Apocalypse” fuzz pedal, maybe, into a row of Marshall plexi’s ), is comprised of four parts the attack, the decay, the sustain, and the release. The Attack While the late 1970’s were hardly a golden era for guitar manufacture,they did herald a greater understanding of sound due to the advent of the synthesiser. Early experiments in synthesis and psycho-acoustics revealed some very interesting- the fact that the human brain gets a huge amount of the information it uses to process sound from the initial attack. I had personal experience of this in the studio, one night mixing doubled lines of cello and baritone sax. I conducted a little experiment and faded out the initial attack of each note. The sound of each instrument after the initial attack of the note was as close as, to be indistinguishable. Spooky! So, this obviously has implications for us as creators of tone. Given that so much of the identity and perceived quality of the sound we make is dependent on how our brains (and indeed those of our audience) process the initial transients of each note then we must focus on those first milliseconds of chaos as the sound explodes into being. Let’s try an exercise: Grab the nearest guitar to you, it doesn’t matter what tuning it’s in, who built it or how much it cost, as long as it has at least one string on it then it will do the job. Attack it. Seriously, move that string, shift some air. See how many UNIQUE sounds you can make (no need to fret it, just the open string will do fine). Use the tops/backs of your nails, your knuckles, the edge of your plectrum, fingertips, whatever you can think of. Ignore anything but the initial transient. Do not look for beauty, only variation. Adjust the amount of energy going into the attack, the angle at which it hits the string and the position along the string relative to the nut and saddle. Eventually you will hear an attack that stands out, you may not be able to explain why (and few would believe you even if you could…) but for some reason it seems more immediate, more honest, more musical… Now do it again. Repeat that EXACT attack. It may take a little while to dial it in but eventually you should be able to duplicate this attack a couple of times in a row. Then five… Then ten… It’s not as easy as it sounds… but you have found something, something you can call your own. Where will you use it? Next Issue: D is for decay… Michael Watts is an award-winning fingerstyle guitarist based in the UK. He has demonstrated the work of some of the world’s greatest luthiers at numerous international guitar festivals and runs The North American Guitar, thenorthamericanguitar.com, a company specialising in bespoke luthierbuilt guitars. He can be reached at: michaelwattsguitar.com or by clicking on the image below! Alphomega. Completing a masterpiece Taku Sakashta’s passing in 2012 robbed the world of a brilliant and creative luthier. But his legacy lives on, through his students and through his instruments. This one, in particular, the Alphomega, is particularly striking. This was planned as a special instrument for his 100th guitar. Over 8 years, Sakashta worked on this guitar, giving, extreme care and attention befitting such a milestone instrument. At the time of his passing, this instrument was almost completed. Mr Sunami, a former apprentice finished the build. Photos courtesy of Blue-G Specs Alphomega SD Cutaway (2012) Top: Figured German spruce Back and sides: Premium Figured Brazilian rosewood Sides: Laminated Figured Brazilian rosewood Neck: Curly Spanish cedar Binding: African Blackwood Fingerboard: Snakewood Bridge: Snakewood Purfling: Abalone Rosette: White Mother-of-Pearl Finish: Shellac finish Waverly gold tuners w/snakewood buttons Scalloped nut Taku Sakashita said “Alphomega to me is like Mona Lisa for da Vinci. I have been taking my time to make sure that the guitar comes out the way I exactly want. This will be the last guitar I can use such a rare and premium materials.” REVIEW Paramita Rev. Heng Sure & Friends Rev. Heng Sure is a California based ordained Buddhist and ‘Paramita’ is a combination of his love for folk songs and Buddhist scriptures. Throw in a superb musicians (Josh Michaell, Paul Hostetter, Robin Petrie, Alan Senauke and Brian Godchaux) and an eclectic choice of instruments (Alberico OM, Howe-Orme high strung parlor, Santa Cruz H13, hammered dulcimer, Givens mandolin) and you have a potent recipe for what he calls American Buddhist folk songs. The CD represents his efforts in creating a genre using classic American folk music and Buddhist themes. The melodies are at once recognisable but the lyrics provoke thought. Sometimes humorous, sometimes searching, the themes revolve around current and endless themes. Mad Beef Cows, Oil, karma, all are covered in the 17 tracks on the album. The end product is highly polished but never losing that intimate connection between the artist and listener. Highly successful is the mix of instruments and musicians involved, with fiddle work, dulcimer and mandolin all playing in harmonious melody. Standout tracks include Earth Store with its haunting trace like melodies and Yashodhara, showcasing a complex fingerstyle composition blending with the telling of Prince Siddhartha’s journey. REVIEW In Winter Michael Manring & Kevin Kastning Atmospheric, contemplative, introspective.... all describing our reactions to this offering from extended range guitarist Kevin Kastning and bass supremo Michael Manring. Both are masters of their unusual instruments- Manring designed the Zon Hyperbass which has an extended range and is capable of a myriad of altered tunings. Kastning uses the Contraguitar and a 12 string alto guitar also, of his own design to extend the range and voice beyond the norm. (Note: We recently interviewed Daniel Roberts, the luthier behind Kastning’s guitars, in Issue 2!) So when you take two avant grade musicians and collide them in a late Autumn/early Winter New England, you get ‘In Winter’. Throw out the conventional compositions and melodies here. The tracks are all about mood and atmosphere. The extended tonal range allows for the two to play out improvisations, drawn out harmonics and endless shades of mood. We definitely felt the evocation of nature and introspective emotional searching. Much like the ECM recording of Abercombie and Towner, this is not a car CD and whilst not an immediately accessible album, certainly rewards listeners with an emotional, contemplative journey. REVIEW Red Planet Arborea If the name Arborea hasn’t registered in your musical scape yet, don’t worry, it will soon. The duo of Buck and Shanti Curran has been earning a slew of accolades, from Rolling Stone to Acoustic Guitar, from Editor’s Picks to Best Under-the-Radar Albums. ‘Red Planet’ is actually the third offering from this band. Variously labelled as folk-trance to new folk, it is safe to say that the tracks here are a wondrous blend of a traditional folk voice, modernist minimalism and all wrapped around hypnotic melodies. With traditional instruments such as mandolins, guitars, ukes, dulcimers the more modern vocals of Shanti, windy and ethereal sings through. Can you tell that we like their work? Let’s just say that the album gets a lot of play time here in the office. Standouts include the trance like interpretation of the very traditional folk ballard ‘Black is the Colour’ and Tim Buckley’s ‘Phantasmagoria in 2’. On the whole, Red Planet is somewhat like a mash up of the two albums we reviewed, take an introspective slightly avant-grade approach to a traditional folk voice and out will pop a richly textured, melodic but deeply emotional ten tracks. DO YOU LIKE OUR MAGAZINE? Please consider subscribing for our future editions and help us stay in publication. Just Click Here! For commercial sponsorship: Just Click Here! Or, for more info: Just click here to email! WORKBENCH GREVEN GUITARS This month, we’re featuring a few photos from the workshop of John Greven. Greven has a reputation as a master of inlay and engraving, a skill developed during his time as a repairman at George Gruhn’s shop. Above: Hand engraving tools. Each has been with Greven for past decade and has been sharpened countless of time to maintain a keen edge for a clean cut and clean lines. Above: It begins with the shell blanks shaped and inlaid into the veneer. Once sanded smooth, they are ready for the engraving process. Below: With magnified vision, Greven uses the tools to cut out many fine lines. These will then help to form the final image. The result of years of practise and mastery: intricate artwork adorning various Greven guitars! Photos courtesy of J.Greven DIFFERENT STRINGS This month’s Different Strings features another ukulele. Okay, we admit we have a lot of ukes here, but have you seen a Kasha inspired uke before? How about one made from curly Cuban Mahogany! This little beauty is crafted by Eric Devine and has lots of tasty little details! Specs Total length: 26 1/4” Body length:12” Upper bout width: 6 1/2” Lower bout width: 8 3/4” Upper bout depth: 2 3/4” Lower bout depth: 3” Scale length: 17” Top, back, sides: Cuban mahogany Neck: Cuban mahogany Binding: Curly koa Fretboard and headstock veneer: Ebony Photos courtesy of E.Devine PREVIEW Stay tuned for Issue 5 of Guitarbench Magazine. With our usual mix of great guitars, information on tonewoods..... PREVIEW interviews with Fabrizio Alberico and more... Lessons, reviews and much more... DO YOU LIKE OUR MAGAZINE? Please consider subscribing for our future editions and help us stay in publication. Just Click Here!