My Guitar Gently Mocks
My little guitar is done. Finished. Strung up and sitting in the livingroom. Along with the other three I made. And so it’s time to ask myself a few obvious questions. Okay, one obvious question: Why?
I’ve always thought boredom was the mother of creativity. Give a person enough time pondering their navel, they might decide to get off the couch and find something interesting to do. Beats TV any day of the week. And scrolling through You-Tube or Yahoo News too. So maybe that was my rationale. Be an excuse to maybe play an instrument more often if it was one I made myself. Naw, that might explain one. Not four. And I’m not going to mention the four banjos I built too.
No, something else is at work. But hell if I know what it was. Some virus I picked up that lodged in the brain and flares up occasionally, maybe. It’s not like I had the skills to make a really fine musical instrument. Or the tools. Course if I had known I would make this many I might have bought a few specialized luthiery tools, not whack and whittle with a jackknife and a chisel. I did buy a steamer and built a steam box to bend wood after restoring a hundred year old rowboat with rotted ribs, which, in hindsight, set me off to bending guitar sides, which, at the time, seemed like the tricky part of guitar building.
And there was this book, ‘Clapton’s Guitar’ a friend gave me about a guitar builder in the Appalachians, kind of inspirational at the time, a curse maybe in the rearview, that convinced me it would be a worthwhile enterprise to embark on my own guitar and possibly a book, ‘Skeeter’s Guitar’, a darkly comic account of one man’s quixotic attempt to build the Stradivarius of guitars with virtually no experience or understanding of what gives guitars their unique sound.
My guitar gently screams. Actually, my guitars gently mock me. I guess if I was a twenty-something, I might keep going, learn from my mistakes, up my game, buy the appropriate tools, improve with the accumulation of 10,000 hours. But I am too old now. And I don’t know that I was getting better by the 4th guitar.
Still, they are unique instruments. Art pieces more than musical, each different in sound and playability. This last one, the black limba with the old growth redwood top, plays well and the sound is good, bass not huge, trebles nice, mid-range nicely balanced. It’s a keeper. Trouble is, they’re all keepers. You want to make guitars, you need to sell some. It was how I ended up in glass work, mostly necessity if you want to keep doing it. That, probably, is the mother of invention, not boredom.
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Tags: Guitar Building for the Complete Idiot, Lessons in Luthiery