The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I’m the sort of person who doesn’t mind making mistakes. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, is my motto. I got a lot of friends who figure the opposite, nothing ventured means no screw ups. Life is for learning, I’d reply, but they’d probably tell me, play it safe.

It’s not like I’m a risk taker. I don’t climb Half Dome in Yosemite with no ropes. I don’t have any interest in exploring the back country of the Amazon or summiting Mt. Everest. I don’t sky dive or bungee jump. My idea is to see if I can live long and if missing some thrills is part of the plan, okay by me. But I do think we should challenge ourselves a little. Otherwise we relegate ourselves to cable TV and the vicarious lives virtual reality is soon going to make normal.

I built a kayak back about 1990, then took it out into the Puget Sound and up into the San Juans. Two years later I built a sailboat and the next year built our house. These were leaps of faith and if you knew me back then, you’d understand how far the leap was, me being a non-tool user of the first order. I grew up without the usual male oriented skill sets of my peers. When I asked my guidance counselor in high school if I could take shop class, I was told I was on a college career track. Sadly, I listened to him and opted to take advanced mathematics.

Not saying calculus didn’t help me build our house, but … let’s face it, woodworking might have been far more germane to my efforts. Nevertheless, necessity is the mother of, if not invention, at least improvisation. Ironically, my life gravitated toward the skills I didn’t have. But you learn that if you set aside the desire for perfection and aim a bit lower, most things are possible. You know, before the Digital Age made hand skills obsolete.

I built myself a guitar last winter. What I learned, other than how unprepared I was for such an endeavor, was how much there was to learn other than just slapping wood together. The science of audio physics, to name one obvious aspect. So when I finished my little project, I was disappointed in the sound my guitar projected while weeping. Which, I confess, propelled me to violate my vow never to make another guitar again and try one more time, maybe see if I could create an improved audio landscape. Maybe put that calculus to use.

Halfway into the second guitar I came across a You-Tube video showing a guy tapping the soundboard as he shaved the braces underneath. By the end the difference from a dull thud to a ringing sustain was downright impressive. I realized my first guitar was more like the dull thud, so naturally, in the middle of the second’s construction, I disassembled the first one. One step forward, couple steps backward into the realm of luthier repairman.

I just finished both yesterday. The first one sounds much better. Meaning, if I had done that earlier, I would’ve saved myself the month I spent on the second. But now I have two handmade guitars, both of which I’m happy with. Maybe I should take some time now to do something else. You know, maybe learn to play one…

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Success is a tough word to define. Failure, not so hard. That old adage about not succeeding at first, so try try try again, I gotta tell you, that might be good advice for a third grader but I’m not so sure about us old guyz. Last winter I put my nose to the grindstone trying to build an acoustic guitar. The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band, builds violins and cellos professionally. He studied for three years at a luthier school in Salt Lake City. If you’ve ever been to TempleTown, you might have some idea how long three weeks would be down there, much less three years. Criminey, three days is an eternity. Salt Lake City is most definitely NOT Party Town USA.

A friend gave me a copy of Clapton’s Guitar, a great read about an Appalachian guitar builder who pretty much was self-taught and now is building masterpieces of luthiery for the locals and folks like Eric Clapton. To say the book was inspirational would be an understatement. I decided right then and there if this good old boy in the hills could do it, why not this good old boy in the nettle hollows? Determination, right? Pluck, correct? Desire and fortitude? Why, just last week there was a story in the news about a guy who built a rocket and launched himself into the sky nearly a mile and lived to tell about it. Building a guitar surely wouldn’t be as dangerous to my health. Would it??

Well, not counting mental health anyway. I gnashed teeth and bent wood and hacked away, read a lot of articles and watched a dozen you-tube tutorials, slept badly but finally finished my first guitar, the one I promised the mizzus would be my last guitar. It looked pretty, played all right, sounded okay. Not bad, I thought, you know, for a first guitar. Not so good for a last one, though. Thinking about all those mistakes a novice like me made on the first effort, I finally convinced myself I could learn from them. I could get better. I could, if I took my time, make an improved version. Like for instance, maybe not try to reinvent stuff, maybe look at a musical instrument less as an art object and a lot more like an audio device. It is, after all, meant to produce sound. And why reinvent wheels that have been rolling for centuries? Maybe learn from the Masters, not try to be inventive on the first go around.

So I’m back on the grindstone. Making mistakes already that no doubt will prove useful to future attempts, but not so much helping the current project. I suspect there is a truth to not letting failure deter a person. Perseverance, youngsters! Push on! The best is yet to come! And I certainly don’t want to be the cynical grouch who refuses to hang the kids’ drawings on the refrigerator with advice like maybe you should try something besides crayon art, sweetheart, and detour some future Picasso into shoe sales. But … I think the time will come when I have to tell myself, Clapton doesn’t want any of my guitars. Even if he does buy about 20 a year.

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