The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This is going to come as a shock to many of you, but … the government has determined that my little guitar building shop is not really an ‘essential’ business. This was not really a surprise to me, to be brutally honest. For one thing, I never sold a single stringed instrument I made over the years, not that lack of profit has ever deterred me in artistic pursuits then or now. And for another, the government has also determined my glass shop is non-essential too. Art, music — we can all live without them, I’m being told. Nothing new there.

The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band (soon to be renamed the South End Non-Essentials), builds violins. Exquisite instruments of incredible craftsmanship. I asked him once, however, why he always made them out of flamed maple. Why not some other kind of hardwood? Because, he explained, Stradivarius made them out of flamed maple and so when he learned luthiery, he was taught to construct his violins with the exact thickness, measurements and dimensions that the Master used. I wondered aloud why not be a little more, oh, experimental, maybe more artistic, maybe shake things up a bit. He looked at me like I’d just climbed out of a tree searching for nuts. People who buy these instruments aren’t looking to stand out in the orchestra, he said. They want what Stradivarius had. And I want, he explained, to sell them, not put them in an art museum.

Well, I guess I could have absorbed that advice when years later I decided to try my untutored hand at making banjos. All kinds of exotic woods, multiple strategies in construction, various experiments with shapes and sizes. A banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. You could string up a tin box with a neck and you got yourself a banjo. A guitar, not so much. Don’t ask me why I decided to build one. Hubris, I suspect. Or maybe I figured I’d build a work of art rather than a musical instrument. I don’t, in retrospect, really remember the thought process. If there even was one.

Five guitars later I understand why my fiddler keeps making copies of Stradivariuses. My guitars each had different woods, different bracing systems, different necks, odd sound holes, each its own little experiment. I was the monkey at the typewriter pecking away hoping to write War and Peace. I had no fine woodworking skills, I had no luthiery background, I didn’t in the beginning know what was inside a guitar or how it was constructed. I guess I thought it was like building my house, just get a hammer and saw and start building, you’ll get it built eventually.

My last guitar got strung up yesterday. It’s a koa guitar, back, sides, with a spruce top and a neck laminated from padauk and maple and madrona. I played it expecting the worst but hoping for a miracle. It has good action, it even has good sound. It’s a keeper. Course, so are the others since none are really marketable. I got my own little luthiery museum.

The brain fever is dying down now and the government is probably right to deem this as non-essential. But for a couple of years, more than I care to admit, building guitars was, for one of us, pretty much essential. For those of us in the arts, that is the sad but passionate truth. I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hits: 114

I know a lot of folks watching my valiant attempt at building a guitar feel like they’re rubbernecking a highway wreck. Just at really slow speeds. They witnessed me trying to bend walnut into a shape nature never intended walnut to pretzel itself into and on multiple tries, nature proved its point. They watched in horror while I whacked on a Sitka spruce block with a froe, a flat length of steel used for splitting cedar shakes I’d let rust for 30 years, then tried to plane the bookmatched sections down to 3/16th of an inch and glue the two side by side together for the soundboard.

Some had to avert their eyes when I made kerfings to attach to the bent sides to create a glue surface for the top and bottoms and add strength to the skinny carcass. When I cut spruce and cedar bracing wood for the top and then the back, they cringed. The big boys scallop these, but I drilled holes to take away mass. The last thing you want is a top that doesn’t vibrate freely because you stiffened it too much.

Remember this mantra: let the top sing! Let it vibrate! Most guitars have a soundhole cut right into that vibrating top. Not me, pal. I’m building mine to let sound out the side so I, me, myself, can hear it, not some mythical audience I’ll never play for. The fretboard on most guitars gets extended over the top down to the soundhole and glued, more dampening of the vibrations. Me, I’m going to elevate it above the top a quarter inch or so, nothing touching that singing spruce.

Ditto the pickguard, usually a plastic affair cemented to the top too. I’m either eliminating it altogether or making a floating wood one attached to the side. Most strings on a traditional gitbox sit on a bridge then drop down through the drilled top where the stress on the thin soundboard is compensated by a hardwood reinforcing strip, yup, glued down. I’m going to attach a fancy tailpiece at the end of the guitar bottom where only the bridge touches the top, the only place the soundboard is tampered with. Good good good vibrations sez the Beach Boys. We’ll see. No, actually, we’ll hear…. Stay tuned!

Hits: 52