My wife has insisted for years now that I do a very poor job of documenting the building of my instruments. Sure, I slap some videos online here and there, but I never get good pictures.
It can be so bad—the documentation, that is—that I’ve received emails from people, messages on Instagram, asking me about a guitar they own, one they bought on eBay or Reverb… and I can’t remember building it. Isn’t that crazy? It takes me at least a month to make a guitar, and yet there are some out there that I’ve completely forgotten about.
At any rate, my dear wife decided to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. Yesterday, we were visiting a dear friend for her birthday. My mother asked me to bring my latest guitar build and sing a little for the party. I only sang three tunes—including “Happy Birthday”—but our friend was happy, and that was the goal.
We sat down to enjoy some delicious food, and I noticed my wife quietly slipping away. She took my guitar and walked toward the garden. Okay, I thought to myself, maybe she’s feeling meditational.
All of a sudden, a barrage of pictures started arriving on my phone. Using her artistic eye, she reminded me—visually—that this guitar was born here. A travel guitar made of local materials, both recycled and harvested by me, put together in a rainforest luthier shop.
I’m quite proud of this little guitar. I enjoy playing it—and that’s key—but I also enjoy the little experiments it features. The neck, for example, wasn’t built traditionally.
Inside the otherwise normal neck, there are three carbon fiber rods reinforcing it, making it very rigid without adding weight. That seems important for a guitar that needs to withstand both humidity and temperature changes without a hitch. But reinforcing the neck alone wasn’t enough.
Over the years, more than a few repairs have come across my bench. Acoustic guitars, as finicky and beautiful as they are, struggle to remain playable as they age. The tops tend to warp, the body begins to arch—and this happens simply because that’s how wood works. Some species are better than others at resisting creep (the slow warping), but acoustic guitars fare the worst due to their box being so fragile. A necessary weakness, of course, to project sound.
My little travel guitar is acoustic for all intents and purposes, but unlike most traditional instruments, she has a spine. A quartersawn piece of Mahogany (the most stable of woods, according to my research) floats between the top and the back, effectively connecting the neck to the tail.
In my estimation, this reduces the amount of work the top has to do and allows me to brace it very lightly. Since it doesn’t have to resist the full string tension, it can vibrate more freely.
This method of construction ends up requiring no neck adjustments, since there’s no truss rod—and the neck won’t bow upwards over time, nor will the top develop that dreaded “belly,” as we call it.
The finishing touch for this instrument was the pickup. I intend to use this guitar in an upcoming show, where my wife and I will perform together—like the good old days—and I needed a way to amplify it loudly enough to rise above the chatter of the joint.
Regretfully, because I do make guitars for a living, this one is for sale. So maybe, right after the show, she’ll leave my hands—as they all do—and go live in a good home.
As you might imagine, I do take Hive as payment. But for now, she stays with me. The wood is still getting used to being a guitar, after all.
MenO