Posted on January 13, 2025January 27, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Makers: Sue and Ray Mooers of Dusty Strings Meet the Makers: Sue and Ray Mooers of Dusty Strings by Jonathon Peterson Originally published in American Lutherie #77, 2004 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 Over the past two decades, Ray and Sue Mooers’ company, Dusty Strings, has become a major player in the folk-music scene in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Their urban-basement store in Seattle has become a regional hub, not only supplying musical tools to beginner and expert alike, but serving as a meeting place for musicians; a place for folk-music aficionados to get information about concerts, festivals, and regional events. Their enthusiasm is infectious, and their expertise, inventory, and reputation has grown over the years. They have probably built and sold more hammered dulcimers than anyone, anywhere, and they have recently moved their folk-harp and hammered dulcimer production into a new, thoroughly modern facility not far from their retail store. I spent an afternoon talking with them and walking through the plant, and was massively impressed not only by the scale and sophistication of what they are doing, but by the two of them. They are warm, welcoming, and down to earth, and they have wonderfully clear and direct attitudes toward their lives and their business. After all these years they are still in love, and despite big changes in the scale of their enterprise and the incumbent responsibilities, they still seem to be having fun. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on January 13, 2025January 27, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: Myles Gilmer Meet the Maker: Myles Gilmer by Todd Brotherton Originally published in American Lutherie #26, 1991 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume Three, 2004 Would you give us some background on yourself? The wood business that I’m doing now is an offshoot of what I was doing in the ’70s. My education was in medical research, but there weren’t too many jobs in that area, so I built furniture accessories and sold them to galleries and stores across the country for a few years. I lived in equatorial Africa in the early to mid ’70s. I was working in the wood business in Ghana and Liberia as a jack-of-all-trades, doing vehicle maintenance, repairing machine saws, and doing some cutting and milling. I spent a lot of time hiking in the forest. The trees are incredible there. I have photographs of a native hut next to a tree that was 220' tall and 12'–14' in diameter. People often imagine an African forest as being a jungle but it’s more like what we see here in the Northwest; an old growth high canopy forest, very open inside with not much secondary growth on the floor, and quite dark to walk through. When I moved back to the USA, I quickly found that there weren’t great sources for the wood I was interested in. I had friends in Africa and started importing a little for my production line. We started importing more, and soon my competitors were interested in buying. I was still producing wood pieces, but getting tired of production woodwork. Over a two-year period I just switched from being a manufacturer to being a supplier. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on December 13, 2024December 16, 2024 by Dale Phillips Low-Stress Archtop Guitar Design Low-Stress Archtop Guitar Design by Steve Grimes from his 2008 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #101, 2010 Before I was a luthier I worked as a draftsman for Boeing. I’d rest my head in my hand and hold my pencil, and I could log in a half-hour or 45-minute nap. In 1972 I realized that if I didn’t change professions, I might as well commit suicide. The first instrument I made was a flattop Martin-style mandolin, and later that year I started building archtop mandolins. I had a preference tonally and visually for oval-hole mandolins, and I’m still addicted to oval-hole instruments. In ’74 I wandered into McCabe’s Music Store in L.A. and saw a great-looking guitar on the wall. The store was noisy, so I didn’t really get a chance to evaluate the sound, but it sounded good. It was made by Lloyd Baggs, before he started making transducer piezo pickups. That guitar influenced me a lot, and it was similar to this guitar which I just finished. It didn’t have the light sunburst, and it wasn’t made out of curly koa like this one, but they both had flat backs. I immediately went home to Seattle and made my first archtop guitar, with an oval soundhole and a flat back. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 3 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on December 11, 2024December 19, 2024 by Dale Phillips An Important Message From the GAL Staff An Important Message From the GAL Staff Originally published in American Lutherie #153, 2024 The Guild’s staff and Board of Directors have recently made some decisions about the future of the Guild’s activities. Tim, Deb, and Bon (the Guild’s original staff) have been working for the Guild for over fifty years, and are hoping to retire from their decades of nonstop publishing. In light of this and other factors (including financial), we’ve decided that next year will be our last year of publishing our journal, American Lutherie. The full staff will continue working in 2025. Our print publishing schedule for the 2025 issues of American Lutherie will be the same as this year (Spring, Summer, and Fall/Winter), and we’ll continue to add lots of great content from our earlier issues to our Articles Online. Then in 2026, we’ll transition to an all-online “Legacy” mode, so members can continue to access our online content. The rest of our longtime staff (Dale, Kurt, and Steve) will still be here to sell our books, plans, and back issues, and to continue adding more content to our Articles Online. We’ll continue in this mode as long as it’s financially viable. We’re hopeful that members will rally for our final year of paper publishing in 2025. Renewing your membership now for 2025 will help us tremendously. (And if you’ve already renewed, we thank you!) We hope that members will stick with us as we go into our Legacy phase. We will likely need to do some fundraising to cover the costs of continuing our efforts to keep what we’ve published available online to members. We’ll keep you posted on how you can help with that. Of course, tax-deductible donations are always welcome anytime: See https://luth.org/membership/donate/. So the Guild is not “going out of business,” we’ll just be moving to a new mode of sharing. We’re proud of everything that we and our members have been able to accomplish in the last fifty years. The Guild has stayed true to our core values of generous and humble information sharing that has become the standard for the lutherie community. We’ve played a major role in the progress and excellence achieved in the handcrafted instrument field since the early 1970s. We thank you for your continuing support as we transition from paper publishing to digital sharing. Please renew today and don’t miss out on our historic final issues of American Lutherie! The Guild is great, The Guild is good, The Guild is great and good! The GAL Staff and their years of service, from left: Steve McElrath (14), Kurt Kendall (31), Bon Henderson (52), Dale Phillips (38), Tim Olsen (52), and Deb Olsen (52). Photo by Isaac Olsen.
Posted on December 11, 2024December 19, 2024 by Dale Phillips It Worked for Me It Worked for Me by C.F. Casey, Dan Alexander, Steve Kennel Originally published in American Lutherie #153, 2024 It seems that nowadays, scissors, rather than being forged as in old times, are mostly made of sheet tool steel and provided with handles of plastic. As we all know, plastic is somewhat less durable than steel, […] This post is only available to members.
