Posted on June 20, 2019March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips Guitar Swap! Guitar Swap! guitars and text by John Calkin and Steve Kinnaird previously published in American Lutherie #81, 2005 John Calkin: When I suggested to Texas luthier Steve Kinnaird that we build each other a guitar I had no specific agenda in mind. Though I spend my work weeks building acoustic guitar bodies for Huss & Dalton, I feel it’s important to build an occasional complete instrument just to keep in practice. Company policy prevented me from building flattops for sale but not from building for trade or gift. And frankly, I had enough nice guitars sitting around the house that I didn’t feel like building another for myself. Trading guitars with Steve sounded like fun. We were already good friends who trusted each other, and we knew each other’s work well enough to know that we were on equal footing as luthiers. Most of the fun for me was in not telling Steve what I wanted or expected in my guitar. He, too, decided that surprise would be the most delicious element of the swap. 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 June 20, 2019March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips Searching for Blue Significance Searching for Blue Significance by John Calkin previously published in American Lutherie #56, 1998 I guess I heard about Scott Chinery’s collection of blue guitars at the same time as everyone else. The photo of a necklace of sky-colored archtops lounging on the grass appeared in magazines well outside the field of music. And my reaction was probably the same as everyone else’s — where does this guy get his money? I was glad Chinery had dumped so much bread into the lutherie community, but otherwise I didn’t see the point. So when the staid Smithsonian Institution decided to house the collection for awhile, I was amused and confounded. What was going on here? I knew two things for sure. First, as a connoisseur of vintage instruments and a collector of wide renown, Scott Chinery was a man to be reckoned with. In the early ’90s he made a short video (available from Stew-Mac) which skimmed off some of the creamier bits of his collection for the home viewer, and let’s just say that any one piece would make any musician’s day turn golden. If the above question about his money seems rude, you should know that Chinery is very up-front about the subject on video and freely talks about what he paid for certain pieces and what sort of tempting offers he has refused for his vintage groovies. My friend and guitar teacher, Mitch Block, played a party at Chinery’s New Jersey home and came back stupefied by the shear quantity of fine (not to mention important) guitars he saw there. 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 14, 2010March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips Review: The Bouzouki Book, by Graham McDonald Review: The Bouzouki Book by Graham McDonald Reviewed by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #80, 2004 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 The Bouzouki Book Graham McDonald ISBN 0-646-43602-3 Graham McDonald Stringed Instruments, 117 pp., 2004 Totally new instruments don’t appear very often. When they do the results can be pretty exciting, both musically and socially, though it’s not easy to establish a pattern to the events. When the 5-string banjo was born in America in the early-to-mid 19th century it took a couple decades for many of the details to become standardized, after which the popularity of the banjo began to grow rapidly. Small builders furnished most of the early instruments, but as the banjo boom spread, larger factories became the important players. Banjo production mirrored the industrialization of the country at large. However, it takes a lot of money to drive an industry, and as the 20th century demand for banjos began to wane, the big companies backed off and there was once again room for the small builder. 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 14, 2010March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips Review: Build Your Own Lap Steel Guitar by Martin Koch Review: Build Your Own Lap Steel Guitar by Martin Koch Reviewed by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #83, 2005 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 Build Your Own Lap Steel Guitar Martin Koch ISBN: 3-901314-09-1 118 pp., 2004 Build Your Own Lap Steel Guitar Martin Koch CD-ROM, 75 minutes www.stewmac.com Martin Koch (www.BuildYourGuitar.com) devolves the process of lap-steel creation to make it accessible to the most unsophisticated readers. At the same time he hints at the small added details that make construction more difficult but add a touch of elegance to an otherwise Plain Jane instrument. Two lap-steel designs are illustrated in this book/CD set. The first is literally a plank with lines for frets, a thick maple board just wider than the untapered fretboard. The nut end is scooped out to create a headstock. The nut itself is a length of aluminum angle stock. The “frets” are inlaid bits of maple veneer. The only guitarish hardware involved is a Les Paul Jr. bridge, the machine heads, a single-coil pickup, a volume pot, and an output jack. Another piece of angle stock might have been used for the bridge, but the LP Jr. item smacks more of a musical instrument and was a good choice. Construction was accomplished entirely with a few hand tools. A bit of decorative trim was added by making a control cover and pickup ring from the same wood as the fingerboard. The guitar was finished in Danish oil. There’s an understated innocence to this instrument that I admire. It would be fun to show up at a jam with it and rock out just as hard as the guys with “real” instruments. It would be a very in-their-face statement. 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 14, 2010March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips Review: Building an Acoustic Guitar by Dan Erlewine and Todd Sams Review: Building an Acoustic Guitar by Dan Erlewine and Todd Sams Reviewed by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #84, 2005 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 Building an Acoustic Guitar Dan Erlewine and Todd Sams Stewart-MacDonald, VHS, 71 minutes, 2002 www.stew-mac.com The title of this video is a bit misleading. It’s about building an acoustic guitar from a Stew-Mac kit, and if you are a first-time scratch builder with no kit experience, it will leave you in the dark in so many ways that you will be helpless. The kit comes complete with bent and contoured sides, joined plates, shaped braces, a 90% (or more) shaped neck, a slotted and radiused fingerboard, and a top routed for rosette rings. No mention is made of how to complete any of the pre-performed tasks, and that’s a lot of stuff to leave out. If they had only added the word kit to the end of the title, I wouldn’t have a complaint in the world about this video. You can’t knock people for not doing what they didn’t set out to do. The focus of this tape is on building a satisfying kit guitar with the fewest specialized tools and the least confusion. A portable drill and a laminate trimmer are just about the only power tools used. A few cam clamps and a bunch of large spool clamps are the only hand tools used that aren’t likely to be found in any home tool kit. A few shop tips are included — trade secrets, as Dan Erlewine would call them — but other than that, there is no extraneous information included. If you don’t need to know it, it isn’t there. It’s not a matter of holding back information, but a matter of preventing a clutter of information from causing confusion. I enjoy trivia, but this isn’t the place for it. 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.
