estebanana -> RE: Time on putting a guitar together (May 7 2010 9:40:13)
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When I started building and working on instruments 1979 I began by sweeping the floor in a violin bow makers shop. That lasted about two days. The bowmaker, Mr. "T", graduated me to the next higher task. Mr. T was my first teacher, his wife owned an antique shop, she was a professional "antique lady" and together they had a large shed full of pieces they had collected to be restored or repaired so they could be sold in her store. In order to gauge whether or not I was worthy of learning to work on violins, celli and cello and violin bows, I was given the task and position of Chief Commissar in Charge of Furniture restoration. In this house there were three concurrent operations. My teacher was a former WPA artist, (for those of you out of the US that was a federal work program during the 1930s depression. ) his training and subsequent experience led him to architecture, instrument building and painting conservation. So one studio room was dedicated to fine oil painting restoration and conservation, and one larger studio comprised of three rooms served as the instrument workshop, with an outdoor annex of power tools. It was my task to find a place with a large work surface so that I could undertake the job of stripping and refinishing medium priced furniture, like desks, chairs and dressers. I was banished out of the shop and onto a plywood table in the back yard under the eaves of the porch. I worked under the porch roof for a summer making $3.85 per hour slaving over hot caustic stripper and steel wool pads whilst poking my head into the main shop whenever possible to catch a glimpse of some violin client dropping off an instrument or bow. After the client had left I was invited in see what was going to be worked on. Little by little over the course of the first summer I was given studio room tasks which began with things like preparing the mother of pearl slide material that T used to make or replace slides in bows. Preparing the pearl or abalone was a process of selecting a section, rough cutting it and then lapping it flat on a water washed electric lapidary wheel which located in the tool annex room. Black Abalone renders the most beautiful of all pearl. The best comes from the the small coin sized section on the abalone where the adductor muscle makes it's attachment. Most of the slides and appointments on the frogs of T's best bows were made with adductor pearl from Black Abalone. T loved to tease me over and over about how I was in the back room "making pearl". This humor eluded me as I was sixteen and did not understand that "making" in depression era parlance meant ****ing. T threatened to call my grandmother and tell her I was out back "making pearl" or ****ing Pearl, whomever she was. I always presumed he meant Pearl Bailey because she was the only Pearl I had ever heard of, and this disturbed me. I was subjected to these vile insults and hardships and my only recourse was to retaliate by dropping by the studio after work with a gorgeous girl I had been dating named "Kookie". T liked gorgeous women, but his antique lady wife forbid him to be in situations where he was "making" them. So thus began the long and antagonistic relationship I had with T, and his wife, until his death in 2000. I did not work for him for the entire duration between 1979 and 2000. By the end of the first summer I was integrated into the workshop as a full time helper/apprentice in bowmaking and cello repair. I did work for three and a half years solid in the beginning and then dropped in over the years to help out on projects or to just take up breathing space in the shop while I aggravated T in which ever way I thought at the moment would be the most aggravating. When I first went to T's workshop it was not with the intention of getting a job making instruments, it was to get cracks in the top of my cello mended. I was in the living room waiting for him to finish a phone call, I was looking at the piano which was draped with a red and Navy blue Persian rug. It was a Beethoven era piano made by Chickering. On top of the piano, lying in state on the blues and oranges of the Persian carpet, were a half dozen very old violins. Some where Italian and some were anonymous but looked, he told me later, to be of Italian origin. One was a violin by Antoniazzi, a modern Italian maker. It was long and tubby with blackish streaks in the varnish. When T had finished his phone call he walked over and asked me what I was looking at. I motioned to the violins, I had never seen any old Italian instruments and said they were breathtaking. He began to tell me about each violin, how old it was and which city in Italy it was from. He explained that violin making in Italy was stylistically regional. Next we went out into the workshop where he showed me a few violins with the tops off, I could see inside from tail block to neck block and the corner blocks and linings. He handed an open violin to me. A moment of discovery. It was as if I had picked up a light fragile sea animals' shell off the beach. I suppose I showed enough interest and blurted out something about wanting to make a classical guitar and having had made some wooden objects in my grandfathers shop. T offered me a job as his grunt work helper, but bristled at the idea of making a guitar under his roof. He said I could learn something about all the projects in the house, if I swept the floor first. There was a guitar maker in town, but apparently he and T had had words. Once the guitar maker and T got together to exchange information and curiosity at being two instrument makers in the same town, Redlands California. The guitar maker said he thought that making a violin bow was not that big of a deal when compared to making a classical guitar. This pissed T off and he and the guitar maker never spoke further. I never brought up the subject of guitar making again until around 1996. The idea that making a violin bow is less an art or difficult a venture than a classical guitar is preposterous. In fact I think making bows is more difficult. The guitar maker in Redlands in the late 1970's was not a great builder, as I look back with what I know now. I am certainly glad I did not happen into his shop first and get snared into working for him as I did with T in his crazy three project circus. Some guitar makers then got away with that kind of arrogance. It was on the tail end of the classical guitar awakening in the US and several builders were riding the tide of being known because there were so few guitar makers. It was not until 1997 when I was in a bar called "The Albatross" in Berkeley California that I met a guy named Eugene Clark who was a guitar maker. He was standing at the bar watching an aire dripping flamenco guitarist named Keni Parker play his regular Thursday night sets and he was the second guitar maker I had ever met. Eventually I got to talk to him and little by little expressed a desire to build a guitar. Gene had a slightly perceptable recoil action, like a small caliber rifle, when you said "I want to build a guitar." I'm sure he had heard this from a million guys who had said they wanted to build, only to flake out. After some weeks of seeing him at the Albatross he turned to me and said "So did I hear you say you wanted to make a guitar? " He asked how he could help me, but in a tone that seemed to ask, I don't l know if I can help you, can you help yourself? He said this with the sentiment W.C. Fields would have intoned with his cliche' line "Get away from me kid, you bother me." What hooked Mr. Gene into engaging me in conversation and ultimately letting me tag along to his work shop was when I said "I would like to see your workbench." He asked why, and I said "If I can see your workbench then I will be able to read it like a book to see which tools you use to build guitars, then I will know which questions to ask you without wasting your time." He liked that answer, he liked it very much. T would admonish me constantly to work carefully and he had several maxims he would tout at me. Some meant to encourage and some to slow me down. One of the most interesting things he used regarding mistakes and how to fix them when you work was: "If an object can survive it's own process of manufacture then it deserves to be born a musical instrument." He was said you can fix things along the way if you make a mistake, often guitar makers and other instrument builders, whether they admit it or not, make blunders while they work. Even the most skilled seasoned craftspeople make a mistake every now and again. T's philosophy was that it gives the instrument character if you make a mistake, but are able to save it, hopefully without anyone knowing. Much of his aesthetic or threshold for finish was formed by his fondness for pre Cremonese period violins, which generally tend to be a bit more "rough" if you can call a violin rough. There is a certain brusque directness that translates the energy of the builders hand into those older violins from outside Cremona and in a more refined way it can be felt in the Cremonese violins. It has always been a point of contention with me that current guitar making standards for fit and finish are more akin to those of freshly painted mechanically polished automobiles rolling off assembly lines than Italian violins. I believe there's vitality in the pentimenti of surface marks which guitar builders make while working. They then have to "cleanse" the guitar of it's own history to please the market. One of T's most oft spoken maxims was "Slow down and do it right. That object is going be around for four hundred years and others are going have to look at your work. " Time means nothing, time does not exist in instrument making. Recording clock time spent is just your ego keeping track of itself. After certain experience has been gained, a guitar or anything can be made in a small amount of clock time. There is an element to making an instrument that can't be counted in clock time and that element will last four hundred years and is the only important thing.
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