Opinion CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER ...
This month Alex Bishop helps two of his longterm student projects reach the end of their ambitious guitar builds
As most of us will know, the road to buying a guitar can be a varied one. Sometimes it takes little more than one chord before a brief flirtation transforms into a longterm commitment (and an emptied bank account). The decision to buy my first proper guitar (a bound Candy Apple Red Telecaster with a Bigsby vibrato) took about five minutes and occurred a mere 12 hours after receiving my first proper pay cheque. On the other hand, I have a friend who bought his dream guitar (a 2004 Larrivée O-50) after hunting down the exact guitar that had once ignited his teenage imagination in a guitar shop almost two decades previously.
Making your own guitar is more like the latter rather than the former; the road between deciding to build your first instrument and stringing it up is long and challenging, originating from a desire that may have been burning away in the background for some time.
This week, two of my students – Giles and Simon – finally experienced the glory of reaching the end of this twisting and unpredictable road within a day of each other. They had each come to me with a vague outline of the sort of guitar they wanted to make: Giles was interested in building the best-sounding fingerstyle acoustic using traditional tonewoods (Indian rosewood for the back and sides with a Canadian Sitka spruce top), whereas Simon wanted to build an instrument that was unmistakably unique (a double-soundhole parlour guitar with zebrano back and sides), with a sound to match.
Determinedly chipping away at their guitars with regular sessions over the last two years, I had the task of guiding them around the many traps that befall the first-time builder. Giles achieved a stunning French-polished finish without the usual agony felt by a beginner, mainly by grain filling with a fast (and experimental) method we devised. Simon avoided the time-consuming job of levelling his frets for a second time after we spotted and replaced a rogue fret.
Choppy Waters
It wasn’t all plain sailing, however. We came close to hitting the rocks on Simon’s guitar
