The New Normal
Awhile back, deep in the recesses of a once fevered brain, I fell into a semi-coma building banjos. Started out as a whimsy, a little test to see if a raw amateur woodworker could possibly cobble together a musical instrument. I’m a banjo player in an old time fiddle band. Old time music, not old time players. Although, strictly speaking, I guess we’re geezers now some 20 years since starting up the band. So a banjo seemed like a worthwhile endeavor.
The first one was a curly maple model, brass tone ring, played okay and sounded, well, like a banjo. Banjos are, to the untrained ear, basically a banjo. Loud, possibly obnoxious, an acquired taste. The Band tells the joke about how I left mine in the truck unlocked when I went into a local store, realized my mistake and hurried back. Sure enough, my worst fears were realized and there, parked in the cab was another one someone had donated.
Me, I didn’t wait for some wag to drop their unwanted instrument on me, I just went ahead and built three more after the first one. Banjovirus! I don’t know how many banjos a man needs and science hasn’t studied the affliction up until now, but I can safely say 6, which is how many I have, is plenty. You might think once the fever died down, I would have a certain immunity, antibodies aplenty. But you would be wrong. You would be very wrong.
A year ago I fell into another trance after I had learned how to bend wood in a steambox repairing the oak ribs on an old 1920’s Alaska fishing boat and so naturally I got to wondering what else could I bend wood for. Who wouldn’t, right? And about that same time a buddy gave me a book about an Appalachian good old boy who made some of the finest instruments in the world in his crummy shop back in the hollers. If he could do it … well, one thing led to another and next thing you know I was bending wood for acoustic guitar sides and constructing gitboxes without much understanding of what, actually, a guitar really was.
I’ve always figured if you put your mind to it, most anything is possible. Right. So go ahead and build a cyclotron, why don’t I? People go to luthier school for years to learn the craft. They buy the proper tools, learn about the tonal qualities of various woods, study bracing strategies, all those esoterics. Me, I knew how to bend wood. And even that, trust me, proved harder when I began to experiment on figured exotic hardwoods that did not want to bend even after steaming.
I won’t bore you with my multitudinous mistakes. Suffice it to say I was in way over my head. Each guitar was unique so learning from the mistakes of the previous one didn’t necessarily offer hints on the next one. But dammit, I wasn’t trying to be a factory, I wanted an artistic design for each instrument. You know, a cyclotron that was a rectangle, then maybe a figure 8, see how the electrons behaved in a knot. I learned a lot. Trouble was, not necessarily how to make a great guitar.
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