If at First You Don’t Succeed …
Success is a tough word to define. Failure, not so hard. That old adage about not succeeding at first, so try try try again, I gotta tell you, that might be good advice for a third grader but I’m not so sure about us old guyz. Last winter I put my nose to the grindstone trying to build an acoustic guitar. The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band, builds violins and cellos professionally. He studied for three years at a luthier school in Salt Lake City. If you’ve ever been to TempleTown, you might have some idea how long three weeks would be down there, much less three years. Criminey, three days is an eternity. Salt Lake City is most definitely NOT Party Town USA.
A friend gave me a copy of Clapton’s Guitar, a great read about an Appalachian guitar builder who pretty much was self-taught and now is building masterpieces of luthiery for the locals and folks like Eric Clapton. To say the book was inspirational would be an understatement. I decided right then and there if this good old boy in the hills could do it, why not this good old boy in the nettle hollows? Determination, right? Pluck, correct? Desire and fortitude? Why, just last week there was a story in the news about a guy who built a rocket and launched himself into the sky nearly a mile and lived to tell about it. Building a guitar surely wouldn’t be as dangerous to my health. Would it??
Well, not counting mental health anyway. I gnashed teeth and bent wood and hacked away, read a lot of articles and watched a dozen you-tube tutorials, slept badly but finally finished my first guitar, the one I promised the mizzus would be my last guitar. It looked pretty, played all right, sounded okay. Not bad, I thought, you know, for a first guitar. Not so good for a last one, though. Thinking about all those mistakes a novice like me made on the first effort, I finally convinced myself I could learn from them. I could get better. I could, if I took my time, make an improved version. Like for instance, maybe not try to reinvent stuff, maybe look at a musical instrument less as an art object and a lot more like an audio device. It is, after all, meant to produce sound. And why reinvent wheels that have been rolling for centuries? Maybe learn from the Masters, not try to be inventive on the first go around.
So I’m back on the grindstone. Making mistakes already that no doubt will prove useful to future attempts, but not so much helping the current project. I suspect there is a truth to not letting failure deter a person. Perseverance, youngsters! Push on! The best is yet to come! And I certainly don’t want to be the cynical grouch who refuses to hang the kids’ drawings on the refrigerator with advice like maybe you should try something besides crayon art, sweetheart, and detour some future Picasso into shoe sales. But … I think the time will come when I have to tell myself, Clapton doesn’t want any of my guitars. Even if he does buy about 20 a year.
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Tags: Clapton's Guitar, Guitar Building for Dummies, Slow Learning Curves