The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This is going to come as a shock to many of you, but … the government has determined that my little guitar building shop is not really an ‘essential’ business. This was not really a surprise to me, to be brutally honest. For one thing, I never sold a single stringed instrument I made over the years, not that lack of profit has ever deterred me in artistic pursuits then or now. And for another, the government has also determined my glass shop is non-essential too. Art, music — we can all live without them, I’m being told. Nothing new there.

The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band (soon to be renamed the South End Non-Essentials), builds violins. Exquisite instruments of incredible craftsmanship. I asked him once, however, why he always made them out of flamed maple. Why not some other kind of hardwood? Because, he explained, Stradivarius made them out of flamed maple and so when he learned luthiery, he was taught to construct his violins with the exact thickness, measurements and dimensions that the Master used. I wondered aloud why not be a little more, oh, experimental, maybe more artistic, maybe shake things up a bit. He looked at me like I’d just climbed out of a tree searching for nuts. People who buy these instruments aren’t looking to stand out in the orchestra, he said. They want what Stradivarius had. And I want, he explained, to sell them, not put them in an art museum.

Well, I guess I could have absorbed that advice when years later I decided to try my untutored hand at making banjos. All kinds of exotic woods, multiple strategies in construction, various experiments with shapes and sizes. A banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. You could string up a tin box with a neck and you got yourself a banjo. A guitar, not so much. Don’t ask me why I decided to build one. Hubris, I suspect. Or maybe I figured I’d build a work of art rather than a musical instrument. I don’t, in retrospect, really remember the thought process. If there even was one.

Five guitars later I understand why my fiddler keeps making copies of Stradivariuses. My guitars each had different woods, different bracing systems, different necks, odd sound holes, each its own little experiment. I was the monkey at the typewriter pecking away hoping to write War and Peace. I had no fine woodworking skills, I had no luthiery background, I didn’t in the beginning know what was inside a guitar or how it was constructed. I guess I thought it was like building my house, just get a hammer and saw and start building, you’ll get it built eventually.

My last guitar got strung up yesterday. It’s a koa guitar, back, sides, with a spruce top and a neck laminated from padauk and maple and madrona. I played it expecting the worst but hoping for a miracle. It has good action, it even has good sound. It’s a keeper. Course, so are the others since none are really marketable. I got my own little luthiery museum.

The brain fever is dying down now and the government is probably right to deem this as non-essential. But for a couple of years, more than I care to admit, building guitars was, for one of us, pretty much essential. For those of us in the arts, that is the sad but passionate truth. I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My little guitar is done. Finished. Strung up and sitting in the livingroom. Along with the other three I made. And so it’s time to ask myself a few obvious questions. Okay, one obvious question: Why?

I’ve always thought boredom was the mother of creativity. Give a person enough time pondering their navel, they might decide to get off the couch and find something interesting to do. Beats TV any day of the week. And scrolling through You-Tube or Yahoo News too. So maybe that was my rationale. Be an excuse to maybe play an instrument more often if it was one I made myself. Naw, that might explain one. Not four. And I’m not going to mention the four banjos I built too.

No, something else is at work. But hell if I know what it was. Some virus I picked up that lodged in the brain and flares up occasionally, maybe. It’s not like I had the skills to make a really fine musical instrument. Or the tools. Course if I had known I would make this many I might have bought a few specialized luthiery tools, not whack and whittle with a jackknife and a chisel. I did buy a steamer and built a steam box to bend wood after restoring a hundred year old rowboat with rotted ribs, which, in hindsight, set me off to bending guitar sides, which, at the time, seemed like the tricky part of guitar building.

And there was this book, ‘Clapton’s Guitar’ a friend gave me about a guitar builder in the Appalachians, kind of inspirational at the time, a curse maybe in the rearview, that convinced me it would be a worthwhile enterprise to embark on my own guitar and possibly a book, ‘Skeeter’s Guitar’, a darkly comic account of one man’s quixotic attempt to build the Stradivarius of guitars with virtually no experience or understanding of what gives guitars their unique sound.

My guitar gently screams. Actually, my guitars gently mock me. I guess if I was a twenty-something, I might keep going, learn from my mistakes, up my game, buy the appropriate tools, improve with the accumulation of 10,000 hours. But I am too old now. And I don’t know that I was getting better by the 4th guitar.

Still, they are unique instruments. Art pieces more than musical, each different in sound and playability. This last one, the black limba with the old growth redwood top, plays well and the sound is good, bass not huge, trebles nice, mid-range nicely balanced. It’s a keeper. Trouble is, they’re all keepers. You want to make guitars, you need to sell some. It was how I ended up in glass work, mostly necessity if you want to keep doing it. That, probably, is the mother of invention, not boredom.