When we moved from Vermont to California at the end of 1989, I brought with us parts of one or two Sympitars that were under construction at the time. Sympitar #3 is pictured here; it was finished in a tiny shop Suzy and I set up in an old storeroom adjacent to Suzy's Dad's workshop. Ken Norris (Suzy's Dad ) was an old-school, hands-on scientist/naturalist/marine biologist/professor with many varied interests. He loved to tinker around his home, and his workshop was a wonderful, messy place full of old tools, whale bones, interesting scraps of wood and so on. He had a functioning band-saw and drill press; we added a cheap table saw and a re-sawing bandsaw.
This #3 Sympitar had 12 internal sympathetic strings and 6 main strings: the set-up I would stick with for several more Sympitars. This one had a lovely Western Red Cedar top and walnut back and sides.
One day I went up to the top of our road to get our mail, and there was this Brazilian guy standing there on the other side of our locked gate. In very broken English he asked if I knew Fred Carlson. He'd just flown into Los Angeles and driven up the coast, using GPS to try to find me (how did he even know my addess?).
Turns out he was a guitar collector (and yes, from Brazil!) and wanted to look at my instruments. I led him down to the house, where I showed him the new Sympitar. He had a guitarist-friend accompanying him, who tried it out briefly. Then he asked me "How much do you want for it?". I was a bit in shock, but I said $4,000. He said he wanted it, but could I replace the tuner grips on the sympathetic tuning pegs with ebony (as I recall they were clear plastic)...I didn't have any ebony grips on hand, so I removed some from another instrument and put those on while he waited. Then he took a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket and proceeded to pull $4,000. out of it, in hundred-dollar bills. We shook hands and they drove off, and I've not heard from him or that instrument since.
He got a good deal (and he knew it!)...I was still functioning under the theory that I should get at least minimum wage for my work, but that it wasn't fair for me to get paid much more than others of my friends did...and I had a lot of poor friends! Somehow we survived!

Sympitar #4 was the other one I had begun in Vermont and brought the parts along to California in 1989 when we made that move across the country.  The back and sides were made from (presumably Vermont) Bird's-eye Maple:  one day an older gentleman showed up at our Vermont workshop to drop off a fiddle needing repairs.  When he came to pick up the instrument, he brought with him an old, dust-encrusted piece of wood he'd had stored "in the loft of his barn" for years, which he gave to us, thinking we might have use for it.  It turned out to be the most beautiful, quarter-sawn "Bird's-eye Maple", eastern sugar-maple or hard-maple with the amazing pattern of tiny knots known as Bird's-eye figure.  I think I managed to get two guitar's worth of backs and sides out of that chunk; one of them was Sympitar #4.  I combined that wood with a top of Sitka spruce, and used the same maple for the neck.  I had both this instrument and the previous Sympitar around for a brief period, during which I thought to invite guitarist Alex DeGrassi, who had been instrumental in helping refine the design, and who I knew was interested in perhaps owning one, to come down to Santa Cruz and check them out.  He chose the maple and spruce version to take home, and has made some wonderful music with it over the years.  It was at Alex's urging that, as well as increasing the number of sympathetic strings (eventually ending up with 12),  I incorporated a damping mechanism so the sympathetic strings could be turned on or off while playing. 

Marvelous world-musician multi-instrumentalist Todd Green came across Alex performing on his new Sympitar (I can't remember where), and called me up to see if he could get one to try out.  I sent him Sympitar #5, the "Moonphase Sympitar" (so-named after the free-form celestial inlays around the sound-hole), which as I recall had African Bubinga back and sides, and a top of Sitka spruce.  This was the beginning of a long relationship with Todd, who went on to commission several of the more interesting projects I've done, and once  year or so brings me a van-load of various unusual ethnic stringed instruments from his performing collection, that need a little (or a lot of!) TLC.  It's been a wonderful learning experience...where else would I have gotten to work on a Turkish "Yali Tanbur" or a "rebab" from Uzbekistan, to name just a few of the instruments Todd has introduced me to.

In 1982 I made this unique bass viol for marvelous composer and friend Dennis Bathory-Kitsz. In my further explorations of bowed instruments (and still without any training in how to make them...the only formal training I'd had was in guitar building), I made this one to be playable either with sound-post (as with modern western bowed instruments) or without (as with the early viols, vielles and so on). The top is western red cedar; I'm thinking the back and sides were/are Vermont cherry...I don't recall for sure. I know it's changed hands at least once over the years...I'm not sure where it is today, but I do hope it's getting to make music!

In 1983 and '84 I made a prototype instrument that was the beginning of a long and interesting process of developing a guitar with sympathetic resonating strings. The evolution of the first "Sympitar" began thusly:
my partner/sweetie pie Suzy Norris had made a fiddle or two with sympathetic strings that ran beneath the main, bowed strings, inspired by the Norwegian "Hardanger fiddle" and the Baroque "viola d'amour" (we called it the "Suzalyne"). A follower of East Indian spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy saw us playing at the Hudson River Clearwater Festival, in the summer of maybe 1981 or '82. Early the next winter, we got a surprising phone call in the workshop at the commune from that fellow. He'd told "The Guru" about the Suzalyne, and "The Guru" wanted to hear one (Sri Chinmoy was a musician and artist; among other things he played the "esraj", a bowed instrument with a lot of sympathetic strings. The great guitarist, John McLaughlin played a guitar with sympathetic strings, and was associated with Sri Chinmoy). In fact, "The Guru" wanted Suzy to play one for him over the phone! And "The Guru" wanted her to play one for him over the phone now, please!
Well, it was a snowy day, and the Suzalyne was "over the river and through the woods", at our cabin. But if a real Guru calls on you, what do you do? Suzy asked them to call back shortly, and she ran off through the snow and woods to get the Suzalyne (no phone in our little cabin). When Suzy played a nice Irish tune over the phone, our go-between came on the line and said, "The Guru" would like you to play only on one string, please. "The Guru" only plays on one string"!!

To make a long story a little shorter: "The Guru" ended up getting Suzy an airplane ticket to fly down to New York that very day, where she stayed with an enclave of his followers and had an audience with him the next day. "The Guru" never ended up commissioning a Suzalyne, but Suzy had a great adventure, and in the process got to see a lot of East Indian instruments, and especially took note of how they ran their sympathetic strings over a wide bridge that makes them buzz (a "jiwari" bridge). She came back home all excited to make a Suzalyne with a "jiwari" bridge (and she eventually made a number of them). When she completed the first of these, I was blown away by the sound of those buzzing sympathetics (like tiny, angelic frogs singing along!!) and immediately got to work making a guitar with sympathetic strings and a jiwari bridge. It turned out to be a great success; I showed it to the great guitarist/composer Alex de Grassi, who borrowed it to record a piece for his album "Deep At Night" ("Hidden Voices"). This Sympitar has had quite a life, and recently got re-born in a new form. More on that later, as well as more on the many designs that evolved out of this first Sympitar.

Although I was captivated by sympathetic strings and increasingly complex designs, my musical roots were in traditional American folk music and I had (and still have) a great love for relatively simple folk instruments. Although the first instrument I learned to play (starting at age 9) was the guitar, and the first instrument I built (at age 16) was a lap dulcimer, my real dream as a young teenager was to build my own 5-string banjo. After building that first dulcimer, my dulcimer/sculpture building mentor, Ken Riportella, helped me build a little banjo, which I carried around with me everywhere for a couple years, learning the old frailing and two-finger styles of playing. That first banjo had a top made of 1/8 inch thick "doorskin", hollow core door plywood that we salvaged from the Weyerhauser hollow-core door factory dumpster (I no longer remember what town in Vermont that was in; somewhere in the center of the state). I made a bunch of (pretty crude!) banjos with that stuff, including the octagonal one that I ended up selling to a young banjo wizard named Tony Trishka (and I'd love to know what happened to that one!)! Around that time I discovered the "Foxfire" books, wonderful records of traditional Appalachian crafts and culture. There was quite a lot about banjo-making in one of those volumes, and I got inspired enough to try preparing my own goat-skin from the baby male goats that were born to one of our does at the commune (she had triplets...three little boys! We didn't particularly want a whole herd of billy-goats, so we butchered them and I got the skins; this was before I became a vegetarian!). My attempts at banjo-making with those skins were not successful, unfortunately. Later, after I'd had a lot more lutherie experience, I got a commission to build a mountain-style banjo, much like the ones shown in that volume of "Foxfire", and that's the one pictured here. It was fretless, with inlaid fret markers; the small skin was wrapped over a "tone-ring" made from a large tin can. I made at least one more of these, some years later, though it wasn't until many years later that I finally got to satisfy my original banjo building urge in a deeper way. Banjo is still my favorite instrument to play, and I find its history as an African instrument brought to America on slave ships deeply moving and fascinating (as many as 63 different variants of the banjo have been documented in one area of western Africa where the slave traders took people from). So much sorrow contained in such a joyful instrument!! What a world!