The little school in South Strafford, Vt. where I learned the basics of guitar building was called "Earthworks"; shortly after my time there, the name was changed to " The Center for Guitar Research and Design", better known as "GRD".  Charles Fox was an elegant and gracious teacher (and still is, I'm sure, in the version of his school current at the time of this writing, "The American School of Lutherie", in Portland, Oregon).  He was impressed enough by my work building my first guitar under his tutelage that he offered to take me on as an assistant at the school, a position that would have been funded by a federal program in place at the time, the "Comprehensive Employment Training Act", or CETA.  I was at that point all fired up to make guitars on my own, and decided not to take him up on the offer.  I will always wonder how things would have turned out in my life if I  had chosen differently.

The guitar I made at Earthworks/GRD in 1975 (at age 19) was of necessity a straightforward, guitar-like design.  The students were given parameters within which to draw an outline of the shape; we had some freedom in designing bridge and peghead shape.  For a first guitar, mine came out pretty nice, I thought, though I was itching to use some of the inspiration I'd been getting from my artist friend/mentor Ken Riportella to design something a bit wilder (for more about Ken Riportella and my time at Earthworks/GRD, take a look at my first Blog, "My Beginnings As A Creative Luthier"). 

Although many people would probably want to keep their first guitar, I was eager to sell mine to finance the building of the next one.  I found a buyer in a friend of one of my fellow commune-members, sold it for all of $300., and never looked back!  Except...well, it didn't take long for that person to ask if I would buy it back from him....I can't recall why; I think it was more that he didn't really have the money than that he didn't like the instrument (we were all poor hippies back then!).  I did buy it back from him and later re-sold it to someone else; that person took it with him to Quito, Ecuador, where I lost track of it, and have heard nothing of it in the 45-plus years since.  I do wonder what became of it...what sort of life it led.  I'll probably never know.

 

After attending Charles Fox's little guitar-building school in the fall of 1975, I came home and helped my brother, Barney, build a guitar. The Guistar was the instrument I designed and built to demonstrate the process to him, while at the same time reinforcing in my own mind and hands the lessons I'd learned from Charles Fox.

I was also eager to do something creative, to begin to apply the creative approach I'd absorbed from my time with Ken Riportella to guitar building. Whether or not I was actually ready to do that with my new and limited guitar-building skills, I jumped right in and this is what I came up with. Despite its lack of technical expertise in construction details, it was a pretty fun instrument.

I ended up selling it to friend and local Central Vermont musician Don Conoscenti, who later had some popularity as a fine guitarist and singer/songwriter, making a number of albums. Unfortunately, the Guistar suffered serious damage and never made it onto those records. It came back to me a couple decades ago, and has been sitting in a corner of the workshop, awaiting the day when I decide to resurrect it. Whether that day ever comes or not, it's a piece of my lutherie history, and I'm glad to have it.

When I first began building instruments in the early 1970s, I thought I was heading towards fiddle building. When I was 17 I went so far as to write to a woman in Arkansas who built fiddles, and who I'd read about in one of the "Foxfire" books (these were great books that documented rural Southern Mountain ways of living, including traditional crafts and their practitioners). My plan was to visit her on a cross-country trip and maybe somehow get her to teach me fiddle-building....a pretty ambitious plan for a 17-year-old who was basically scared of leaving home! For various reasons, that plan never came to fruition (I did make it to Arkansas briefly...long story...but never to the fiddle maker). Instead I found Charles Fox's guitar-building school and switched gears in my head from fiddles to guitars. But I was (and am) still interested in bowed instruments, and have made a number of attempts at constructing them over the years (more recently getting more refined, with much assistance from my violin-building sweetie, Suzy Norris).

This fiddle-ish-looking instrument, which I called a "vielle" (kind of generic French word for fiddle-ish instruments!), was made around the time of my study with Charles Fox (1975); I don't seem to have an exact date in my records. It was made for a dear friend/housemate at "the commune".  The carved top is western red cedar; I believe the back was flat, and the back and ribs were of walnut. I think this had a sound-post (like modern violins), though I could be wrong. I was very interested in the sound of earlier bowed instruments that did not have sound-posts, and made several experiments with such.

 

 

I built this unique tenor viol also in the mid 1970s, during this period following guitar-building school, when I was beginning to build guitars but continued to experiment with bowed instruments. It was one of several bowed instruments that I built for dear musician friends who had been (or were at the time) part of my extended "family" at The New Hamburger commune in Plainfield, Vermont.

I really had little knowledge of the "right" way to build something like a tenor viol; most of what I did know back then came from pictures in books, and one or two books that had some actual construction information. I was very attracted to instruments from the Medieval and early Renaissance periods, before (European) bowed instrument design became formalized into what we know today in the modern violin family. Those early instruments often had flat or near-flat wooden plates for their sound-boards, unlike the carved/arched tops of modern instruments. They also lacked the modern "sound-post and bass-bar" architecture that gives modern bowed instruments much of their particular sound. The sound of an instrument with a flat wooden top and no sound-post is quite different than that modern sound. I characterize it as "hollow", "haunting" and "mysterious"; I've also heard it called "glassy". It's quieter, less full or rounded, edgier. It is also harder to get it to "speak" clearly with the bow.
When I built this instrument, I unintentionally re-enacted the development of the modern bowed instrument, in a way. I started with a fairly thick piece of western red cedar for the top, which I removed wood from the underside of to leave two thicker strips under each foot of the bridge for structure. No glued in bass-bar, no sound-post. Upon stringing it up with its six gut strings, I realized that the top was in danger of collapse, so I added a sound-post mainly for support. This saved the instrument from self-destruction, and also changed the sound, making it fuller, as well as easier to play. I had perhaps discovered how and why our modern bowed instruments evolved to have a sound post!

 

This instrument had some interesting carving on the peghead and some unusual detailing on the sound holes. On the back of the peghead there is a little carved face. The wood for the back, as I recall, came from a chunk of maple firewood I found in the commune's woodshed!

 

 

My first mentor, Ken, built instruments based on the Appalachian dulcimer, and after studying guitar building, I built a couple of dulcimers of my own design for friends/clients before moving on to mostly making guitar-inspired instruments for a period. 
Here's a dulcimer I made in the mid-1970s, this one for dear friend and wonderful composer Andy Christiansen.

I think this may have been made shortly after my time at guitar-building school; the top I recall being of western red cedar, which I was introduced to by Charles Fox in '75, as a wood for guitar tops. Not at all traditional for a dulcimer, but then neither was the triple-bout shape!

I don't know what became of the final print of this photograph...this one is a proof that I saved from the waste-paper basket in the photographer's darkroom. I'm glad I did, because I don't have many pictures of any of these, all built between 1974 and 1976. From left to right:

a wild-flying lap dulcimer; a cherry-wood banjo; that odd little 6-string fiddle, and my 2nd-ever guitar, the "Guistar".

The cherry banjo has little sound-holes around the perimeter that are integrated into little carvings of apple trees. I made a few hardwood-topped banjos around that time...very quiet and sweet-sounding. If all the banjos in the world sounded like that, there would be no banjo jokes!! Or at least they'd be different sorts of jokes.
I sold that banjo to a friend of a friend, whose name I no longer remember. But I do remember he brought it back to me at some point, maybe for a repair (?), and proudly showed me where he'd gotten Pete Seeger to sign it for him. Pete (in a marvelous display of lack of taste, if you ask me!) had applied his signature in very large letters to the banjo's side, in bright orange magic marker!
Both the dulcimer and that banjo had scroll-like pegheads, with a spiral snail shell glued into them. I thought this was really pretty clever at the time, and even briefly called my non-business "Tooth and Snail Musical Instruments". Gosh...I was so young....