1993

The Jomama!

The "Jomama" is a fretless, 5-string banjo/oud hybrid (sort of!), made in 1993, in our Santa Cruz workshop. The sculpted/painted back-shell is made from recycled brown paper grocery bags ripped into strips, dipped in "Titebond" woodworking glue, and pressed into a plaster mold. The plaster mold was cast from a clay sculpture. This process is something I learned from working with Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater, whose founder, Peter Schumann, uses a similar technique to produce his amazing masks and puppets. I had the great joy to tour the U.S. and Europe as a puppeteer with B&P in the late 70s and early 80s. I also did mask theater with another great mask maker, Ellis Jacobsen, with his company, "The Regular Theater". These experiences gave me the idea that the mask-making process could be used to make a shell that would work as the back and sides for a stringed instrument. In 1992/'93 I finally found the time and courage to try it, with great success. The Jomama has an Englemann spruce top (not pictured here), and a walnut neck. The paper mache shell is quite resonant and sturdy. Originally the Jomama was strung with a combination of weed-whacker cord and fishing line. Eventually I replaced some of the strings with harp and guitar strings to improve the tone. It's tuned an octave below a traditional 5-string banjo, and has a marvelous, gutsy sound. The Ethiopian instrument, the "Krar", was the sound I had in mind when building the Jomama, and it does have some of that quality. 

And in case you're wondering, my long braided beard got cut off not long after this photo was taken; when I shaved for the first time in my life in my mid-thirties. I still have that braid, hanging in my bedroom! 

Mid-1990s: The Dreadnautilus Years

Looking through files, I realize I skipped over a few things, chronologically, in my 50-year retrospective. I can't leave out my lengthy experiment with attempting to make an inexpensive, beautiful, great-sounding travel guitar; not my most brilliant scheme, though it produced some mighty fine and interesting guitars. It started when friend Bob Fitch asked me to make him a good-sounding portable guitar that he could take on a world-spanning adventure. He wanted to spend no more than $500.00, and didn't need more than the first 5 frets on the neck. I came up with a simple, headless design that we christened "The Fred", that satisfied his requirements, as long as I accepted the fact that my hourly wage for the project probably came in at about $3.00! Since in the early 1990s I was supporting my lutherie habit doing children's theater for $5.00 per hour, this didn't seem too bad! The project was ultimately a success, and I felt it was a worthwhile idea that needed aesthetic and acoustic improvement. I came up with an entirely new, nautilus-shaped design, and between 1995 and 2000 I made 15 of them, working in batches and adding improvements and refinements with each batch. The pictures here show one of the early versions, alongside what the bracing evolved into in the later versions. I called it "The Dreadnautilus", as a play on the popular steel-string guitar shape known as "dreadnaught". To further the silliness, I termed it the "Model A", and abbreviated it's name as the "DNA". I got at least one letter from a potential client expounding on the stupidity of the name (oh well, I guess we don't all have the same sense of humor! I thought it was brilliant!). In any case, it was cheap enough that folks bought them, despite the name! For a while, I had fun tweaking the bracing: in one batch of four I braced all the tops, then carefully removed wood from the braces, one top at a time, and did tap-tone comparisons, until I got what I thought was the most open, sonorous response to tapping. The bracing pictured here was the pattern I established using that process. This was one of the few times in my years of doing this that I have replicated a body shape enough times to refine the bracing in this way. I got pretty bored with this design by the 12th or 13th iteration (some sort of psychological defect I have, I guess!), but I sure learned a lot! Among it's unusual features, the Dreadnautilus had a "headless" neck, with the tuning pegs on the body, below the bridge. On the first versions, those pegs were "planetary" geared banjo-5th-string pegs, anchored into a plate on the underside of the top. That system had a couple of problems: the plate that those tuners anchored in put more weight/damping on the instrument's top than I would have liked (although they sounded OK!), and perhaps more importantly, the banjo 5th-string tuners couldn't reliably stand the tension of the guitar bass strings, and tended to strip their gears pretty quickly. I had to replace all the banjo tuners I'd used on them, and came up with a better system that used guitar tuners attached to smaller blocks, thus solving the tuner issue and eliminating some of the damping on the top plate in the process. I wish I'd managed to keep one of these for myself... they were great little guitars (and hopefully still are!!). I unfortunately had to give up my dream of making the perfect, inexpensive travel guitar. I raised the price with each batch, but also spent more time on each instrument. The last one I made I think I sold for $2,000., and I figured out I was still making less per hour than a good wait-person at a restaurant in Santa Cruz could make! 

You might judge, from this installment of "50 Years A Luthier" that the mid-1990s was a varied and interesting time in my life.  Frankly, it's all been something of an adventure!

Before Sympitar #3 got taken away by the Brazilian collector it got some use by my sometime alter-ego, Big Blue Harold. Big Blue, shown here with his musical partner, The Blues-Bird of Happiness (brandishing her Suzalyne as if to ward off angry guinea-fowl!), is one of the biggest of the Big Blue singers. Unfortunately, this black and white photo doesn't do justice to their blueness.
This musical power-duo, known as The Blues Monsters, is most famous for their smash hit, "I Used To Be A Hippie". Here's a sample of that dynamic lyric:

"Oh, I used to be a Hippie,
my bed was full of bugs,
Yes, I used to be a Hippie, Baby, my bed was full of bugs;
But now I've started wearing underwear,
Almost completely given up recreational drugs!"

They don't write 'em like that any more!! 

For some years when we lived in Vermont, I was part of a Vermont Council on the Arts program called the "Crafts in the Schools" program. I discovered I loved making instruments with kids. When we moved to the west coast, I used that experience to get accepted in Santa Cruz County's "SPECTRA" arts-in-the-schools program. For several years in the early 1990s I did workshops in local schools. It was a great way to help pay the bills and spread musical instrument building love, while trying to get my own instrument-building "business" off the ground in a new part of the world.

This wonderful class of 6th-graders at the Quail Hollow School in Ben Lomond (CA), loved making these cardboard banjos with shish-kabob-skewer frets and fishing-line strings. They especially loved decorating them, as can be seen in the close-up of the "Betty Boop Banjo".
Once I began getting orders for my own creations (and repair work) I decided to leave the program, so I could focus my energies more completely on building instruments for clients. I do miss getting to hang out with kids, but as you can imagine, it was a LOT of work to pull something like this off, and I really wanted to spend time developing my own art/craft.

The Guitarangi da Gamba

This was the first of a couple of commissions in the mid-late 1990s that attempted to combine aspects of guitar and viol or violin family. Carved redwood top, flat Bigleaf maple back. Lots of sympathetic strings. To be perfectly honest, I don't think it's possible to make an acoustic instrument that really works like a fine violin-family instrument and can also have the full tone of a fine guitar when plucked; the physical properties needed kind of contradict each other. But I managed at least to make something that sounded interesting (even beautiful), and looked really cool! If one has an open mind about what something should sound like (and I've been accused of having such an open mind that my brain has fallen out!!), you might even say it worked!

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!

In 1981,  Joe Heed, a math professor at Norwich College in Northfield, Vermont, asked me to make him a bass viol. I had a great fascination for bowed instruments, but no training in the construction of them, so at that point I was winging it, relying on my guitar-building skills and the few books I had on the subject. I love the graceful body shape of this one, inspired by a picture of an early Italian viol I saw in a book. The peghead carving is a bit grotesque...it's hard to know now just what compelled me to do that; likely it just happened! Top is Western Red Cedar, back and sides Vermont Cherry (the black cherry tree that grows wild in Vermont). Joe invited Suzy and I over to visit at his house, after the instrument was done. I remember he served us some kind of a fancy red wine that he and a buddy had purchased a case of in France, just after World War ll, and had shipped home. I'm not a fan of wine (a waste of perfectly good grapes!!), but this stuff was AMAZING.
Apparently Joe liked the instrument, as he commissioned me later to make him a vielle, sort of a smaller version, which I did after our move to California, in the early '90s.

Here's the first 12-string guitar I made;  this was, I think, in 1981 as a demonstration model for a small guitar-building class I taught in our Vermont workshop. My partner, Suzy, was one of the "students", as well as our dear friend Elliot Burch. I remember that Elliot made a guitar with a Grateful Dead icon inlaid in the back; Suzy's had a sound-hole representing the planet Saturn, with it's rings making a sort of rosette. Suzy and Elliot were both already accomplished luthiers (Suzy with violins, Elliot banjos), so it was a fun class!
This tiny 12-string has a Sitka spruce top and lovely Vermont black cherry back and sides, and last I heard, it sounded wonderful. I sold it to a young Israeli guitarist I met at a summer music camp. Where is it now? 

In the fall of 1981 I made this steel-string guitar on commission. The peghead (not pictured here, unfortunately) suggested a humanoid figure reaching out with both hands to hold a star. I called it "The Starchaser", which seems a little corny to me now. I really liked the overall design, and made two more shortly after. This one was by far my favorite...Western Red Cedar top, Walnut back and sides. Odd inlays around the sound-hole. Extended playability up the neck with a shape I found (and still find) more pleasing than the traditional "cutaway", which always looks to me like someone took a big bite out of a guitar. 

I made this unique, 3-string "rebec" for dear friend Melissa Weaver in 1982. Modelled loosely after medieval fiddles, the neck, peghead and body (back and sides) were all carved out of one solid chunk of maple (well, actually, 2 chunks glued together...there's a black veneer line at the joint), kind of like carving a weird-shaped bowl with a long handle. The top, made out of a vertical-grained cedar shingle (fancy tone-wood!) was slightly carved/arched, and glued onto the open side of the "bowl"/body. Pegs for tuning the 3 gut strings were African Bubinga wood. Played with a simple, curved bow (like a small hunting bow, but with horsehair), or even better, a modern violin bow! I think the maple for the body was from a big piece of firewood from a woodshed at the commune. Nothing but the finest!

Getting back to the 50-year wild partying here:

This picture is of the first nylon-string guitar I ever made. I made it in the late 1970s, for my stepmother, Virginia Carlson, as a way of paying my Dad back for his funding of my guitar-building education and purchasing of basic tools.
As with a lot of my work back then (some might say even to this day) I didn't really know what I was doing, but I winged my way through on passion and raw creativity, which I had a lot of both!
Western red cedar top, walnut back and sides. I designed a sort of fan-bracing for the top that necessarily, because of the unique sound-hole placement/design, was unlike any other classical guitar bracing.
It turned out to be a very pleasing instrument to play and hear; not a very powerful, dramatic sound, but warm and sweet. Perfect for my dear step-mom. After she passed away, my Dad gave it back to me, and I eventually re-sold it to a gentleman out here in California, who occasionally sends me pictures of it and tells me how much he loves it. Yay!!

In 1979 I built this asymmetrical steel-string guitar for my friend Russell Aminzade. I called it "The Juggler", imagining the ebony bridge to have hands that are juggling the stars-turning -into-birds motif that circles the sound-hole. The moon looks a bit surprised by it all. I recall it being very challenging to do those inlaid stars and birds...I used a knife and chisel, and the alternating soft and hard grains in the Sitka spruce top-wood make it very hard to get clean lines. But I never liked using Dremel (electric carving) tools, which would probably be what a smarter luthier would have used! Looks like I did OK, anyway.  This one had walnut back and sides, as I recall.

I was surprised when I came across this picture of another guitar I made in or around 1979, that it also clearly uses the "juggler" motif.  Here, it's even more obvious: the bridge has hands that are juggling the three sound-holes as though they were balls.  Some years earlier, as a teenager, I spent quite a while trying to learn how to juggle.  I did get so I could keep 3 balls going for a while, but never got to a point of being very good at it, or doing cool tricks.  At some point I came up with this visual idea of the bridge as hands juggling, and apparently I liked it enough to explore it on two rather different guitars.  

This instrument has a Western Red Cedar top, which is mostly what I'd been using for tops up to that point (around that time I began using spruce more); I think the back and sides were maple, but they may have been walnut; I can't recall for sure.  

I just got the urge to see them side by side, which for some reason never occurred to me before:

I'd love to hear them side by side, too!

The party goes on! This is the peghead of my third guitar, built in 1976 (or '77?). I called it "The Penguin". At the encouragement of my early mentor, Ken Riportella, I applied to exhibit it in a show of contemporary instrument builders at The Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery ("The Harmonious Craft", 1978-80). I was asked to deliver it to The Renwick for final judging, and the timing worked out so that I was able to drop it off as I passed through Washington D.C. on a nationwide tour with Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater and Word of Mouth Chorus (the "Ave Marie Stella" tour) in 1977. On the final leg of that tour, somewhere in the northern Mid-west, I got word from home that it had been accepted.  Here is the only picture I have of the finished instrument, taken by the Renwick Gallery:

It was a great show, and a great honor. The exhibit included all manner of musical instruments including an amazing dulcimer sculpture by my mentor Ken, bagpipes, a set of tuned crescent wrenches and much, much more.  Among the other guitar-builders included were Max Krimmel and Jeffrey Elliot.
My brother, Barney and I, along with Ken and another friend, made it to the opening. We had borrowed a "Garbage Man" puppet head from Bread and Puppet, and brought along a little "crankie show". Somehow the Gallery let us perform the show in an upstairs exhibition room. I gather we were pretty funny, as one woman in the audience was literally rolling on the floor in laughter. My puppet-headed alter-ego, Big Blue Harold, played his hit song, "I Used To Be A Hippie".....I'm sure that helped!! Ah...youth!!
The Penguin was sold to a man in Switzerland (my first international sale!) as a result of being in that show, for the now ridiculous-seeming price of $600. 

Penguin's Siblings

The "Penguin" guitar, which got exhibited in The Harmonious Craft show at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, was the same basic design (body size and shape) as my first guitar, built at Charles Fox's school. I made two more steel-string guitars using that template (including the same basic bracing pattern for the top and back plates); this replicating of one design, although not what I ultimately wanted to do, felt like an important way to begin to understand the basics of guitar construction. I knew I needed to get more of that understanding before I started heading off into outer space, following my own creative intuition.

Guitars # 4 and #5 were both perfectly fine instruments, though neither had details that quite equaled the inspired head-stock carving of the Penguin. I did manage to sell both of them...not for much money, but enough that I could keep building more, which seemed like the point. I sold one of them to friend and wonderful local (Vermont) guitarist, Daniel Hecht, who I had taken some guitar lessons from. Daniel later got a 12-string guitar from me, which he used on his album on Windham Hill Records, "Willow" (more on that later); him buying this early 6-string from me was very exciting, as he was by anyone's standards a fine guitarist. He used that 6-string on a self-produced album, "Fire-heart/Fire-river"; as I recall he paid me partly in copies of that album (no one among my circle of friends in Plainfield, VT at that time had much money...barter was pretty common among us hippie-types!). I had a big stack of those albums lying around the shop...eventually I think the vinyl warped and I had to throw most of them out.

Daniel was really a brilliantly creative guy (probably still is...I haven't seen him in years), and often his creativity at that time related to music and instruments. He came up with an idea to mount a metal rod on the guitar, running parallel to the neck along the bass side of it, onto which he could attach specially designed capos. These capos could be operated by foot pedals, allowing him all sorts of interesting musical possibilities. I only heard him demonstrate it once, that I can recall...it was very cool. I don't know what happened to that idea...I do know that he eventually removed the device from that guitar, leaving a number of mounting holes in various spots on the instrument, and sold the guitar to someone else, at which point I lost track of it.

Guitars #4 and #5 were the last I made of that design, and that remains one of the few designs I ever replicated.

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....