TIME FOR A CHANGE
Most guitar players are traditionalists. They like familiar shapes and colors. Take for instance the 1950’s Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster, their most popular 6-string models. Fender is in competition with itself to keep producing these same models no matter how hard they try to improve it. Over the years as trends change, Fender has tried to keep up with that change by adding things like a humbucker pickup, locking tuners, a Floyd Rose bridge, and so forth. But in the end the 1950’s Stratocaster and Telecaster shape is their winner. I myself jumped on the band wagon and made Stratocaster style and Telecaster style guitars using highly figured 1/4” drop tops, semi-hollow bodies, Paul Reed Smith type natural bindings, triple P-90 pickups and fancy stains and tints. Something that Fender did not provide. The closest offering they had was the Fender Foto Flame which used a thin sheet of photographic film glued to a wood body and most people thought it was a solid wood top. It looked cool because we like the beauty of highly figured wood on our guitars.
The latest guitar trend these days is a super light body (around 6 pounds) with a few pointy ends and 7 or more strings. Don’t forget the stainless steel fan frets, kill switches, thick colorful polyurethane finishes and super overwound pickups. Keeping up with trends is hard and I myself have chosen to no longer ride on that bandwagon. As fun as it was, I also felt uncomfortable building copies of Fender guitars rather than my own shapes and designs. It wasn’t original. It was a copy. Therefore I have recently made the decision to stop building the usual S-Style and T-Style electric guitars and focus more on the craftsmanship and tone shaping of acoustic guitars and mandolins.
There are going to be a few changes in the shop. I’ll still continue doing repair work, but I’ll be building more acoustic guitars and mandolins using traditional hand tools and methods that I truly enjoy. There will be more options for tone woods and design choices for the different styles of playing such as finger style, bluegrass or Celtic.
Another change I would like to make is teaching and sharing knowledge. I am hoping to find someone I can teach how to do repair work and instrument building. There is knowledge that needs to be passed along to the next generation. The ideal exchange would be a person that has the skill set and in-depth experience with video creation and photography to help train me on navigating social media and promoting my business. If you know of anyone, please send them my way.
Thanks for taking the time to follow along.