Workshop: Fylde Guitars
If Roger Bucknall were a chef he’d have two Michelin stars, possibly three. After all, in nearly 60 years of guitar making he’s served up bespoke tonewood recipes to some of the world’s principal gourmets of acoustic guitar tone…
Roger Bucknall began building guitars professionally in 1973 on the Fylde coast of Lancashire, although he actually built his first instrument in his father’s garage at the age of nine. With a degree in engineering – he insists guitar building is simply engineering with wood – and an interest in the works of William Shakespeare (all Fylde models bear the name of one of the Bard’s characters) combined with a love of guitar and music in general, he set up shop.
Relocating to Fylde’s current location in Penrith in the mid-90s, Roger has made guitars for folk legends, including Martin Simpson, Martin Carthy, Davey Graham and Nic Jones, and jazz players Al Di Meola, Pat Metheny and Biréli Lagrène, as well as artists like Sting, Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney.
In 2016 he was awarded an MBE for services to ‘guitar making, music and heritage crafts’. “I did wonder if I would be granted an annual stipend, but apparently not, and I don’t even get my own castle,” he said at the time.
We visited Roger and his small team of builders on a rainy December morning last year and found a hive of activity. After a quick tour, we asked him about the instruments currently making their way through his workshop.
“A lot of the time I’ve got artists’ guitars going through, and it’s really what keeps me going. At the moment, we’re just finishing off another guitar for Chris Difford, quite an unusual one, it’s quite highly inlaid and exotic woods. We’re also sending out a guitar for Adam Holmes who is one of Martin Simpson’s Magpie Arc band. It’s a five-string, high-strung, a bit like Nashville tuning, but only five strings on it. It’s specially built for this tuning, it’s not a modified six-string. The bracing inside is built for the tension and neck width, and string spacing is built for the tension. I’m hoping that he likes it. It sounds a bit like a musical box.
“We’re also just starting another batch of guitars that includes another guitar for Gordon Giltrap, another for Adam Palma – it will be the third identical guitar, a shallow-bodied Falstaff. He lives half in Poland and half in England, so he needs guitars everywhere. Then there’s a Falstaff for John Doyle, which he ordered shortly after he made the Fylde album. We tend to alternate: get a small batch of artist guitars through and then relax and make some more straightforward instruments.”
What’s the process behind the development of artist guitars? “The first thing is to discuss the concept of the guitar – how big it should be, string [scale] length, neck join and timbers – to try to supply a certain tone. It’s nothing exotic, normally; I don’t get involved very often in special inlays and things like that. The ones I’ve made for Martin Simpson recently have taken a lot of discussion. The first guitar was very successful, and then we thought, ‘Okay, what’s it going to sound like made with Brazilian rosewood?’ And we needed to find out, because the first guitar was so successful made with mahogany, we needed to know if it was going to work with a different timber, and it has. It’s even better; slightly different but better.
“The first one was a 12-fret body join in order to put the bridge in a really efficient place on the body. It was a short scale because Martin didn’t want a huge tension on the strings. But this meant there wasn’t a lot of access to higher frets, particularly with a capo on. So we thought, ‘Okay, this time it’s got to have a cutaway.’ So we made that cutaway, Brazilian rosewood, very successful, lovely guitar and beautiful to look at.
“The next was, ‘Okay, this is lovely, but I can’t take it abroad.’ And then, because I knew that the change in CITES was coming up, I said, ‘Okay, we’ll try Indian rosewood,’ and, again, it’s come out very
“A lot of the time I’ve got artist’s guitars going through, and it’s really what keeps me going…”