Team Building
This month Alex Bishop clears the decks to prepare the workshop for a three-week guitar-making extravaganza
Twice a year, I run guitar-making courses designed to satisfy the demands of students who wish to experience building an acoustic guitar from start to finish in just three weeks. Given that my processes are predominantly hand-tool led – carving with chisels and smoothing with planes in favour of shaping with routers and power sanders
– it’s an intensive lutherie experience that aims to leave my students with a six-string as good as any high-end guitar they might buy from the shops, all the while revelling in the magic and mystery of a master luthier’s workshop. No pressure there, then…
It’s easy enough for the students to turn up on day one. But it’s become necessary for me to spend a week preparing the workshop in order to be ready for this guitar-making spectacle. This is where I find myself at the start of this month, carefully organising piles of tonewood to be prepped for three different guitars: an OM, a dreadnought, and a Gypsy jazz guitar.
Prep School
The work this week included jointing and thicknessing backs: two sets of rosewood and one English walnut in this instance. Rosewood is a relatively dense wood, so the walnut was up first to save blunting the newly sharpened plane blade (with thanks to Devin, my work experience student this week, who was loyally stationed at my sharpening wheel for a day). It was necessary to ensure that the two panels of wood that make up each back were perfectly aligned such that no light passed through when held up together at a window. This is an uncompromising test but one that would ensure the integrity of the back join for decades to come.
Plenty of work remained for the students, however, who would have to hand-plane their spruce tops to the desired thickness. The soundboard is the beating heart of the sound of any acoustic guitar, and its thickness has everything to do with producing a resonant sound. Too thick and the top will be overly stiff resulting in muted overtones; too thin and the tone becomes weak and overly bright. It’s not good enough to follow precise measurements because no two pieces of wood are the same. My own expertise will have to come into play to help encourage the cautious students to go further, as well as rein in the overly eager ones.
The dreadnought model that one of my students has chosen to build this month is also a first for me, so a good chunk of the work this week has been spent putting together a new mould based on some technical drawings I’d been working on. This time around I decided to employ the CAD services of my buddy Ash (Nightingale Guitars) to speed up production of this crucial bit of kit. In essence, the mould forms a scaffolding around a guitar within which the luthier can coax the wood into shape, and it will be an essential tool on day one of the course: bending the sides.
I must admit I always feel some trepidation before welcoming three strangers into my workshop and setting them loose on my tools and tonewood supplies. It’s easy to take for granted the intuition that develops from years of lutherie experience, but I know that steaming exotic hardwoods around a hot iron to form guitar-shaped curves is not an everyday experience for most people. Visions of wood splintering, tools flying and strings breaking begin to pass through my mind.
However, I’m looking forward to helping these would‑be luthiers wield a chisel for the first time and to grow the confidence necessary to create the best work. After days of shaping braces and carving up necks, it will be quite the accomplishment for them each to finally hear the voices of three new guitars. What more can we do than embrace the process? After all, you can’t craft a guitar without making a whole lot of sawdust.
The next course will run 17 June to 4 July 2024 www.guitarmakingschool.co.uk
“My own expertise will have to come into play to help encourage the cautious students to go further, as well as rein in the overly eager ones”