BRINGING MUSIC TO LIFE
Leslieville workshop hosts guitar-making lessons, repairs that can be a labour of love
Leslieville shop crafts guitars from old wood,
Jeremy Nicks is listening to a piece of wood again.
At his Leslieville workshop, a warm room in a former factory that’s pervaded by the smells of cedar planks, pine boards and sawdust, he holds a broad sheet of wood to his ear and gently taps it.
“You’re looking for that indescribable quality,” says Nicks, an amiable, soft-spoken Maritimer with a curly shag of hair and a scraggly beard.
“Two pieces of wood from the same tree can sound completely different.”
Nicks and his co-craftsmen at the Canadian School of Lutherie are obsessed with the sound of wood. It makes sense if you know what “lutherie” means — no, they’re not nailing declarations on church doors; these three apron-clad guys build guitars, and they’ll teach you to make them, too.
“You’re basically bringing something to life,” says Nicks, 34. “It’s dead and you raise it up and breathe life into it.” And then it makes music. Mitchell MacDonald runs the school and workshop with Nicks, while former student Richard Botelho has been hired on to help teach and repair instruments. At any given time, they have eight or nine students who come in to learn lutherie — which begins with drawing up design blueprints, choosing an array of materials and then painstakingly crafting their vision from hunks of wood until they have a guitar.
“The process is just as much fun as having the finished product,” says MacDonald, 31. “You’re learning all the time.”
MacDonald and Nicks opened their school three years ago, after moving here from the East Coast, where they learned their craft in Halifax under Richard Rizsanyi, a well-respected guitar-maker who has built instru- ments for the likes of Keith Richards and James Taylor.
His apprentices decided it was time to expand, so they transplanted the business to Toronto to start the Ontario branch of Rizsanyi’s Canadian School of Lutherie, which is based in Halifax. The Toronto school offers an array of courses, from one-day workshops on how to set up guitars and make small repairs to year-long apprenticeships where, for $35,000 tuition, students build several different instruments and are taught how to run their own shop and maintain their tools.
“The teaching really is the main gig,” says Nicks, adding that he makes three or four of his own guitars per year.
“There’s a lot of room to be creative.”
That’s certainly what drew Botelho to the vocation. Originally from London, Ont., Botelho was working as an audio engineer when he took to Google to find “the best guitar school in Canada.” The Leslieville school came back in the results, so Botelho signed up.
“It’s really neat. It’s pretty much all hands-on,” says Botelho, 25, who now handles most of the repairs for the business. “It’s almost like a meditation. You’re in it and you can’t focus on anything else. It’s really peaceful.”
MacDonald and Nicks both say the same thing: the attention to detail and fine woodworking required to build guitars can induce a trance-like state, a line of work the men find thoroughly satisfying.
But for MacDonald, who wants to head back east soon to start another school in his native Prince Edward Island, the best part might be finding the materials that become his guitars.
He and Nicks have trudged through the northern Ontario woods in their quest for workshop fodder, recently lifting a rock and bringing it back to use for decorative inlays. They thought it was a meteor because of the way it glimmered and was magnetic, though it turns out it was just a curiosity called pyrrhotite.
MacDonald also likes to use salvaged in guitars, once taking wood from the mast of an old ship and pieces of an old church organ. He likes to think of the wood as being imbued with the energy of its former life.
“Music had already been running through that wood for years,” he says of the boards he used from the organ.
“The whole process is kind of mysterious,” Nicks adds, standing before the blueprints of the next acoustic he plans to make. When the instrument is finished, it will be unique and interesting, its tone affected by the grain and springiness of the cedar he plans to use, he says.
It’s a labour of love, the final instrument carrying the qualities of the stuff it’s made from, “even the energy of the person that makes it.”
At least, that’s how he imagines it.