Dad makes the guitars. Son shreds them
There is perhaps nothing cooler than possessing the musical chops needed to shred a blistering rock solo on an electric guitar, as 19-year-old Ben Drake can. Unless, of course, you can actually build a handmade electric guitar as his dad, Jeff Drake, 52, can. That’s pretty cool too.
“It’s nice to see the way they’ve connected over this,” said Sally
Drake, wife and mother. She tolerates the takeover of her dining room table and other parts of the house when her husband brings up slabs of wood cut in a basement workshop to begin assembly.
“The whole house becomes a workshop at times,” she said. It’s a rehearsal space too. She occasionally exercises a mother’s prerogative and asks her son to unplug the amp if he’s jamming into the wee hours.
A self-taught luthier, Drake
has built 10 solid-body electric guitars and one electric bass in the past five years. Just don’t ask him to play one.
“Ben tried to show me the opening riffs from ‘Smoke on the Water,’ which any idiot should be able to play,” the father explained. “I failed.”
Meanwhile, Ben has a veritable guitar shop at his disposal. “It’s pretty cool that I can pick a different guitar anytime I want. I’ve got more styles than I’ll ever need,” he said.
So far, Drake has not sold any of his creations. But that could change: He’s toying with the idea of testing the waters on ebay.
He has an emotional connection to each of his creations, which makes it hard to think of parting with them.
The journey began when Ben was 7 and his parents bought him his first guitar, a cheapo model at Target.
“It played and made noise,” Ben said with a shrug.
He had played violin beginning in fourth grade at Westmere Elementary School and continued into the orchestra at Guilderland High. His heart was never really in it, though.
“We kind of twisted his arm,” his dad conceded. When Ben started gravitating to the guitar as a teenager, his parents encouraged it. Goodbye, violin. He began taking guitar lessons at Hilton Music and displayed talent.
His dad eyed electric guitars in the performance space and, since he was a woodworker, wondered how hard could it be to make one. He started with a Fender Telecaster knock-off from a kit.
“Wow, this is pretty simple,” he thought after he opened the kit and inspected the contents.
He was no stranger to making stuff. “I’m a complete woodworking nerd,” he said, a skill he learned from his father, a former educator and master cabinet maker.
Drake has an associate degree in mechanical engineering from Hudson Valley Community College and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and criminal justice from the University at Albany. He works as a technical writer for Philips Healthcare, specializing in MRIS.
The kit went together smoothly and played pretty well, so he decided to up the ante and build from scratch. He chose a style reminiscent of a Gibson Les Paul because he’s a fan of midcentury design and the Studebaker Avanti is his favorite car. He found a nice piece of birdseye maple and worked on it with saw, drill, router, file, glue and sander. Three months later, Ben jammed on the first guitar his Dad stamped with a wood-burning tool: Drake Guitar Company. Mckownville, NY.
“I did a lot of reverseengineering,” he said.
It turned out pretty well, so he made another.
He decided to purchase a pre-made electric guitar neck paddle head that he could customize.
“I learned the hard way that if you have a bad neck, you’ll never have a good guitar,” Drake said.
It’s a lesson in the laws of physics. Precise placement of the bridge, humbucker pickups, single coil pickups, strings, neck, nut, head and tuning pegs is required.
“It’s all a matter of managing the vibrations,” he said. He also built an amplifier and a wooden case.
His rock tastes run to Pink Floyd and Rage Against the Machine. “If all rock bands sounded like Boston, I wouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
His son’s earliest guitar hero was Jimi Hendrix. “I heard ‘Voodoo Child’ and it blew me away,” he said. He learned Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan riffs before moving through a metal phase with Black Sabbath, Slayer, Metallica and Megadeth. Alex Lifeson of Rush remains one of his favorite guitarists.
While he’s good enough to play in a band, he prefers jamming with friends because he’s busy working on an education degree at
Hudson Valley Community College, with an eye toward teaching history. He also drives for Doordash and plays drums for fun. His younger brother, Matt, 16, drifted away from playing the bass to focus on football at Guilderland High, where he’s on the varsity squad.
One of Drake’s guitars won a prize in a regional woodworking show and he joined an international competition called The Great Guitar Build Off 2021 with hundreds of entries. He’s working on a guitar using black limba wood. Limba is used in Gibson’s iconic Flying V guitars.
Sometimes, raw materials arrive unexpectedly, like a massive limb that fell from his neighbor’s maple tree and smashed the family mini-van. “At least I got enough wood to make several guitars out of it,” Drake said. He’s already made one featuring a worm-tunneled section.
Drake finds creating guitars therapeutic, particularly during this pandemic year. But, mostly, he does it for the good vibrations his son conjures.
“I just love hearing Ben play,” he said.
His hobby makes economic sense. He can build a guitar for about $300, a fraction of the cost of a high-quality electric guitar by Fender, Gibson or Ibanez.
He likes daydreaming about new concepts, like an electric guitar a luthier made out of 5,000 coffee beans.
As he explained how the coffee beans are solidified with an epoxy process, his wife walked within earshot as we sat on the patio.
“Don’t get mad at me,” the guitar builder said, noting it would fill the house with the pleasant aroma of a nice dark roast.
His wife merely rolled her eyes.