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Post subject: A question about luthiers...
Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 10:06 am
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Hey Folks,
As I've been sitting here noodling with my various build/rebuild projects, I had a weird question go thru my head. In reference to guitar building and repair, from time to time I've ran across the term "Master Luthier". Now this term implies that said person would be a highly experienced, well seasoned individual who's been building and working on guitars most of their life. My question is, how exactly does one become a "master" luthier? I mean, it's not like this is something you can generally take courses for at a community college, right? In the old days...ok...the really old days (like a hundred years ago or more) clearly one would "apprentice" with a Master, etc., but with things like guitar building today being all manufacturing and "big business"...short of reading books and watching how to vids, where exactly does one go to learn this stuff and how exactly does one obtain the title of "Master"?

I've been working on my own guitars pretty much since I started playing when I was 17 (over 25 years now). Over the years I've done many mods, cut a couple of my own bodies, I'm at the point where I feel fairly proficient at doing finishes and I've certainly "studied" all of this stuff to the best of my ability (often having to do things the hard way I might add as I don't always have the proper tools for a specific job). While I do consider myself a competent guitar tech, I'm not really looking to become a master or anything here...despite Cleveland being "the home of rock & roll", there's not many guitar builders around anyways, but considering my experience, it does provoke a certain degree of curiosity. In this day and age, how exactly does one achieve the title of "Master Luthier"?

I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

Peace,
Jim


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Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 10:49 am
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Hi Jim: where I live in London the London Metropolitan University (just for example) runs a famous course in instrument building (in a department that used to be part of the London College of Furniture, oddly). So you can do a BA/BSc in instrument making in anything from harpsichords and lutes through to electric guitars.

That would be a step on the road to becoming a "Master Luthier". Many famous builders from a lot of countries have been through that particular course. (I met a Dutch violin maker once who'd done it: his clients came from orchestras around the world to buy his fiddles.)

I'd be astonished if America and other countries don't have comparable courses. ...Of course they do!

On the other hand, I believe I remember the story of Fender's Senior Master Builder, Yuriy Shishkov. I think he started off working on his own in a tiny basement somewhere in the USSR and had to copy Fenders out of photographs because he couldn't get his hands on the real thing. Don't know what his qualifications might be, but it is clearly his sheer individual skill that has taken him to the top of the electric guitar making tree.

Another interesting career path is that of Roger Giffin. From a small workshop underneath railway arches in West London to building guitars for - well, almost everyone in the 1970s; to running Gibson's Custom Shop; to again producing guitars under his own name to this day. Well worth looking at his work:

http://www.giffinguitars.com/

I like this one. To me, this is almost painfully beautiful:
Image

No idea if he has any paper qualifications, but he's a Master Luthier for sure!

Cheers - C


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Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 2:55 pm
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Jim, there are several luthier schools around North America.

it is very much an apprentice / master kind of deal. very much like the olde trades. many luthiers study under (by working for,) masters.
You are from Cleveland? maybe you could make the trip to Athens Ohio, and see if Dan Erlewine will take you on as an apprentice!!!

:lol: :lol:

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Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 3:13 pm
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The traditional method is to get a job sweeping floors at a independant builder and work your way up. If you look at the life of master builder yuri shishkov he made guitars in a dank cellar in eastern europe copying guitars from pictures in guitar mags smuggled to him. Its said the cellar was so small he had to open the door to fit necks. When he emigrated to the USA he got a job with washburn as a production line level employee working on quality control. (unsure but i think by showing them examples of his work from photo's). He acheived promotion by repeatedly going to his bosses and showing them pictures of how to improve certain elements of their guitars as he was unable to speak english. They quickly promoted him to their custom shop where he worked on guitars for diamond darrell to name one. Then he left and joined fender as a master builder.

Thats a much abridged version. If you look at Yuri's one off's they are always utter intricate works of art. From a dank cellar and fridge door magnet pickups to the vangogh of guitar building. His life is quite a story, fender should publish it.

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Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:21 pm
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Twelvebar wrote:
Jim, there are several luthier schools around North America.

it is very much an apprentice / master kind of deal. very much like the olde trades. many luthiers study under (by working for,) masters.
You are from Cleveland? maybe you could make the trip to Athens Ohio, and see if Dan Erlewine will take you on as an apprentice!!!

:lol: :lol:


Well, like I said I was really more curious about this than anything...just one of those weird thoughts that tends to go thru my head. Besides, the daily commute to Athens would be a $@!&*! LOL! My wife and I go camping down near Marietta so I know that Athens is a good 3 hour drive for me each way...ouch.

It's kind of funny that you mention that though...I had called Stew Mac last year to see if they did tours or anything of their facility. I was thinking it would be an interesting diversion during a camping trip but alas, they only deal thru their catalogs and over the internet.


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Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 5:03 pm
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I don't know if it's the same in other countries, but here in Australia you'd have to go through an apprentice/journeyman/master system if you wanted a title. I mean, there isn't a guild as such, but the ancient trades would adhere to some variant of that system from the Middle Ages.

A few years ago I caught up with a friend who'd had a flamenca negra built for him by the son of an ex-student of his... a beautiful instrument, just lovely, and made after careful study of my friend's playing preferences. Anyway, this young guy had been making guitars for a while and had just successfully presented one of his instruments for the Australian chapter of the Guitar Society. This was quite a big deal, apparently, and important for his future career. It seemed to me that the process was a bit like a Masters course at a university used to be, in that ultimately you'd have to defend your thesis against a group of academics.

I'm sure anybody with enough experience could just set up shop and see how they go, but it interested me to learn that the traditional system was still present in some form. I wonder what the setup is in Spain... I went to Sevilla years ago, and the streets were filled with minstrels (yes, minstrels!)... if you study music at university in Sevilla, it's mandatory to don the cap and robe and get out there to serenade all and sundry. It made me so happy to see them.


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Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:44 pm
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Ok...as I was sitting here having my last cigarette of the evening, another interesting thought crossed my mind.

I've been kind of rolling this whole convo around in the back of my brain for a day or two now and everything here...having to train, having to apprentice, the comments about starting out by pushing broom, etc...all this does of course make sense. That said...way back in the late 40's when a man by the name of Clarence Leonidas Fender created an "electric" guitar initially called the "Broadcaster"...could this man really have been considered a "Master Luthier"? From what I've read, Leo Fender and Doc Kaufmann had been making some Hawaiian guitars for a bit and before that Leo ran his own radio repair shop but it doesn't seem to me that he ever "studied guitar building" specifically, at least certainly not in the traditional sense we've been talking about so far. From what I recall, he never actually really learned to play a guitar...not that that's required to build one obviously.

To me it seems that Leo was more of an inventor than a luthier...or am I missing something here? If this is indeed the case, it seems rather ironic that the man who had perhaps the single greatest impact on musical instruments in the past few hundred years...the man who created the Strat, the Tele, the P bass, etc....that this man wasn't actually a luthier or a "master builder" such as you'd find in the custom shop today as much as just an "ordinary Joe" who simply had a couple of good ideas.

Now please here...I'm not trying to crack on Leo's genius or anything at all...he's one of my personal heros. Certainly there were other guys at the time working on that whole "solid body" thing too...Les Paul for example. But still with all of this talk about what's actually involved with becoming a Master Luthier, not to mention the musical instrument makers that were around at the time who didn't quite get this...to think of some guy who ran a radio shop having such a deeply profound impact as Leo did...it's kind of weird huh? Maybe it was because he wasn't bound by the limitations of conventional thinking that he was able to do what he did.

Again maybe I'm missing a little piece of history here and perhaps I'm even rambling like a complete idiot, but I wanted to toss this one out there. I'm very over-tired but I had to come up here and write that out before I forgot it...hopefully it made sense. I look forward to seeing everyone's comments in the morning :D.

L8r,
Jim


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Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:52 pm
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He may not have been a luthier but he certainly was a master craftsman.


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Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:59 pm
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Sorry I haven't got anything much to add at the moment (I'm at work), but your description of Leo F. reminds me very much of Chris Kinman... check out the "My Story" section of the Kinman pickups site if you haven't already -- it's very entertaining...


http://www.kinman.com/Shop/story_tmp.htm


...I think inventors and tinkerers probably accomplish more than master luthiers when it comes to electric guitars and their accompanying paraphernalia, except for the fine woodworking and finishing side of things.

I think I just enjoy it when people are enthusiastic about something, preferably enough for it to be infectious!


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Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 10:37 pm
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Jim

Leo was definately not considered a 'Luthier" by the guitar making community. fender, both company and man, were considered upstarts
by the established guitar making community.

This is from "The Les Paul Legacy' by Robb Lawrence.(page 60) a qoute from Ted McCarty (longtime president of Gibson,) of a conversation with Fred Gretsch about the newly released Les Paul model:
"Fed Gretsch, uncle of the current Fred Gretsch, and I were personally good friends,and he called me and said 'Ted, how could you do this? You know, now anybody with a bandsaw and a router can make a guitar. And that's the sort of thing that Fender is selling.' I said 'Yeah, I know that. But he's cutting into the market, and we're going to give him a run for his money.'"

So you can see the established guitar makers of the time didn't have a high opinion of his innovations.

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Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 11:32 pm
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Ceri wrote:

I'd be astonished if America and other countries don't have comparable courses. ...Of course they do!


The only courses I've been capable of finding in the EU is in Britain and Spain, don't know about the US


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Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:43 am
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Time-Machine wrote:
Ceri wrote:

I'd be astonished if America and other countries don't have comparable courses. ...Of course they do!


The only courses I've been capable of finding in the EU is in Britain and Spain, don't know about the US
check here. i believe i saw one in Norway on the list.

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Post subject: Re: A question about luthiers...
Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:57 am
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lomitus wrote:
Hey Folks,
As I've been sitting here noodling with my various build/rebuild projects, I had a weird question go thru my head. In reference to guitar building and repair, from time to time I've ran across the term "Master Luthier". Now this term implies that said person would be a highly experienced, well seasoned individual who's been building and working on guitars most of their life. My question is, how exactly does one become a "master" luthier? I mean, it's not like this is something you can generally take courses for at a community college, right? In the old days...ok...the really old days (like a hundred years ago or more) clearly one would "apprentice" with a Master, etc., but with things like guitar building today being all manufacturing and "big business"...short of reading books and watching how to vids, where exactly does one go to learn this stuff and how exactly does one obtain the title of "Master"?

I've been working on my own guitars pretty much since I started playing when I was 17 (over 25 years now). Over the years I've done many mods, cut a couple of my own bodies, I'm at the point where I feel fairly proficient at doing finishes and I've certainly "studied" all of this stuff to the best of my ability (often having to do things the hard way I might add as I don't always have the proper tools for a specific job). While I do consider myself a competent guitar tech, I'm not really looking to become a master or anything here...despite Cleveland being "the home of rock & roll", there's not many guitar builders around anyways, but considering my experience, it does provoke a certain degree of curiosity. In this day and age, how exactly does one achieve the title of "Master Luthier"?

I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

Peace,
Jim

l , bro , maybe it's like the mcat , your knowledge would help there , break a leg bro .

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Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 5:06 am
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I think you can't call someone who assembles or tweaks solid body electrics a "luthier." A woodworker, a guitar builder, a guitar 'technician,' okay. Or, in Leo's case, a manufacturing whiz-kid and circuit designer. but a pretty far cry from a luthier.

A luthier is someone who can build a lute: i.e., an acoustic instrument. I know a guy who hand-builds exquisite parlor-sized acoustic guitars, mandolins, five-string and tenor banjos. HE'S a luthier. The guy who used to set up my Strat was a guitar tech.


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Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 5:30 am
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lomitus wrote:
Ok...as I was sitting here having my last cigarette of the evening, another interesting thought crossed my mind.

I've been kind of rolling this whole convo around in the back of my brain for a day or two now and everything here...having to train, having to apprentice, the comments about starting out by pushing broom, etc...all this does of course make sense. That said...way back in the late 40's when a man by the name of Clarence Leonidas Fender created an "electric" guitar initially called the "Broadcaster"...could this man really have been considered a "Master Luthier"? From what I've read, Leo Fender and Doc Kaufmann had been making some Hawaiian guitars for a bit and before that Leo ran his own radio repair shop but it doesn't seem to me that he ever "studied guitar building" specifically, at least certainly not in the traditional sense we've been talking about so far. From what I recall, he never actually really learned to play a guitar...not that that's required to build one obviously.

To me it seems that Leo was more of an inventor than a luthier...or am I missing something here? If this is indeed the case, it seems rather ironic that the man who had perhaps the single greatest impact on musical instruments in the past few hundred years...the man who created the Strat, the Tele, the P bass, etc....that this man wasn't actually a luthier or a "master builder" such as you'd find in the custom shop today as much as just an "ordinary Joe" who simply had a couple of good ideas.

Now please here...I'm not trying to crack on Leo's genius or anything at all...he's one of my personal heros. Certainly there were other guys at the time working on that whole "solid body" thing too...Les Paul for example. But still with all of this talk about what's actually involved with becoming a Master Luthier, not to mention the musical instrument makers that were around at the time who didn't quite get this...to think of some guy who ran a radio shop having such a deeply profound impact as Leo did...it's kind of weird huh? Maybe it was because he wasn't bound by the limitations of conventional thinking that he was able to do what he did.

Again maybe I'm missing a little piece of history here and perhaps I'm even rambling like a complete idiot, but I wanted to toss this one out there. I'm very over-tired but I had to come up here and write that out before I forgot it...hopefully it made sense. I look forward to seeing everyone's comments in the morning :D.

L8r,
Jim

l , bro , an electrician who loved music , the only guy that could invent the modern instrument . leo fender .

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