For more than twenty years I had always been very curious about building a guitar. I’ve been playing acoustic guitars for almost as long as I can remember. I had a great friend who lived down the street and we did everything together, so when he announced that he was going to learn to play guitar, naturally, I didn’t want to be left out! We bought a couple of new guitars and practiced a lot together, even on a cold winter night, we went to the local laundry to practice when our people kicked us out! … Yes, my enthusiasm has never waned throughout my great hippie youth. until today where I find myself living on a yacht in Australia with eight wonderful guitars at the dubious age of fifty-eight… I even still do some gigs!
But I digress! It doesn’t matter how many guitars I’ve owned over the years … and I’ve had a few … I always had a secret desire to build one for myself. With pride I imagined how I would carve it all with love, inlaid with black Coral, turquoise, silver and shiny mother of pearl. But, whenever it came to the crisis, I just didn’t have the balls to get stuck and handle it.
It’s wrong? I couldn’t figure it out. I had accomplished many other things that I had set out to do throughout my journey through life. I built a 43 foot yacht to start with. I had learned that to finish a project was to tell every living soul that I knew I was going to do it … that way, I knew that later, when my enthusiasm waned, I just had to carry it out, if I didn’t, I would get the reputation of being a loudmouth, I would want to be “I secretly thought it was my insurance policy! It really helped, sure.
However, as much as I loved to play, my life was turned upside down when I finally went to see a great Australian boy named Jeff Lang play a concert in my hometown. I sat captivated, turned around, totally impressed by the rich, vibrant and fresh sound that seemed to jump out of this lap steel guitar in an astonishing way.
It just didn’t seem possible that a guitar could sound so full, so haunting, so melodic, to tell you the truth, I was so overwhelmed with everything, I felt the tears running down my face I felt so silly … Well what a state to enter ! It was a great crossroads in my guitar playing!
This incident never left me the same again … I loved one of those Weissenborns so much it hurt. I felt like I couldn’t face my other guitars again. I sulked, we didn’t talk for a few weeks ….. but I gave up, I had to. I wanted a Taylor all my life … now I had one, was I never going to play? again? However, something was different … I wanted to touch that damn thing like I had never wanted to play before, so I did, you better believe it. I don’t even want to think about how long and how many hours it took me to start improving, but I did really well.
It has taken me this long to get to the point of this article. I had gotten over the indecision that haunted me … I couldn’t afford two or three of the greats to buy a good lap of steel. No way.
Fortunately I have a great friend at luthier Kim Hancock from Tamborine Mountain in Queensland. Kim, a kind soul along with his two sons (also fearsome luthiers) Dane and Sean, build guitars that are something else that are already established among the best on the world market …
Kim was really encouraging and gave me my first secret, without knowing it. If you turn it on and fill it … so what? It’s just a piece of wood, look what you did wrong, throw it away and ask for another piece … simple! So, get it right the second time!
The second secret came directly on the back of the first! Don’t let the project intimidate you … take control … you are the teacher, he is the subject.
The best secret of all came when I started building … I remembered the words during our conversation a few weeks before … Treat each stage of construction as a separate project. The rear, the sides, the bridge, the headstock … a separate project. That’s a good secret I guess. That way, you can see the construction as many small projects instead of one big overwhelming monster … Hey, and give yourself a reward every time you complete one of those stages … a beer, a lollipop, go out and splash. people, don’t get cheap!
The next secret is this: during construction there is always something that will stop you in your tracks. To me it was “How the hell am I going to get the rear joint perfect or the front joint, come to mention?” Well my secret lay in the fact that I had a good guitar making book that Kim had provided me. The answer was there! Glue some sandpaper to a straight edge bubble level and then sand each section to make it smooth like a baby’s bottom … look, simple when you know how!
So find a way to solve every problem by thinking about it carefully … there is always a way to solve every problem you come across, it may not always be the way you imagined! Oh yeah, the name of the book is “A Guitar Maker’s Handbook by Jim Williams”. You can get it from Kim Hancock’s site.
[http://www.Australian] Luthiers supplies.com.au Let me tell you though, there are no plans for a Weissenbourn there, you can get them from StewMac in the US or other vendors.
The final secret is really simple: make a firm decision to see it through to the end. In fact, I live on a yacht in a marina. I almost convinced myself not to build the guitar over and over again. I’ve heard so many times “How can I build a guitar if I don’t have a shed, a bench saw, etc.?” BS people, BS with a capital BULL. Make the most of what you have, have your lumber supplier cut the lumber to size, then plan it so you don’t need all that expensive equipment, man, they have it all!
There are a few more secrets too … I’ve written a book “How to Build a Weissenborn Guitar” that will give you some more lights to shine on those dark corners of that mind of yours! To help you do this! This guitar is really basic, just like the originals, without purfins, without armature rods (they don’t need them), simple but the sound! YES haaa!
It tells you how to build the guitar of your dreams at your own pace right there, in your home, in the garage, or on the floor with the minimum of tools and experience. I now have a site on construction called http://www.buildaweissenborn.com that you can also see in the authors resource box.
There are some pictures of my new weissenborn there, made by the way, with Australian maple (a cousin of Koa) and an Indian rosewood fingerboard that doesn’t actually have any frets and maybe never will.
Finally, I hope that any of you reading this article want to know how my Weissenborn turned out … amazing! It is the loudest guitar I have heard in thirty years playing … I can barely sing to its sound !!! and that’s saying something, people because I have a strong voice … not a good friend, but a strong voice !! It has been a leveling but amazing experience, thanks again to my good friend Kim Hancock for all the help and advice he gave me so freely, especially when I didn’t have to!