New Years Meditation
Happy New Years from Queen City Guitars new home in Vermont, and what a year to be leaving behind. Leaving aside all of our collective experiences in 2021 and just speaking personally it was quite a busy year, though perhaps less in guitar related things than I would prefer. Probably largest on the list in 2021 was moving to Brattleboro, Vermont which consumed a lot of September and October and then subsequently setting up a new shop through the remaining days of 2021. I officially got back to work in December and I suppose this is my official announcement that I am back in business here and am officially open for guitar orders and taking appointments for repair work in 2022.
As we move into the new year I am also happily nearing completion of the cantilever rb-00 prototype I have been working on and am looking forward to incorporating that into my build options in 2022. I hope to be stringing it up in March and look forward to being able to evaluate it as a completed instrument. I closed the box before leaving Oakland and am currently finishing up binding and preparing to get back into working on the neck.
If you follow along with my youtube channel you may have seen me make the birds beak joint for this neck, and if you have not, you might check it out. I will be making new videos on guitar construction and hand tool woodworking in the new year and subscribing to the channel is another great way to get a window into what is happening in the shop. I am always interested in what people want to know more about so drop me a comment or an email if there is a particular aspect of my work that sparks your interest and I will try and address it on the channel.
While I may not have had as much time in the shop toiling away at guitars in 2021 as I might dream of, there was still plenty to spark my interest in guitar building. I worked quite a bit at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco doing exhibit work in 2021 which gave me a lot of perspectives on art and craft and production as well as plenty of time to reflect on some aspects of guitar making that have intrigued me for a long time. The most solid thing I have been reflecting on is probably time and temporality in instrument making and if the start of the new year isn’t a good time to bring time up I do not know when is. Besides it has a lot to do with what I will be offering on guitars in 2022.
When I am building a guitar, especially when I am working with the spruce for the top and braces, I am often struck by the lifespan of the tree. On my current build in just the 7.5 inches of one half of the bookmatched top there are 165 rings. That is 165 years represented in the life of that tree and it is only a portion of the life of that ancient tree. I feel honored to be working with such material and a real sense of duty to make something of value that can be used and enjoyed for something approaching that long span of time.
That sense of duty can lead down multiple roads of course. Working at the museum gave plenty of examples of the way we have moved in the modern western world, i.e. opting to use less precious material instead and accept disposabilty, a real practical method when you have to make new display structures for every short lived exhibit, but no one wants mdf guitars and I don’t want to make them.
Of course the actual art, at least the old art, provides a much different perspective. Whether something is a purely artistic object or a formerly functional artisanal object, its preservation requires heavy limits to use (display only) and exposure (from anything: light, temperature, humidity, the off gassing of hardwood, plywood,or particle board).
I certainly see both strategies at work in the guitar world. The former in the cheap and near innumerable instruments made by industrial manufacturers everyday; The latter in the high end instrument market, vintage and new where there can be a tendency towards transposition of the guitar as a tool, albeit a beautiful artisanal tool, that must also function as a means of making music, into an object that is an end in and of itself which needs preserving in as pristine a condition as possible.
Of course in vintage instruments approaching them with an eye towards conservation can make a lot of sense, and the preservation of the guitar at the cost of all else can make sense as well. I love the idea of being able to look at examples of guitars from the very earliest days of the instrument. For many other vintage instruments the other half of conservation, understanding the fragility of a thing and how to execute the needed and inevitable repairs in order to keep that thing around, functional and true to its past is an important perspective to hold.
In the world of new guitars however, I think there is a pull to track a different course away from approaching the guitar with a sense of balance between its use, fragile nature and the subsequent need to have an eye towards conservation, towards trying to make an object that is indestructible, unchanging and avoidant of the need to imagine its future repair. As though one could build an instrument that could avoid the effects of time and that one should own an instrument in such a way to avoid the same.
I don’t think I can send a guitar out into the world and expect it to be used as intended (often and enthusiastically) and also hope that it lives into the 22nd century without also considering that it will need to be repaired at some point. That consideration informs so many of my decisions on how to build, from my use of hide to glue, to the work I have been putting into this cantilever design, and it has been a consideration in my choice of finishing instruments with nitro lacquer, a finish that I was initially resistant to using. Nitro is a modern finish with some potential durability advantages over shellac, but also some significant disadvantages. Its main advantage is that it is not dissolvable by anything you should reasonably have around your guitar, but that comes at the price of having to dissolve it in some pretty toxic stuff to apply it, and I am not one to throw around the word toxic lightly. That also means that repairs of the finish will often mean working with those same solvents or filling the damage in with something other than lacquer.
Having worked with shellac french polish as a guitar finish and then mostly with lacquer and also having worked on numerous vintage instruments finished with both, I find it harder and harder to say that nitro lacquer truly stands as an improvement and when I think of the full picture of each finish, from the perspectives of purpose, application, life span, care and repair I think that shellac is the better choice of the two.
It is applied with an essentially non toxic solvent, 190+ proof grain alcohol which is wiped rather than sprayed. The additive nature of the application allows better control of the finish thickness and evenness. Using high quality shellac and other natural resins creates a durable and attractive finish (my old work space/ apartment had shellacked maple floors which survived a lot more abuse than a guitar should ever be subject to), and to top it off shellac repair is actually very similar to lacquer repair, but without all the challenges of working with lacquer and lacquer thinner (shellac is often used to repair damage in lacquer).
All this said ( and I could say more, and happily would if you are interested in a guitar, but uncertain about the finish), I will be transitioning away from lacquer starting in 2022. Shellac french polish will now become my standard finish for the body of the guitar, with an oil varnish for the neck (which sees a lot more contact from sweaty hands). I am also open to french polishing necks and for the time being to lacquering future guitars, however nitro lacquer will now incur an upcharge, mostly to reflect that it is a lot more difficult to work with without being much of a labor saver in terms of finish time.
Moving into 2022 I aim to continue working on what I work on every year, making the best guitars that I can and striving to learn to craft even better guitars, always with an eye towards ensuring those guitars can be alive and kicking long after I am done building. Thanks for checking in with me, I hope you have a great year ahead, maybe a year that includes a new hand made guitar?!