Was it the chicken or the wooden egg?

In building a guitar one must first solve this fundamental, foundational, all-important, life-or-death question before he can prove worthy of advancing beyond go: What came first - the chicken or the egg?

If you said egg, you're not welcome here.  Please discontinue reading immediately, you have not proven yourself worthy to view the innermost workings of the mind of a self-professed world grand master luthier.  If you said the chicken came first, well then, feel right at home.

The truth is, dear reader, there are many ways to begin building a guitar.  Every serious luthier that has ever publish has their own method and unique steps and traditions to accomplish the transcendental.  Perhaps I'm already getting a little ahead of myself - there is one place to start, and that is you need to determine what you want to make and out of what materials.  With those decisions behind you, it then becomes like one of those middle school choose-your-own-adventure stories.  You know, the ones where honestly most everyone ends up in one swamp or quicksand pit or another about 10 pages into it.  Well that won't happen to us; I can say this boldly because I have a secret I will share with you...  go ahead, gather in close...  I bought guitar insurance, yup that's right, if anything happens to my project, I'm torching the whole lot in effigy, running to Guitar Center where I will buy the most expensive guitar in the store, will write "Verdani Guitars" on the headstock with a sharpie and draw Tim's own scantily clad art nouveau rendition of Moucha's Muse of Music or Dance and call it a night.

No not really, but we'll see how tough this whole thing actually becomes...  Well again, reader, I digress.  I was limited to guitar style by what plans were obtainable.  The two main websites I looked at were www.stewmac.com and www.lmii.com.  Stewart MacDonald is a little pricier but I could see exactly what I was getting and they had a matching acrylic template for the soundboard and back which sealed the deal.  I didn't want to go with the Dreadnought style - it's just too popular and overrated.  I like the sexy curves of the more traditional parlor and jumbo styles far better.  I figured a jumbo would be too big for the Adirondack Spruce I wanted to use for the soundboard (hard to find large plates in this wood), and they didn't have any "grand auditorium" or orchestra styles so I ultimately decided on the biggest parlor style guitar they had, the Martin 000 with 14 frets to the body (looks more modern than the 12 frets to the body model).

I made my final tonewood selections after I had ordered the guitar plan and template.  I purchases everything initially from Stephen Roberson at Colonial Tonewoods, www.colonialtonewoods.com.  I have to give a shout out to Steve, what and incredible help he was!  Extremely friendly and helpful, I told him what my vision was and we went through a few iterations together until we found the perfect fit - a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind selection of American crotch-figured black walnut, with matching sides, and a unique Adirondack Spruce plate set for the soundboard.  As Steve always said, "that red spruce is the redheaded step-child of tonewoods," and when I got the plate set I knew exactly why - Adirondack Spruce is unlike any other spruce species you see in guitar building these days (Sitka, Englemen, German, etc.) in that it has no consistent and uniform grain.  Instead it can look loose and splotchy, but I absolutely had to have it because up until just after WWII, it was THE wood of choice by luthiers and was only replaced because of it's increasing price and diminishing supply.  I compare my joined soundboard with a Sitka spruce specimen below so you can see the difference.

Well sadly, reader, I must go.  I've whittled away all my available time, without much to show for it other than wordy diatribes and provacative pictures.  Until I catch everyone up to where I currently am in the process, I fear my posts will be extremely scattered.  Thanks for putting up with it.  Until next time, live long and prosper.

In the Beginning...

In the beginning was God... and on the eighth day was God created the harp, forerunner of the steel string guitar, and just like God had to wipe the slate clean with the flood, so too did God start anew when the first luthier forsook all other stringed instruments and created the 6-stringed mecca of musicality.

And so my tale begins, unfortunately not at the beginning, for indeed I have already started - in the words of the great Lord Helmut "Commence to Start!"  I've wanted to create a website to document the construction of my first instrument - a modified Martin-style 14-Fret Triple-O - but lo and behold website's cost money and I've spent everything I have buying baby clothes for our first child and tools for my workshop.

This whole idea came into being when one day (for the thousandth time) my "aging" and hard of hearing father looked longingly at a guitar and said to himself - "oOOoo  that's nice, I'd like to buy that, wish I could..."  You see my father picked up the guitar shortly after I did many moons ago (7 years I think) and was immediately forevermore entranced by its wonders.  As I mentioned, he's extraordinarily hard of hearing, and has thick, cumbersome hands and fingers; even so, he's captivated by the siren song, like a sailor born and bred to the sea.  What he says he lacks in polish and skill, he all the more makes up for in his childlike wonder of the power of music, his incredible vebratto and his sheer overwhelming joy in singing and teasing harmony from chaos.

Well what else could an able bodied and indepted son do but decide to give his dear old dad a gift to bring joy to his heart.  To be honest, I had ulterior motives as well, you see I wanted to make myself my next guitar too...  So for my Dad's birthday last year, I decided to surprise him with a curious present; I bought all the wood components I needed and a copy of the guitar plan, wrapped them in a blanket and threw it in his arms.  With a look of puzzlement he opened the blanket to find the jumbled mass and as soon as he saw the guitar plan his face lit up.  The rest is history, well, history in progress I should say.

You must understand why I gave him the peices rather than a finished guitar, and in doing so you must understand one very important thing about my father - he's an impulsive buyer.  I feared I would spend the next two years secretly working on my peice de resistance, only to show up one day with an almost finished guitar in my hand to show him and a brand new glitzy guitar in his, fresh from the local music store.  The stakes were too high; that, and you must also understand something about me - I'm extremely ADD and can count the number of significant projects I've completed fully on one hand; I'd need a legion of hands and toes to count all the projects that are still PENDING.

So anyway, I leave you now with a short background of my journey.  Soon to follow are all manner of pictures and descriptions and lessons learned, Lord willing, in some fashion of order.  Until then may God bless you and keep you, may His face shine upon you, and give you peace.