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.