Tappin' that Ash

I worry a little bit that when I get better at building instruments, I will have less to tell you about. The stressful, albeit entertaining, disasters, the elation over actually doing something well...Eh, you're right, I will probably never get that good to not have any stories. How lucky for us all!

This past week, I have been finishing up a ukulele as well as working on a 000 guitar and neither have provided all that much stress. My dad was off teaching a workshop and left me in charge of things while he was gone, and the last time he did that, I forgot to glue the bridge plate onto the top of my guitar before I glued it onto the guitar body. I then spent the entire night worrying about how to remedy that instead of sleeping. After several hours of pondering how to go about righting that kind of serious oversight, Herb walks in the shop and goes, "Well haven't you ever paid any attention to what I do here?! About 90% of my time is spent removing and putting in bridge plates. Of course you don't have to take the whole top off!" So, now I know, and all the fretting (hehe, guitar joke) was for nothing because it turns out I could (fairly) easily glue the bridge plate into the top without significant hassle.

Simple curly maple rosette and purfling, rosewood binding 

This 000's top has a bridge plate, and small braces around the soundhole, and I even remembered to sign it and make sure the kerfing was fitted perfectly around the back braces before the body was glued together. After I tightened that last clamp though I was pretty sure I had to be forgetting something. I had to have, right? As far as I can tell, everything is in order. Odd to do something right once in a while, and boring as now I have nothing to tell you about, other than obnoxiously hinting that I am awesome and super good at guitar building now... Just wait till my dad sees it and finds some significant step forgotten...Until then though, I have decided that I am awesome.

Speaking of awesome things, I will say that this new ukulele that I just finished is pretty neat. The wood is White ash, again provided by the amazing Dean from Electric Hardwoods. He sent me home with this beautiful piece of ash (haha) that he and his employees had been using as a coat rack. After I sawed pieces for sides and glued together a back and a top, everyone in the shop enjoyed making ash jokes. After listening to the surprisingly strong residual ring produced when he tapped on the surface, Harrol exclaimed, "Wow! What a great sound that comes from tapping that ash!" Similar jokes ensued just about all day, but the fact remained that, aside from the eye catching grain, it was a promising piece of wood that would also produce a great tone.

Another neat thing about this ukulele is that I had free reign to make it however I saw fit, using any materials of my choosing. The ukulele is going to be featured as part of an exhibit promoting the history of instrument building at the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History along with instruments made by several other local luthiers. Well known folks like my dad and Audrey Hash are among the lutheirs chosen to display instruments for the exhibit, so I am pretty lucky they decided to include me as well. The only downside is that when they came to take pictures I was still wearing Tiffany blue colored nail polish since I was fresh back from Asheville. (I try to cover the guitar stain, black superglue, and saw marks on my nails while I am in Asheville among regular folks so as not to appear homeless or scare anyone.) I think it was difficult for the exhibit designers to conceal those, so my picture looks kind of like I am napping rather than working. I really was doing something, probably really important. Here is a link to the museum's webpage, there you can find information about the exhibit and other neat goings on at the museum. They also have a facebook page, so once you are done liking my page, go like theirs too!

Photo (and borrowed ukulele) courtesy of Mac Sumner

The ash really does sound great now that it has been bent and carved into a ukulele, and of that I am very proud. I have not heard of anyone else, at least not around here, using such a wood to make a guitar or ukulele, and it is so exciting for me to be able to find new and different materials that are local and sustainable so I can help open people's minds about acceptable types of tonewood. This one is a doozy and I think if you heard it, you would want an ash instrument too! All the cool kids have one.

Decided to try metal inlay for the soundhole rosette. 

Ukulele favorites

The last two ukuleles I built might be my all time favorites. For now anyway. Even though I say that after pretty much every build, these are a little more important because of who they were built for. Usually the super extra special ones are reserved for my family members, like my mom's curly maple ukulele, cousin Matt's Koa cutaway guitar, or Leah's ukulele; my very first one. But the interesting thing about numbers eleven and twelve is that neither was for someone I have known for any significant amount of time, and even though they were not for my super close friends or family members, I was excited to put a little extra love in there anyway.

Of course, I met both Steve and Lucas through my dad, but unlike most folks who filter through the shop who are solely focused on obtaining a Wayne Henderson instrument, they both stopped long enough to talk to me too. Lucas and his grandparents have become frequent visitors to Rugby and I now consider them good friends to my dad, so it was super flattering that they always include me too. Lucas is the most positive, extraverted person I know, and I definitely had trouble believing he was 16 when I met him. Not just because he laid on a pretty heavy slather of flirting, but because he was completely devoid of that cape of insecurity and brooding most teenage boys shroud themselves with. It was Lucas who introduced me to Zac Brown, got my dad to play on stage with him, and of course the most important thing, somehow convinced John Mayer to write me a little note (with a heart!!) on his Born and Raised CD cover saying that I had built a great guitar. (I might have wet myself a tiny bit when I read that, but that is beside the point.) Also, because I assume we are all friends here, I will also unnecessarily share that I had already bought that CD twice because I pre-ordered it on Amazon but it didn't come fast enough so I bought another copy at Target the morning it came out...Now I have three, so if you missed buying this album, let me know because I might have an extra...Aaaanyway....

For Lucas, I knew I had to make something worthy of such a great guy, and that was the challenge of this build. The ukulele I ended up constructing was made from Hawaiian koa wood, as it is traditional, but also the most beautiful wood I know of; I figured it would be difficult to make a uke that would not get lost among his flashy personality, so the fanciest wood was used. I also added pearl inlay around the top and soundhole, and designed and cut a pattern of curly cues for the fingerboard. I was pretty proud to have worked on this ukulele completely alone; my dad did not even test it after I strung it up to make sure I had set the strings up right. When I work on an instrument, sometimes it seems that everything falls into place just as it should, and like this time, the ukulele played perfectly the first time I strung it up. Maybe that is something that happens normally for other folks, I know it does most always with my dad, but I like to remember what he always says when I mess something up, "Well, you always gotta learn how to fix stuff. That is more important than getting it right."

I apologize for the quality of these pictures-forgot my camera at home and had to use my telephone...

The Goat Man

There is a fellow named Frank who lives nearby. He likes to stop in the shop periodically to check on his guitar order and remind my dad that he is still patiently waiting by offering him fresh eggs, mason jars of honey, and goat's milk feta cheese from his farm. Frank is a goat farmer. Aside from the occasional bit of straw stuck to his boot or the shoulder of his fleece, you would have trouble telling Frank that is a goat farmer, as he is very knowledgeable about many things, most of them having nothing at all to do with goats.

When he first ordered a guitar from me, I didn't quite know what to make of him, but I gladly accepted the goat's milk feta and honey. He is obviously very smart and I was a little curious as to how this fellow, who prefers Arc'Teryx to Carhart, came to be a goat farmer in the rural North Carolina mountains in the first place. Turns out, he hasn't been a goat farmer for that long, as several years ago he was the president of the Chicago Transit Authority, he was besties with then Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daly, and his wife ran many political campaigns, even working with Hilary Clinton. Frank was even nice enough to ask Hilary to sign the picture of her shaking hands with my dad when he received a National Heritage Award and we all tromped up to Washington to rub elbows with the political elite. In all honesty, I was too short at the time to reach any elbows of note so I mostly just hung around the food table.

Anyway, this post is being written to tell you about the guitar I made for Frank. The neat thing about him, other than leaving a high-powered political position in Chicago in order to become a goat farmer in the mountains, is that he was very interested in having an instrument that I would enjoy building, and encouraged the use of sustainable materials and whatever else I might want to do. His guitar is the third of mine that has been constructed with oak, and I ended up using a beautifully curly piece that I got from my new friend Dean, who lives up in Haysi, VA. If you missed that post about Electric Hardwoods, go read it. You will learn about Dean.

The only downside to that set of wood is that it smelled a little....how do I put this delicately? Like turkey poop. How do I know what that smells like? Well, it just happens to be my dog harper's favorite poop to roll in, not that she is particularly picky, but she seems especially proud of herself when she trots over to me covered in streaks of the smelliest feces you can imagine. That's how I know. My dad and Herb speculate that the wood was reclaimed from the side of an outhouse or something, but from wherever it came, the stench in it's wake was pretty rough. Especially when it was sprayed with water, which happens during several steps in the guitar making process. I hoped fervently that the six or seven layers of catalyzed varnish I would eventually spray on it would quell the odor. Several folks pointed out that it was a fitting smell for a goat farmer as it didn't stray far from what feta cheese smells like. Frank claimed not to notice the smell much, so that was lucky. The smell did diminish as I worked down the wood and sealed its pores with wood filler and varnish, so crisis averted. Mostly.

It is always exciting to be asked to do new things; different sizes of guitars I have never done before, or an ambitious inlay, or a new type of wood. This guitar was just about the opposite of that 12 fred D I was working on alongside it, but it provided just as many new skills as the bigger guitar. Frank asked me for a left handed 00 guitar. I loved the small size (no dropping!), and was excited to learn the differences between making a left handed and right handed guitar. Turns out, there isn't much, except for the two bottom braces on the top of the guitar were opposite sides, and obviously the strings and the bridge were opposite as well. It ended up being easier than my dad predicted for me to remember and carry out such tasks, maybe because I am left handed and it made more sense to me, or perhaps because I am still so new at the building process that I haven't adopted a specific muscle memory for the craft. Either way, it was really fun. Bring on some more exciting builds like this one!

Tree headstock inlay. 

Frank testing her out! Also, Frank's niece Gretchen made the pickguard when she visited from Vermont! 

Showing off the back wood.

He asked for an acorn to be inlaid on the heel cap so everyone will know it is made of oak! 

Lovely match to the sides. Koa binding and end piece.

Koa rosette and binding. 

I can play just as many chords on this thing as a regular! Maybe I am ambidextrous. Or should be playing left handed... 

Hello again friends!

Hello again! After a bit of a break, I am back to tell you some more stories of the shop life here in Rugby. It has been such a busy spring, I have barely had time to brush my hair. (Well, let's face it, I still probably wouldn't do that even if I did have the time...) But thank you so much for being patient and still wanting to read what I have to say! I figured I should get back to it when one of my dad's friends asked if I was still updating my blog or her computer might be broken because she has not received an update notification recently. Woopsie. On the upside, I have gotten a lot of work done, finishing two new guitars and also two ukuleles. It is too bad I wasn't able to tell you immediately how much I enjoyed working on each of those instruments, and watching them come to life, but I will tell you a little bit now, starting with guitar #11:

Guitar number eleven is one of the very few dreadnaught sized guitars I think I will ever build. It is a sloped shoulder 12 fret style, and for goodness sake, did it want to jump on the floor any chance it got. My hands are not large enough to handle such a wide body and there were several times that I thought I had ruined weeks of hard work after it slipped from my fingers when I attempted to slide it into an empty slot in the shelf that holds unfinished guitar bodies. Once, I completely lost grip on the thing and it tumbled full forcedly into a basket of pointy clamps that sits on the floor next to the shelf. My dad's no-nonsense friend Don was there to witness that slip and in his typical gruff tone, said, "Well you've done it now, I guarantee you busted a whole in the side of that thing." After much scrutiny of every inch of that guitar body, I could not find so much as a ding in the surface. I suppose that is another great attribute to using oak. It sure is durable.

Even though it was too big for my little hands to deal with a lot of the time, I do love so much how this guitar turned out. I attempted my first sunburst top, which turned out to be a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be. My dad has always said I would probably be really good at spraying sunbursts because most of the art I made growing up included heavily shaded abstract images. I even used to change the gradient within the black lines of a coloring book page with a crayon or colored pencil.

Turns out, this is a kind of different skill set.  The spray gun that usually houses finish is filled instead with black stain, with a couple of drops of brown just for a little bit of depth I guess. Then you have to attempt to evenly spray a gradient into the top of the guitar, which, if you think about it is kind of like spray painting a pristine, clean white wall. Maybe Banksy would excel at such things, but I was definitely not super excited to go spraying black stain all over the top of my beautiful guitar body. Needless to say, there was little room for error and if you look closely, you can tell I am not an expert at this type of work just yet. My dad said that is good though because the old Martins aren't perfect either, and that is the look we are going for anyway. So I guess I will go ahead and mark this attempt as a success.

This guitar turned out so much more beautiful than I would have imagined. The deep colors of the shaded top paired with the saturated color the oak was stained was surprising. The wood that Mark, the owner sent for me to use was, if we are being honest, not the prettiest pearl in the bunch...I even asked him if he would mind if I used a different set of oak that I bought from the lumber yard in Asheville. It boasted big bold light colored stripes set in the darker wood that looked like those marking a Bengal tiger. Luckily I sanded that set a little too thin for such a large guitar and ended up using his wood after all. (Don't worry, my set will be used for a smaller body guitar or a ukulele) When I circled on the first few dips of stain, the wood transformed into the most figured, beautiful piece I had ever seen. My dad was equally amazed at the transformation, as no one saw that coming. The finished product ended up being significantly more exciting and fun than I anticipated, the dropping episodes aside.

I am so honored to have been asked to build a guitar for the fellow who ordered this instrument. He really knows what he is talking about when it comes to quality and sound, and when he came to pick up his finished guitar last week, he seemed pleased with the outcome. Sometimes it feels like I am sending something equivalent to a child or a beloved puppy off to an adopted family, hoping so hard that my baby guitar will be well cared for and loved as it should be in its new environment. It is always such a relief to know for certain that they will be, and in this case I am certain.

Wood straight out of the box from Seattle

Note: The light in the spray room makes the guitar look a lot more red than it really is,.

My dad testing her out.

I apologize for the quality of these last few pictures-I might have left my camera in Asheville and had to use my phone...

Ol' Sassy

There really doesn't seem to be a much better feeling than finishing a project. Writing a blog entry, meeting a deadline at work, or baking a beautiful cake are all cause for satisfied sighs and the slow lean-back in the easy chair with your hands laced behind your head. You know what I mean, right? Personally I have never found that position to be comfortable, but yet it comes to mind when considering a job well done. Kind of like saying 'ahh' after a swig of Coke. I don't do that either I guess, but hopefully you get the picture. But seriously, the first note I hear from one of my instruments is arguably the most satisfying moment of my day. After quite a bit of hard work, there is a tangible payoff. And today was no different. I might even argue that today was one of the best.

I waited (kind of) patiently all morning for my D'Addario titanium soprano uke strings to be delivered, and when they did finally arrive I might have scared the UPS man due to my unhinged excitement. Oh well, I think he is used to it at this point. As soon as I strung the first string and gingerly plucked it, I knew this one would be awesome. I strung the rest of the strings and tuned her up!

This ukulele in particular holds a special place in my heart for several reasons. First, it is to be a wedding gift for a very dear friend of mine, therefore I made sure to put some extra love into it. My friend Joe has been so good to me over the years, even letting me be his roommie one of the summers that I lived in Juneau, Alaska. I cherish those summer months more than most, and miss our nightly Snatch games way more than I should. Ok. Before you start thinking up weird definitions for what Snatch is, let me explain. Snatch is a word game similar to Scrabble; it uses the same tiles, just no board. I learned how to play it from one of my very favorite teachers during my undergraduate studies at NC State. He was one of the fellows who taught many of my outdoor education classes for a minor I was pursuing. He would pack this game when we went on climbing, rafting, and kayaking trips because it is an easily transportable, multi-player game that can be super duper fun if you like words and word games. Which I do. So, that last summer of undergrad, I taught the game to Joe and we eventually just left the Scrabble tiles poised face-down on the dining room table, ready for a game anytime we were. These games took place most every evening after dinner, sometimes turing into super competitive marathon-type tournaments. We even upped the challenge by eliminating three-letter words from being allowed during play. If you'd like more information about how to play this amazing game, or if you would like to play with me sometime let me know; Joe has left a void for which I have yet to find a suitable replacement.

The second reason I love this ukulele so much is that I did all of the work myself, which isn't new, but I also did not consult or have my work checked by more expert eyes along the way. Being of the type who strives very hard for perfection in my work (and also might enjoy being praised for doing things well),  it was difficult for me to trust my judgement and forge ahead without the reassurance that each step in the process was accurate and no mistakes were being made. When making a musical instrument the frustrating thing is that it is not certain whether the braces are cut just right, or the bridge is in exactly the right spot until you string it up. If you didn't deduce, that step happens at the end, therefore I feel there is some gambling involved unless you are 100% positive of your actions. That is why I was so excited to hear this ukulele sing. I wish you all could hear it. Perhaps I will be as brave as my amazing cousin Leah and sing you Over the Rainbow. But probably not as it would really be bad news for your ears and take away from the ukulele's far more pleasant melodies. Also, speaking of Leah, Monday is her bday, and I likely won't post again before then to remind you, so wish her a good one if you happen to know her! I will leave you with a couple of pictures of Ol' Sassy. More are on my Facebook page, EJ Henderson Guitars and Ukuleles so please 'like' me and check them out if you haven't already!!