My Journey to Guitar Making

I’ve always enjoyed making things. It seemed normal to me to make surfboards when I started surfing. When I started playing acoustic guitar I wanted to make my own guitar. I had some skills from extracurricular wood working classes at school and there were a few tools at home I could use. A slightly older friend from Newfoundland Canada, Nat Matchim, also wanted to make a guitar and had a Gibson steel string we could copy. He met Greg Smallman, then in the fairly early stages of his luthiery career, and found out from Greg which timberyards in Sydney would let us pick over their stacks to select wood that was suitable for our guitars and what sort of glue we should use. Armed with that rudimentary knowledge and a few hand tools I made my first 3 guitars in 1972 and 1973 while I was supposedly studying Arts/Law at Sydney University. Greg’s advice that we should use New Guinea rosewood for the back and sides, spruce for the soundboard and traditional hot hide glue to hold the assembled parts together was well founded and my first guitar, while very rough and ready, is still in one piece. It also sounded particularly good for some styles of playing.

During this time my interest in folk music was growing and at my favourite folk club I met Jim Jarvis, an accomplished singer, fingerstyle guitarist and songwriter. Jim liked my first guitar and ended up using it for many fine performances around Sydney’s folk scene and eventually to record his album “Outskirts of Town”. This was powerful encouragement for my guitar making and in early 1976 I ventured to America to learn more. I attended the School of the Guitar Research and Design Centre, also known as Earthworks, in Vermont where I studied with Charles Fox. The 6-week residential course, where a small group of us each made one guitar under Charles’ instruction and close supervision, was beyond inspiring and gave me a colossal amount of new information, skills and possibilities to absorb and process.

Returning to Sydney I was excited to show off the guitar I had made at the school and keen to make more guitars. Of course, this was more of a challenge than I anticipated away from the well-equipped workshop in Vermont and without the experience and the calm mentoring Charles Fox had provided.

While showing off my new guitar around Sydney I had met Jim Williams who was selling guitars at Guitar City, one of Sydney’ boutique guitar shops. Then owner of Guitar City Mike Davidson, on the spot, commissioned a guitar from me (more encouragement) and Jim went off to Charles Fox’s school where he was instructed by George Morris a highly skilled cabinet maker and luthier, who had taken over the teaching role at the school while Charles developed his guitar manufacturing.

I had gradually acquired tools and developed a workspace but was struggling to reproduce the quality of work I had achieved in Vermont. Particularly the process of achieving a good finish, either with lacquer or French polish (shellac) was difficult. Fortunately, I was able to attend the French polishing Trade Certificate course at Sydney Technical College as a self-employed apprentice. This course, 1 day a week for 3 years, gave me a good understanding and experience of the range of materials and techniques used for furniture finishing and useful for guitar finishing and for repair and restoration work on guitars. Also attending the course and just as obsessed with guitars as me was Teen Goh, another graduate from the school in Vermont. He would go on to become highly respected for his skills as a luthier.

Jim Williams, on returning from America, had set up his workshop in the rooms next to Guitar City. He started doing guitar repairs and was quickly in high demand and invited me to share the workshop and the growing volume of work. We both wanted to be making guitars but were often over-run with repairs. This was sometimes frustrating but also instructive. Much “repair” work is actually making adjustments and modifications to make guitars more comfortable and easier to play and more accurately tune-able. In other words, making them do the job better for the musician who is playing. 

Jim and I were learning “on the job” as we worked. Our studies with Charles and George had been specific to a particular style of guitar making and did not attempt to cover the huge range of guitar manufacturing approaches (sometimes with inherent design flaws), and the huge range of problems and challenges that can present themselves when doing “repair” work. At the time there was nowhere to study guitar repair and the various workshops offering this service around Sydney were, like us, learning on the job. The quality of our work was no doubt somewhat variable, but we were doing the best we could and were driven by our obsession to understand and improve upon the guitars we saw on our workbench.

The setting, next to a bustling Guitar City with new owners Elly and Doug Loyd Jones, was musical and exciting, and Jim and I enjoyed sharing a workspace and benefitted from the exchange of knowledge, experience and ideas.