Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Carruth
Most 'luthiers' in the old sense can, and usually did, do repairs on them as well. I did a lot of repair early on. This is one of those places where specialization has really caught on in the past couple of decades. I know quite a number of instrument repair people who don't build at all, and don't particularly want to. Most of them call themselves 'luthiers', and that seems to be the expectation these days: if you're luthier you do repairs. Repair is, in fact, a much different mind set from building, and usually calls for a different sort of shop setup as well. The good repair people I know are far better at much of what they do than I ever was, simply because they do more of it, all the time. Many of them do more setups in a week than I do in a year, for example. Since I call myself a luthier I'm always getting repair calls, even though I have not done repairs on a regular basis for more than 15 years. It's one of those places where language usage has gotten a little out of synch, at least from the perspective of some of us. Then again, I'm still railing against the use of 'flame' to describe wood figure when what you really mean is 'curl'. *sigh*  |
I think however most of the great builders of today started out doing repairs, probably mainly as "bread and butter" while trying to get established. As a teenager and young adult I was never "gentle" on my guitars, and had to learn how to repair them quite a bit (especially after punching through the top of my Yamaha acoustic after drinking a bottle of tequila - never again!). My foray into building started as a teen with my quest for a carved-top electric. I figured I could just take a belt sander and some 40 grit and carve my existing electric. Finding out the guitar was plywood was disheartening, along with not calculating where that darn control cavity was! Patched it up the best I could, and gave it a paint job, which came out great. When I started working as a cabinetmaker's apprentice a few years down the road, I took the body and ran it through the thickness planer and glued solid wood on and re-carved it. And that was how the bug caught on, though had been on-and-off for a long time. The discovery of builders like Somogyi and Greenfield and others over a decade and a half ago had refueled my desire, led me to sites like MIMF and AGF, and slowly have been ramping up my own building ever since. But most my friends that were musicians or knew of musicians would seek me for setup work or repair, and I always obliged. I do find the more I concentrate on my own designs and builds, my desire to do repairs had decreased.
As to "curl" - I think that word is generally used to describe the figuring, and the other words like "flame", "fiddleback", "tiger stripe", "rope", are more descriptive as to the "type" of curl... Such as "quilt" - you can have "pillow", "blister", "popcorn"... etc., etc...