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From: Ross
Remote Name: 76.101.10.136
Date: 23 Feb 2007
Time: 08:52:29 -0500
Luthier’s Weblog 2/23/07 Last entry, my imaginary luthier came a little closer to some basic parameters for a finger style guitar. The question that comes unbidden to mind is: Why not find a good finger style guitarist that he respects and get some input from that guy? Well, I’m glad I asked. Here’s why not. I don’t trust artists. My daughter has a fondness for the work of Vincent Van Gogh. She likes the way his art makes her feel, and I must admit the stuff is striking in a visceral kind of way. Lots of impact and so forth. But I’m afraid that what goes on the canvas is really the way he sees things. His job, of course , is to present the viewer with another way to look at things. Emotions get evoked, and the raw work of doing art is accomplished. But Holy Smokes, the stuff he sees doesn’t look ANYTHING like the way I see the same things. And I wouldn’t know where to begin in the Picasso discussion. I’m using painting as an example, but the point is that an artist’s reality is not automatically translatable into practical application. Another way to look at including artists into the design process of their tools is to imagine going into a fine restaurant and insisting that I be shown to the kitchen to confer with the chef on my food’s preparation. I might know what I like to eat, but to presume to know more about cooking than an expert with long experience and training would be foolish. In 1989, I built a series of instruments in which I collaborated closely with the owners in the design process. At that time, I prided myself on the extent of inclusion I welcomed from the client in terms of design. “ I will build whatever you dream up” I would say to prospective customers. Unfortunately, many viewed this as a challenge, resulting in some monumentally unpleasant instruments with my name emblazoned thereon. These instruments still appear occasionally, and always cause me to cringe. I vowed after that series of heavy metal-styled instruments to only build instruments with my proprietary shape and limit customer input to details like neck shape, color and ornamentation. I built fewer instruments, but felt better about the ones I did. But time wore on and I got older, and I began to resent the amount of time and effort that went into an instrument’s construction for purposes other than utility. I felt that I would rather build two plain instruments rather than one heavily ornamented one, and partake of the increased insights gained by focusing on purely functional concerns. Custom finishes and shell decoration impeded my progress as a builder, and so became anathema. Specialized touches suggested by the client were distractions that required inordinate amounts of time to incorporate. I began to see that building instruments could be a laboratory of life (more on that in the future). Of paramount importance was the concept that I could develop a vision of a playing experience and an imaginary sound as the blueprint for an instrument. Long experience as a repairman had provided the required understanding of cause and effect A couple of modest successes at “building to target” resulted in a philosophy of “build what seems right, and attack all problems from an engineering standpoint“. This is the philosophy my robot luthier employs, and which he will demonstrate tomorrow. Ross Teigen 8:44 A.M.