![]() I’m doing the greenest tech in high-end guitars. If a person buys one and it needs a neck reset a year later, we’ll reset the neck and send it back. Young musicians who don’t want something shiny and new from Guitar Center like them, and pro musicians love that these guitars come with a lifetime warranty for structural and playability issues. The wood in these Harmony guitars is extremely stable-they have very few problems with changes in environment, temperature, and humidity-and over the last 50 years, the necks have done all the warping and twisting they’re going to do once you straighten them out and put them back on, you won’t really ever have issues with them. ![]() ![]() The remanufactures look cool and sound cool they don’t look like everyone else’s instruments, and if something happens to them on the road, you can get another one pretty easily. You can get a guitar with 80-year-old wood that has the mojo, the patina, the sound-everything that excites you about picking up a ’30s Martin or Gibson-for a fraction of the price. When you’re done with those mahogany Figure 8s with spruce tops, they’re easily as good as a 1934 000-18 or an OM-18, and I sell them for $2,000. Many of these rebuilt instruments, especially the ones made between the late ’30s and early ’50s, sound as good as or better than Martins that cost $30,000 to $40,000. Their tone is on par with the best of the Larson Brothers guitars. At first, graduates did basic repairs and a few rebuilds here and there, but then I started looking at the rebuilds as something special. Once they reach a certain skill level, the graduates start working on customers’ instruments. That builds up my inventory so I don’t have to be constantly looking on eBay.ĭo your students work in the shop when they’re done? I do a six-for-one trade that works well for musicians who don’t have a lot of money: They bring in six of these cheap old guitars, which they can find for under $50, and I rebuild the nicest one for them in exchange for the other five. By the time my students build their first acoustic guitar, the only things they haven’t mastered are bending the sides and carving the neck. After you’ve gone through my program and had a good year’s worth of experience, you can pop open a Martin or a Gibson without any problems and put it back together. Most schools make neck resetting some sort of mythical procedure, but we get right into refitting dovetails on day one. By the time they get through the course, they’ve done 15–20 neck resets, 15–20 refrets, and 15–20 bridges and saddles. I take two 3/4-size Stellas, show them how to do something on one guitar, and have them do it on the other. It’s a six-month, all-day class, three days a week required, but most guys come in all five days. What’s the curriculum at your luthier academy? The guitar sounded great when it was done, and I started doing more of them. Once we took it apart, I decided to put in the bracing I used on our custom guitars. I knew that if we rebuilt one, he’d be doing a neck reset, a planing refret, a nut, making a bridge and a saddle, figuring the neck-angle geometry and the intonation-in the context of one guitar, we’d cover 80 percent of the repairs he’d need to know. In the early 2000s, when my son decided he wanted to learn guitar work, I had several Harmonys in various states of disrepair. What inspired you to remanufacture old guitars? Most of his energy, however, goes toward remanufacturing old guitars, especially Harmonys and Kays-in a conversion process centered on replacing ladder-style bracing with his proprietary scalloped X-bracing-and running a luthier academy where updating vintage instruments is an essential part of the curriculum. These days, he’s happily ensconced in Athens, Georgia, where he plays, records, and builds custom guitars. After dropping out of college in 1974 to join Mossman Guitars in Winfield, Kansas, he did a brief stint at a repair shop in Kansas City, worked at Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, owned Mossman Guitars in Dallas, and gained widespread renown in Denver. Scott Baxendale has had a helluva peripatetic guitar-repair career. This article is free to read, but it isn't free to produce! Make a pledge to support the site (and get special perks in return.) LEARN MORE.įrom the October 2018 issue of Acoustic Guitar | BY E.E. BRADMAN
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