Well, I made it to and survived the Healdsburg Guitar Festival. The couple of weeks leading up to the show didn’t have a lot of hours in the “sleeping” column on the life spreadsheet. It was a little bit hectic. Seems like I remember something similar last show, hmmm… Maybe there’s a pattern there. Anyway the show was fun. I talked to lots of other guitar crazies. The Bossa Blues Buddy attracted a lot of interest and generated a couple orders. I guess there is something to be said for weirdness.

Carl Vast played a more conventional thin bodied 16″ archtop for my demo concert Friday. As always, Carl’s playing was wonderful and the audience was very responsive. He played several tunes amplified through the P.A. using a direct box and also played a tune using a microphone to demo the acoustic sound of the instrument. It sounded quite good even with the thin body and flatwound strings.

This show I displayed the Bossa Blues Buddy, the thin archtop, a chambered electric with a spectacular flamed maple top plate, and a Delta Blues Buddy small bodied steel string. Thanks to all of you who came by to say hi and check out this show’s crop. Double thanks to the folks who placed orders. I’ll be starting a small run of the nylon archtops pretty quick here. If you’re on the fence, go ahead and commit. Your wife really wants you to have one!

Tom Ribbecke’s party on Saturday night was stellar, as usual. Great food, great beverages, An outrageous guitar cake (life size 16″) by Ty and Bobbi Rivera, and the traditional potato cannon bombardment of the back 40. I don’t know if a good time was had by all, but I had a hell of a good time.

Well, I guess I should get back to work. Enjoy yourselves and wear ‘em out!

Joe

Well, actually I knew that all along. I guess I’ve just been suffering from a combination of S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder, not a joke) and terminal manana syndrome (how the hell to you insert tildas over “n’s”). Oh well, anyway things are looking up. the temperature is rising, the sun is starting to be out a lot and “Lizard Man” (moi) is starting to scuttle around at a faster tempo. I’ve got some pics of recent shop activities laying around. As soon as I develop some some “l33t sk1llz” with FTP I’ll get them up to the server and try to noodle out how to make them magically appear in some at least slightly logical spot on the site. Mandolin project is moving forward in fits and starts as I make progress, then hover in approach/avoidance pergatory for a while. That frikken Orville Gibson cat was a real loon with all that scrolly, pointy crap everywhere… Lighting the afterburners now since a hard deadline is about six weeks away. I’ve got a couple of oddball string instruments underway that I’m building “just for the hardass” as my youngest sibling Marky would say. Hopefully they will interest somebody, but you never can tell. They don’t really fit into any sort of typical instrument category. They have strings though, so it’s not a big deal… Somebody will play ‘em.

If any of you guys want to send me one of those multi-billion dollar retention bonuses, my address is on the front page of the website. Cashier’s check or Postal money order only, no PayPal… It’s like $460,000,000 now. Send me $40,000,000 and it’ll be an even half a billion. Yeah…

While I spend most days torturing wood in my little shop of horrors, I spent most of today out in my yard working in my garden. In the sun. In a t-shirt. It’s not everyday in late November that you can do that here in Carmichael but it’s often enough. I was going to just spend the day in the shop but I decided I should take advantage of the beautiful weather. It has to get cold and rainy and miserable at some point and I figured I’d be kicking myself in the butt about it if I didn’t take advantage of the nice day. I cleaned the remains of my summer garden out of two of my beds and tilled them up, added some compost and alfalfa pellets and planted out some onions. I planted Italian Reds, Stockton Yellow, and Solano White. Hopefully they will do well and I can have 100% homegrown salsa next summer. I didn’t grow any onions last year so all my cooking and salsa making was with “store-boughten” onions. What a shame…

I took a few recently built instruments over to my favorite photographer’s (Michelle Shiflet) place yesterday to get some pics for the website. One of them is a thin bodied nylon string archtop for her hubby, Kurt Shiflet. The others are a small bodied steel string and a strat copy that I put together just to use an extra set of pickups I wound awhile back. I hope to post the pictures on the site in a week or so.

Kurt’s guitar is a fairly plain koa back and sides, Englemann spruce top. The neck is a three piece with koa on the outside and flamed purpleheart down the center. I used red dyed maple veneer between the segments. It provides a pretty neat visual. Peghead overlay, fingerboard, bridge and tailpiece are Brazillian rosewood. It has K&K contact pickups in it. It’s kind of weird but kind of cool.

The steel string is based on my Blues Buddy body shape. I guess you could think of it as a “Delta Blues Buddy”, or not… It has indian rosewood back and sides. The top is really old Sitka with a very simple rosette, just a few black white and red veneer lines. It’s x-braced, predictably enough. Finger braces are just what seemed logical to me at the time. The neck is Cuban cedar. It smells good but the dust has a few fairly odd characteristics. The finger board is Madagascar rosewood.The bridge and peghead overlay are Brazilian. The heel cap is a cutoff from the back just in front of where it was cut out of the blank so the grain matches. It looks pretty neat, actually. It sounds good and plays nice. All it needs is  a final buff out and it will be done. Just waiting for Stew -Mac to finally start shipping their new hyper nifty buffing setup.

The St**t is just an exercise in opportunism. I had an extra set of pickups from a recent winding session and figured I’d just do a quick and easy guitar to use them. I just bought a body from a supplier and made a neck. I shot it with a “blonde” finish. That is basically translucent white fading to almost opaque white along the body edge. I used a red tortoise pickguard and parchment white control knobs and pickup covers. It’s a hardtail, mainly ’cause I hates me some whammy bar… It looks groovy, sounds nice, and plays nice. Wanna buy it?

Well,  I think that’s about enough free association for one day. There is some possibility that my blog frequency will increase from its current once a month level. You never can tell. Check back and see! In the mean time, stay warm.

I just got my confirmation that I got accepted for the Healdsburg festival coming up next August. I have shown guitars at every show since the original one back in ‘95 or ‘96. It’s cool! I’m jazzed. I’ll have an example of each type of guitar I build plus a fairly bizarre special project. You’ll have to come to the show to see what it is, ’cause I’m not telling. SO, don’t ask. I said quit asking me!

This part of the blog is for questions. They don’t need to be about guitars. They don’t even need to be coherent questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll make one up!

Time flees, not flies, (fugit like fugitive, ya know). Much more sinister, don’t you think? I got a couple little single-ended 5-ish watt tube amps finished during the week. One is a one-knobber the other has  first stage gain, tone, and output controls. They are both 5755 preamp, 6CM6 output, 5Y3GT rectifier, Hammond transformers. They sound pretty cool, and you can crank ‘em without making your ears bleed. Tommy T likes ‘em. I need to build and cover a couple cabinets for them. I need to decide whether to make them heads or combos first. Decisions, decisions!  What’s a guy to do?

In addition to working on some of my own guitars I’m knocking out a guitar using an AllParts Strat body just for fun. I shot a “blonde” translucent white finish on it that turned out pretty nice. It’s a hardtail with a red tortoise pickguard and a set of pickups that I wound. I’m building out the neck now. It is fairly plain rock maple and will have a madagascar rosewood fretboard. I’m still deciding on the fretwire to use. I’m thinking either the old style narow, low stuff (.084x.039) or the more modern stuff I usually use (.095x.048). I’m sure I’ll put off that decision until the board is radiused and ready to go. I’ll probably use a fairly flat radius, 14″ or 16″. Never did like that 7.25-9″ stuff…

I’m getting ready for big session of plate carving here in the next week or so. I have plates for 3 Blues Buddies, 2 16″ archtops and 3 17″ archtops joined and profiled. After a couple days of meditation to center my life energy I will be firing up the ol’ chainsaw wheel and diggin’ in. It’s a scary tool, but somebody’s got to do it ( and I’m the only one here…). I always try to rough carve a bunch of plates at once because it makes a prodigious mess. Do them all, haul the sweepin’s to the compost heap, shopvac. Voila, livable shop space restored. If I think of it while I’m carving I’ll shoot a couple “Still Life with Chainsaw Wheel” photos.

Well, Michael Lewis and I are back home from Bonneville where we acted as pit crew for Michael’s brother Gary. Gary ran a Suzuki Titan 2 stroke twin in the “Modified/Partially Streamlined/Gas/500cc” class. Speeds were a bit higher than last year (136 mph) but lots of thrashing went on in our pit. Lots of changes to the bike from last year and some ignition/jetting teething problems remain. We met a lot of really cool, nice people up there and had a hecka good time. The wait in line to get a run can be several hours, so you’ve got lots of time to yak. Everybody is really just racing against themselves and the standing record, so there is no “speed secret” mentality in play. I shot a few hundred pictures (I’m not joking, either…) so I’ll sift through and post some of them up here as time permits. There were a couple of electric cars, as well as a street luge powered by a 1200cc Harley-Davidson Sportster engine to nail down the weirdo end of things.

Better get back to work! I’ll get some pics up here soon.

Well, after a long cycle of approach/avoidance I have my web site up. I will be adding and changing things on a regular basis so check back if you find any of it amusing. There are a few missing chunks that are still being written.

While the site is mainly a frontend for my guitar business I also plan to have some of my other activities represented here. My pal and Luthier extraordinaire Michael Lewis and I will be going up to Bonneville soon to indulge our motorhead personas. I’ll have a travelogue of that up here in the next month or so. If you love weird machines there’s no place like Bonneville!