Column: There Are No Dumb Questions

That's the common trope when you're on a field trip in the third grade, or when, 30 years later, you're talking to a financial planner. I try to follow that rule religiously, to the point where folks can't tell whether I'm playing dumb or am just, in fact, kinda slow. I guess the jury is still out.

With that in mind, here's my latest dumb question: How the heck does an acoustic instrument stay together?

Glue, sure. A "dovetail joint," you may answer, or "bolt-on." I get that, in theory. But what really holds it all together? 

These were the thoughts rushing through my head in my garage this week. I promised my son we'd build an instrument together. He didn't want to build an OM or a dreadnought or a Telecaster or anything that could be crafted from a kit or a bunch of Warmouth parts or even visualized in my head. He wanted to be a completely original beast, named after another beast (his cat). A violin-ish, mandolin-ish thing that could be bowed or strummed. Larger than a mandolin, smaller than a guitar. Acoustic. And, as we enter month three of me being stay-at-home teacher dad, I welcome such oddball challenges to get away from the laptop screen and actually do things.

I may be dumb, but I wasn't going to deny my kid his Nuzzle? (The cat, or the instrument.) 

Armed with a box of scrap wood from Allied Lutherie (thank you, Adam), a $40 sander from Harbor Freight, a Dremel with a wood cutting disc and some Titebond (and truly nothing else), we went to work.

My son and I move swiftly so as not to get distracted by iPhones (me checking my work emails) or other dreams (Him: "let's build a fort!") or too much overthinking. Measure once or twice, cut once or twice. That's the motto. The shape of the body came together. That was easy enough. Drilled some f-hole-ish things. Fine. We moved onward.

I was smart enough to know that we wouldn't be bending sides for this go around... this was going to be a strictly straight line, flat top and back affair. Nothing a ruler and a handsaw couldn't do. Sort of like a Gibson Army-Navy mandolin but without the refinement... maybe it's a Gibson Peace Corps. A neck was crudely sanded into shape; a headstock got glued onto that. We'd figure out luxuries like tuners, nuts, bridges and finishes at a later date. Intonation? That's for pros.

But then I hit my roadblock: Attaching the neck to the body. And that's where my dumb question comes into play.

Over the last 15 years, I've spoken to possibly hundreds of luthiers. Some very famous, some just doing their job. I've talked to guitarmakers about D'Angelico versus D'Aquisto, changes to Martin's bracing, tone woods, finish thickness, OMs versus 000s, popsicle braces, PAF pickups and all sorts of minutiae. Even when I'm wildly out of my league, I can talk the talk and eventually write an article about it. 

But building an acoustic instrument from scratch? How does it really go down? You glue the sides to the top and back, you glue the neck block to the sides, but then what? What keeps the whole thing from imploding? What gets glued first, and what last? Is the dovetail doing all the work? Is the top? This was a true head scratcher. 

I suppose I could dive into Stew-Mac's YouTube channel and learn this, and everything else there is to know about instrument design. I could call people, too. But I have to say, for a few days now, it's been nice to not have the answers, to just ponder. To just think about how this engineering we all take for granted sticks together. Makes me think that perhaps I need to start asking some more dumb questions, too, at least once in a while. Why focus on graduate school when Guitar 101 is just as helpful? 

I wasn't even going to share this tidbit but I found myself interviewing Jason Kostal last week about the guitar he just built using wood from Jimmy Carter's property (listen to our podcast here). Unlike this Jason, Jason K. is working at some of the highest levels of lutherie around. He survived a career in the military, he made it through the corporate world, he was a middle-aged apprentice of guitar guru Ervin Somagyi and today he's making a fine living crafting guitars one-at-a-time. His guitars command some of the highest prices of any acoustic lutherie anywhere. 

But, when I asked Jason about if he was stressed working with the oddball Paulownia wood that former president Carter planted two decades ago, he matter-of-factly compared it to working with wood from the Tree (that over-the-top mahogany that continues to be marketed to high-end guitar collectors as the ne-plus-ultra of tonewoods): To paraphrase, he tries to not think when working on it, because if he does he'll make more mistakes. 

Jason Kostal sells guitars for north of $20k. He's been doing it for years. And he still makes mistakes? If he can, I guess any of us can. It was a good reminder to stay humble and calm and to keep asking questions, even if they're dumb. 

I'm not sure where the Nuzzle is headed, but I'll keep you updated. 

As for the FJ? Our new Electric Guitar Annual is finally printing and will mail out later this week to all who pre-ordered it. Our 46th issue is shaping up nicely (finally we talk to Mark O'Connor about his amazing guitar prowess!). And we have a ton of new content on our website in the form of interviews, shop tours and podcasts. The pandemic may have slowed down our video shoots and postponed our next Fretboard Summit to 2021, but - as with that Nuzzle - we'll keep moving forward. And asking questions all the way.