I want to tell you about the single biggest shift in my thirty years of building guitars. It didn’t happen at the bench. It happened in my backyard, pushing a lawn mower.

This was early in my career, at my old workshop here in St. Louis. I was finishing up an archtop that had a magnetic pickup on it, a regular electric guitar pickup, and I was installing it that day.

I’ve always been fascinated by energy, electricity, magnetics, all of it. And while I worked, I kept thinking about how strange this little device was. It just sits there. No moving parts. And somehow, some wires wrapped around a magnet take a perfect electrical picture of the vibrating string. The frequencies, the dynamics, all of it, copied in real time into a completely different form of energy, then handed to the amp.

Something was stirring while I thought about that. I wasn’t fully conscious of it yet. But I could feel something deeper moving underneath.

I finished work for the day and went out to mow the lawn. It was August in Missouri, which if you’ve never experienced it is its own kind of torture. Over a hundred degrees, maximum humidity, maximum mosquitoes.

There was a window in my shop you could see from part of the yard, and I’d left the guitar on the bench. I’m pushing the mower, mind drifting, and then my eye catches the guitar through that window. The pickup sitting there on that archtop.

And right as I see it, the thought lands:

If the pickup is converting the string’s vibration into electricity, then what we’re really dealing with here is just energy.

It’s not the string being loud. It’s the energy loaded into the string. The string is just carrying it, raw energy, waiting to be directed.

I stood there in the heat with the mower running, and the whole instrument snapped into focus. Tune a guitar to pitch and you’ve charged the battery: 160 pounds of tension, loaded and held. Pluck a string and you flip the switch, releasing a pulse of energy for the instrument to shape.

I couldn’t unsee it. The guitar isn’t really a wooden box. It’s an energy processing system. Every piece of it is either guiding energy, storing it, releasing it, or leaking it. And the builder decides which.

The Guitar as an Energy System

Think about what an acoustic guitar actually does. It takes a vibrating string and translates it into sound the room can hear, the same way the pickup translates it into electricity. But it doesn’t translate it neutrally. The woods you choose, the thicknesses, the graduations, every subtle decision you make at the bench shapes how that energy comes through. You’re programming the translation before a single string is ever plucked.

It’s like the difference between a home stereo and a studio monitor. One adds its own built-in flavor to everything that passes through it. The other tries to tell you the truth. Neither is wrong. But the designer chose, on purpose, what that box would do to the signal.

Most of us were never taught to see the guitar this way. We were taught parts. A top, some braces, a neck, a bridge. So we collect tips about the parts, and the tips contradict each other, and we’re left guessing about which expert to believe.

But when you see the instrument as one energy system, the parts stop being separate arguments. Every choice becomes a question with an actual answer: what does this do to the energy?

Listen Inside the Note

Here’s a small thing you can try this week. Pick up a guitar, any guitar, and pluck one open string. Don’t just hear the pitch. Listen inside the note. The attack when your finger releases. The fundamental ringing underneath. The overtones shimmering above it. The way some of it fades fast and some of it lingers.

What you’re hearing is energy revealing itself, processed by every component of that instrument on its way to your ear. Once you start listening that way, you never hear a guitar quite the same again.

That August day set me on a path I’ve been walking ever since, and it took years to fully take shape. Over the next few weeks I want to teach you some of what it became, piece by piece. Where the energy goes. Where it gets stuck. And what that means for the guitars you’re building.

The wonder of it still gets me, all these years later. Some wires wrapped around a magnet, and a whole new way of seeing the guitar.

Sapere Aude · Creare Aude

Tom