One day in 2013, my printer made a sound and flashed an orange light to let me know it had finally finished. It had been printing for what seemed like forever. I picked up the big stack of pages, still warm, and held it in my hands. After countless hours of trying to distill the most important parts of building my best guitars into the simplest, most helpful form, I was holding the final manuscript of my book for the first time.

I still remember looking down at the first page.

The title was printed in big letters, and it wasn’t The Art of Lutherie.

It was The Art of Listening.

That was the title that I felt expressed the fundamental note of my book and my approach to lutherie. My publisher said no, because they didn’t think people would understand what listening had to do with building guitars. They were probably right. We settled on naming it after my website, theartoflutherie.com, which I’d launched the year before, in 2012.

To this day, listening is the core of my daily practice of building guitars and everything else I do. When I’m building a guitar, I’m not just doing what it says on the blueprint, even if I drew the blueprint. I’m listening to the wood, trying to understand how to help it reach its full potential and unleash its unique voice.

That’s exactly what I try to do for the members of Luthier’s EDGE, and what I want to do here in the newsletter, too. Before I can really help someone, I need to listen and understand where they are, what they’re trying to do, and what’s getting in their way.

We’re all on different paths, and we get stuck in different places. So I’d like to ask you a simple question…

What are you getting stuck on?

It could be anything: a technique that isn’t working, a decision you can’t make, not having the time or the space, not knowing where to start, or something small, like the one I’ll tell you about below.

Your replies will help me shape what I’ll be writing about and sharing here for the next few weeks.

So just click here and tell me about it.

But before you do, I’ll go first. Here’s something I’ve been stuck on for years:

My go-bar deck.

Here’s where I’m at. Whenever I want to brace a top, I have to get out and set up my old go-bar deck. If you’ve never used one, it’s basically a clamping system that uses flexible rods to hold braces in place while the glue dries.

The traditional design works great for a lot of reasons, but in my little shop, I’m always having to move things around to set it up. And those big threaded rods around the edges always seem to be right where I want to work. I’ve bumped my head on them more times than I can count, and somehow there’s always one in the way when I’m trying to clean up glue along a brace with my chisel.

So a few years ago, I started thinking about a new design that would work better in my shop and be more fun to use. And if I could stop hitting my head on it, that would be nice, too. 🙂

In my mind, I’ve been calling it the “Ultimate” go-bar deck.

I started the process of designing and building it the right way. The first and most important thing I was concerned about was the downforce of the rods, so I bought a bunch of different go-bar materials, diameters and sizes, tested each one, measured the force it put out, paid attention to how it felt to use, and narrowed it down to what I thought was optimal for what I’m trying to build.

Then I turned around and got stuck on the next decision, which is really silly, because it’s mostly an aesthetic one: I wanted to use cast iron pipe for the frame because I thought it looked cool in my workshop. But I could never decide on which fitting to use and what the resulting dimensions would be. I hit a spot where I couldn’t reason or research or theorize my way to the design.

And then, the years flew by…

Every time I want to brace a steel-string or nylon-string guitar, I get the old deck out, put it back together, and say, “just one more time.” Then I take it apart again, telling myself that this time, I really am going to throw it away, because by the time I need it again I’ll have already built my new one.

I did the right thing when I ordered and tested the go-bar rods. The second time, with the cast iron pipe fittings, I just got stuck and forgot to do what I already knew to do: put my hands on the parts and listen to what they tell me, rather than trying to figure it all out in theory.

And when I say listening, I’m not just talking about what we hear.

I’m talking about what we sense through our hands, and even those subtle things we begin to recognize intuitively, before we can quite put them into words.

It’s the same with a guitar. I could calculate how much wood needs to come off a brace, and that gives me a starting point. But the rest comes from learning to listen and feel the wood. I trim a little, tap the top again, and listen.

You can’t theorize your way to those small decisions. That’s the art of lutherie in action, and I think it’s part of what makes your work your work.

I’ve been building guitars since 1997, and I still catch myself getting stuck on the simplest things. Even when I know better, I sometimes forget to stop and listen. It’s something I have to keep practicing, and I suspect I always will.

So this week, I’m going to take my own advice. I’m going to get a few of those pipe fittings in my hands and see what works. And instead of trying to guess what would be most helpful to write about next, I’m going to ask you.

What are you getting stuck on?

It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Mine wasn’t. Tell me here.

Sapere Aude · Creare Aude

Tom

P.S. I’ll read every reply you send, and next Saturday we’ll start working through the things you’re getting stuck on, right here in the letter.