Dents

My guitars take about a year to build.  It's a hobby for me so I get to take my time and work on them when I want to.  Over that year or so I tend to spend time wondering about how it is going to look and sound and play.  It's probably a bad habit of mine, because it tends to make me want to hurry and it tends to take me out of the present, the meditative part of creating something, which is part of what makes it so satisfying to make things with my hands.

This one guitar, a J45 style, made of lutz spruce and indian rosewood, was almost done when the body fell to the ground.  I was finish sanding it outside in the yard and had set it on a chair to go inside and get some more sandpaper.  A gust of wind picked it up, dropped it, and rolled it across the gravel of my driveway.  It had cracked in two places and there were dents in the top and the lovely curly maple binding.

Now, ordinarily, I would have been angry with myself.  For some reason that I still don't understand, I was calm this time.  I brought the body into the house, showed it to my wife, Karen, and said that I was going to put it on my workbench for a while and take a break from it.  I was going to give myself a time out and collect my feelings.  Maybe for a few weeks or months.  Karen shared some soothing, sympathetic thoughts.

However, five minutes later, I found myself gently working glue into the cracks. Somehow, the cracks disappeared.  I never did fix the dents.  They were left there on purpose.  Honestly, they don't bother me at all.  I have made previous guitars that were finished with a shiny, mirror-smooth finish.  For this one, I decided on a hand-rubbed, matte finish.  It shows the wood better anyway. And this one, the one with the dents, sounds better than any of my previous guitars. It's my favorite.

So now I have a new practice.  And it doesn't include shiny finishes.