I have been building guitars by hand, one at a time, out of a one-room shop in Asheville, North Carolina, for the last nine years. I make about three a year. They are commissioned, mostly by fingerstyle players, and the typical build takes between seven and ten months from the day I select the top to the day the instrument leaves the shop. Last fall, I started a commission for a player in Brooklyn who wanted a small-body steel-string — an OM-style with a Sitka spruce top, Honduran mahogany back and sides, an ebony fretboard, and a Brazilian rosewood bridge. He had asked for a soft, dark voice with strong fundamentals and clean mids. He had been very specific about not wanting a guitar that sounded like a dreadnought. The commission was paid up front. The deadline was loose. I started in October.
I should say that working alone for nine years on objects that take eight months apiece does something to a person. Most days, the only conversation I had was with the lumberyard guy when I drove down to look at tonewood, and the conversation was almost always about whether something was quartersawn. By last October, my friend Esme, who runs a small violin shop in Greensboro and who is the only other luthier I see in person more than twice a year, had started, very gently, to suggest that I was getting strange. She did not put it that way. She said something like, “When did you last argue with a person who was not on a screen?” I did not have an answer for her that I wanted to say out loud.
It was Esme who told me about Knotchat. She had been using it, she said, two or three evenings a week, for about six months, mostly while she was rough-grading the back plate of whatever was on her bench. She described the appeal in a way I have come to think is accurate, which is that it is the closest thing she had found to having a conversation with a regular customer in a music store that no longer existed. You opened the site. You waited maybe ten seconds. Then somebody, somewhere, who had decided to spend half an hour of their evening doing the same thing you were doing, was on the other end of the connection.
The first call I had on it was with a woman in Wilmington, North Carolina, who turned out to be an ICU nurse coming off a fourteen-hour shift and who wanted, she said, to talk to anyone whose work did not involve a heart monitor. We talked for thirty-five minutes about the tinnitus she had developed from the alarms in her unit, and how it changed which songs she could stand to listen to in the car on her way home. I went back to bracing the top the next morning with her tinnitus still in my head. I did not change anything that day because of it. But I was, for the first time in maybe a year, thinking about how a particular human being would receive the sound of the instrument I was building, rather than about whether the bracing pattern was mathematically defensible.
The conversation that did change something happened five weeks later. I was matched with a man in Melbourne who introduced himself as a live-sound engineer for small venues. He was very tired. He had spent the previous evening doing front-of-house for a touring act whose acoustic guitarist played a beautifully made hand-built instrument that, the engineer said, “had been voiced to within an inch of its life and could not survive any room larger than a kitchen.” He said this without malice. He said it the way a doctor describes a patient whose treatment was technically correct and practically wrong. I asked what specifically he meant. He told me in detail. He described a top that had been so aggressively scalloped that it was sensitive to anything — humidity, room reflection, the player’s body weight on the lower bout — and that, the moment it was asked to project into a room with more than thirty people in it, collapsed into a thin, papery midrange that no amount of EQ could rescue.
I sat with that for the rest of the night. The next morning, I undid two days of work on the top of the Brooklyn commission. I had been planning a scalloped X-bracing pattern, slightly more aggressive than my usual, because the player had asked for the soft dark voice, and aggressive scalloping is the standard answer. The Melbourne engineer’s description was not, technically, news to me. Every luthier knows that you can over-voice a top. But I had not heard anybody describe what over-voicing actually sounds like in a real room with a real audience for at least three or four years, and I had been drifting, without noticing it, toward thinner braces every commission. I switched the bracing to forward-shifted X with light scalloping only on the tone bars and left the main X-braces taller than I would have a year ago. The top came out about thirty grams heavier than my recent average. It is more resilient. It will, in my estimation, project better than any guitar I have built since 2022.
I had perhaps forty more of these calls over the eight months. None of the others changed a building decision. Many were nothing. Several were strange in ways I would have trouble explaining. There was a physics teacher in Eugene, Oregon, who spent fifteen minutes describing the Martin D-18 his grandfather had owned, which had a hairline crack along the bass-side waist that no one had ever been able to figure out, and which the grandfather had refused to have repaired. There was a librarian in Pittsburgh who had inherited a 1950s Gibson L-50 archtop and wanted to know whether it was worth playing or whether she should just hang it on the wall. (I told her to play it.) There was a retired air-traffic controller in Halifax who had taken up classical guitar at sixty-one and wanted, mostly, to talk about how slow his hand was. I did not solve anyone’s problem in any of these conversations. I am not sure that was the point.
The Brooklyn commission left the shop in late May. The player called me, three days later, from somewhere in upstate New York, and said the instrument did exactly what he had asked for and a thing he had not asked for, which was that it stayed itself when he carried it out onto a porch and played it for friends. I knew what he meant. He meant the bracing had held. I had been about to send him a different guitar, eight months earlier, and I would not have known the difference until somebody — at a small venue in Melbourne, probably — described it to me out loud.
I still spend most evenings in the shop. I still talk to no one about quartersawn. But two or three nights a week, when the glue is curing, and there is nothing useful I can do in the next forty minutes, I open the site and wait for someone. About one in fifteen conversations changes something specific about the way I think about the instrument on my bench. The rest, I now believe, are doing something else, which is keeping me from confusing the bracing pattern with the music.
