Dr. Dovetail is a [humorous] advice column for luthiers. It consists of some earnest letters of inquiry that Dr. Dovetail has been helpful with.
Be it noted that no one is named who has objected to their name being used, and other names have been disguised to protect the innocent. There is no subtext, there are no hidden messages, there is no weirdness or backstabbing going on outside of my own silliness. If I really don’t like someone, I certainly don’t make fun of them in public. I go after them in other sneaky ways.
On the other hand, nothing is trickier than writing humor. It’s more difficult than any other kind of writing; it’s impossible to not offend someone, no matter how hard you try. So if this isn’t going to be quite your cup of tea, please don’t read on.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
My boyfriend is a luthier and I’ve been going to lutherie shows with him for some time now. I’ve noticed something odd going on. All the luthiers part their hair on the left. Is this some weird membership or dress code thing? Why do they all do this?
Signed, Puzzled in Topeka
Dear Puzzled:
Their mothers were all right handed.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail,
I am thinking of hiring some luthiers for my guitar factory. I have heard that Leo Buendia is a fine luthier that I should get to work for me? What do you think?
Signed, Anxious
Dear Anxious,
You will be very lucky to get this man to actually work for you and I would waste no time in hiring him.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
My teacher at the Roverto-Benn school gave me a lutherie problem to solve: A famous guitarist is playing a big concert in a renown music hall in City A at 8:00 p.m. City A is 200 miles from City B, and 300 miles from City C. A luthier in City B wants to sell the performer in question a guitar and starts hitchhiking with his guitar to City A, at noon. He averages thirty miles an hour. But, unfortunately, he forgets to take his medication along. A second luthier, in City C, also wants to sell a guitar to this musician. He starts driving his Yugo toward City A at 10:00 a.m., flooring it all the way. He averages 40 miles per hour. Unfortunately, he leaves his concert hall tickets at one of three bars he stops at to ask for directions.
Which luthier gets to the musician first and makes the sale?
Signed: Al Thumbs
Dear Al Thumbs:
Obviously, the luthier at the bar who found the mislaid concert hall tickets.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I’m a part-time luthier and computer hacker and I’ve just hacked into the central C.I.A. database files at Langley to find out what kind of dirt our top national security agency has gathered about the. board of directors of one of our larger lutherie supply organizations. Amazing!!! These people are the most incredible bunch of misfits and ne’er-do-wells I’ve ever read about. They’ve run their own businesses into the ground, cheated on their partners, colluded in price fixing of a vast array of their shoddy merchandise, have wild sex orgies at their annual sinposiums, and take drugs regularly. The most disturbing thing was that none of them seems to have ever been convicted of anything. Do these people have any previous convictions?
Signed, Amazed
Dear Amazed:
Well, yes; they all used to believe that honesty is the best policy.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I have a problem. I have two brothers. One is a luthier. The other was put to death in the electric chair for murder. My mother died in an insane asylum when I was three years old. My two sisters are both prostitutes and my father sells narcotics to high school students. Recently I met a girl from a reformatory where she served time for smothering her illegitimate child to death. I’m really in love with this girl and I want to marry her. My problem is this: if I marry her, how do I tell her about my brother who is the luthier?
Signed, Fred in Omaha
Dear Fred in Omaha:
It’ll sound better if you tell her he’s on the Board of Directors of a nationally prominent luthier’s supply organization with certain connections to a major national security organization.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I understand that individual guitar makers, having no advertising budget, are forced to market their instruments by going to guitar concerts and hawking them backstage, after the shows. Amazingly, some luthiers do very well at this. I’m told that Jason Kostal has been particularly fortunate in this method of marketing. How did he start?
Signed, For The Record
Dear For The Record:
This luthier’s early career in somewhat vague, but we have an unverified report that before he was a guitar maker he made grand pianos. He would drive them to concerts and haul them backstage to show musicians. It was working pretty well for him, but his back eventually gave out and he needed to lift lighter things.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
Supposing you are making a guitar out of Egyptian Yew and Baltic Wormwood that have a density of six point two and five point nine pounds per cubic foot, respectively, at 26 degrees centigrade and 36% humidity. The woods are worked to .130″ during light Santa Ana wind conditions in October, when Young’s Modulus for the topwood is precisely 3. The braces are made out of Thuringian poplar felled at a 7000 foot elevation in December, with a grain count of 13 per centimeter. The air cavity is 17.85 liters and the soundhole is 4.25 inches in diameter. The bridge, made from rare aged Tasmanian Devilwood, weighs 39.7 grams at sea level at 60 millimeters of barometric pressure.
What would you expect the effect on the guitar’s 0,1,1 resonance dipole to be, and also on the impedance midrange transient of the 5000 to 8000 Hertz band (including bass signature roloff), of increasing the scale of this guitar by one centimeter?
Signed, Scientific Guitarmaker
Dear Scientific Guitarmaker:
None at all, unless you put strings on it.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I’ve been reading about the Kasha bracing system, with its radial asymmetrical bracing and impedance damping split bridges. I find this radical approach thought-provoking and intriguing, as it seems to come out of a heretofore unexplored concept of guitar acoustics that has ramifications into both monocoque and structural engineering, as well as exciting implications for entirely new bracing systems. Can you explain some of the dynamics and thinking behind this important contemporary breakthrough in guitar design?
Signed, Fascinated
Dear Fascinated:
No.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
Frank Ford, of A.S.I.A.’s board of directors, is a well known repairman and an avid adherent of hide glues. He recently wrote the definitive History of Glue. Is this book any good?
Signed, Curious about Yellow
Dear Curious:
No one on the staff here could put the book down once they picked it up.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I hear Ervin Somogyi has broken ground as an artist by developing a new art form: woodcarving art inspired by the techniques and materials of lutherie work. Some people say this artwork-for-the-wall is pretty brilliant. What have you heard?
Signed, Aesthetic Woodworker
Dear Aesthetic:
The consensus in the art gallery world and among the doyens of the National Endowment is that at least Somogyi’s wall-art work, if not the man himself, is quite well hung.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I’m impressed with Michael Bashkin’s guitars, as well as his marketing acumen. He has worked hard at placing his instruments in the hands of prominent endorsers and is constantly striving to increase his market profile. What advertising blitz will we, the members of the public, be treated to next?
Signed, MBA plunker
Dear MBA plunker:
This man has really surpassed himself by recently signing an exclusive-use endorsement deal with the prestigious Gallaudet University Guitar Symphony Orchestra. They love the sound of his guitars! Look for their CD soon on the Music Mime label.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I want to buy a guitar, but am concerned that I find one that’s made with New Age Consciousness, with regard for all living things, and with an attitude of respect for the earth. What brand do you recommend?
Signed, Conscientious in Fargo
Dear Conscientious:
I’d try a Taylor. They don’t use laboratory animals to test their products. They use real consumers instead.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
It’s been a long time since anyone’s heard about Larry Robinson, the famous guitar inlay artist. He made it Big Time in the seventies and eighties, but then ran into trouble with controlled substances, gambling debts to the Mob, various nervous breakdowns which led to hospitalizations and electroshock therapy and, of course, some sexual escapades notorious to the point of becoming legendary. What ever happened to him?
Signed, Reminiscing
Dear Reminiscing:
The individual you named has really cut a wide swath through the barrel bottoms of life, there’s no denying. After several attempts at drug rehab, counseling, and ultimately finding religion, his parole officer assures us that Robinson has turned his life around a full 360 degrees.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
Me and my brother-in-law Biff went into partnership to import inexpensive Mexican guitars. Our business plan has been to rent a truck, drive to Mexico, buy a load of cheap guitars, and haul them back across the border to sell. We’ve done this a few times, buying the Mexican guitars for $50 each, driving them across the border, and selling them for $40 each, stateside. Cash flow is terrible, and we’re just scraping by. We’ve been tryin to figure out what to do about this situation. What do you think we oughtta do?
Signed, Mack from El Paso
Dear Mack from El Paso:
You obviously need a bigger truck.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I read that the National Luthier’s Guild. recently completed some rigorous controlled listening tests on guitars made by its members. What were the findings?
Signed, Acoustician in Nashville
Dear Acoustician:
The N.L.G. found that Nothing sounds better than a Manzer guitar. Much better, in fact.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
It’s always interesting to know how various prominent luthiers got their start. After all, it’s not as though one could go to school to learn these skills, until recently, and all the old timers segued into guitar making from something else. One of the most fascinating individuals on the scene is Kasha Michael, who heads a world-famous enterprise that carries his name: how did he get his start in designing and making soundboxes?
Signed, Anecdotally Curious
Dear Anecdotally Curious:
He started out making caskets for dead pets.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
The name C.F. Martin is known the world over. The first initial stands for “Christian”. It seems to me that to have four generations of the most famous guitar making dynasty in the world having this name can’t be an accident in this day and age. Do you know anything about the nexus between Christianity and guitars, which this name suggests? There’s probably a significant history, perhaps even an entire metaphysic, involved. Can you cast any light on this?
Signed, Christian luthier
Dear Christian luthier:
There’s been a lot of speculation about the nexus. You can read all about it in the recently published The Day Christ Died: The Real Story Behind “X” Bracing, which is available through The Luddite’s Mercantile catalogue.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I’ve been following Lewis Santer’s career for some years now, and I’m really impressed with his work. What accounts for his fabulous success as a repairman?
Signed, Motown groupie
Dear Motown groupie:
This man’s work is motivated by an attitude of extremely conscientious, almost compulsive, carefulness and fastidious attention to the smallest details. Why, he’s so meticulous that when he misplaces something, the place he finds that thing is not the last place he looks— just to make certain he didn’t lose it somewhere else! No one else we know of functions at this level.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I’m a psychologist and part-time luthier. In doing archival research for my doctor’s thesis in weird personality disorders, I’ve stumbled onto the fact that Bick Doak, who is associated with the Marlin Guitar Company’s custom shop for many years, once aspired to become an engineer as well as a writer of literature. He wrote at least one book in which he tried to combine engineering, fiction, ethics, marine science, whaling, theology and topology, but it seems to be out of print and I can’t find any references to it tell me what it was about either. Can you help?
Signed, Rosewood Sheepskin Man in Tulsa
Dear Rosewood/Sheepskin:
Mr. Doak has indeed had a varying palette of interests in his past lives. The book you refer to is Mobius Dick, (or What Goes Around Comes Around), which became an obscure but intensely studied cult classic some years ago. It was unfortunately doomed by vicious academic infighting between the engineering and ethics departments of the Universities at which the book was taught, that culminated in the unfortunate and subsequently hushed-up lawsuit between the Vatican and M.I.T. Psychologists have argued that the book, which carries the author’s first name in its title, is autobiographical. Pirated versions can still occasionally be found on the Vatican’s website. Mr. Boak is presently working on a specialty catalogue of inexpensive woods and materials for the guitar maker, titled Cheap Thrills In The Woodshop. We can hardly wait for it to come out.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
Many luthiers have had previous careers in everything from business to photography to the arts, and have been successful in these. Furthermore, when they become guitar makers they often bring specific skills and attitudes from their former occupations with them, and use these to great advantage in mastering the skills of lutherie. I understand that one of the most prominent female luthiers on the scene today used to be a lawyer. What legal skills did she transfer over?
Signed, tax-accountant/guitar maker
Dear tax-accountant:
She actually wasn’t ever a lawyer: she was a dyslexic law student who dropped out when she found out she wouldn’t ever be joining the American Bra Association. But, even so, she did have a bit more trouble at first than the average second-careerist in transferring her legal skills over into lutherie. Due to a semantic misunderstanding, she believed that her guitars’ ease of playability needed to be actionable. She made many like that.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I went to the opening of a fancy new yuppie restaurant in my town and was attended by a most attractive waitress. When she asked me what I wanted I told her that I wanted a quickie from her, and she slapped me. She said that she didn’t do that kind of thing, and what did I want? Brought up short as much by her reflexes as by her looks, I repeated that I really did want a quickie from her. She slapped me again, and said for me to forget that, and what did I really want? I didn’t want to get hit again, so I left. What gives?
Signed, Bubba von Dresdner
Dear Bubba:
It’s pronounced keesh. We could recommend a good finishing school for you.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I’ve been hearing reports about Santer Instruments but I can’t quite get a fix on them. I hear that they have a guitar model called the “Zero Defcets”, which happens to be my name. Can you tell me something about its founder?
Signed, Zero Defcets
Dear Mr. Defcets:
Miroslav Santer is a man who has achieved the American dream. Originally an immigrant into the U.S. from New Jersey, Mr. Defcets started out with nothing. But like many self-made men he has, through sheer hard work and will power, made his way to the very highest pointof the Bell Curve.
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Dear Dr. Dovetail:
I’ve long been fascinated at how guitar making work has attracted aficionados who previously have had other jobs, interests and careers. I’m particularly fascinated at how these creative individuals have brought with them the skills and disciplines of their former work lives — be they training in fine arts, machining, architecture, pattern-making, cabinetwork, commercial design, music or physics — and adapted them to guitar making. Have any luthiers come from the automobile making industry?
Signed, Edsel from Detroit
Dear Edsel from Detroit:
Why yes, there is one prominent luthier, whom we cannot name, who has come from that well-established industry. His current main project is a guitar with listener’s-side air bags. Frankly, it’s generally felt that his instruments really do need them.
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Dr. Dovetail’s column will be continued in the second volume of this set.