Strings & Sweat

A guitar can be much more than a block of wood and six strings. B.B. King famously named his trademark Gibson — and all subsequent guitars — Lucille. Eric Clapton named his Fender Stratocaster Blackie, while Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Strat was known as Number One.

Jeff Bush doesn’t have a name for the butterscotch-blonde acoustic hanging on the wall of his shop, Blue Guitar Music Company, but if he did, it would be Blood, Sweat and Tears.

Bush is a luthier. He started building and repairing stringed instruments in the early 1970s, when he was hired at a local music store. Bush built his first guitar in 1978. It was an acoustic and the result of many failed efforts. Bush said he didn’t really know what he was doing, so building that first guitar was a process of trial and error.

“You need to know when to say ‘This isn’t going to be right’ and start over,” he said.

Bush doesn’t know how many guitars he’s built since then — he stopped counting at 35 — but he’s sold dozens of both electric and acoustic guitars.

For serious musicians, a good luthier is invaluable. Dennis Schubert of Columbia has been playing guitar, mandolin and dobro in bluegrass bands for about 40 years, and for the last 20 or so, he has been taking his instruments to Bush. A good adjustment will last for years, Schubert said, but when a musician owns several instruments, there’s always something in need of repair. Over the years, Bush has done everything from making new bridges to putting in pickups to grafting new necks for Schubert’s instruments. When Bush gets an instrument from a musician, Schubert said, he is able figure out exactly what needs to be done to make it playable again.

“I can bring something in and say ‘fix it’ and walk away, and he’ll just know (what to do),” Schubert said.

Today, information on instrument repair is easily available in books and Internet tutorials. But when Bush was starting out, there was less formal instruction. Information was freely passed from one luthier to another, which was a much better way of learning, said Bush.

“It’s like a book trying to teach you to paint,” he said. “You’re a better painter if you learn to paint with more experienced painters. The only successful book on painting is a paint-by-number, and they don’t make a guitar-by-number.”

Like a good auto mechanic, a good luthier is often found through the word of mouth, said Howard Marshall, who has been playing the violin for 35 years.

Marshall entrusts his violins to Allen Wyatt, who, with his son Matt, owns Wyatt Fiddle Shop in Independence. The Wyatts, like Marshall, come from a long line of fiddlers, although Allen Wyatt is the first luthier in four generations.

A few years ago, Marshall bought an old violin in Mexico, Mo. It wasn’t playable, he said, but something about it spoke to him. Like many old violins, this one was a hodgepodge of pieces salvaged from other instruments. The front came from an 18th century Italian violin. The back dated to around 1850, while the neck was relatively new.

“I knew it had a story to tell,” Marshall recalled. “Only a really good luthier could bring it out.”

Wyatt carved a new bridge for the instrument and added a new fingerboard. Although there are still parts that could have been tweaked to perfection, Marshall said he was too excited to hear what it sounded like to let Wyatt work on it any longer.

Violins are more difficult to maintain than other instruments. With a guitar, the owner must change the strings once in a while, polish it and perhaps adjust the neck or replace a part on an older instrument. Generally speaking, guitars are more solidly built than fiddles.

Fiddles are little more than a sound box held together with points of stress, said Marshall. If one of these points fails, the whole thing falls apart. For instance, the bridge, which is located at the bottom of the body, holds the strings so they are at the correct height along the fingerboard. While the bridge on a guitar is glued directly onto the body, the bridge on a violin is held in place with string tension. If a fiddler wants to change the strings, he or she must do so one string at a time or the bridge will fall over. Marshall said that only a good luthier is able to place it in just the right spot.

Wyatt started studying luthier work in the mid ’90s. He said he picked the brains of several good luthiers in the St. Louis area for information about the craft. He built his first violin in 1995, but like Bush, he found that he spends more time repairing instruments than he does building them. To date, he’s only built 10 violins.

“What I found over time,” he said, “is once you become a repairman, you really spend a lot of time doing that. It’s hard to do both.”

About 10 years ago, Wyatt started keeping records on the instruments he works on. So far, he’s up to 630, he said. In the past year alone, Wyatt has worked on 170 instruments, which include guitars, upright basses, mandolins and other acoustic instruments.

However, Wyatt mostly specializes in vintage fiddles, which can be anywhere between 50 to 200 years old. He said many are German or Italian relics, often buried and forgotten in trunks and attics. He enjoys finding these instruments, buying them, fixing them and selling them.

Other times, people will bring in an instrument that’s been in their families for 150 years, and Wyatt will gladly spend a week or so fixing it.

At any given time, there will be between five and 10 instruments needing repairs at the shop. Wyatt said that if it’s possible, he will take an early retirement next year from his job with the Social Security Administration so he can start building violins again and still keep up with repair work.

“I try to do quality work,” said Wyatt. “That entails learning as much as I can. I’ve probably got about every book out there. As I’m working on somebody’s instrument and I find something I didn’t notice when we first started, I go ahead (and fix it). There’s not a lot of money in it, but a lot of satisfaction in fixing something that wouldn’t be playable.”

For many luthiers, this satisfaction is enough to make what started out as a hobby into a full-blown occupation.

As Bush continued working on guitar repair and restoration, he learned how to improve the guitars he built. He learned how guitars change as they age: the parts that weaken, crack and break; the way string tension warps the neck; how parts can go out of relation to the rest of the instrument.

Using this knowledge, Bush was able to build guitars that would hopefully be more resistant to the wear and tear that comes with being a functional piece. However, he might intentionally age a guitar to make it more appealing to a musician. For instance, many guitarists don’t like the crisp feeling of a new neck, so Bush rounds the edges to give it the feeling of a 30-year-old instrument.

Repair and restoration doesn’t leave much time for building, however. Bush is building only his fourth guitar since he opened Blue Guitar Music Company. He loves building but acknowledges that repair is the real “bread and butter” of his business.

Bush hopes to devote more time to building guitars in the future. But while Blue Guitar Music Company is growing, moving a line of instruments is a challenge. Right now, Bush only sells a few guitars each year, and building is truly a time-consuming practice.

When Bush builds, he builds electric guitars. He calls his electric line U.S. Guitar Works. These guitars aren’t made from scratch. Instead, he buys bodies and necks from the best manufacturers he can find, bolts them together and uses building techniques to add to the value.

The bodies, for instance, come unfinished. Bush smoothes out the edges, adds a finish and puts a binding around the top. The whole process of building an electric guitar takes between 30 and 40 hours.

Acoustic guitars are even more time-consuming and difficult to build. Wood is an unpredictable medium. It snaps, cracks and splinters. Though he pieces together previously manufactured parts to build electric guitars, Bush’s acoustics are designed and carved out completely by himself. Bush builds his acoustics “log up,” meaning he starts with a thick piece of wood, which must be thinned to less than a tenth of an inch. To make the curved sides of an acoustic, the wood must be heated and bent.

Because his acoustics are a much more personal creation than his electrics, he named his acoustic line Bush Guitars, and each carries a letter “B” on the headstock.

Bush isn’t certain why a musician would prefer a custom-built guitar over a big-name manufactured instrument. He speculates, however, that over the years, musicians come in contact with all the different variations. Favorite features may not come together on one guitar, but by collaborating with a luthier, a guitarist can realize his or her dream instrument.

And, he said, in a world of homogenous, mass-produced products, custom-built instruments stand out. They allow for uniqueness. As long as Bush’s work inspires a musician to play more and play better, then he considers himself successful.