EDITOR'S NOTE: Rick's good friend Dennis Yates interviewed him for eLUTHERIE.org. This is part I of II. DY: What drove you to start making your own guitars?
Rick Toone: Simple frustration.
I’ve fought with the guitar my entire musical life — almost 30 years now. I want to express myself, lose myself in the music, but at some point the instrument always intrudes on my physical consciousness and knocks me out of right brain, into the present moment.
Awkward balance, like having to support a neck that wants to point toward the floor. Constantly having to reposition the instrument to reach all fretting positions. Crouching or hunching around the body to see and hear what I’m doing. A sharp edge that digs into my right forearm. The knob or switch I whack when strumming. Sloppy or uncomfortable tuning systems.
Honestly, it’s as if these machines were designed to prevent us from creating art.
My first guitar was a plywood Les Paul clone I bought from my cousin in 1980 for $75. The best thing I can say about the guitar is it was so awful I was fearless about making modifications. Disassembled and reassembled every component to learn how it worked then tried to make it better.
I was a freshman in high school and late to the game in terms of learning to be a musician, but got totally hooked on wanting to improve the instrument. I kept thinking to myself: “I can do better than this.”
Throughout high school and college I spent every available moment building instruments for myself or my friends. A few of them are still floating around today.
Excellent question. Makes me realize I’m Don Quixote — on a mission to systematically improve the guitar until I finally create one I like. An instrument that is exquisitely expressive yet physically imperceptible. Don’t know what happens at that point. Fame? Fortune? Death? Yikes!
DY: What do you view as the biggest limitations of the current conventional wisdom in mainstream guitar design?
Rick Toone: Tradition. One size fits all.
Music is art, correct?
I’ve always thought the purpose of art is to express our unique life experience. The unrepeatable combination of genetics, intelligence and happenstance we each sustain as individuals. Dennis, for example, has survived three combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq — which is something I will never endure. In contrast, I have had years of fine art exploration and solitary shop concentration. Even with common interests plus three decades of friendship the art we each produce should be necessarily different.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Today is Memorial Day in the US. Thank you for your lifetime of service to our country.
I really like Ayn Rand’s
definition of art: “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” Philosophical affirmation art is inescapably autobiographical.
What we create is the sum of our experience.
If you think about it, most contemporary popular music is really about emulation. Imitation. The opposite of individuality. When an archetype emerges — an iconic player — a line instantly forms as hundreds of thousands of musicians attempt to mimic him. Or her.
We analyze, sort and classify music into
genres and sub-genres each of which requires adherence to a particular formula, until songs on the radio become interchangeable sound units between commercials. Plug and play. Almost like mechanical components in an assembly line.
I think we’re facing the same issues with guitar design.
Music is particularly beautiful because it bypasses the filter of language, entering our subconscious through emotion. It is a howl in the darkness, the scrape of teeth on bone, wind in the leaves. Across time, space and culture it grabs us by the instinct.
All other arts we can describe using words, but music we can’t. Words are often barriers between us and direct experience — little abstract symbols — therefore subject to cultural interpretation and fluency issues.
From my perspective, the least desirable outcome an artist would seek is a mass produced sonic tool. Because the degree of separation from other players is just that...one degree. Think of the competitive advantage inherent when an instrument — the direct physical embodiment of expressive touch — is unlike any other in the world.
Now imagine needing a prosthesis leg — 5’2” 120 lb woman vs. 6’3” 230 lb man.
One size fits all?
Same with guitars?
DY: You and your father are historians of a sort. How has your knowledge of 18th and 19th century woodworking influenced your design and construction?
Rick Toone: I was fortunate Dad recognized and encouraged my interest in woodworking early. He gave me access to the bandsaw and my own set of chisels by second or third grade. And he let me make mistakes. Working alone and intently following a pencil line I nearly cut off the tip of my thumb with the Delta. Painful but valuable experience.
The misshapen left thumbnail I have to this day reminds me to never, ever take my eyes off the blade.
He built his own highly innovative
APBA outboard B-class runabouts until I was seven and he was injured by a propeller in a racing accident. So I absorbed the excitement and direct connection between designing and creating a complex mechanical device, then using it for utility or pleasure.
When he instead
applied his skills to recreating technology from early American history — including a Pennsylvania “Kentucky” Long Rifle — I became fascinated by gunsmithing. The beautiful 1773 Lancaster County style J.P. Beck he duplicated required such an intricate assembly of parts and hand skills: blacksmithing, engraving, inlay, incise and relief carving. Great lessons for a kid watching the process step-by-step.
Poring over George Shumway’s
Rifles of Colonial America lent me an appreciation for the individuality and fine art expressed by these artisans, 250 years ago.
Ten years ago I had an opportunity to act in Mel Gibson’s
The Patriot where I met
contemporary master gunsmith Larry House, who replicated all of Gibson’s historical firearms for the film. One of the other actors was carrying a Herschel House rifle and allowed me to handle the piece. Absolutely stunning work. Lightweight, balanced, comfortable. For me, a pivotal moment to kinesthetically merge with a tool.
What is important to understand about design and construction techniques from the 18th century and (early) 19th century is craftsmen had limited access to adhesives or fasteners. To compensate, forces needed to be neutralized within the design.
If we consider
dovetail joints on a piece of furniture, for example, use and entropy actually cause the joints to become more solid and lock together. Well maintained flintlock rifles from this golden age will still operate perfectly today, despite the explosive mechanical forces necessarily present in launching a projectile.
Modern musical instruments have a long way to go to catch up to these firearms of the past.
I’ve never built a rifle. My path is lutherie.
But I increasingly strive to emulate the lessons I’ve learned from these historical studies. Using only knowledge and muscle a single individual transformed raw materials into an elegantly functioning tool. No electricity. No CAD. No standardization. No mass production. Just skill and reputation.
It was a remarkable time period of pre-industrial artisanship.
DY: What — or who — are your biggest influences in the design of your instruments? Or do you simply do what you do by "feel" or do that which simply makes sense to you?
But I tend to be more organic in my design approach. There is a spiritual aspect to my connection with the wood. I live not far from New Hope, Pennsylvania, where
George Nakashima worked, and I visited his shop to observe work in progress several times before he died in 1990. I wish I’d met him in person.
I love how he featured what would usually be considered a flaw in the material: split, void, knot. With the design held together by physics. His book
The Soul of a Tree is a fine introduction to his thinking.
Starfish was built in 1993 and indicates Nakashima's influence on my work.
Just after college I seriously considered architecture as a profession. My friend Paul and I went on the quintessential Great American Road Trip to check out architecture schools and tour notable examples including Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Falling Water. I actually preferred the design of the visitor center more, ironically, and it was in the book store I discovered Paul Jacques Grillo’s wonderful book
Form, Function & Design.
That was a fun trip. We spent a lot of time applying lessons from Grillo and critiquing design, including the abysmal (name deleted) car we drove that caught fire and nearly killed us, hours from anywhere in the wilds of western Utah. Poor design — mechanical, political, or economic — can wreak havoc.
Another great question, really.
If there is an overarching theme to my design aesthetic, it would include:
• Form is determined by function
• Less is more
• Forces in opposition
• Design for human use
This last principle is particularly important because most items manufactured by industrialized societies are designed for machines. Ease of assembly. Sub-components fastened to structures. The intent seems to be, “How can I make it easy to assemble this widgit?” rather than, “Here’s a human need...how can I create a tool that functions so perfectly it becomes invisible to the body?”
This paradigm shift intrigues me more and more.
DY: What materials are your favorites to work with?
Rick Toone: Native hard and soft woods from North America. I love using local species. For one thing, this is a much more ecologically and financially sustainable approach. Cherry, walnut, maple, cedar, pine, oak, hickory, locust, elm, beech, holly, ash and birch all grow (literally) in my back yard. I could build instruments my entire life, and the impact it would have on my local ecosystem would be almost unmeasurable.
I don’t subscribe to the theory that endangered tropical species are necessary to create tonally superior instruments. Instead, think about it as a design challenge. I have a material with a resonant frequency of X and structural integrity of Y with a mass of Z — okay, how to design a solution that maximizes the potential of those properties?
Why not build a guitar neck out of ash or hickory?
Those two woods formed tool handles — again, in the 18th and 19th century. Early American woodworkers, including the pre-european tribes who inhabited this region, always used intelligence combined with the natural properties of easily obtained indigenous materials to achieve their design objectives.
One exception seems to be ebony. I have an addiction to ebony as a fretboard material. I love the way it looks and feels and sounds. But ebony is also obtained from Africa, where industrial demand for raw materials is creating an ecological and humanitarian disaster.
We are creating a cycle that will haunt us for generations.
By “we” I primarily mean Europe, China, and the US. Industrial producers. Third world countries are enticed by our money to trade their local resources. But the extraction takes place in an ecologically brutal manner, or exploits loopholes in local land “ownership” traditions. Ecosystems collapse.
Indigenous humans who lived in sustainable balance with these resources for hundreds of generations can no longer survive. So they are forced to relocate. They migrate to urban areas, putting additional pressure on surrounding areas to support swelling population. Or they remain impoverished, and angry, often easy recruits for radical religious factions who then want to target us.
You can see this
pattern at work with desperate immigrants to Europe from Africa. Or into the US from Mexico and South America. Obviously, this needs to change.
It’s a primate trait, but we tend to foul our own nest. Evolutionarily, we were designed to migrate in sync with resource cycles, but the planet has become too small in relation to our numbers. That was a long-winded explanation for why I am going to devise an alternative fretboard solution.
I am undergoing a similar revaluation with metals. Trending away from harmful platings and chemicals and toward natural finishes. Smart use of materials rendering those extra steps unnecessary. The resulting effect is also more beautiful and organic.
Part I of II.