by Michael Shea.
Continued from page one »
How would somebody that wants to get into inlay go about it nowadays? With the use of CNC machines is there still a place for handwork?
CE: The thing with the CNC is it’s only good if you’re going to do multiples of a design. If you’re just going to do one or two, it’s way too much programming. It will probably never replace handwork on one-off instruments. I mean it’s just not feasible or affordable, at least at this point, although there’re new techniques in the raw development stages that may change even that in the next few years! There are guys that do CNC work, like if you have a simple logo, and you want fifteen or twenty of them, they’ll actually program it up and just do a really small run.
So a lot of small instrument shops can work with these CNC specialty shops. If you’re really doing elaborate, full-on inlay on a real high end instrument and it’s the only one you’re going to make, or you’re only going to make two of them, you’re just better off doing it by hand and you need the skills to do it. So if a guy’s getting into inlay now, it isn’t like it was twenty years ago. There’s actually some books like Grit’s book, where he gets into most of his techniques.
Larry Robinson has not only “The Art of Inlay”, but he’s got a set of three videos, beginning, intermediate, and advanced, where he really parses out minute detail in his technique of approaching an inlay job, from a customers sketch on a napkin to the final thing. And so that stuff’s available. And that wasn’t available years ago, I mean when I got into it nobody told me anything, you just had to make up your own techniques. But now you’ve got a huge available data-base, not just about inlay but on building instruments in general, so there’s no reason really to make a bad instrument even on your first try if you’re really conscientious about taking instruction.
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Craig Lavin’s “Sitting Bear”. Photo courtesy of Craig Lavin. |
And it’s almost the same with inlay, there’s no reason to do bad inlay even from the start because there’s way too much information to be easily found; and the tools, there are tools available now that weren’t available a couple of decades ago, from suppliers like Luthier’s Mercantile [L.M.I.] and Stew-Mac [Steward-MacDonald]. We’re talking about routing attachments, inlay patterns, special cutting bits, blade wax, engraving tools, glues and fillers, and the kind of saws and the quality of the blades. The main thing for a beginner is just jumping in and doing a piece, and getting used to it.
When doing a neck, do you free form the cuts?
CE: No, although I can do that. I’ve got a banjo here where I did a free form inlay. I did a pearl truss rod cover which is bell shaped like Gibson, but then I just free-formed an abalone inlay in it without drawing it out. I just started cutting. That’s something that really hasn’t been explored too much, there’s not many guys around that kind of just jam with shell like that, and just start cutting and see what happens. It’s almost like the material’s too precious to risk doing that with. Personally, if I was doing metal engraving I’d be doing free form engraving just kind of like an artist does.
Once you’ve got the classical techniques, do something that’s not classical, just turn yourself loose on a piece of metal. Same thing with shell. You can do that. Just start cutting and see what happens. There’s not a big market for that kind of stuff and I don’t think too many guys have tried it, but it can be done. Usually you would draw a pattern out and on a fretted instrument you either want to fit stuff in between the frets, like at your marker positions, or if you’re going across the frets with a vine or something that is just continuous up the fingerboard, a lot of time you’ll work in a leaf or a flower at the frets that would normally carry markers: one, three, five, seven, ten, twelve, all that. And so there’s some clue, even on a continuous inlay, of where those key fret positions are.
So it really has to be planned out pretty close you know? And you don’t want fret wire cutting across a really critical junction in your inlay, like just taking out some detail you should have had. It’s a real narrow canvas, but most guys spend the time to really plan it out, and then cut it the way they designed it.
When routing out the fret board and then cutting the inlay material, are the two an exact match or can you cut the inlay material a little smaller?
CE: Well you can, in a lot of the real old instruments, I mean several hundred years old, if you look at the inlay on a lute top or the old guitar tops, they just cut a big wide channel, maybe half and inch wide, and then they’d take all these little cut out pieces of shell and just glue them in there, and then fill up all the space around them with a black filler and sand it off, and its like all “duck butter”.
So the modern guys, where they’re actually trying to route a cavity to fit an already cut inlay, you cut the inlay first, and they you glue it on top of the wood real lightly, then you scribe a mark around it and pop the inlay off and now you cut out where you marked. And generally you try to cut pretty close to the line. It’s like a kid with a crayon, you stay in the line, right?
But because things were done so sloppy in the past, people didn’t sweat having some filler around an inlay. But as things got more competitive, especially with the hand builders market, one of the things you could point out to a customer is “I’ve got less filler around the inlay.” And it’s not just an aesthetic thing, as the type of filler that was being used would often swell up if it got damp and it would shrink as it dried out, and so you’d actually have these rough spots if that filler swelled up around the inlay, you know. Now we’ve got fillers that don’t swell up, but you can always brag about doing really closely fit inlay, especially with the CNC stuff which is perfect. And when I was building, my personal drive was always to do as fine a work as possible.
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PRS Double-neck Dragon. Photo courtesy of PRS Guitars. |
You know, like not have any wobbles in the line, not have filler around it. And I spent a lot of time getting stuff touched up to where it was a perfect drop-in fit, within a few thousandths. And it takes a lot of skill. So it was kind of a builders thing that I could always tell a customer “Go in a music store or go to another guy’s shop, and look at the inlay, and look for file marks on the end grain on the heel shaping, and look at how they dress the fret ends, and get the neck under a florescent light and see if there’s any ripples in the gleam running up and down the lacquer finish, and look at the filler around the inlay.” It’s the signs that distinguish fine work from average work. So the drive was always to get things cut as close as possible in that inlay cavity, and that’s become the modern norm rather than the exception.
If someone were going to buy an inlaid guitar, how would they be able to differentiate a great job from a mediocre job? Some of the things you just covered answered that. Anything else?
CE: Yeah, there’s a number of things. The hardest shape to cut by hand or with a CNC is a circle. Because you can never just get into a groove and continue cutting the way you’re going. You’re constantly changing direction. It takes the most skill to cut a curve and the least skill to cut a straight line. So, what you do when you’re looking at inlays is you look at the curves and if there’s any little flat spots or unevenness, that’s not good. If done by a guy who’s really good it will look perfectly smooth; even if he’s got to go back and file it up, a good inlayist will do real smooth, continuous curves. It won’t have any little jerks or kinks or bumps in them, and so that’s one thing I always look at.
Another thing you look at is if it’s really centered on the neck, and on a five-string banjo there’s a center string. You can see if that string’s in the exact center of those inlays, or centered over the gaps between paired inlays right under that string, or if it’s off to one side or another. You look at an inlay on the heel cap you can tell if it’s off right away. Same thing on the peg head, if you look where the tuner posts come through and there’s inlay very close to them, especially with a symmetrical inlay, you can see whether or not it’s the same distance from the post on each side, or if one is a little closer to the edge binding. So I always look to see how well things are centered and how smooth those curves are. And then I look at, as we were talking about earlier, the amount of filler that’s around them.
I also look at their choice of shell, especially since I’m a shell man. And Laskin and Robinson, and Leach, they also look at the choice of shell or materials. The old way was to grab a piece of pearl, and then just lay your patterns out on it, and nest them as tightly as you can so you waste the least amount of expensive shell, and not even worry about how they’re going to light up, or from which direction, as you look at them.
The really best craftsmen in the industry now have finally caught on, and I was actually an influence in this because I think I was doing this before anybody else was, since I was handling so much shell, and I didn’t have to worry about wasting a little bit of shell. I’d actually, if you came in and ordered an inlay from me like a pattern or neck or something, I’d pick out the pieces I was going to use, and I’d lay them in a shallow tray of water with one light source over it, and every time I’d walk by the end of that bench I’d move those pieces around and see how they reflect best, and I’d find precisely in what position each piece really comes alive. I want to see how it really lights up, and that’s the way I’m going to put it in the neck.
So when I look at it from a certain angle, it lights up. Well I can do tricks with that. I can do inlays in a neck where each successive inlaid fret would light up from a slightly different angle. So if an instrument moved, or you walked by, the instrument’s inlays would light up in sequence and go dark in sequence, and the light rolls from one end of the fingerboard to the other.
Oh, it’s absolute control, and may take you many hours to pick out shell that does that exactly right. But if you’re going to do all this other control in the building of the instrument, where you’re controlling the materials acoustically and aesthetically, luthiers understand that, but when it got to the inlay they just kind of slopped them in and used them any old which way, and now they’re starting to understand you need to exercise the same degree of control in all the things that go into an instrument, if you’re expressing anything at all artistic.
You need to make the same expression with the way you chose your shells. So I always look at how well the shell matches, what it’s supposed to be suggesting. I mean, are they really paying attention to the colors and getting them matched right or are they putting colors together that are so close that it’s hard to tell one segment of the design from the next.
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Dave Nichols’ Mandolin Peghead Inlay. Photo courtesy of Dave Nichols. |
You know, if they’re doing a vine that’s got a continuous trunk going up the center, it used to be you’d cut white pearl for the whole thing.
Well, now guys like Dave Nichols and some other artists, they’re starting with maybe white pearl up here (indicates the top of a guitar neck) and then they’re going to a slightly yellow pearl, and then a more yellow pearl and maybe that will go into a pink colored abalone that gets into a darker abalone, and by the time you’re at the bottom you’re into blue abalone, but it’s just like a spectrum that goes from light to dark all the way up and it adds a whole other dimension of visual interest.
I would do stuff like that on guy’s instruments and spend hours and hours and hours book matching the figure in the inlays or doing some trick, and I wouldn’t tell them. And then three years later I’d get a phone call saying, “Hey, man, we were just sitting around goofing off, I was looking at my instrument under a light and I noticed this thing. Did you do that deliberately?” And I go, “Yeah, it was like an extra twenty hours.” And they’d say, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I’d respond, “Because I try to build stuff into an instrument, so the more intimate you get with it over the years the more little things you’ll discover.”
It’s like, you don’t just see it all the first time you see it. Well there’s builders that think that way now. And Grit’s really like that. We’ve got a guitar he built for us, and he still hasn’t told us all the things going on in there although we know there’s some other things happening. And sometimes we almost get it. And he says, “No, you haven’t seen it yet.” You know, real clever stuff!
And I think in some dim, reptilian way people pick up on that. Like subconsciously there’s an effect there. They go, “I don’t know what it is, man, but there’s something about it that grabs me.”
There’s been so much outsourcing of labor to other countries, has the process of inlay been subject to foreign competition?
CE: There’s guys in England and France that are doing inlay on instruments, but the market isn’t real big over there and they’re not real well known here. Some of that stuff’s pretty artistic but it’s not really competing with anything here.
You’re not going to see those instruments here. Stuff is coming out of China, and this is changing real quickly; but traditionally China would imitate high-end instruments, only they would do it in the crudest style with the worst materials, with just awful workmanship. But at first glance from ten feet away, they’d have an electric guitar with dragons and stuff that would look like a thirty thousand dollar PRS and you’d walk up to it, and it’s just garbage. But they can sell the thing for fifteen hundred and you go, “Well you know, for fifteen hundred bucks, man, that’s pretty amazing.”
So you can get this kind of ersatz high-end instrument without spending a lot of money. But that’s not really going to cut it with the current high-end buyer. China might be selling instruments, but in the US market, which is a big instrument market, experienced builders and players are way more sophisticated than that; they’ll put up with inferior or borderline work on some stuff, but if someone really wants a good instrument, they want a good instrument, not one that just kind of looks like a good instrument. So I don’t really think there’s any competition. China and Korea can’t do it at this point.
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The Art of Inlay by Larry Robinson. |
In Japan, there’s some great makers that are doing some very nice work. In fact there’s Japanese makers that have come to the US, who have moved here and are building here that have done some really fine avant-garde work with their instruments and with their ornament.
And I’ve been told by some of them that no matter how good you are in Japan as an instrument builder and inlay artist, you’re really not respected there, because what they really respect is the big name US artist. So Japanese makers will come over here, even if they’re already skilled, and build instruments for a while, get a reputation going, and then when they go back to Japan it’s like they finally have some respect because they’ve been accepted in the US. Kind of an interesting twist on it, since it’s not like they were bad builders before coming over, they just have to get a reputation here before they can go back home and sell stuff.
So maybe some of the best work is coming out of Japan, but not much of it’s really cutting into the market here. And to tell the truth the market is big enough, as it’s supporting an all time high number of small shops. The technical skill level that’s needed to compete is pretty high but there’s a lot of resources available to do that, you know.
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Lizard Inlay by Craig Lavin. Photo courtesy of Craig Lavin. |
I mean, you go to a luthier’s show and there’s builders there with their first or second instrument that’s amazing in quality! In the old days you didn’t get to that level unless you’d been building for ten years, but now they can do it, they’ve got stuff available to them. So the competition is fierce but the markets big enough that anyone who wants to do that kind of work is going to sell instruments, I think. And with the Internet, there’s a lot of guys that are getting sales through their websites, even foreign sales from players that have never seen, or touched, or heard one of their instruments. And they’re selling instruments to them. There’s a lot more trust. There’s that much trust in hand built instruments that didn’t used to exist back in the ’60s.
Do guitarists buy a beautiful inlay guitar and then play it? Or do they put it on the shelf and say “It’s too valuable, I love this too much I can’t take it out and perform with it because somebody will steal it.”
CE: Well, there’s a difference between recording and performance. Some artists will buy guitars they would never take on the road only to have it suffer the abuse of being packed around from show to show.
But they will have those kinds of instruments at home and those might be the instruments they stage or get knocked over by a drunk or something, or get mishandled by an airline. So guys that tour, a lot of time their best instruments are at the house and you’ll hear them on the recordings. Some players will carry instruments like that and perform with them and they get beat up, it’s just going to happen, but an instrument is to use. A lot of the top end stuff is so pricy that really it goes into the hands of buyers who may or may not be players, but they’re collectors and it really goes in a glass case.
I mean, I’ve got that instrument from Grit, but we don’t really allow just anyone to play it. When we take it to shows we’ll let people play it, but if we can see they don’t know how to handle it we’ll grab it from them. So a lot of the high-end stuff is going to collectors. A few years ago it was aficionados like Akira Tsumura and Mac Yasuda from Japan who were buying and they were commissioning incredibly expensive instruments from everybody including the factories, small shops, everyone.
The Gibson Custom shop, at the time Greg Rich was there, was dependent on orders from those guys. I mean, they cranked out ten, and twenty, and fifty thousand dollar guitars and these collectors would just suck them up. They had endless money, and that brought those guitars to the point where art galleries started to take notice, and they were actually having mounted shows of the guitar as art, and people were buying them that didn’t know anything about guitars.
They were just buying them as a visual object. And that hasn’t gone away, those guys aren’t collecting anymore for one reason or another, but there still are collectors. But that really established an art market. There really weren’t art instruments as such, at least not important ones up to that time. That was a big turning point in the industry and those would record with or play small gigs, like house concerts or small intimate concerts, or something where they’re not really going to be estranged from their instrument, where it can suffer damage or fall off a stand on the guys just kind of established it single-handedly.
And then Scott Chinery came along with the famous Blue Guitar project. He commissioned blue colored, blue finished guitars from a whole bunch of shops, and that really got a lot of attention. There were Blue Guitar articles in Cigar Aficionado and Playboy and all kinds of places. That got huge visibility, and as far as public perception, especially with the guitar playing public, before then a lot of players weren’t even aware they could have an instrument built specifically for them. I mean they’re just used to using factory instruments.
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Chuck “The Duke of Pearl” Erikson. Photo by Michael Shea. |
Well, those kinds of articles really woke people up to the fact there’s all these luthiers out there that can build something to fit my hand and my nervous system, and they’ll give it a try. Now the level of building is so high that they’re probably not going to be disappointed and they’re going to be in it for some more guitars down the line, it’s not just going to be factory stuff. But it’s that art guitar movement that really made luthiery visible in a lot of ways to a lot of new people.
So I don’t know where it’s going to go, but there’s a lot of emerging markets, especially in foreign countries that have traditionally been so poor they couldn’t afford good instruments, but now for whatever economic or political reasons, people are winding up with expendable income, and they’re looking for toys. Well, who knows what they’re going to want. Those cultures have a different aesthetic than we do but if they start buying guitars and they want any kind of ornament on it, it’s probably going to be a different type of art than we’re used to in the western world.
Are there any well known guitarists playing a “Duke of Pearl” inlaid neck?
CE: Well, I was a banjo builder primarily and at the time, in fact there’s a list of guys in that bio where I name a bunch of pickers I did work for, so you can get it out of there.
[According to Chuck’s bio, he did personal work for the Kentucky Colonels, Pat Cloud, Herb Pedersen, Doug Dillard, John Hartford, Don Parmley, The Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, Bernie Leadon, David Lindley, Larry McNeely, Alan Munde, Geoff Stelling, Mark Platin, John McEuen, John Hickman, Bill Knopf, and many other West Coast music makers.]
Is there one neck that you think is the best you’ve ever seen?
CE: Out of all the instruments ever built? By anybody? I just don’t think like that. At one point I used to have favorites. But it’s like asking me what’s my favorite shell. I’ve got 32 different types of shell available, and it depends on what I’m doing with it. I could say blue colored Paua abalone’s my favorite, but then when it comes to doing a certain job that’s not the best choice. I mean, it can’t be my favorite then, because it’s not going to work. So it’s like every one of those shells is my favorite depending on what I’m thinking about doing with it. And I guess with guitars or inlay, out of all the blade-breakers who are doing really good work, I can’t say I’ve got a favorite.
Grit Laskin I really like because he’s such a storyteller and he’s so complex. He’ll build layers of meaning into his inlay, and I really like that. And he’s incredibly skilled at it. He’s almost got a photo-realistic technique of working with his materials, too. And then Harvey Leach has really come along with some incredible optical tricks. He invented an inlay effect that was used on several of the Martin guitars, and others are starting to copy it, which uses some of our paper-thin white pearl veneer, thin enough to read a newspaper through but still pearly, which if you look at it from an angle it becomes opaque so you can’t read through it. Then when you move over in another position you can see the wood or whatever’s behind it.
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Hot Rod Inlay by Harvey Leach. Photo courtesy of Harvey Leach. |
But then Larry Robinson does some things that are better than the other two guys. It’d really be hard to give a blue ribbon to one guy and a third place to another guy.
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The Living Sea Inlay by Craig Lavin. Photo courtesy of Craig Lavin. |
What do you see as the next development of the world of inlay?
I’m not real good at being a prophet. I’ve been really involved in a lot of the changes that have happened with inlay, such as setting the modern standard on quality, introducing a grading system now used by everyone, being one of the first to experiment with non-traditional themes, and introducing about two dozen new types of shell materials most especially through the Abalam and Gravlam laminates. That has absolutely changed inlay forever, it’s never going back to what it was.
There’s things being done now that couldn’t be imagined twenty years ago. I didn’t see that coming and I was one of the shakers and movers in it. So, who knows? My sales are in Pennsylvania now, so I’m not distracted with answering the phone or filling orders all day. One major function as the Duke is to keep going to shows and be The Duke, in company with The Duchess, and I also handle tech support for customers because Frank Eskra, our Vice-Chancellor of Nacre who’s doing the sales, isn’t a builder and doesn’t do inlay, so people call me if they need real advice on how to handle shell.
I’m also developing new non-instrument markets, such as the surfboard, and custom cabinetry and furniture industries. But one of the things that’s really fun is I’ve got about half a dozen projects with shell where I can be the mad shell scientist on the kitchen sink, with my wife’s China. I’ve got dangerous chemicals, and I’ve actually got something I’m going to work on the next few weeks that if successful could change the industry as much as the laminates did! I mean, it will change what we can do with shell, that no one’s ever been able to do before. And I’ve got six projects like that, some of them going back into the sixties.
I’ve got research papers from France in 1921 that are really obscure papers that have to do with chemical deposition of shell in the animal. I’ve got technical textbooks on bio-mineralization that I’m studying. I’m not a chemist, but there’s a chemist I corresponded with who’s a Nobel Laureate Prize winner specializing in scleroproteins whose given me some hints about one of the projects, about which direction I should be looking at.
And any one of these six projects could just absolutely change the industry as much as the laminated shell has. And the laminated shell has really been a huge, huge influence. And these projects could do the same thing so I’m slowly working on them. I can’t tell you what they are, but if any of those things work, that’s going to change the industry. There’s going to be materials available that have never been available before in shell, that nobody can even dream of. So that’s kind of in my head. And so I can make a prediction about that if I can get them to work consistently. Yeah, there’s some big-time changes coming down the line!
As far as just the art of inlay, I think experts like Laskin and all the others we were talking about have really, really, opened it up for being artistically expressive in the sense of high art, not just craft. There’s also some incredible craft being done, but it’s still basically just surface ornament no matter how good it is. And I’m not knocking it, but ornament and craft aren’t the same as art, you know? You and I might draw a different line on where it is. I’m sure you’ve got things in photography you would consider high art, and other things where the shutterbug is just a good technical photographer.
Well, it’s the same thing in inlay. And usually it’s the stuff at the top, that’s genuine art, that filters down and changes everybody else. So I think you’re going to see craftsmen who are just ornamental artists starting to express more things, like being more emotive with it or whatever.
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Custom Geese Inlay by Judy Threet. Photo courtesy of Judy Threet |
There will be more storytelling and symbolism, and less purely decorative surface ornament. There will be commentary or satire or visual puns going on. It will just progress to different levels, and that’s going on now, with more of the leading artists being cloned through imitators of Robinson, Laskin, Leach, Threet, and the other non-traditional inlayists. They see and imitate what the radicals are doing. Like, Sheldon Schwartz in Canada was influenced heavily by his mentor, Grit Laskin.
I’ve got one of Sheldon’s early guitars here where he’s got a woman on the peg head, and she kind of goes off the peg head in the Laskin style, she’s got this flowing skirt, but there’s no story, it’s just this nice pleasant looking, anonymous woman, you know, but there’s nothing else going on, it’s just a graphic. Sheldon’s currently backed away from doing that much inlay, but for a while he kind of moved on and started to tell more involved stories with his art, but now he’s kind of gone back to a minimalist use of inlay. So, even those who are influenced by Laskin and Robinson are still limited to just imitating them unless they really learn a whole new set of skills in thinking like them, and getting some depth into it.
But I think that’s happening, because there’s pressure on everybody to not just keep on doing stuff the way it’s always been done for the last several centuries. So I think story telling’s probably going to become more the thing, and that’s really critical because if you or I want to get an instrument built, it’s pretty neat if we can have it truly personalized in the way Grit or Larry do, where they’ll plumb their customer, they’ll plumb their lives, they’ll get stories out of them by asking “What are your passions, your interests, a personal anecdote, who are your favorite characters and heroes, who’s your favorite author?
Whatever it is, let’s work that into a neck.” If you’re a fly fisherman, then work up something where there’s a fly fisherman in the inlay, where there’s some humor, where there’s a story. So if you’re getting a really nice instrument built and you’re at all interested in adding ornament, it’s very appealing to have something on there that’s distinctly intimate to your own life, that transforms the instrument itself to a ceremonial object every time you pick it up.
Related Links
Chuck “The Duke of Pearl” Erikson
Grit Laskin Interview (feature story)
The Guitar Inlay Artistry of Craig Lavin (article)
Grit Laskin (website)
Larry Robinson (website)
Linda Manzer Guitars (website)
Pearl Works Ltd. (Larry Sifel) (website)
Custom Pearl Inlay (Dave Nichols) (website)
Craig Lavin Inlay (website)
Judy Threet Guitars (website)
Crosscut Saw Photography
PRS Guitars
Martin Guitar
