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Tag Archive for: Inlay

This is exciting stuff, folks. We all know that Grit Laskin is one of the finest luthiers around and is widely considered as a master of inlay work. Today, Dream Guitars announces that he is working on a custom guitar that we have made available for reservation with delivery expected in December.

Our own Paul Heumiller worked with Grit to develop the basic inlay ideas and Laskin took off running. As you can see in these pictures, the design is amazing, intricate and just short of groundbreaking.

Here is some of what Grit himself had to say about this piece:

One of the most beloved and influential guitarists was the legend who passed away just last year, Doc Watson. I began thinking about Doc, and about the natural world and the title from Shakespeare popped into my head: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ which takes place in a forest. The more I read about Doc, the more his life inspired me: His musical beginnings, the events in his life that shaped him and the fact that what gave him the musical bug was the shape-note hymns sung by his mother. My brain locked onto that seminal influence and also latched onto the literal meaning of the word shape — this old-style singing shaped his life, yes, but the notes themselves also provided physical shapes in which I could place scenes and elements from his life. Bingo.

“I’m putting a large portrait of Doc picking a guitar on the headstock in the same realistic I used for John Lennon on the ‘Imagine’ guitar. Flowing down the fret board are the seven basic shapes of shape notes (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti) large enough to place within elements such as Doc’s earliest musical instruments, his early solo album, ‘Southbound,’ which  first brought him to prominence. In fact, the working title of the piece is ‘Southbound.’

Talk about creative thinking.

If you’re jazzed about this guitar and Laskin’s work no one would blame you if you missed our announcement, so here it is again: This guitar is available and you can reserve it now by contacting the Dream Guitars shop near Asheville, NC, right away. If you miss this opportunity, or want to see more of Grit Laskin’s work, check out the gallery on his homepage.

James Olson, Larry Robinson, Kevin Ryan, and Michael Keller

Clearly, luthiery requires a diverse set of finely honed skills, but it also requires a deep aesthetic understanding. Do you consider yourself more of an artist or a craftsman?

I definitely consider myself a craftsman with a very strong artistic sense. I had always been fond of arts of all kinds — decorative, interpretive, pre-modern, impressionist, surrealistic. I am fond of many types of art. But I’m also very fond of many types of crafts, pottery, jewelry and knife making, and furniture. This is the world of my imagination.

MICHAEL KELLER

MICHAEL KELLER

When you’re starting to build a guitar and you’re trying to picture it in your visual mind, many artistic considerations come into play that go beyond crafting a fine sounding guitar. Different colors of wood, different colored shells, colored purflings, bindings and shapes, all become a pallet that is available to you to compose a beautiful looking instrument.

One must also realize ultimately you’re making a tool for a musician. No matter how beautiful or arty a guitar looks, if it doesn’t play well and sound great I don’t care how arty it is. I would much rather have a guitarist tell me, “I love the sound of the guitar”, rather than “the sound is OK but the inlays are great”. It’s really totally about the sound and playability.

Recently, flying back from a guitar festival I noticed one of the editors of a guitar magazine on the plane who had been at the show. We started talking, and he mentioned that he had played a lot of very expensive heavily inlaid guitars that didn’t play or sound very good. He said exactly what I was thinking from my own experiments at the festival. A lot of the guitars at the show were designed to be eye catching, but a lot of effort had not been put into making them play well. So the artistic side of guitar making is a field that one should embrace carefully, making sure the instrument sounds and plays well first. After that, as far as I’m concerned, anything goes.

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