Tom Jackson:
Hi, I'm Tom Jackson, president of Cal Poly Humboldt, and I'm here again today with my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Keith Flamer, president of the College of the Redwoods. Good to see you.
Keith Flamer:
It's always a pleasure being with you.
Tom Jackson:
Do you smell something?
Keith Flamer:
This smells like resin. Some little some wood.
Tom Jackson:
What do you see?
Keith Flamer:
This is the cleanest shop I've ever seen, Number one. Two. I see old guitars.
Tom Jackson:
We are in the workshop of Michael Walker. Good to see you, Michael.
Michael Walker:
Thank you. Nice to see you.
Tom Jackson:
Thanks for your time today. So what do you do?
Michael Walker:
My title is I'm a luthier.
Keith Flamer:
You have to explain that.
Michael Walker:
Luthier, I think, is someone who builds and works on violins and fretted instruments, guitars, banjos, whatever it may be. I am a guitar builder. Also, I spend most of my time restoring old Martin guitars from the years mid-twenties to late thirties.
Tom Jackson:
What is it that makes these years special for you?
Michael Walker:
Around 1929, Martin started making what we might consider the modern guitar. That would be able to handle the tension of steel. Strings have a larger body, longer scale length, it was able to project more than the previous smaller body and nylon string guitars. So they had outstanding craftsmen in that shop around that time, and they were making a lot of things by hand.
They consider that the golden era of acoustic guitar making. And so around that time, 1929, up until 1934, they were using a system called Bar frets to hold the next together. They don't use that anymore. Now it's called t frets Modern T frets. The main difference there is a bar for it is just a square piece of metal that gets filed down around it, radius, much like a jeweler.
And that system was what they had been using forever. And that was a system that held the guitar neck straight, kept it straight, kept the proper amount of relief in it. That changed in 1935. That's when things started getting a little different. They put a metal bar in there. They changed the frets, and when they did that, things started changing.
Necks started moving around, the acoustics of the instrument changed a little bit.
Keith Flamer:
There was a change.. in a positive way?
Michael Walker:
The way I view it, they were changes that were not focused on the sound and the tone of the instrument, but more of, “Let's don't have this instrument come back to our factory because we are a factory. We're not a repair facility. So let's beef up the guitars, let's move the braces around so that they don't they don't belly up through tension. Let's let's do all we can.”
And this happened gradually, gradually from 29, 30, 31 to 34. And then finally and around 1938 or so, 39, they had shifted the braces completely. You get a completely different guitar and then you get into the war times. You know, by the time you get to 1940s, they were making other things than guitars.
Keith Flamer:
… because of the war?
Michael Walker:
Yes. So that's your golden era right there. Now I tend to focus on the things that are 1934 prior, because I specialize in the bar fret system. So the new guitars I make have the bar frets in them, but I'm one of two or three….
Tom Jackson:
…. maybe in the world?
Michael Walker:
…in the world that does that system. So I guess I sort of believe in it. I'm passionate about it. I like it, you know, I like the idea of holding it all together. I would say that 95% of the guitar players in the world have never played an instrument with a bar fret system.
And I'd say about one and a half percent or probably interested in bar frets.
Keith Flamer:
But that's a very small percentage of people.
Michael Walker:
Focus, focus, focus, focus. [Laughter]
Keith Flamer:
Okay. When I walked into the door and I heard your accent from South Georgia.. so talk us about your journey.
Michael Walker:
Sure. I grew up in South Georgia on my grandfather's father's farm, and my dad was a farmer as a kid. That's what we did. Livestock, hogs, cows, things that fed those hogs and cows.
And my dad was… ‘frugal’ would be the word. maybe to a fault. And so he built the house we lived in. He built all the furniture in the house, you know, and we had a sawmill on the farm. So we cut the trees and we sawed the boards. You know, we had our own lumber. So I learned a lot about working with my hands and I learned a lot about problem solving from him. I would say that that is probably the most important part of what I do today - it’s problem solving. There's each of these repairs. It's different every time. After high school, we left and went traveling through the country.
Keith Flamer:
Who's we? You and your father or….
Michael Walker:
Actually, my wife, who is still my wife. She's from Georgia, as well. We went to high school together and through all that traveling, this was a place that stood out to us. And I guess, like a lot of people come here, you know, a lot of people travel through and say, “This is a beautiful place.”
But I really think the better question is like, what keeps you here? You know, because a lot of people come and a lot of people go to, you know, it doesn't work for everybody.
Keith Flamer:
So why stay?
Michael Walker:
Well, the community, I mean, I really love the community. They embraced me as a young person, 20 years old. I had a few skills, you know. I went to CR do the agricultural program. Went Humboldt State. During that time. I took another trip with a friend of mine and we went on was kind of like a little musical journey playing, going to different camps to learn music.
At one of those camps in Colorado, they actually had a little luthiers building shop that you could build a little tiny mandolin and two weeks.. And and that gentleman there, I started talking to him and he was a guitar builder from Santa Cruz, from the Santa Cruz Guitar Company. Nice guy. And from that point, I thought, you know, I could probably do this.
That's the first time I knew such a thing existed. Really.
Tom Jackson:
We're here in the workshop of Michael Walker, a very unique specialist who repairs and replicates unique guitars. There had to be that first moment when you said, I'm going to open up this guitar and I think I can fix it. What was going through your head when you did that? How did it turn out?
Keith Flamer:
Great question…
Michael Walker:
The skill level did not just fall out of the sky for sure.
Tom Jackson:
[Laughter] I feel sorry for that guitar…
Michael Walker:
It wasn't so much as sort of taking apart guitars. I started building guitars.
Keith Flamer:
Where do your guitars go? Companies, private collectors, current folks who are on stage playing, who like who do What do you do business with?
Michael Walker:
At this point? I have a dealer that I work with. His name is Eric Schoenberg, and Eric has been in the business for 60 years or so. He's a guitar designer, he's a guitar player and he's a guitar broker. So I have one client really, and that's him. And he's been I most definitely would not be where I'm at now without without him.
Keith Flamer:
You know, I'm curious because the work you do is magical. How do you pass on the gifts that you have just to the next generation of guitar enthusiasts?
Michael Walker:
And that's that's a good question. One of the reasons it is so specialized is the newer guitar people are not that interested in it. They want to build something new, something unique and something really artsy. So first of all, you have to be interested in it. You know, I'm a firm believer that these are the best guitars that were ever made.
And if you want to build a guitar, the first thing you should do is study these guitars. And if you don't get a chance, many people will not ever get the chance to play these guitars, much less have them in your shop to open them up, see what the builders before us did. So I'm lucky to be able to see these guitars.
And that's how I'm learning. That's how I'm learning to build the guitars. That's how I'm learning what works, what's stable. And I'm also very lucky, like I said, to have Eric as knowledge. T.J. Thompson is has an open door. I can he's able to share things with me that I haven't had the experience of and it kind of helps me along if I get in to something that I don't know how to solve myself.
Keith Flamer:
Here’s a very weird question. I was walking in here and I was thinking, what would these guitars, what would the story be that these guitars can tell us?
Michael Walker:
Well, they do all have a story. It can be quite funny, you know, A lot of it. You know, those classic examples of the barroom fight and the mic goes through the top. Those kind of things.
Yeah, but, but probably the better stories are “This is my grandmother's, it was new in 1935 and it was handed down.” You know, a lot of these things, they have a lot of sentimental value to the owners. It's not all collectors. It's not all people that want to have a trophy on their wall, having the rarest thing. It's a family heirloom. And there's a lot of satisfaction in that, you know, keeping that heritage going for families.
Tom Jackson:
That's a good story by itself.
Keith Flamer:
That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.
Tom Jackson:
Earlier when we were chatting and you're giving us a tour of the workshop, you mentioned the name Gary Burnett. Can you tell us the story of Gary and how he inspired you? Because hearing you describe him, it was a moment of inspiration. At least those are my words. But talk to us a little bit about him.
Michael Walker:
It was during that same trip that we traveled around playing music that I told you about, meeting a guy from Santa Cruz. Gary is a vintage guitar dealer and he lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He said, ‘Well, let me let me let you boys hear what a real guitar sounds like.’
Keith Flamer:
And great, great, great opening line. I love that.
Michael Walker:
So he goes down to his ‘vault’, I think is the word he used. He comes back up and he, you know, just let us play them. And at that point, playing the guitar, strumming through it, holding it. There was a certain tonal quality there that I had not heard before, you know, and even not heard in other Martin or older guitars. Like ‘this was the year’... You know, this is very unique. And I remember that and I still remember it today. I really do remember that sound. It's in my brain. And I have been chasing that ever since. And all the restoration work and all the ways of building, it's all trying to capture that.
You know, I'm not interested in putting a lot of inlays into a guitar or lots of fancy woods even that just takes away. That's not what it's about for me. It's not an art piece. It's something to make music, it's something to function, It's something to bring happiness and creativity to people. And it's an exceptional quality that these old guitars have.
Keith Flamer:
What drives you? What is that tone that drives you to do this?
Michael Walker:
Okay, so this is a 1929 OM, and on the bench beside it is the 1930 OM. And both of these guitars are in here for restoration purposes. This one here actually belongs to Eric and it's part of a project that we're doing with him, a legacy series of instruments that he has owned in his 68 years of dealing guitars.
And so what we're doing is we're I'm trying to gain as much information about this guitar measurements feel the shapes and sizes of the neck, all the little intricate parts of it. And we're going to recreate this guitar for the market. So all the way down to the bar frets, these bars of metal are what keep the neck straight.
It's a system of compression. And so right now this guitar has too much relief. It's like an upside-down banana. But now it's kind of going up and making the strings too far off the top of the fingerboard. So we're trying to do is bring these strings down and straighten out that neck. And so the way that you do that is you make that piece of metal, that bar thicker and it compresses neck together and it strings it out.
And I can do that with metal shims, or I can put another metal bar in there, you know, in a series, maybe every other one or wherever it has the dips in it. You know, that's partially why nobody does this work either. It's a modern guitar. You can turn a little wrench and have the neck straight in like 10 seconds.
This could take me a week to figure it out, to get it working. But they do sound good.
Keith Flamer:
Okay, here we go.
Michael Walker:
And what I'm noticing about this… is the word that would come to me would be dry. There's overtones, not a whole lot of overtones to complicate it, to make to make the tone mushy.
Boxy would be another word. Each note speaks is speaks by itself. They're separate. They're perfectly separate for one another. But at the same time, they complement each other word together
Keith Flamer:
That's so wonderful.
Tom Jackson:
Its own little song in a way.
Keith Flamer:
I can see where I could see why this drives you. I can see that you were….
Tom Jackson:
Being taken to another place. Listening to it. But watching you, you were like, you know, you're.
Keith Flamer:
You were somewhere else. And I wanted to be there to be there. Thank you so very much.
Michael Walker:
You're welcome. Thank you.