Guitarbench Magazine Issue 4. Luthier Interview with Mike Doolin by Terence Tan

T H E I N T E R V I E W: MIKE DOOLIN

GUITARBENCH P LAY E R S | LU T H I E R S | C O LLE C T O R S

ACOUSTIC&CLASSICAL

Issue 4 2012

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Thanks for taking the time to chat. Can we start at the beginning- how you got into lutherie? I started out as a professional musician, but I’ve always modified and repaired my own guitars too. I rewired guitars back in high school, then over the years I gradually took on more involved tasks, such as truss rod adjustments, making nuts, setting intonation, refinishing, refretting and tremolo installation. So, it was repairs and modifications for a long time, mostly just for myself, and almost all on electric guitars since that’s what I played. Then sometime in the late 80’s I heard Michael Hedges, and that inspired me to want to play acoustic guitar. But since I was coming from playing electric guitars, I was accustomed to easy high fret access. Practically all of my solo repertoire was unplayable on even a standard cutaway acoustic, because the cutaways weren’t deep enough. So that got me thinking about a double-cutaway acoustic guitar, and since there were none on the market that were to my liking, I realized I’d have to make one myself. Happily, I’d been friends with Jeff Elliott for years, so he was the obvious choice to ask for advice. I got a copy of Cumpiano and Natelson’s “Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology” and, over the course of about 10 months, built my first acoustic guitar. This was in 1993.

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Maybe you could share a bit more of your build philosophy with us? I'm surprisingly traditional in some ways. I didn't set out to try to improve the sound of the guitar, I think the best of the traditional designs sound fantastic, really no room for improvement there. So if you look inside my guitars you'll see Martin style scalloped X bracing on the steel strings and Hauser-Torres 7-fan bracing on the nylon strings. What I did set out to try to improve was functionality for the player (because initially that player was me!). First and most obvious of course was the double-cutaway, to give free access to the whole neck. But implicit in that design goal was for the entire neck to be playable in terms of action too. Happily, a secondary advantage to the doublecutaway is that almost all of the frets are effectively "on the neck", instead of the last 8 or 10 frets being on the fretboard extension over

the body. This solved the classic "hump at the body joint" problem that's so common in noncutaway guitars. And then, the Adjustable Neck Angle System solved the last piece of the puzzle, making it extremely easy to maintain the action without ever shaving the saddle or paying to have a glued neck joint reset. The Pinless Bridge is the one other design change Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve implemented, and I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even have to invent that one since Jeff Elliott already had! There are several functional advantages to it: no pins to lose or wear out or get stuck in the holes, no holes drilled through the bridge to wear open over time, the string ball ends arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t grinding away on the bridge patch. If you break a string, it simply falls off! I think most importantly, the rods are permanently glued through the bridge, top and bridge patch, so my bridges never lift up in back.

All of that is more along the lines of my design philosophy. As to my building philosophy, how I actually go about physically constructing instruments, I'm somewhere in the middle between the "old world craftsman" and "modern engineering approach" schools. My two main mentors, Jeff Elliott and John Greven, are definitely the former, old-school woodworkers with tremendous hand tool chops who don't need much in the way of power tools or jigs to build world class guitars. I came to guitar making with very little background in woodworking (I got D's in high school shop class!) but with a natural mental inclination towards engineering.

So I've always used power tools and jigs and fixtures to make the components of my guitars. I do love a sharp chisel or scraper and use them when appropriate, but I also do a whole lot with belt and spindle sanders, routers, table and band saws, and lots of simple jigs that attach to those power tools to make repeatable accurate cuts. On the other end of that continuum would be the CNC luthiers, who program the dimensions of parts into a computer for the CNC to cut. It's not that I'm morally opposed to that - I have my headstock logos cut by CNC laser - but it doesn't strike me personally as very much fun either. At the end of the day, I'm still flexing, tapping, scraping, chiselling, and otherwise hand-shaping things to final dimension, and above all, listening! To what the wood is telling me.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Above all, listening! To what the wood is telling meâ&#x20AC;?

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And you’re pretty traditional with wood choices too? Yes, in as much as there is such a thing any more. It’s very lucky for us all that the voice of an acoustic instrument is the top (whatever percentage you’d like to put on that) because the tops of most string instruments are made of softwoods, which are plentiful and fast growing. Particularly in the northwestern US where I am, Sitka and Engelmann spruce and Western red cedar all grow nearby, and are readily available in extremely high quality. But the other traditional woods for guitars, such as Honduran mahogany, Brazilian and Indian rosewood, and African ebony, are in short supply. Would I prefer to use Honduran mahogany for a neck, Brazilian or Indian rosewood for back and sides, and African ebony for the fretboard and bridge? Sometimes, and happily I personally have put away enough of a stash of those woods to make all the guitars I’m likely to make in my lifetime. But I think we all have to get over some of the traditionalist mindset regarding wood choices, because of the reality of current availability and because there are so many woods available that can make fantastic guitars.

I’d say the best guitars I’ve made have had either cocobolo or Madagascar rosewood back and sides; my best dreadnought had a redwood top and African blackwood back and sides; my favourite harp guitar has a redwood top and Peruvian walnut back and sides; I recently made an outrageous 00 model with a Lutz (Sitka-Engelmann hybrid) top; my bass that Esperanza Spalding is playing has Sapele back, sides and neck; my personal bass has a redwood top and zebrawood back and sides; my best OM had a Western red cedar top and lacewood back and sides. When I first got started 17 years ago, “alternative woods” was a huge controversial topic. At first, everyone wanted traditional wood combinations, but in a very few years that started to change. Instead of “just give me a spruce top and rosewood back and sides”, people became interested in what was available, and started asking what wood combination would give them the sound they were looking for. I think that’s very healthy, both from the perspective of conserving endangered species and of being open to the possibilities afforded by nontraditional wood choices.

Again, the voice of the instrument is the top, and we have plenty of gorgeous top woods available to us. I personally think in more general terms about back and side woods. Heavier woods (Brazilian rosewood, cocobolo, African blackwood) give you more bass and sustain; lighter woods (mahogany, lacewood, even Indian rosewood) give more punch and separation; really hard woods (cocobolo, Madagascar rosewood) give an extra kick to the treble; more damping woods (Macassar ebony, zebrawood, maple) have a drier quicker sound. The neck wood is another variable - that red cedar / lacewood OM had an Eastern maple neck, which I think had the weight to put the bass and sustain back under the light weight lacewood body and bright redwood top. But these are all icing on the cake so to speak. The voice of the instrument is the top, and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re all so fortunate to have available to us the plentiful, beautiful, sonorous softwoods to be the voice of our instruments.

I noticed you've been moving away from standard 6 string flat-tops and more into Harp guitars?

That led to orders from Gathering attendees, and of course I put them on my site and in my print ads so that led to more orders.

Not moving away from 6-strings, I still make a lot of those, but harp guitars have become a big part of my business. That was another case of good timing on my part, completely accidentally of course.

After attending the first three Gatherings as a builder I became interested in playing them myself, so I’ve built three for myself and one for my wife. I was a featured performer and teacher at the 9th Gathering last year, playing (coincidentally) my 9th harp guitar. I’m also featured on Harp Guitar Music’s “Christmas Present” CD playing that instrument. That’s the redwood/walnut harp guitar I mentioned earlier.

Back in late 2002 Muriel Anderson came to town, and both Jeff Elliott and I showed up at her concert with guitars in hand. It was kinda funny really, both of us standing in line with our cases, hoping to show Muriel what was in them, he the master, me the student, but of course Jeff was as gracious as always and we both got back stage with Muriel on the break. She, in turn, played both of our guitars on stage in the next set! But then of course the next week she called Jeff to ask him to build her a harp guitar. Jeff had a 15-year wait list at the time, so he offered to consult on the design and have me build it. So that's what we did, Jeff designed the bracing and structural matters, I designed the visuals, and I finished it in time to attend the first Harp Guitar Gathering, at which Muriel was a feature performer.

As an instrument designer and builder, I’d have to say that harp guitars are a welcome opportunity to try new things and let the design muse run wild. There isn’t much of a tradition to draw on there, particularly in terms of players or repertoire, but also in terms of the design of the instruments themselves. With creative souls such as Fred Carlson out there pushing the design envelope to the limits of imagination, it’s an open creative field. I haven’t done anything nearly as innovative as some of Fred’s designs, but I’ve definitely felt free to break with the Dyer/Knudsen tradition and interpret the design essence of the harp guitar in my own way.

Similarly as a player, harp guitar is a wide open field. There's literally no playing tradition to copy! So at each Gathering we see how individuals have cast their musical personalities through the harp guitar. Speaking for myself, the first harp guitar I made for myself was an archtop F-hole (as far as I know, the only such instrument ever made), which I dubbed the "jazz harp guitar" and played Pat Metheny and Leni Stern tunes on.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;As a player, harp guitar is a wide open field. â&#x20AC;?

The second was my "R&B harp guitar", based on the Gibson 335 design, which I played material such as Hall & Oats and Grover Washington Jr. on. Finally, I came around to realizing the beauty of the flat-top acoustic harp guitar (not that it wasn't obvious, but I was coming from a jazz and R&B perspective which are fundamentally electric guitar styles) and built myself one of those. But my take on that instrument is still rooted in jazz - it has 7 sub-basses tuned in the key of Eb, with sharping levers to let me get to any key from Eb to E. That's let me explore the possibilities of acoustic guitar with flat-key bass notes. Most guitar music is in E, D, A or G, because of the open bass notes available. With a harp guitar that has 7 subs tuned to Eb, there's no particular advantage to those keys. So it lets me play tunes like Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed" or Thelonius Monk's "'Round Midnight" in their original key of Eb (Major and minor respectively).

Aren’t harp guitars difficult to constructeven from sourcing materials to the longer time on design and construction? Well, sure, and we have to charge commensurately. Tops are particularly hard to find since softwoods aren’t typically available at exotic wood suppliers. Backs and sides aren’t so difficult so long as you’re willing to work from raw lumber, resawing it yourself or having planks resawn into sets. A lot of us do that anyway, because you can get some gorgeous and unusual wood if you don’t rely on what the lutherie suppliers have available. I've bought all my cocobolo, Peruvian walnut, sapele, African blackwood, figured maple and mahogany as raw lumber and had it resawn by a mill nearby, which actually saves me a lot of money and gives me access to materials I couldn't otherwise get. Cedar and redwood are available as lumber too, you just have to wade through a lot of planks to find one that's clear and quartered. Spruces are much more difficult, but you can sometimes find cello top sets big enough to resaw for harp guitar tops. The design part is an opportunity really. I don't think I would have ever become a luthier if all there was to do was to recreate existing designs. There's a place for that certainly, particularly in the world of the violin family, and there are lots of very traditional guitar makers as well. That's a huge technical challenge, to accurately recreate a traditional design, and an important way to preserve traditions. I have great respect for luthiers who do that, but it's not for me. Harp guitars came along for me at the perfect time, when I had pretty much got my process down and my designs finalized.

It was almost getting to be rote - another Jumbo, another OM, what can I do that I haven't done yet? - when I got the opportunity to really design a whole new instrument, and that was that first harp guitar.

Once the design is done, actually building a harp guitar isn't that much more difficult than building a regular guitar. It's about like one and a half guitars. But again, we charge commensurately.

Muriel wanted nylon strings, a short "requinto" scale, and 20 frets accessible, so right off there was nothing like that in the Dyer/Knutsen tradition.

I guess it gets down to what you want to do with your time, what you enjoy, what your ambitions are. After all, nobody becomes a luthier because it's easy! It's not, and that's not even the point. We do it, or at least I do it, to create something beautiful in the world, to realize a vision.

That was very freeing. I just started with Jeff Elliott's smallest classical guitar body shape, laid the strings all out where they would ideally be, and from there it was pencil and French curves on the drafting table, playing with lines and curves, shifting the soundhole off-center, working in all my usual design trademarks, and just trying to draw something that looked right to me. A very creative, very satisfying experience.

With harp guitars would you say that player ergonomics come into play much more? Yes, certainly with regard to string spacing. The original Knudsen and Dyer instruments had the sub-bass strings spread pretty widely apart, making it more difficult to grab all the strings with the right hand. I space mine as close as is practical, so even with seven subs I can simultaneously sound the lowest sub and the high E on the neck. Add a bank of supertrebles to that, and there's no way you're going to be able to simultaneously sound the lowest sub and the highest super with your right hand, but you still want the supers to feel like a natural extension of the neck strings. Ergonomic problems definitely arise with the body shape too, and in some ways there isn't much you can do about it. The harp arm does limit the possible playing positions somewhat, and acoustic harp guitars are, by nature, big instruments.

But you can still do arm bevels, wedge bodies, and relatively shallow body depths to help the ergonomics. My first harp guitar was in part a response to an ergonomic need. Muriel Anderson is just about five feet tall and under 100 lbs, and she was having a lot of trouble touring with the full-sized Dyer-style harp guitar that Del Langejans made for her, as nice as that instrument is. She literally had to have someone meet her at the airport to carry it for her in its flight case. So part of the reason she wanted a harp-requinto was so she could carry it on a plane and put it in the overhead compartment. It also just made sense to make her an instrument scaled to fit her physically. So that instrument is just about the size of a standard classical guitar, and it looks perfect with her holding it.

Not to mention the weight of the tuners and the bass arm.... ...add in sharping levers and nut posts and you can have an awful lot of metal out there. I've always made my harp tuner posts and nut posts out of brass rod, since it's easy to turn on a lathe and is a nice gold colour. But brass is also relatively heavy, and way out there on the harp headstock every little bit of weight adds up. On my most recent HG I made those out of 7075 aircraft aluminium, and learned to anodize it and tint it gold. That made a huge difference, shaving 100 grams off! I also use open back tuners with wood knobs, both to save weight on the tuner casings and because the tuner post screw is accessible so I can replace the posts. I replace the tuner posts so I can make them a larger diameter to handle the larger gauge bass strings.

I also save some weight by making the harp headstock out of Spanish cedar. It looks like mahogany but is much lighter weight. It's also rather soft and not as strong as mahogany, so I reinforce the harp headstock with two layers of graphite cloth. Graphite cloth is interesting stuff. It's only .007" thick and very flexible on its own, so you wouldn't think it could add stiffness and strength. But the fibres have no stretch whatsoever, so if you epoxy it to both sides of a sheet of wood, it makes the assembly amazingly stiff. I split the thickness of the headstock and epoxy it back together with graphite in between, and put another layer of graphite under the head veneer on the front. If you look at the edge of the harp headstock you can see the first layer of graphite as a fine black line running all around. The other layer is hidden under the binding. It adds practically no weight but a great deal of strength and stiffness.

There's not only the bass strings to contend with, these days there are more folks looking at additional courses of strings or treble bank... Muriel had me build her a second instrument with super-trebles, and most of the inquiries I get are for HGs with both supers and subs. Come to think of it, other than that first one for Muriel, all of my harp guitar orders have been for both supers and subs. The only other subs-only HGs I've built have been for myself and my wife. I haven't felt attracted to super-trebles as a player, I guess the prospect of all those strings kind of intimidates me!

â&#x20AC;&#x153;You typically need about 27 lbs of tension per stringâ&#x20AC;?

From a design perspective, super-trebles are easier to deal with since there isn't typically a body extension to hold them, they're just strapped across the treble side of the body. I've been using zither pins for attachment and violin fine tuners for tuning, which are much lighter than regular tuning machines, so there isn't much of an issue with additional weight. What does become problematic is the additional string tension. A subs-only harp guitar is about like a 12-string for tension, but supers add another 8 strings worth, and that's getting way up there! You typically need about 27 lbs of tension per string, any lower than that and the string goes sharp when you first pluck it, it sounds like a koto.

So a regular steel string guitar is carrying about 160 lbs of tension at the bridge, while a 7-sub HG has about 350, like a 12-string strung with heavy gauge strings. Add 8 supers to that, and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re looking at 540 lbs of tension! I think thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s going beyond reasonable expectations for what a flat-top glued-bridge guitar is going to be able to hold. On that most recent instrument for Muriel, I found a way around that. She wanted another nylon string instrument, but she wanted steel supers. There's a huge design conflict there: do you brace it for nylon or steel? If you brace it for nylon, the supers will cave the top in; if you brace it for steel, the nylon strings won't be able to drive the top. But I realized that if I didn't attach the supers at the bridge, if I ran them all the way to the edge of the body instead, their tension wouldn't be applied to the bridge. They go through the tie block and over the saddle, but they're attached to the fine tuners all the way back at the edge of the lower bout. That let me brace the top for nylon strings with fan bracing, so the neck strings and subs can drive the top properly. This worked so well, I don't think I would do super-trebles the old way again. So no plans for multiple banks of super trebles? MD: Actually, I do have one order for a harp guitar with three super-treble banks, and it will use that same design of taking the supers off of the bridge. But I can't say any more about that project, it's top-secret!

Ok, maybe we can talk a little about the announcement on your site about your retirement... Sure. The simple answer is that I came into some money, enough that I don't have to work any more. That's the kind of event that makes one ponder what one wants to do with one's life. I've been building guitars full time for 16 years, and working on them as a hobby since my teens. I've also been, at times, a software engineer, technical writer, web designer and a few other assorted things. Throughout all of that, I've always been a musician, since second grade in fact. I made my living at it through the 80's, but that's not an easy thing to do and it's gotten harder over the years. So I've usually made my living at something else. Now that I don't have to do that any more, I'm simply returning to the thing I've always wanted to do, which is play music. When they hear this, some people have taken it to mean that lutherie was not a passion for me, that it was nothing but a way for me to make money. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I'm still making guitars, designing jigs and tools, and writing for American Lutherie. I'm just not taking orders. I think that in my heart of hearts, every guitar I ever built, I was building for myself... and then I'd have to pack it up and ship it to its owner, deposit their check, and go on to the next one. That did give me a lot of experience building, but it was often hard to send those guitars away. Now I really do just build them for myself, and I get to keep them, and play them! That sounds wonderful- you can now concentrate on the stuff you want to build. But that means there is currently, no way we can obtain a new Doolin? Yes, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m afraid so. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s down to the hundred or so instruments already out there. There are a couple in particular that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d buy back for myself if they became available!

So which we your favourites you've had to let go over all these years? Well, there was this 12-string, curly black walnut with a sitka top. I've only built three 12-strings, and this was the third one. The person who commissioned it actually refused it! Didn't like the neck profile or some such. I later found out that he bought my second 12-string "used" right after that. Enough said about that situation... but I took the guitar back, per my policy of "first right of refusal", and sent it on to a dealer who sold it immediately. For me as a player, a 12-string is a bit of a novelty, so I don't know if I'd take the time and trouble to make one for myself now. But I'm a huge Ralph Towner fan, and that was a really wonderful instrument, so I wouldn't mind getting it back. There was also a Madagascar rosewood jumbo with a cedar top and dove inlays on the fretboard. It's the guitar I put on my business card and in many of my ads. My wife designed and cut the inlays. I heard that the owner sold it after a year or two, which kinda broke my heart. I guess that always hurts, when you pour everything you have into an instrument, doing everything the customer asks and everything you know will make a great guitar, and then they either immediately refuse it or sell it later. (To be fair to both my customers and myself, I’ve only had two instruments refused in 16 years of lutherie). I understand, there’s no accounting for taste and everyone has their own preferences and desires, and these things are a considerable financial investment too - I’ve had to sell a few guitars that I loved but couldn’t afford to keep. But it is ironic that those two instruments that I consider some of my best were not so highly appreciated my their original owners. Oh well. That probably influenced my decision to retire too.

Maybe we could shift focus a little and speak about your musical career- what are you up to now? I guess the short answer would be, "all the same stuff, but more of it". I've been a sideman in jazz and R&B bands around Portland for the past 30 years or so, and I also have a fondness for duo and solo playing. My gigs are about equally divided between duos with singers in wine bars and coffee shops during the week, and big R&B horn bands in dance clubs on the weekends. The latter are high energy dance gigs, playing loud and fast, while the former are lower key and quieter but often more challenging since I'm sort of functioning as the whole band. My strengths as a guitarist seem to be in harmony and rhythm - the R&B bands like me for my rhythm playing, and my duo partners like that I can hold down a bass line and comp simultaneously while holding down a groove.

I read fairly well for a guitar player (which isn't saying much!) so I do get calls for reading gigs. I'm the accompanist at a weekly vocal jam that has me reading lead sheets for jazz standards in funny keys (that's a great thing about working with singers - they put their tunes in whatever key suits their voice, so you end up playing in keys like Db a lot, and after a while key just doesn't matter any more). I'm also in the bands of several songwriters, playing and sometimes recording their original material. In between all of that, I'm working up solo repertoire on harp guitar, in anticipation of this year's Harp Guitar Gathering. I'm going to be writing material for a second album with David Martin, which we'll record this August. I'm writing and recording background music for a set of meditation CDs. And I'm writing and recording theme and incidental music for an upcoming film.

And in between all of that, I'm practicing, learning tunes, studying chord voicings, transcribing solos... just trying to become a better musician. I don't have any ambitions for fame or to play with famous people, I just want to play good music well.

I’ve been playing harp guitar for about 7 years now (although admittedly not as my primary instrument), and I still have to think pretty hard to keep the subs going. I only have a handful of pieces I can play on it. But it is a fascinating instrument.

Composing for the harp guitar - is that harder than just six strings?

Thank you for your time and we wish you all the best on your next album!

I don’t think it’s much harder. It actually frees you up quite a bit in terms of what you can do with your left hand, when you don’t have to be fretting bass notes all the time. What’s hard is learning to play the piece once it’s written!

And thank you, Terence, for interviewing me for Guitarbench!

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