If an item is made by hand, is it worth more? If electricity is involved (power tools, lighting, etc.) can an item be described as having been handcrafted? Is there any difference between one person making a product and a team of people making that same product? Does one approach produce a better guitar than the other?
Here are some thoughts on the topic.
Does a given item have intrinsic worth simply because it has been made by hand?
I think so. Consider the number of children's crayon drawings taped, pinned, or held with magnets onto walls and refrigerators throughout the Earth and across generations. Many a desk, shelf, or curio cabinet has proudly displayed one of those children's first clay sculptures (or stick, rock, paper, etc. creations).
But if one of those children was to bring home a printed image, for example, even if that child was the one to press "PRINT" on the machine that generated the image, does something happen in the eyes of the parents regarding the valuation of the item, especially if it can be directly compared with an item that was generated by the child, previously?
I have a memory of an elementary school contest that occurred when I was in maybe the fourth or fifth grade. The object of the contest, announced on a Friday, was to make a small boat that would be due the following Friday. Though it could not be a drawing, and had to be 3-dimensional, it did not need to be waterproof. Instead of wisely allocating the time I was given to designing and constructing my little ship, I waited until the last minute and panicked.
Happily, for me, my artistically-inclined father became enthusiastic about my project, and stepped in to assist me. We had started building model airplanes together, and similar construction principles applied. As with the model aircraft, we quickly constructed a hull frame using balsa sticks. Instead of stretching thin paper over the frame, though, as we would for the airplanes, we covered the boat's frame with overlapping long, slender strips of cardboard for planks, clinker-style. The deck was cardboard, and the masts were made of wooden dowels. It was about that point, deep in the night before the deadline, bleary-eyed, I was sent off to bed, leaving the project unfinished finished. I awoke early the next morning surprised to find a completed 2-foot long sailing vessel waiting to be transported to school. My dad had added cloth sails and rigged it using string. The whole thing was touched up with an artist's brush to give it a very realistic appearance. He was quite the artist and the ship was quite stunning!
The entries for that contest included most every imaginable variety of what might be called a boat. More than one entry was carved from a bar of Ivory soap (anyone remember the bar soap that floated?). Contraptions made from sticks, boards, construction paper, papier-mâché, and even modeling clay were on display that day. I vividly recall a fellow classmate, named Joey, who had whittled a simple boat out of a large Balsa wood block using his own trusty pocket knife.
There is a strict definition of handmade that would, understandably, exclude the use of electricity. Such was the case for both Joey's boat and my ship. In fact, all of our entries that day were constructed without electricity. Had there been an option to use power to speed up the boat building process, I am certain we all would have taken advantage of it, but I digress.
Consider a scenario today, where a youth, perhaps having worked to purchase his first rudimentary CNC, has successfully set it up, trained himself in CAD/CAM, designed, manufactured, and presented his family with gifts made of wood (or acrylic, metal, etc.). Are these items somehow less valuable to his family than were his first pencil or crayon drawings, due to power tools having been used? I tend to think not.
I have built acoustic guitars without electricity, and I have built many more guitars utilizing power tools. Does one approach over the other consistently produce a more valuable guitar? Is a guitar made without electricity better than the instrument made using electricity?
If we are contrasting two guitars made by the same knowledgeable and skillful builder, I would assert that the better guitar will likely be the one to which greater attention has been paid throughout the entire build.
In my opinion, neither electricity nor the absence of it guarantees a better or worse instrument. As a result, I include power tools in the definition of a handcrafted guitar.
When it comes to handcrafting wooden musical instruments, the right pieces of wood, worked the right way by the right person can become more than simply the sum of the parts. The wood seems to open up, blossoming and blooming, revealing itself in a most intimate interaction between man and the creation. The end result of good design and expertise reveals an unprecedented physical, visual and auditory experience that can leave one at a loss for words.
For me, there is a much more significant issue than whether or not an item has been made using electricity, or not, and it all goes back to eventful boat building contest from my childhood. My entry took the blue ribbon that day. And I treasured a fond memory of a rare moment of working on a project together with dad. But when I saw my classmate's Balsa boat, I cried. You see, Joey's boat, crude as it was, was made all by himself. My boat, the one that all the kids, teachers, and administrators fawned over, the entry that got first prize, was only partially made by me. The real detailed, aesthetically-pleasing (wow! factor) elements were made by my dad.
I define handcrafting as allocating both the credit and the liability to an individual maker, with or without electricity.
A team of makers might distribute a work flow to construct a guitar, or a multitude of guitars, such that no one individual is actually building a complete instrument. This can be very efficient for delivering a quantity of product. And this is my understanding of a factory, or mass production, approach.
Is there any qualitative difference between a guitar built by an individual and a factory-built guitar?
Disclaimer: I don't own a guitar factory, nor do I have any plans to do so. I do not work in a guitar factory and I never have (though I have visited a few). However, I have owned, performed with, and even repaired many factory-built guitars. A couple of my favorite personal guitars happen to have been factory-built.
Throughout the years, very significant instruments have been made by the hands of skilled craftsmen who are in the employ of production factories. I once opined that, in such cases, it wasn't so much the factories who were building these guitars; it was the craftsmen who worked there.
As a result of the countless instruments produced, a wealth of knowledge has been generated regarding the construction of the guitar. Independent guitar makers, me included, have no doubt benefitted from such knowledge, with many sharing their own discoveries back into a growing encyclopedia/database of information.
Successful factories excel at precision tooling and automation. Some have invested heavily into study, research and experimentation. With such a plethora of guitar-related data and experience available, one might assume that factory-produced instruments must therefore all be better than all but the most rare exception of independently-built instruments. I do not assume that at all.
I began playing the guitar as a child in the 1960s, started repairing and building as a teenager, have learned from master luthiers and now, decades later, I have convinced myself I am qualified to offer at least one more opinion on a topic others have likely exhausted more eloquently.
When thinking about the difference between a handcrafted guitar and a factory-built guitar, consider the following contrasts:
• Hand-tooled leather vs. machine-stamped (embossed) leather
• Original oil paintings vs. prints
• Custom cabinetry vs. production cabinets
• Handmade, tailored clothing vs. off-the-shelf, store-bought clothing
• Hand-tossed, brick oven pizza vs. frozen pizza
• Chef prepared meals vs. microwave dinners
The chef-prepared meal vs. microwave dinner contrast may be a bit harsh, but I am intending to point out the distinction between examples of custom made and run-of-the-mill, factory-produced items. While a chef is certainly capable of producing a boring plate, his or her reputation and career hinges on such missteps, and it won’t happen often (at least, not for very long). It is just as unlikely that any diners will be raving over their next microwave meal, their eyes rolling back in their heads, their senses overwhelmed with gastronomic delight, overheard uttering adjectives such as ambrosial, gustatory, brackish, dulcet and sapid!
Like it, or not: factory products are largely governed by owner/shareholder profit and benefit from close monitoring of factors such as market share, executive management, purchasing power, economies of scale, advertising and marketing, labor force, equipment maintenance, repeatability, compliance with safety standards, etc. Much like “spec” homes, factory-built guitars need to sell into a mass market in order to realize a profit and decisions are made, for better or worse, to ensure that happens. To think that all these business issues have nothing but positive impact on the end product would be a bit naïve. It would be just as silly to claim that a factory could never put out a worthy musical instrument. They can; they have; they do.
Independent shop products are largely governed and/or driven by the owner’s economic survival, knowledge and skill level, passion, drive, determination, ingenuity, morality, etc. More like a custom homebuilder than a large spec house developer, the lone guitar maker typically exhibits a greater attention to detail and has (may have) more freedom to pursue product personalization than does the factory. Of course, he or she can never compete with the volume of instruments produced by a factory, and is hard-pressed to produce instruments with the same level of consistency. That is not to say that all factory-made products are somehow inferior, or that any and every small shop’s products are always preferable. Personally, I do not believe that all independently built guitars are better than all factory-made ones (though I secretly want to believe they could be). Yet there are differences between the two and, sometimes, those differences can be significant.
A successful factory excels at repeatability. So-called Quality Assurance/Quality Control monitors standards that have been established to be the factors that are replicated, over and over. The intention is to ensure consistent output and, if that output has been determined to be profitable, another success story can be heralded. Each machine and machine operator has a task to perform and, barring any labor force interruption or tool mishap, the entire process comes together with unparalleled precision and speed.
Imagine a large machine, akin to the prototype built by the toymaker’s apprentice in Disney’s 1961 rendering of Babes in Toyland, into which stacks of wood are repeatedly fed and out of which emerge popular guitar models.
An operator enters the parameters that will produce the desired output into the machine's highly-intuitive graphical user interface and presses "Start." One after the other, out pops the next product, identical in every detail to the one that preceded it. Of course, this is exactly where consistency in the fully automated production process may potentially falter, though rarely as significantly as in a 100% manual (read: independent) operation. Employees move up, on or out and must be replaced and retrained. Sometimes pressing "Start" is not as easy as it sounds. Knowledge and skill may or may not survive various corporate transitions. Machines require maintenance, they change over time and (hopefully) improve. Tools constantly wear, so adjustments must be made and deviations accounted for. Or not.
It is rare to find an independent guitar builder who produces a lone, single product and even more rare to find one who uses the exact same wood and precisely the same processes throughout the entirety of their career. Multiple models created from multiple species of wood using a variety of tools and techniques over decades can make for a rather well-rounded luthier. The very nature of the dedicated craftsman drives him or her to improve and perfect lutherie skills, to master and keep mastering oneself and one’s craft. Over time, the knowledge acquired and the skills mastered are quite extensive, as they must be, for every aspect of every guitar has to be addressed by one person.
The master luthier can be counted on to produce a consistently masterful guitar, regardless of the changes in materials, tools, processes or product.
A production guitar factory will most certainly approach craftsmanship, quality and value differently from an independent luthier. All luthiers are not at the same level of knowledge and expertise, just as all factories do not contain identical equipment with identical workforces and policies. For the factory, craftsmanship will often be equated with machine operator skills. Where handwork may be involved, there is a belief that highest and best use will yield greater efficiency which directly translates into profit, so the factory worker will be relegated to reproduce a component or step repeatedly, day after day, likely until such time that he or she can be replaced by a machine or automated process. Quality is usually defined and measured as a target standard for consistent output. Value is typically determined to be more about brand recognition and public perception than the actual time cost of ownership of the instrument.
The skilled independent instrument maker has learned that the response of a given instrument is controlled by ever-so-subtle variations in the thickness and stiffness of the woods used, the bracing material, pattern, placement and shaping, the precise sizing of the sound chamber (the body of the guitar), the size, shape and placement of its soundhole/soundport, overall weight, neck and fingerboard choices, surface preparation and finish, et cetera. This knowledge is used to (hopefully) tailor each guitar to its new owner’s needs and desires. The recipient of such a creation couldn’t care less about how efficiently some shop ran that week. He wants his new guitar to be the best of the best, and his expectations are exceedingly high. This is a glimpse into what craftsmanship and quality can mean to the independent luthier. Value is much more closely coupled to actual costs of materials and level of expertise, and worth (or price) is determined on an individual, case-by-case basis.
There are myriad combinations of construction techniques and even more adjustments and tweaks that the luthier can draw upon to address individual need. Having the knowledge to do so, let alone the flexibility and freedom, is tantamount to success for the hand-maker. No factory (that I am aware of) is in a position to devote such time and attention to an individual instrument.
So long as the machinery is running smoothly, marketing is properly inciting customer demand, and the accounts are in the black, the company is deemed to be successful. I have speculated for years (and have yet to be proved wrong) that this assembly line approach demonstrates another fundamental principle regarding the intrinsic nature and distinction of wood. With dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands of guitars emerging from a production process that replicates itself to exacting standards, the question persists: how is it that one guitar in {n} number of guitars will stand out from the rest of the production batch? Why does one particular guitar that has been built with CNC precision to be just like all the others in a given production run dare to be different, even exceptional at times? As all other factors are identical, one is forced to acknowledge the wood, alone, must be responsible for the distinction. Unlike metal or plastic, wood is a living substance having notably diverse characteristics that benefit from individual consideration.
The extra attention and accompanying expertise required to coax the maximum musicality out of each and every instrument built, not just the one or two outstanding accidents or close approximations, lies at the very foundation of the handcrafted instrument maker’s business and reputation.
At the factory, even if someone were to notice an occasional exceptional instrument amongst a production run, the very effort of pausing to observe the hiccup would likely be deemed a distraction from the process. That process cannot accommodate variations in the wood (at least, to my knowledge, it hasn’t, yet). I consider the ability of the independent luthier to bring all his or her knowledge and skill to bear on the one instrument being built at the moment to be the primary reason why so many independent luthiers’ guitars are easily on a par with or well exceed the very top-tier offerings of the factory-made instruments.
As guitar manufacturing companies grew larger, their respective corporate policies were adjusted in support of the maxim, "We are in business to sell product, not repair warranty claims." Many (not all) guitars were subsequently built heavier, the idea being that a more sturdy instrument will likely endure greater mishandling.
The attention to detail that would result in a finer, yet perhaps more delicate instrument was once held to be a common and desired trait among skilled instrument makers. By relegating that extra attention to detail to a corporate interest’s “Custom Shop,” and employing more generalized building techniques on the assembly line, more standard production guitars could be produced in the same amount of time, potentially generating higher revenue.
When the quantity of instruments produced is counted in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, extra material added to mitigate returns eventually had to be weighed against the cost of improved precision in machinery, material and processes. Acoustic guitars were once again able to be built lighter again, though quite probably not for the reasons you may have been hoping.
Face it: the market is flooded with shiny and sturdy products offering mediocre performance. Expectations have been dramatically altered among the consumer base. Guitars must now be offered in my favorite color, only cost the equivalent of what I might pay for a new lawnmower and either last forever or until I tire of them. And they all need to make me look/sound/feel like my favorite artist.
Not wishing to be remembered merely as the critic who only cast aspersions on the veracity of production guitar factories, I must acknowledge the positive contribution(s) the factories have made and consider the prospects they hold for the future. Much of the design and sound of the modern acoustic guitar is owed to a handful of factory workers who pioneered the field. The rash of independent guitar makers that broke out in the 1970’s built on the foundation laid by those pioneers. Factories came and went (overseas, mostly), and the ones who stayed changed with the times. Some, having the funding, connections and overall wherewithal, had (and have) the potential to research and develop the field of guitar making, and have introduced innovations that benefit us all. Huge efforts have been made in the areas of forestry and conservation, as well as importing and exporting of raw materials. Looking ahead, methodologies can be perfected, boundaries can be expanded, myths can be busted, new materials and processes can be explored. That is not to say that all of this will happen or that the end result will be preferable, but it opens up all kinds of possibilities.
So what of the fate of the independent luthier, the lone handcrafted guitar maker? He or she can choose to stay the course just for the love of it, or perhaps incorporate factory machinery or processes into his or her own craft, or choose to apprentice the next generation of independent builders. Or maybe even write a compelling story, retain the movie rights and finally get away from all the sawdust.
Food for thought: We have yet to see 3-D printed violins selling for $20 Million dollars.