Beardsell Guitars

The Fretboard Journal - Summer 2010

My first encounter with one of Allan Beardsell's guitars was with a 4G, a 17-inch steel-string acoustic, belonging to my pal Alex Varty, a great Canadian guitarist and music writer. I was really surprised, not so much by how it looked, but by the way it sounded. The sound field around the instrument, courtesy of the side holes and unusual design, made it feel like I was wearing the most expensive audiophile headphones in town and listening to the instrument through the best studio mics in the world. I was just blown away on so many different levels.

I was enchanted, because the luthier was experimenting, and I'm a sucker for things that are experimental. All the experimental things worked; together, they did something amazing! Side ports, asymmetrical neck, unusual top hole, radial bracing on the back, laminated wood, strange peghead, armrest — they were all in service to the sound and the playability, all about my interaction with the instrument. So I ordered one for myself . . .

I remember taking it to the Freight & Salvage club in Berkeley to show my sometime collaborator David Lindley. He was disconcerted and almost mad, because he found it to be one of the best-sounding acoustics that he had ever encountered. I've acquired a couple of more since and I just love these guitars. There's nothing else like them.

I'm certainly one of those folks who own too many guitars — and they're outstanding guitars. Years ago, I contracted that Guitar Acquisition Syndrome from Lindley, so I've been fortunate to live with many great instruments and have relationships with them for decades. I have guitars from more than several great luthiers who are amazing craftsmen doing beautiful art, making guitars that sound wonderfully transcendental. But, to me, Allan's are the biggest successes in being experimental in so many different ways at once. All of his experiments seem to succeed together and produce exceptional instruments.

Blinded by Science

henry kaiser: What you have done as a luthier must seem so untraditional to most folks. But are there traditions that serve as inspiration in your life?

allan beardsell: That's a good question. It's funny — I feel there's a part of me that's very traditional, and then I recognize what that is and I completely avoid it when I go to build. But, you know, the soft line of the guitar is obviously where most guitars tend to go. They're extremely rounded, and, yeah, I don't really head off in that direction.

hk: Your approach is certainly different; did you like science-fair projects when you were a kid?

ab: Oh, I see what you mean.

hk: I mean, how your brain works to make decisions, not how you work — outside of the guitar tradition of, "OK, well, this person did that, now I'll add this." When you throw out the typical thinking about the guitar, your personal expression is in making those instruments. You've got it in playing music, you've got it in making these instruments — but I know it must come from some other things, too, in life. What else?

ab: Wow! I wish you'd told me you were going to ask me that question; I'd think of something brilliant to say, but it's probably something really boring. I've always been a total science guy, as a kid making rockets, and — well, my mom would tell you that I almost burned the house down once, making gunpowder. It's what every kid does, you know?

hk: It's the science-fair-project thing; it's experimenting at home, yeah. Who are your favorite science- fiction authors?

ab: Philip K. Dick is a big one for me, Frank Herbert, all those . . . the mind expanders. Seeing big possibilities — that's what a lot of speculative fiction is about.

hk: And do you think that influences you as a luthier?

ab: Oh, absolutely. Just that idea that there are possibilities beyond what we know, and the way to find them is to invent those worlds where these kinds of instruments, these kinds of ideas, can live, essentially.

hk: Yeah, I'm there, too. When you look at the instruments, they don't look retro; they look modern. But some things look classic even though they may not be. What in the world's going on with your aesthetic choices? Like the X-ray rosette, what's that? Is that something from the past or is that something from the future? Or is that something from the future of another past? Or the past of another future?

ab: It's a bit of everything. You calling it the "x-ray" — there's something kind of '30s about that. I think it started as kind of a tip of the hat to some deco ideas, which maybe has not served me well, because people always think of the guitar as being like a Django-style guitar or something like that.

hk: 'Cause there are elements of that there, but there are also elements of some kind of futurism. I'm just not sure what year that futurism's from.

ab: Yeah, I'm not sure either. When you try and be classic, in a way, you are trying to be a bit timeless. Like there's a bit of looking to the past and looking to the future, and where you end up is somewhere, hopefully, now, you know? I'm not exactly sure where that comes from, 'cause I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel; I'm just trying to make my own wheel.

hk: A wheel that you haven't seen before.

ab: Exactly. I once read something in a Tom Robbins book. It was Skinny Legs and All, and there's a guy — the protagonist — he's trying to explain what it is to be an artist. And he says something, and I'll paraphrase it: You just imagine what it is that the world is missing and what it is you want to put into it, and then the art you make fills that spot.

"Transparent Interface"

hk: When you started building, had you taken a class or looked at book?

ab: I took a night-school course at the local art college in instrument making. It was one night a week, but because I worked in woodshops at the same time during the day, I was maybe a little more advanced than some of the other people in the class. I basically finished it on my own; I think I took one semester in the class and then just went on my own. And from there I started making more electric instruments — lap steels and electric guitars. Then I got a job repairing guitars, and I did that for 10 or 11 years.

hk: Is this in Toronto?

ab: This is in Toronto. And so I developed all that — there's a sort of intuitiveness that you get just from being a player. You think of things that you want, things that you need. And then, with repairing instruments, I was starting to understand just what makes a guitar work really well. When you hold it in your hand — I've sort of developed this idea in my head, what I geekily refer to as "transparent interface" — you hold it, and it doesn't fight you. You just basically can take what's in your mind and your fingers and make it into sound.

hk: That's one thing that I love about your instruments.

ab: Yeah, I try not to use phrases like that too often, so you can put quotes around that one: "transparent interface." I was in the repair job, and people started asking me to make guitars for them — electric guitars. Then, an interesting singer-songwriter from Vancouver named Veda Hille asked me to make her a tenor guitar, and so that was my first real acoustic guitar, which really turned out great; she loved it. She's mainly a piano player, but she really made a strong connection with this instrument.

And then I thought, Wow, there's got to be something here with this, and I took a short course with Sergei de Jonge, who's a brilliant master guitar maker from Canada. He offered a nine-week course. My wife and I just had our first child, and I really couldn't take that much time off from my job and from my family to do this course. So I made a deal with him to take five weeks to do it, try to cram the whole thing — like, make two instruments in five weeks at Sergei's place — and managed to do it.

hk: Steel-strings?

ab: A steel- and a nylon-string. I was trying to learn about building traditional instruments, and they were the first and last traditional instruments I ever made. The steel-string was stolen almost immediately after I finished the course, and I still have the nylon-string, which is a nice instrument, too. But after the course was over, I sat down and I really got myself thinking, Well, what is it that I need? What, as a player, do I really want? I want to be able to hear myself when I'm onstage, even with a pickup. When you hear what comes out of the monitors, it's a very compressed kind of signal; it doesn't really interact the way you do when you sit in a room and play.

hk: Had you seen pictures of side ports, or had you heard of side-porting a guitar?

ab: I'd heard of it — when I was with Serge and also in conversation with Grit Laskin. Grit said, "Well, you know, you don't really have to have a conventional top soundhole. It doesn't matter where the soundhole is, it can be anywhere." You look at a concert harp: The thing's on the back, and that instrument, the concert harp, is sitting onstage with orchestral instruments, and it's one of the few plucked string instruments that actually competes with a huge orchestra. You can really hear it, whereas a guitar would get lost.

So I took some of those ideas of how to make instruments loud and balanced and useful in a louder world, I guess, really, and so that was where the sideport part came from. There was a part of me at first that really wanted to omit the top hole or the front hole altogether, but in the end, I just thought it looked wrong, so I left that in.

But I'm trying to balance the size of the holes to be most functional. The openings — the area of the apertures — they amount to what is essentially a fourinch soundhole, so it's a slightly larger soundhole than most, collectively, but we balance the bigger treble with, hopefully, a stronger bass end as well. So it was a matter of balancing things, and that's one of the evolutionary components of my guitars.

hk: What about the asymmetrical neck?

ab: Again, there was one of those things where I asked myself, "What do I want to feel when I'm holding the neck?" Since studying classical guitar as a young person, I wanted to be able to have a very firm grip, but not make it so thick that it was tiring to hold. So I basically wanted to think about the shape of the hand, the way it makes kind of a teardrop shape, and I just thought, Well, that seems like a really simple idea. You move the weight of the thickest part of the neck towards the crux of the hand, and the thumb can, without really thinking about it, make a more solid grip — without really having to use grip, you know what I'm saying? Ah, it just seemed like a good idea to do. It's a teardrop shape.

hk: And so you just tried it once and then adjusted it on each guitar a little bit 'til you got it where you wanted it?

ab: Yeah, exactly. It just follows a more natural shape of the hand; that was all it was. Most people who've seen asymmetrical necks before, it goes the other way — where the fat side is on the thumb side and not on the finger side. And almost everybody I know who's tried [my neck] thinks, Wow, that's so obvious. Some people don't like it, it's true. I won't say it's universal.

hk: Then there's the bracing pattern.

ab: The back is a radial brace. It's nothing really unusual. I just noticed that a number of builders, especially the Kasha-style builders, were using this Richard Schneider-style back-bracing pattern. [Beginning in the 1960s, biophysicist Dr. Michael Kasha worked extensively with luthier Richard Schneider to improve the acoustic properties of stringed instruments, using scientific principles to devise a number of structural and design modifications.] And mine is not exactly like that, but it's fairly similar.

Ladder bracing, which is very strong, doesn't really support the back along its length. And I basically wanted to be able to make the back looser, but not so much so that it would lose structural support for the guitar, especially with the much stiffer, heavy rim. The idea being: By making the rim much stiffer, the top and back can be made freer to move much like a snare drum, you know, where the rim stays completely rigid at the top, the top powers the back, and the back is where the bass end or the low-mid is shaped.

And all these ideas were just more instinctual than actual — the science is stuff that I've looked into later, and I believe it supports many of the ideas.

hk: You've been making the sides thicker, more laminated lately?

ab: Yeah, from the drum perspective — to bring out the projection — I've used the laminated sides for a long time, but that was originally as a way to support the rather sizeable aperture in the side of the guitar. It exposes all sorts of end grain, and in order to keep the guitar from basically cracking and splitting down the side, it has to be fairly supported, and it's also banded on the inside as well.

But I noticed by making the side so stiff — and also not using kerfed liners anymore, they're all solid-wood liners — the rim becomes incredibly stiff. For me, the rim is really the engine of the whole guitar; everything's built to the rim. And the more I made it a stiffer, more rigid platform for the top and back, I noticed that the projection of the instrument — just the sheer power of it — really started to build.

Parallel Worlds

hk: An aesthetics question: I know where my guitarplaying aesthetic fits into guitar tradition, but it also comes from many other traditions and experiences, like Japanese monster movies or what it's like to be underwater and a lot of other things. Your aesthetic choices and creativity, what's it come out of, besides out of guitar-making tradition? When I first saw your guitars, I was going back to Philip K. Dick and Man in the High Castle . . . Parallel worlds.

ab: A favorite book of mine.

hk: What if, in the guitar world, Martin and Gibson — the Americans — didn't set the pace; what if the French did? Because the French had the art deco as a French thing . . .

ab: That's right.

hk: . . . the Selmer thing is a French thing. You see how far everybody's taking Gibson and Fender — what if you take Selmer along that progression, instead of winding up in this little backwater of the gypsy stuff?

ab: Well, that's a really interesting point and actually something that I've really started looking into in the past few years. After looking into the Romantic era in guitars — like the early-19th-century guitars, after the development of the viola da mano, after lutes from the Renaissance — and then through into Spanish guitars, [I noticed] what Martin and Gibson came out of was European, pre-Spanish guitar. You know, like the pin bridge.

The viola da mano lost its double chorus and became a six-string instrument right around the turn of the 19th century, and there was this explosion of innovation. There [were] so many different guitar makers from Austria and Germany, England and France and all the more northern European countries. And that is where I think a lot of my tradition comes from, that era of instrument.

In fact, I took a trip through England a year ago April and went to visit a number of collections over there of these kinds of instruments, and it was just astounding to see some of the innovations that you see now — with the double tops, and soundholes in weird spots, and the extreme negative neck angles and all that kind of thing. It's all been done! Everything that's on my guitars, all that stuff has been done already.

All those guitars that I saw, there's just some amazing innovation that got basically forgotten, because, after Martin left the Stauffer-style guitar and came to America, that was sort of the basis of what became flattop steel-string guitars later. Then there was Torres, who's not the first person to make what is now considered the Spanish guitar, with a tie block, which is left over from the lute era, but he perfected that — essentially made a better version of that guitar — and that became very established as the classical guitar.

Then you have these completely separated lines of instrument: the Spanish and the steel-string. But there was this whole section of innovation that took place between 1800 and 1850, I guess, that has not really been visited too much anymore.

hk: I was mainly an electric player, originally, and then over the last 15 or so years, I've played more and more acoustic music, too. I'm a real no-pickups purist with myself when I play acoustic guitar, but you must have people who want pickups all the time in acoustic guitars, and you're pretty critical. Is there anything that works for you?

ab: Well, first of all, I generally tell people that I don't put them in because I've been away from guitar repair for quite a while. I still repair guitars for friends or whatever, if they ask me to, but as far as electronics, that whole world changes so often and so fast that it's impossible to know what's even out there anymore, at least for me. So I don't really have too many opinions about it, except that I leave it up to the player; if they want a certain type of pickup in it, I'll put it in.

hk: Are your electrics made for a certain idiom, the archtops you're making now? Because they look kind of grouchy, rockabilly and Atkins-y . . .

ab: Yeah, I would have to say that I was pretty influenced by the Gretsch — you know, the Jets with the archtop on a chambered solid back. So it is kind of in that style. I think the one that you're referring to has the FilterTron and SuperTron pickups in it and the Bigsby. I have made other versions of that guitar with Gibsonstyle pickups in it.

But, yeah, I don't know what else to say about that guitar, except that I've wanted to make electric guitars that are not all sustain and no resonance. I think it's the one thing I really like about Gretsch guitars. In the electric-guitar world, sustain and resonance seems to be kind of an inversely proportional thing; if you have too much of one, you're gonna lose the other. So, to me, electric guitars have tons of sustain. Why add more? Why not give it some character, too?

hk: Electric banjos, you've made three now?

ab: I made the first for a great Canadian banjo player named Jayme Stone. He'd seen some electric guitars that I'd made, the archtops, and he said, "Wow, I really want that sound, but I just want it in a banjo." And so we talked back and forth for actually a couple of years, and he finally said, "Well, OK, I'm ready to go." And what resulted, the first one, was not really to my liking — and not his, I don't think, either, because it turned into more like an electric guitar.

For the ones that I built for you and Bill Evans, it was actually what I originally wanted to build for Jayme, which was really a hollow instrument. So the build that I originally wanted to do was actually a bit more like a Dobro, which is what I think I did more for you and Bill. The one I made for Jayme was so solid that it actually didn't have any character at all. Again, it was that sustain and resonance — it had tons of sustain, all that, but, you know, a banjo doesn't really sustain so much. It's more of a plucky, short-ring instrument, and that had a very particular midrange spike.

hk: You make the banjo pickups yourself?

ab: With Jayme's banjo, it also was my first experiments with hand-winding my own pickups, 'cause it's hard to get a five-pole pickup on the market these days. And I think what I ended up with for your banjo and for Bill's was about three light years ahead of where I was back then.

hk: One of my favorite moments playing one of your guitars was when I was making a record with a great Norwegian guitarist, Knut Reiersrud. We were playing sitting next to each other — acoustic, without headphones on — and I played this harmonic, and the note started, and then it got louder, like a volume pedal. I mean, dramatically louder. And Knut says, "How'd you do that?" And I said, "I don't know, the guitar just did it."

ab: Wow, interesting!

hk: Then I did it again several times, and it seemed physically impossible; it was just some really weird resonance thing. For me, that's a great moment with a guitar — when the guitar surprises me. It was like a message from another reality or something.

ab: Exactly. The whole thing about my job as a guitar maker is to make good tools that a player can use in as many ways as they want to. After that, it's up to you.