Well, my name's Andrew White, and I'm a guitar maker. I have been building guitars for now about 13 years. I started actually when I was in college. I was studying abroad in Spain and I decided to purchase an instrument and it was a pretty amazing experience because when I bought this handmade guitar from this old Spanish guy in Madrid, I asked him if he would show me his shop and at the time I was thinking, I was studying Spanish. So, I was literally thinking I would learn some Spanish words. That was the idea. I would learn the word for hammer or whatever. And I walked back into this guy's shop, and it's about the same size as the shop we're in right now. And, you hear about the light bulb going off and it was just in a flash I said, I'm going to make a guitar and I went home and I started telling everybody that I was going to build the guitar. And it was that Christmas that my sister bought enough wood for one guitar. And all of a sudden, I had to walk the walk of building this guitar. And I did. And it took me an entire year. I had to learn every single aspect of the instrument. Down from choosing the woods, which she helped me with. To designing the instruments, understanding the structure of the instrument and I bought a book and that's how I learned and I built one guitar a year later. I was finished and the second guitar, I traded for a website. And the third guitar I sold, and I was in business just like that. And it was a pretty amazing time because I was able to earn my income by doing this art, and doing this craft, and at the same time teaching myself all about guitar making. There have been a ton of roadblocks along the way. There's no doubt about that. I wouldn't say any one thing stands out particularly. But learning to design instruments is probably the greatest challenge because I was adamant from the beginning. To not be held in the binds of a traditional instrument, which talk about the school of hard knocks, that's basically the path I took. And what that ended up with was completely developing designs from the ground up, completely learning the materials, the wood, from the ground up, without anyone Instructing me at all, there was a little bit I learned through the book I had, but other than that everything I learned was just based on breaking stuff essentially. And it's a great way to learn especially with wood because it's such a tactile thing you really have to experience it in my opinion in order to really get what's going on. Take bending sides for instance every piece of wood is totally different and even not just the species of the wood, every piece of wood, you have to listen and perceive what's happening with that particular piece of wood to ensure that it bends safely without breaking it. Wood and understanding wood is probably the most critical component of what I do. It- In every single aspect, how I receive, who I purchase from, where they get their woods, the lulls around the woods, and that's before the wood even gets to me. And then, once I get the wood, understanding its properties, how strong it'll be, how it'll hold up under the tension of the strings. What do I need to do to change it to make the optimal tone? What tone is it going to lend to the guitar? It's funny, I actually I remember. Now, I was a philosophy student. And I remember back when I built my first guitar, one of my goals was to kind of learn to be a more patient man [LAUGH]. And building guitars requires a great deal of patience. And in my very first guitar I remember looking at the sound board of the guitar, the top of the guitar. And while I was trying to learn patience I was also studying the materials. And it occurred to me how long it took that piece of wood to grow in order to produce that very particular tone that only that tree, only that cut of wood, could lend to that guitar. And it was something like 150 or 200 years. And I thought, geez, if you build a guitar out of carbon fiber you really arent' using and taking advantage of the time that only wood can produce. The different species are probably, the single most important factor in the structure of the instrument and in the tone of the instrument, and we usually break it down to the back and the sides. And the back and the sides being one wood usually in common, the sound board of the guitar and the neck components. There's about 150 to 180 lbs of tension on a guitar and wood is an interesting thing because it's the way I think that the guitar is in constant collapse, unfortunately true. My goal it to increase the longevity of that collapse, to 200 or 300 years that I can. So, using the right words. It's pretty important when you're trying to make an instrument or any product, right? Last 200 years or 300 years. On the back and the sides of the guitar,we usually use hard woods. For my hand made instruments I usually prefer to use very exotic woods,one because they do lend different tones that you might not find in a mass produced instrument they are marketable. Say a Brazilian rosewood there's a lot of appeal to that when a customer is spending $10,000 on a guitar. They like to know that they're getting something very special. So, a lot of different factors go into the back and sides, and the soundwire of the guitar is usually a coniferous wood, like spruce, or cedar, are the most common. And within spruces even, for instance, I've build with many, many different types of spruces, red spruce, Sitka spruce. We get spruces from Italy and Germany and France. We get spruces from all over the world, and they do a very particular different thing to the instrument. It's hard to explain how important that is until you've engaged in an in-depth conversation with a guitar player who is trying desperately to communicate or to emote some thing. That a Sitka spruce doesn't satisfy them. But only a German spruce would. Very, very difficult thing to understand. There are numbers of different issues around sourcing wood and there are a great deals laws around it. Most importantly the side D's, I think it's the Lacey Act. They are doing great things to protect and preserve wood in the rain forest, and trees. At the same time, that can make it difficult for a company like mine to source materials. I appreciate what they're doing but I have to work around it. Now, what that means is that in my very small kind of niche industry [COUGH] there have developed whole, a great deal, of boutique wood suppliers that sell particularly to even guitar makers, if not musical instrument makers. And that's a that's a very difficult job because they're the ones kind of on the front lines going to these different countries sourcing these different woods or going to major exporters and importers of those and finding just the cream of the crop that would produce a good instrument.
