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Sunday, August 21, 2022

Mini-Review: Live Men of Steel

Live: Men of Steel -- The Art of the Steel-String Guitar (Thunderation, 2003)

Don Ross Tony McManus Beppe Gambetta and Dan Crary. First off, I call b.s. Judging from their photos, the accounting department is as close as any of these dudes have come to working in a steel mill. Yes, they play steel string guitars. But that is a parasitic relationship to steel. So, i challenge the title of "men of steel."
Second, a complaint. If it were possible for an album to contain too much incredible guitar playing, this album would be one of them.
And, finally, some praise: _Live Men of Steel_ is a gorgeous celebration of the acoustic steel-string guitar with four master musicians performing for what must have been a drop-jawed audience. Also, as an aside: I would like to start a petition for Don Ross and @TedNugent to face off in a guitar duel. The loser has to shut up forever, and the winner gets to help set social policy. #albumreview #acousticguitar

 


Saturday, July 30, 2022

Linda Manzer and the Spirit of the Guitar

The Pikasso built for Pat Metheny by Linda Manzer. Image from www.manzer.com

    
The story goes that Linda Manzer got hooked on instrument building after making a dulcimer for herself in high school, or shortly after, in art college maybe, and never gave it up. Manzer has built several guitars for Bruce Cockburn, and he has purchased others second hand. Currently, Bruce plays two Manzer six strings and a twelve string, as well as the charango, which was the first instrument she built for him. But Cockburn is just one of Manzer’s high-profile clients. Pat Metheny, Stephen Fearing, Mary Lynn Hammond are just some of the remarkable musicians to play her instruments. She has built close to thirty instruments for Pat Metheny alone, including a sitar-style guitar, baritones, and “The Pikasso,” with four necks, two sound holes, and forty-two strings.

     Dulcimers are big in folk circles and were everywhere in the popular music of the 60s and early 70s. Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, even Led Zeppelin had droning dulcimers on their records. The building experience led her to apprentice with Jean Larrivée, one of the most respected and influential luthiers in North America, and one of the first to introduce a cutaway design to the steel-string acoustic guitar. Manzer joined Larrivée’s team in 1974 and apprenticed there until 1978 when she went out on her own. 

     Acoustic guitar players wanting to play high on the neck are impeded by the instrument’s traditional body design. The upper bout, the rounded part of the guitar body on either side of the neck, can be a challenge to navigate. The player has to bring the hand around to the front of the guitar and release the neck. Solid body electric guitars do not present this problem because the body is usually cut away, giving access to the notes higher up on the neck. Most of the sound of an electric guitar comes from the pickups anyway, making large, resonant bodies unnecessary. But an acoustic guitar creates sound as the body vibrates. The more surface area available, the louder and fuller the sound. 

    In the early and mid-70s, players like Michael Hedges, Richard Thompson, John Renbourn, and Bruce Cockburn were pushing the limitations of the instrument. Jean Larrivée responded by building an acoustic guitar with a cutaway design to give the player access to the upper frets. His first models to incorporate the design were called the Larrivée C-series. Bruce Cockburn received one of two of these early cutaways, which perpetuated the idea that the C-series had been made specifically for Bruce, a story he denied in an interview with Acoustic Guitar Magazine.[1] 

    But David Wren, a luthier apprenticing at the same time as Linda Manzer, remembers it differently. Cockburn had been visiting Larrivée’s shop in Toronto quite regularly in the early 1970s. In an interview with Jon Carroll from December 17, 2000, posted on The Cockburn Project, David Wren remembers that Bruce “requested a cutaway, which at that time was a completely outrageous idea. I had never seen that on a flat-top steel string.”[2] So, either the first steel-string acoustic guitar was made for Bruce Cockburn, or he was given one of the first made.

     The cutaway design, now a standard option for acoustic guitar, is not without critics. Don Ross, among many other players, has noticed a loss of tone and resonance with the reduced surface area of the soundboard. Bruce Cockburn dismisses the argument outright.

     “You know, I honestly don’t give a shit. I really don’t,” he said in our 2019 interview for the Canadian folk music magazine Penguin Eggs. “If a guitar is a good guitar, it’s a good guitar. They all sound different. You could take two Martin D-18s built five years apart and they don’t sound the same, although they are constructed in the same manner. It’s the individual instrument, how it feels in your hands, and how it sounds to the individual player. There are trade offs, although I don’t know if it has to do with the cutaway as much as the construction.”

     Amplification is a much more immediate problem for the acoustic player than a reduced resonating surface, especially for a performing musician. Cockburn searched for a long time for an acoustic guitar that could be better amplified on stage. In small clubs and coffee houses, the acoustic player might get by without amplification, or with a microphone placed in front of the sound hole, but in larger venues the acoustic guitar needs to be wired for sound. Acoustic guitars are notoriously difficult to amplify. Adding pickups to the acoustic can make it sound like an electric, and then what’s the point? Microphones mounted inside the body are prone to create feedback and to muffle the sound. Modern electronics have pretty much rectified these problems. The acoustic guitar pickup systems used now, even in less expensive instruments, are remarkably good at reproducing the natural timbre of an acoustic guitar.

     While at Larrivée’s shop, Cockburn met Linda Manzer and David Wren, both of whom were apprenticing with Jean Larrivée. He eventually acquired three guitars by Wren, one of which was lost in a fire at a rehearsal studio. Soon after, Linda Manzer began her independent practice, and Bruce became one of her clients.

     Linda has received a lot of attention for the Pikasso guitar built for Pat Metheny. It’s an attention grabber. The first Pikasso guitar was built in 1984 when Metheny asked for an instrument with “as many strings as possible.”[3] Linda offered him forty-two strings on four necks, with two sound holes. It looks like an instrument played in the bar on Tatooine while Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan plan their escape, or an experiment in teleportation gone horribly wrong. The body of the instrument is so large and cumbersome that it led Linda to another innovation to the acoustic guitar’s centuries-old design called “The Manzer wedge.”

     The Manzer wedge is a slight tapering of the guitar body at the lower bout where the player’s arm rests. It gives freer access to the strings and helps reduce strain on the elbow caused by reaching over the guitar body and by repetitive movement.

     Manzer saw the ergonomic benefits of her wedge innovation immediately but thought it might be too much of an extreme modification to an instrument that has seen very little change in centuries. “The idea for the wedge actually came about from a discussion I had with [luthier] Tony Duggan-Smith while trying to figure out how to make such a huge guitar more ergonomic for Pat. I started incorporating the ‘Manzer Wedge’ into all my guitars, but because it was an incredibly radical change to the guitar design at that time, I was afraid people would boot me out of the guitar making world.”

 

    She needn’t have worried. Players who tried the wedge design were immediately taken with the comfort it offered. Cockburn found that the modification helped relieve a pinched nerve in his elbow. And soon, other luthiers were adopting the design into their builds.

 

    “I was very discreet about it for the first few years, but once people started copying the design I realized I had to attach my name to it so people would know it was my idea, and that I wasn’t copying someone else,” says Linda.

 

    Rather than trying to prevent other luthiers from using the modification, Linda made it open source, for a price. “At the beginning, I gladly excepted a bottle of wine each time somebody used it. If I had kept that up I would have quite a wine collection,” she says.

 

    The wedge is now open for anyone to use if due credit is given to its inventor.

 

    Guitar-making is akin to a spiritual practice for Linda Manzer, and players speak of her instruments as living beings. There is a bit of animism at play with instruments and musicians. An instrument needs to be played, otherwise they quite literally go to sleep. The wood becomes rigid. After a prolonged time without use, the instrument will sound thin and become less playable. The more regularly an instrument is played, the more it opens up. A good guitar gets better with age, if consistently played. And the guitar will change in response to the specific player. Wear on the fret wires and fretboard under the strings and the back of the neck reveals the favorite positions of the guitarist. Slowly, a guitar will mirror the player’s habits. Many guitar players claim an instrument takes on the spirit of the player.

 

    “I actually do believe objects can hold a little essence of the person they spend a lot of time with,” says Linda Manzer. “I have personally experienced getting a guitar back from somebody for repair and feeling as if they are in the room with me. After a few days that leaves, and I infuse the guitar back with a little bit of me. It sounds a little hokey, but I bet someday in the future what I feel intuitively will be scientifically proven.” 

 

     She does not produce a great many guitars, and her instruments, new and used, are prized among players. These are not entry level instruments. A used instrument, like the 1979 model formerly owned by Stephen Fearing, has been listed for $14,000 US. A new Manzer guitar can go for $25,000 and more. The building process can take eighteen months. It is slow, meticulous work.

 

    In 1989, Stephen Fearing was looking for a new guitar. His Guild D-35 was falling apart. He’d heard of Linda Manzer through his friend the late Willie P. Bennet, for whom Fearing’s current band Blackie and the Rodeo Kings began as a tribute. As luck would have it, Linda had a guitar for sale.

 

    “I like the idea of hand-built guitars,” says Fearing. “And I was definitely aware of Larrivée. Somehow, I knew that Linda had studied with Larrivée, which made me curious.”

 

    Fearing paid $2,900 for his first Manzer guitar, which, he says, “was a king’s ransom at the time.”

 

    He played that guitar for thirty years until, on the anniversary of that purchase, Linda Manzer presented Fearing with a new guitar. “I’d been trying to figure out how I could afford a new one,” he says. Astonishingly, a fan willed Fearing a Linda Manzer guitar that had not been played. It had sat on a stand in the corner of a room for years. When Stephen Fearing received it, the guitar needed some work. He brought it to Tony Duggan-Smith, who performed a neck reset, which involves removing the neck from the body, adjusting the joint, reattaching, then refinishing the sound board. The guitar also had a mother-of-pearl unicorn on the headstock, which Stephen had removed.

 

    Linda took it back in trade for the new guitar.

 

    “It’s an astounding guitar,” says Fearing of the new instrument. “It has the wedge, and it has my signature beautifully inlaid on the twelfth fret. She cut it out of mother of pearl. Linda said she didn’t breathe for an hour. Mother of pearl is super thin and very brittle. She glued a piece to thin plywood then used a Dremel tool to cut around my signature. Astounding.”

 

    In recent years, Linda Manzer has been building guitars for exhibitions in art galleries. It is kind of full circle. Before she joined Jean Larriveé’s team at the age of twenty-two, Linda studied painting in college.

 

    One recent project included six fellow Larrivée protégés, whom Manzer calls her “tribe of littermates,” each building a guitar in honour of a member of The Group of Seven. Linda’s guitar is a tribute to Lawren Harris and his painting Mt Lefroy (1930). The main part of the guitar is a traditional six string, but a shorter, eight-stringed harp neck juts up toward the player like the mountain peak for which it’s named. The guitar body is painted white like winter on Abbot Pass and gradually becomes icy blue toward the harp neck, which is shaped to resemble Mt. Lefroy itself. The guitar is now part of the Group of Seven permanent holdings at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Bruce Cockburn surprised Manzer by composing a piece for the instrument called “The Mt. Lefroy Waltz," which was later released on his Crowing Ignites album with a band arrangement of bass, drums, cornet, and electric guitar, but no little harp.

 

    “I tried to come up with something icy sounding,” Cockburn told The Globe and Mail’s Brad Wheeler. “The guitar favours the higher frequencies, and I tried to write that into the piece. It played very well. I was even able to use the ‘harp’ strings that are part of its architecture.”[4] 

 

    Manzer continues to build for players as well and is excited about the quality of luthier-built guitars in Canada at present.

 

    “I notice other builder’s designs,” she says. “But I don’t particularly study them. I am more interested in building techniques and how other builders technically assemble their guitars, the tonal choices they make. There are so many great and innovative builders out there right now. It’s nice to see everyone sharing ideas and technique.” 



[1] Acoustic Guitar Magazine. (January 28, 2015) [Video] https://youtu.be/W8sYV_eo7_Y?t=1420

[2] Carroll, J. (December 17, 2000). Interview with David Wren. http://cockburnproject.net/news/001217davidwren.html

[3] Pikasso. (n.d.) https://manzer.com/guitars/custom-models/pikasso/

[4] Wheeler, B. (December 31, 2016). Masterwork guitar exhibit honours Group of Seven. The Globe and Mail.