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.
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.” 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.”
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.”
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.”
