| Is
there a special gift of a sensitive ear which is possessed by
people who know how to create beautiful musical instruments
which also sound good? Visual artists are rumored to have
especially developed imaginations coordinating their minds
with their eyes so that they can look at a blank piece of
canvas and see their finished masterpiece. Perhaps the process
of learning how to take chunks of wood and artfully arrange
them so that the finished instrument sounds wonderful to our
ears develops the ear of the creator of such instruments.
Randy
Allen says he doesn't know about that, but he does love wood
and he loves making musical instruments. I met with Randy and
his wife, Penny, recently and discussed with them how that
love of working with wood has turned a part-time hobby into a
full-time labor of love and successful business. Randy arrived
with a brochure, a copy of a newsletter he produces and a
scrapbook of pictures, and an eager expectancy, although he
had earlier expressed some reserve, wondering what, if
anything, was remarkable about himself that would make a
person want to read about him.
That
same modesty, I found, showed up in other people's comments
about Randy and his work. At least one person said, "He
just doesn't know how good he is" about a guitar Randy
had made. That unassuming attitude is part of what makes Randy
so easy to talk to; he 's a low-tension conversationalist.
About the process of instrument making, however, Randy shows
considerable passion, and the excitement level in the air
increases when he gets to talking about his designs and
methods of working. His hands attempt to illustrate his words
and to punctuate his sentences quickly so that he can quickly
get to the next point.
He
told me that he performs between 150-200 separate task steps
in building an instrument. Some of these steps are small, such
as "thicknessing" the wood, and other steps are
larger, such as choosing the wood to be used for each piece of
the instrument. Sanding, measuring, bracing, gluing, clamping,
doing inlay, etc. all have their places in the sequence of
incremental steps which produce a beautiful, good sounding
instrument. Randy related how he had gotten into repairing
back in his mid-twenties when he had sent his own guitar to
someone else to repair and it had come back without being much
better than it was before. So he carefully (and with some
trepidation) he did the work over, and in the process,
discovered that he seemed to have a natural flair for
understanding the construction of acoustic instruments.
Ironically, the first guitar Randy built from scratch was a
solid-body electric guitar, which, he said, wasn't as much
fun, but it was a custom order for someone else, so he built
it to specifications.
Soon
friends began asking him to do increasing amounts of minor
set-up and repair work and he felt more and more confidence in
his developing skills in building instruments. With the aid of
a couple of instruction books he was able to build his first
guitar. Randy's wife, Penny, at this point, told me that Randy
had reportedly taken apart alarm clocks, as a child, to better
understand their workings, so that tinkering with things to
make them work better just came naturally to him. He demurred
a bit, saying that he hadn't at first understood musical
instrument making; that he had really had to work at learning
his craft.
For
a number of years Randy divided his energies, doing some
instrument making and repairing, but hanging on to day jobs in
the construction field, for a reliable paycheck. He did
cabinet making, spec-building, store-fixtures and other such
ubiquitous work, but he said that such a scattering of his
energies left him feeling that he'd lost his sense of
direction for his life. There also wasn't any enthusiasm for
the day job or joy in trying to make four mortgage payments,
from his small real-estate adventures.
After
a few long discussions with his wife, Randy decided that it
was time to go full-blast into the luthier business. Randy
could have loped along, indefinitely doing a little bit of
this and that, but he decided to take the full-time plunge
back approximately in 1993. Randy and Penny live off the
beaten path on a small acreage with plenty of trees nearby,
and he has advance orders for his instruments and ships them
all around the world. Besides guitars, Randy also has been
making resophonic guitars and mandolins. He has also started a
luthier supply business supplying woods and a fret slotting
service to other builders. Other recent projects have been
Mandolin and resophonic tail pieces, in a solid cast design.
Mandolins are beginning to move now, for Randy. At one
festival, early this summer, his inventory of mandolins was so
low that Randy did not have one of his own mandolins to play.
He had sold the last one he had built the day before he left
for the festival. He felt a bit embarrassed, having a booth
featuring his own instruments and going around jamming with a
mandolin with someone else's signature on its head. He took a
bit of kidding about that, and tries to keep at least one
mandolin ahead of demand, so that he will have something of
his own to play.
Regarding
his resonator guitar, Randy talked briefly about the designs
he has developed. He incorporates a sounpost construction
system. The coverplate is held in place with machine screws
which is a vast improvement over wood screws that tend to
strip out over time. Most of the musicians who are attracted
to his resonator guitar creations are progressive in their
playing style, and Randy explained to me how that makes some
sort of sense. To Randy, each instrument has its own,
individual (and possibly unique) voice-some sweet, some dark,
some bassy, and players of traditional styles seem to prefer
the sound of a sound-well design, whereas more progressive /
contemporary stylists seem to gravitate to instruments with a
sound-post design.
Shipping
instruments to places like Japan and Malaysia now takes a
fairly large share of Randy's time. He has contracts with
distributors in a number of far-flung places now. Going to
trade shows, having booths at a few festivals also take part
of the Allen's time, and Randy reports that he is beginning to
see results from previous advertising and marketing efforts,
as the demand for his instruments increases.
Randy
and Penny both comment that Randy really likes each aspect of
his work - buying large amounts of wood of various kinds,
"playing" with it, the clamping process, doing inlay
with abalone and other such beautiful materials, interacting
with people.
One
of the chores of a luthier is translating the sometimes less
than articulate points his clients consider critical for the
instruments they are ordering into tangible, accurate
characteristics. Many people know, in their ears, the sound
they want their instrument to have, but they don't often know
what kinds of choices will create that sound.
Randy
told of one client who visited the shop and fell in love with
the sound and feel of a certain guitar. He wasn't in a
position to buy it right then and shortly after the guitar was
shipped overseas. He was disheartened about this, deploring
the fact that he had missed it. Later Randy handed him another
guitar, quite a bit different from the previous guitar, and
asked the guy to play it. The end of that story is that after
an initial period of thinking the new guitar wasn't enough
like the previous one to suit him, finally came to the
conclusion that the new guitar, was very rich and even-toned,
and the wider neck actually suited his playing style better
than the first one did.
Randy
doesn't go around trying to persuade people to change their
choices, of course, but that just shows that Randy had been
listening when the guy tried to describe the sound he wanted
out of a guitar, and even though the guy had some ideas about
what kind of instrument would produce that sound, Randy had a
deeper knowledge of that topic. Dropping his eyes a bit, Randy
told me about another guy who had sat with tears rolling down
his cheeks after he first played the guitar Randy built for
him. "You always worry whether the person you build a
guitar for is going to like what you've built them,"
Randy said, "but this guy's reaction really touched
me."
Feedback
from people about his instruments has been remarkably positive
and encouraging, from his first efforts on. The most usual
feedback he receives is the reflection that his instruments
are unusually clean, inside and out. And of course, they are
easy on the eyes, too. Penny's guitar, particularly, is both a
visual and aural testimonial for Allen guitars. Sometimes it
is easy to get so submerged in the individual steps of the
process that the totality of the emerging guitar isn't
apparent until it is completed. Then it is possible to look at
the finished guitar, to strum it, and marvel at the wonder of
its essence. "Sometimes the thought occurs to me that
such a wonderful ending may have been a fluke, and maybe I
couldn't build such a nearly perfect instrument again,"
Randy confessed. A finished, well-done instrument can be
intimidating to its maker.
An
additional source of satisfaction for Randy is that, recently,
many of the instruments he gets orders for are to be used in
spiritual worship. Peter Oliva, who used to play with the
Byrds and now plays Christian music, full time, for instance,
plays an Allen Guitar. That sort of thing, says Randy, is
really gratifying, and the fact that Randy cares what his
instruments are used for also says something special about
Randy Allen
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