Webbage

Maybe Blogs are like a new hot tub - You use it a bunch at first, and then we'll see...

Been thinking about putting up a website for a long time now. A lot of people ask if Ive got one, and always look disappointed when I say I don't.

I've got a spare computer that would make a perfectly good server, just sitting in the office - S'pose I should do something with it.

As such, I've been looking at a lot of Luthier websites, to get a feel for what's out there, as well as what I like and don't like about them. It seems to be a simile kind of day, so... It strikes me that Luthiers are much like brewers. With brewers, there's a spread from home brewers, to microbrewers, to regionals, to huge corporations, and Luthiers and their websites are much the same.

Right off the bat, I can say I don't care much for the huge stuff - The institutional builders all pretty much have institutional websites - They can't help it, it's just the flavor they gravitate to - Even though Chris Martin's homey and smiling face is on the Martin website, (And by all report he's a great guy), it's still huge - They may make Red Hook Ale instead of Budweiser, but you can tell they're humongous. Martin, Gibson, Fender, Taylor, Washburn, National, Dean, Carvin, Deering, etc, etc, they all feel the same...

Then there's the mid-sized ones - Large, but not yet sporting an institutional feel - There are a LOT of these guys - I'd put Larivee, Seagull, Breedlove, Collings, Garrison, and Webber in this category, and there's a bunch more. These guys still speak of, and to some degree reflect their roots, but their production speaks louder. Take Webber - This is a 2 man shop in North Vancouver, B.C. - But they put out over 100 axes a year, and build 70%+ of them as standard models available through their dealer network. Webber points to the fact that CNC work makes much of that possible - He says that, "Vital tasks such as brace carving, neck fitting, and inlaying abalone are performed entirely by hand. Routine tasks like neck carving and roughing out bridges are efficiently performed by a computer controlled router." To me, whether or not you consider carving a neck a "Routine task" might have bearing on how you feel about that statement and that builder - I don't care for it frankly, but that's just me.

Then there are the little guys, and these are the ones I like and admire the most - Folks who have been doing this full time for between 10 and 40 years, and are still basically one-person shops, with maybe an Assistant or Apprentice or two. They don't put out tons and tons of guitars - They basically build one or two at a time, and a buyer can wait a pretty long time for theirs, if the builder's popular. Girdis, Baranek, Galloup, Berkowitz, Borges, Davis, McElroy, Dunwell, Grimes, Zeidler, and Manzer, these are names we're all familiar with: They're the people who have forged a cottage industry into a pretty decent chunk of the Big Picture of guitars-for-sale. I love that, I even aspire to it, and although it probably won't ever happen, you never know. There are a ton of builders - Just look at websites, or ads in Acoustic Guitar Magazine. Yet there's a market, and it seems to be growing, slowly but surely. True hand builders make up about 3% of industry-wide output, according to Official Sources. If that's true, and players keep playing, then just like micro-brews have taken a bigger market share each year for the past 20, there's some serious potential out there...

Some of the little guys have found a unique niche, though it seems most of them just hand build really nice guitars, with personal attention, appropriate nods to tradition and history, and exemplary craftsmanship and artistry. Their websites aren't all well done, which is something to keep in mind... Nonetheless, pretty much all these sites reflect the builder and their passions, and that's what it's all about...

You know what, on second thought, it's probably not correct to say some of their websites aren't good - That's probably not true - What I should say is that their websites all reached me differently - some well and fully, some not so well... That aspect of a website's viability as an advertising vehicle probably has a lot to do with how a customer will reach and connect with the builder they finally choose in the end run, huh?