Linda Manzer made her first guitar because she couldn't afford to buy one.
"I went to a store and bought a dulcimer kit. I was quite sure I wouldn't
be able to get it together, but the guy at the shop gave me some encouragement,"
remembers Manzer.
Today Manzer's most intricate guitar creation -- the Pikasso -- is priced
at $50,000. "You can't help but get better the longer you do it," says Manzer.
Abe Wechter's career is the result of having a near religious experience
when he walked into a guitar repair shop. "I was a hippie who played guitar
and loved guitar," he explains.
Wechter found work in a repair shop and started learning
about guitar making. "I worked on dulcimers and guitars, and starved!"
Manzer was going to art college when she made her first guitar. She made
more for her friends, and soon guitar making was a regular hobby. Gradually,
guitar making became more important than art school.
"It's artistic. It's very scientific. It's music," she explains. "It appeals
to me on three very different levels."
Manzer searched for a teacher. She found a mentor in Jean Claude Larrivee.
"I kept bugging him, basically, until he hired me."
Once hired, Manzer apprenticed three and a half years. "That was a fantastic
way to learn," she says. "I did every aspect of guitar making."
After repairing guitars, Wechter went to work for Gibson Guitars for nine
years as a model maker before quitting to make his own custom-built guitars.
"I built my reputation as a high-end guitar maker," he says.
Manzer now has her own guitar shop in her home. "It's on the ground floor
-- I live on the second floor," she says. After 22 years in the field, she
still finds working with wood both romantic and comforting.
"When you're working with it, it gives people a lot of satisfaction. It
appeals to a very basic part of human character. Not to say there aren't ugly
moments," she laughs.
"The phone bounces off a guitar top, a piece of wood breaks after you've
been working on it for two hours, the cat jumps up and brushes its tail across
something precariously balanced on the edge of your workbench and I lunge
across the room to catch it. All guitar makers have had these moments."
Good moments and bad, Manzer and Wechter like what they do. "Are you kidding?"
says Wechter. "I love it! I'm really into it. I wake up in the morning and
I just can't wait to get up and go to work. I've been fortunate. I have a
lot of good clients."
And each luthier has their favorite creation. A luthier is a builder of
any wooden stringed instrument -- except the piano.
Manzer's masterpiece is her Pikasso model. It has four heads, three necks
and 42 strings. "At the beginning, it was hard for me to let stuff go. Now
I'd rather a really good musician have it than me. They breathe life into
it, if you know what I mean," says Manzer. "It also frees me up to start the
next project."
Wechter's masterpiece is a guitar called Our Lady, or Notre Dame. "It's
really, really pretty," he says. "That's the most ambitious project I've ever
done. I built that in 1993." Wechter also developed the Pathfinder for mass
production. "Now that's a cool design."
What makes a great guitar? "That's a big question," says Wechter after
a pause. "Their body. Neck. Everything! It's not big strokes of genius --
it's all the little details!"