Official Luthiers Forum!

My client loved what I did to his Garrison so much that he brought me a second one.

This time I stuck my phone in the thing and took a pic of the X-brace.

This one is also very well made and the only thing that failed on it was exactly what failed on the first Garrison I worked on last week, the nut. The only part that g*bson contributed to the endeavor is what failed on both of these.....

So my question for you woodoholics is what kind of wood are the back and sides? The first one was the same stuff and I'm not familiar with it.

Hope everyone is having a great Sunday. I was up at 1:00 AM and at work in Ann Arbor by 3:00 AM and just got home. I love being productive.

My guess would be birch plywood.

The wood be birch, not plywood tho.

Thanks guys it does look like birch.

Flat sawn, which is why it reminds you of plywood.

My understanding is the framework was formed to allow a ledge for the top, back, and sides to set in and create binding at the same time. Not sure if this was included in all models.

Yes, flatsawn, very well book matched, and not all warped up - that is why I would guess plywood. If it's solid wood, I guessed wrong.

The guitars, both of them sounded very good by the way and every bit as good as a decent Martin. I think that Garrison may have been on to something and that's why the Borg bought him out and sunsetted the company, sadly.

I know these are no big deal but these are the first two I've ever seen and I see a lot... of guitars every day but never saw one of these. Usually the so-called better mouse traps are anything but but I'm impressed with these.

Wonder if Garrison watched The Graduate when he was a kid like I did. Plastics my boy, plastics....

Garrison G series guitars were made in Newfoundland, Canada, and were all solid wood (various models in birch, mahogany or EIR). Later there was the AG series - "Designed in Canada, Made in China" - laminated back & sides, but I think they had solid tops. What does the label say for this one?

I live just a couple of km. from where Garrison guitars were produced. Unfortunately I know about as much as the rest of ye
when it comes to a critique of these guits. Never had one in my hands. As I too was curious, I googled.
Garrison is just the brand. The young man behind the company was Chris Griffiths. They started production in 1999, sold to
Gibson in 2007 and vanished in 2010. Not 100% sure but I think Gibson produced mostly their own lower end Songmaker series
at the Garrison facility and manufactured a lower end series of Garrisons in Asia. Word was that the Songmaker series was
unsuccessful sales wise so they shut down production and got out of Dodge.
I remember looking at their website back when they were in production and seeing Koa, for example, as a wood choice.
Alex Lifeson of Rush played a few Garrisons I do believe.
Here's a link to a marketing page from back when..., It shows pics of the actual bracing system for anyone who might be interested.

https://jedistar.com/images/April2018/G ... e_2004.pdf

sorry, no plywood, Clay:)

Hi Ken,
I have been wrong before, and I'm sure I'll be wrong again. It was a guess as stated and could have been wrong on both the species and the construction. I now know more about the brand than I did previously.
It still looks like a good system to combine with HPL and other low cost materials to make an inexpensive instrument.

Good stuff Ken I did not know most of this, thanks!

Mark it's already back in the owner's hands (we have one day turn-around for the jobs I do) so I can't look at the label, sorry.

That document was really interesting, thanks for sharing.

It was a bit jarring to read about the glass fiber composite 'skeleton' and the next line reads "Every Garrison guitar is manufactured from 100% solid wood".
Saw it at least twice in there.

Interesting approach, though.


Edit - I was curious what Mr. Griffiths was up to these days. A quick google found him on LinkedIn. Shows him as Chief Sales Officer for D'addario, so still in the industry.

I think it would be a much better book match if it was plywood...it's a good match, but not what I'm used to seeing with veneers...view image and blow it up and pay attention to the lower bout where it just comes out of the curve and goes flat to the tail, one side has a separation in the brown and the other doesn't have the break up and appears solid brown...it's rather hard to tell definitively because the photo is taken at an angle ...just my 2 pennies

Very cool Chuck I know he went to the Galloup school early on too and they know him well, Dave my business partner knows him too.

There is a lesson here but not a good one for this forum..... Here is a guy with a great idea and lots of money behind it and they did go commercial, met the market, had a run and were sold and then sunsetted. Now he has a real job But seriously it's a tough slog to make a living as a guitar maker for sure.

The people who do make it and do well financially are few and far between and that is very, very, very rarely said here. For every successful, profitable guitar maker with a "proper" business insurance etc. it would not surprise me if hundreds others tried and failed.

Thanks for posting this Chuck and now I know where to find him and we are a D A'ddario dealer too so I can call him.

I played a few Garrison guitars back when they were being made, and thought they were pretty good and an interesting idea. It is a great shame that the company seemingly got taken out by corporate maneuvering.
Regarding the solid versus ply question for Hesh's patient - I note that the interior shot shows that it has the full plastic/resin bracing front and back and rims. So, it would be one of the Canadian-made G-series, and therefore solid back and sides. The Chinese-made budget models only had the synthetic "Griffiths bracing" on the soundboard, while the kerfing and back bracing was conventional timber - and those ones had laminated back and sides.

I remember seeing these when they came out and thinking it was a brilliant idea from a production guitar standpoint. I wonder if they built in any way to tune the top a little after it was glued to the bracing...

Pat

_________________
Pat

If builders don’t know this going in, they certainly know it going out: trying to build (not repair) guitars for a living does not compare well to a regular job, and that is true even if you make a lot of favorable assumptions. The numbers just don’t add up. You’d better have a working spouse or some other source of money to support yourself and (if applicable) your family if you want to build guitars as your sole occupation.

As Hesh’s posts about how busy he is will show, a person can make money doing repair work. There are a whole lot more guitar owners in need of repair work than those wanting to buy a handmade guitar. In contrast to a pure building business model, those numbers have a better chance of adding up, depending on 1,000 other things (like being good at it, charging enough but not too much, marketing, etc.).

But, if you think about building as a side thing that might (or might not) bring in a little extra money, and could be fun and gratifying in the process, success is not as elusive. That’s my goal: to eventually make guitars that are good enough that people will want to buy them, but only as a fun side gig. I earn my living doing something else, and always will, until I retire or die.

Thank You Don! This is the word on repair vs. building and it also provides someone who really wants to justify building anyway with a way to accurately set expectations and have eyes wide open going in.

It was my intent to make a living building and I did get up to 24 guitars a year and did very well financially with a waiting list and such. Nonetheless the time I invested was 80+ hours a weeks, my hands hurt all of the time and after a while the production level necessary to get me to where it was worth while wore me out. I got old....

Then I met Dave Collins and he took me though on a white board with my own metrics the numbers game. Turns out I was making 62 cents an hour building. Now I make as was recently said here by Woodie $100 - 200 an hour. I only work ten hours a week and bring home $30K annually (for the 10 hours a week) AND my work stays at work AND my home stays as my home and not a shop. We could do far better too by nixing overhead and are actively working on that as I speak. A six figure job if I wanted one is mine for the taking if I wanted to increase to full time.

Thanks Don you have it figured out and you will do very well making this fit what you want to do.

I wanted to add too when I started hand made individual Luthier instruments were not that common. Now a days there are literally hundreds makers in the US alone all producing what they will and much of it is awful.... Some is top shelf but only a small percentage. The thrill and romance of commissioning a custom guitar from an unknown builder is not what it once was, be warned.....

The big names when I started are still the big names and those of us who came after for the most part are still unknown. There are exceptions of course, there always are.

Thanks, Hesh. I don't know if I have anything figured out beyond my own subjective priorities against the backdrop of market realities. The rest flows from there. I encourage everybody to do their own deep thinking about the same things, and find their own answers.

It was pretty clear to me when I started building that there was no money in it, except at the top end or a semi-production guitar.
The sheer number of hours required vs what you could charge just doesn't add up.

Thankfully I long ago decided to stick with the day job (engineering). Playing music has been a rewarding (sometimes even financially!) hobby, guitar building/repair (which I came to much later) is the same.

Very interesting. And the marketing is entertaining too

Ken - Thank you for the Garrison sales paper - very interesting. I had never heard of those guitars.

And Don and Hesh - my take on it too - very interesting ideas.


To me, twenty-four guitars a year is quite respectable. I worked for years and built around 9 guitars a year along with some repairs. I think in part, I spent too much time working on jigs. Back then, being no internet even in sight, established builders were very helpful - I talked to Charles Hoffman, Bob Taylor and Robert Ruck and tried some of each of their ideas on jigs. Bob Mattingly and Lloyd Baggs helped me a lot, but they were on the opposite side of the spectrum, building relatively few guitars per year, without a lot of jigs. Lloyd at that time was sort of a Trevor Gore; very technical, mapping out the frequencies and chaldni patterns, etc., which I had learned earlier from Richard Schneider, who had low volume but intense jigging.

What amazed me was how similar in some ways everyone was, but the mental approach and details were so different. They all seemed to be doing well in their own way. This was in the early '70s to mid '80s - and it was also amazing that builders and repair guys were open to sharing their tricks and giving advice. Lots of other builders repair people also gave me advice.

At the end of the day, it also seems to me that one needs to decide whether you want to do a few set models and build in volume, or one-off. At the time, I never really made that decision, so I was building one-off guitars and trying to jig up for them. Now, I am building two models of guitars, and I spend less time reinventing the wheel. I'm also quite happy with building up to ten per year. I'm also putting together a written outline of the process with measurements, and digital photos of the setup. At this point in my life, I can spend too much time trying to remember how I did something last week, what jig I used, or what the dimensions of a certain piece are. So I'm trying to limit the time searching all my handwritten spiral notebooks.

But it is such a personal thing - there is John Greven who builds around 48 guitars a year and has far less in the way of tooling and jigs than me. Also, there is a very interesting video on YouTube of Marshall Brune building a guitar, and although many of the comments from viewers seemed to assume they were very well jigged-up, I was amazed at the DIY jigs, which were quite impressive, but overall, they did not have such tooling, specially when compared to a Charles Fox.

But back to the Garrison guitar, I remember a GAL article, where a guy built a frame, I think out of laminated wood, that looked like the Garrison frame, but the bracing was put on the top first, and then it was glued to the frame. This guy called it, I think, the "Beetle" or something. It also was similar in some ways to Smallman guitars. It looks like for a young guy, Chris Griffiths did quite well in creating a unique but good sounding guitar.

Thomas I really, really appreciate your post AND your participation in the trade too. Thanks for sharing this it's fascinating to me to hear about you guys who cut the trail for the rest of us. Would love to talk more to you too.

This is my approach as well. I gave it a shot in the 90's and the repair bizz was pretty good actually. I had 4 shops in the area I was doing repairs for. But in the advent of the commercial Internet they all went out of business. I still have plenty of local clientele for my part time gig and make about 4-5 guitars a year.