Letting the wood sing

Luthier crafts stringed instruments from scratch

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When luthier Michael Colbert is crafting a new guitar, he lets the wood decide what it wants to become.

“They are all unique, and they all have their own character, and I like all of them,” he said. “They all have a different voice. I don’t want it to sound like a Martin. I want it to sound like what it wants to sound like.”

Colbert is a retired construction worker who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and moved to Port Townsend in the early 1970s. His former company, Townsend Builders Inc., was disbanded when he retired in 2013.

When he starts a new guitar project, Colbert picks pieces of wood from a bin in his basement workshop. Much of it is sourced from Edensaw Woods of Port Townsend.

“I will take stuff off the pile and throw it up on the in-process bench,” Colbert said. “I will just start throwing parts up there, and one day I will say, oh, that is a pretty piece of wood. That one’s next. Let’s take that and turn that into something.”

Not a mainstream guitar

Colbert designs his guitars in a contemporary style and is not interested in making an approximation of popular assembly line instruments.

The noticeable differences include the fret markers, bracing patterns or the style of rosettes — the decorated area surrounding the sound hole — found on his guitars, Colbert said.

“You also wouldn’t see a wedge body,” he said. “You see how it’s wider on this side than it is on this side? Well, that makes it play like a smaller guitar, but it has got a larger body volume. It plays more comfortable. I am tucked in, and my elbow is not up because I am not playing a colossal guitar. But I end up with a greater volume.”

Colbert tends to shy away from classical-style guitar bodies.

“There are plenty of other folks out there that are doing it,” he said. “There are hundreds of people out there doing a Martin clone or a Gibson clone. There are even people out there cloning Taylors. I don’t know why, but they are doing it. I like to think I am doing something that is unique to me.”

Colbert never makes the same guitar twice.

“I make the same body shapes, but there are no two guitars that are identical,” he said. “The outside body shape and profile might match, and obviously scale lengths and fretboards and headstock shape will match. But, as far as the woods and the rosettes and those different elements, they are all unique. I make about 25 different variations inside of about four or five different body shapes.”

As he looked at the custom guitar in his hand, Colbert said, “You will never find a guitar like this one. If you owned this, you will never see somebody else with one just like it.”

So far, Colbert has made about 40 stringed instruments since he began circa 2010, including guitars, ukuleles and mandolins.

Colbert, who has learned from years of trial and error, plans to ratchet up his production to about 20 or 30 instruments a year, he said.

“We have been over rebuilding my daughter and her husband’s home in Ballard for the last four years, so that is done,” he said. “Dad gets to go back to work.”

And although he’s technically retired, making guitars is pretty much a full-time job for Colbert.

“I have never been busier,” he said, adding he is now much quicker through the process.

“I can build a basic guitar now in about 30 hours. It used to take me three hours to radius in the back interface. Now I can do it in about three minutes. There is a huge savings in time.”

Colbert’s first guitar took about 120 hours to complete, and it was built on his kitchen table that was being moved for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“I would say it was a good eight months that we had it there,” Colbert’s wife, Karen Alfke, said. “It was a longer project.”

Alfke said she did not mind the mess.

“I think, for us, it is a natural fit because we are both makers,” she said. “He puts up with all my yarn and fabric around the house. That is what drew us together was the joy of making things. It ebbs and flows. He built his first guitar on our dining room table, and he has helped me with knitting patterns and selling them at trade shows. It is a good give-and-take.”

Still, Alfke is pleased all the production is now done downstairs.

“It helps that we have most of his wood and tools and things down in the basement,” she said.

Alfke said she knows her husband is a master craftsmen, but she’s still impressed when she sees a newly finished guitar emerge from the shop.

“It is both surprising and not surprising, given how long he has been working with wood and building things like houses. He has taken every component of the various things he has done … and it informs what he is doing now. On the other hand, these things come up from downstairs and the detail on them is still surprising.”

Alfke said a family friend who saw  one of Colbert’s guitars for the first time remarked, “I knew it wasn’t going to be a two-by-four with nails, but dang!”

A lifelong passion

Colbert has loved guitars since he was a young boy.

“I have been playing guitar since I was 6,” he said. “I got my first guitar from my dad. He used to take it out and play it now and then. He wasn’t a great player, but he did play, and he did really enjoy it.”

Colbert knows his way around a fretboard but does not generally share that talent with the public.

“I have always played, but I don’t play out very much,” he said. “I used to play out when I was younger, but I really don’t play with other people. It is really just this private thing I do.”

Seeking to get better at his craft, Colbert studied briefly with luthier Ervin Somogyi.

“I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a class, a 10-day intensive, with a luthier who I think is one of the finest luthiers on the planet,” Colbert said. “I learned an absolute ton.”

No custom orders

Colbert no longer makes guitars to order, he said.

“I have done custom orders for a couple of people in town, and it was fine, but it is not fun,” he said. “It is stressful building what they think they want. I would never order a guitar like that. For somebody to come in and actually order a custom guitar, even though I can make a guitar I guarantee you will like, tonally it is going to sound lovely, but I still wouldn’t do it.”

Instead, Colbert makes what he makes, and he sends out a mailing list to clients to show them what’s in stock.

Colbert does not reserve any guitars for himself.

“They are all for sale,” he said, adding he has no favorite.

When he makes his guitars, Colbert concentrates on several specific criteria.

“To me, most of what happens in the guitar is the bracing and the fabrication of the guitar top,” he said.

A guitar top is the front face of the body where the sound hole is cut out.

“That is where most of (the tone) lives,” Colbert said. “I tap tone every guitar top, and I sit there and carve the braces until I hit a target that I am after.”

The tops are thinner than those of a conventional guitar, Colbert said.

“Every single one of them is deflection tested to a certain target,” he said. “I sand it down, and as I sand it down, it becomes weaker and weaker. You can’t go too far, but (my guitars are) about 25 thousandths thinner than a normal off-the-shelf Martin.”

The wood chosen for the side of the body also is important, but not nearly as much as the wood for the top, Colbert said.

He also pays special attention to how the fretboard feels in his hand.

“For me, a big part of it is what I refer to as the interface,” he said. “It is like typing on a good keyboard or playing a good piano. This is what you interact with when you are playing. It is not so much that it is smooth, but it is consistent across the range as far as how high the action is, what the nut action is like — meaning the distance between the string and the first fret — so that when you play it, every one of my guitars feels the same because they are accurately set up.”

All his fretboards are fabricated with a computer.

“It is radiused, and the fret slots and the outside profile are cut with a computer-controlled router because it is the interface,” Colbert said. “We want it to be dead accurate. The fret spacing is within thousandths of an inch from where the fret needs to be, mathematically.”

All that attention to detail results in an instrument unlike anything off a music store shelf.

“Most guitars that are built these days are basically beach guitars,” Colbert said. “You can beat them to death because they are so heavily built. You can’t break them. But they don’t deliver. They don’t create a responsive instrument. These (custom guitars) are responsive instruments. It is just a totally different animal. These things just are fun to play.”