A Visit With Dan Erlewine

[Music] hi i'm dan earleywine from here in athens ohio and we are in my guitar shop i'm a guitar fixer sometimes guitar maker and um i've been in the guitar business since i was a teenager when i started taking guitars apart painting them and doing things like that and except for playing in bands which i did pretty seriously for a number of years from my teens until my late 20s i was as serious about playing the guitar and being in a band as i was about working on them but the working part took over and i saw i have been fixing guitars and building some electric guitars since 19 60. be about that by 1960 i was doing it for my friends and today we're going to go around my shop and see what i what little i have and it's not that big but there's a lot crammed into it you're in the main room here and this shop was only built five years ago i used to be in the basement of the house next door and we've been here in athens it'll be 35 years this fall so we've been in this house 34 years and at one point i had a shop a basement built off the back of the house but to get that i had to have a deck on top for my wife and which was fair and i love it we had a deck then five years ago we couldn't find a place to expand to or move to so we cut down a 220 year old sycamore tree right here and i have the wood even it was a huge thing to do and people took the stump out and we built a shop here back to this end of the shop is um some of this stuff is temporary i just bought this thing that's just sitting there this little lathe i stuck away but i was using it it's supposed to be a wood chop but back here i just bought this beautiful little old milling machine that's just the right size for a guitar shop it's real quiet and i got that from don mccrosty who i worked at stumac with for years and he's retired too he makes the red diamond mandolins in shade and he got a another machine and luckily i bought it that's the back window looking down madison so we're coming out this was the end of my shop at that opening so for three years that was the entire shop and then a year or so ago we knocked out that wall and put an extension on it if you could imagine um this giant workbench wasn't here then but all these take all these tools were out here and we had at once we had three people you paul steve and even blake right at one time there were four young people working here in various capacities one at one point was a paid student to be here because i would have students in and they would pay to learn what they wanted some were apprentices like elise who works her butt off she also waits out at the eclipse company store so she works 11 hour days to be a guitar repair gal and these are some dirty benches i told you about this stuff was all on these shelves we are rearranging shelves so uh elise and i are all this mess is because we took it off these shelves to clean them and put our spray stuff on it and all the sanding things here were on these shelves so i at least made shelves to hold them all we're tightening that down so they won't shake right mm-hmm your stuff she's been strapping them down so the darn things won't shake so this is where we keep little air brushes for spraying small guitar stuff lacquers what we have here is a newfangled device that's new in my shop for this last year it's called the howard's total vise this man is approaching the guitar business with some stuff that he's designed for working on rifles archery equipment and in a machine shop transmission shops he's got all kinds of this hardware that's modular so with this the howard's total vise you can take your work away from the bench walk all around it and this is the latest piece i've got and elise has been helping me we're screwing big thick boards to these overhangs so they're strong and putting threaded inserts in there and they can just drop that little red piece on these two thumb screws and have an instant place to put a vise i'll show you another one later back here um it's not a lot of room come on back a bit we're cleaning like i say we threw a bunch a whole bunch of wood away we didn't throw it away gave it to a friend there's storage up here and that's almost full a lot of these tools don't get used a lot so they're on wheels and if i'm not using that i can slide it back in the corner almost everything's on wheels not this because it's too big and heavy a couple of these aren't but back in here you have a dust collector a joiner a disc sander little planer a tiny edge sander those go up and down as they go not plugged in those go up and down while they're going around a thickness sander like if you had to sand a guitar top this is a nice old delta six by 48 sander it's holding wood right now that's some beautiful spanish cedar here if i lift this up i have a little exhaust fan if i'm sanding something heavy i may have the dust collector on back here but i still need more suction so i'll have i'll open this and sawdust will go out the window or i will do small spray jobs back here and i use a co2 tank that's for those airbrushes it doesn't take a lot of air it's quiet i don't really spray big things out this fan a lot of a lot of rattle cans and i put a filter up when i spray that's the the small shop spray booth for small items you don't want to spray too much because you don't want to have it hanging in here while you breathe the fumes i'll take if i spray something and don't want the films i'll take it over and hang it in the garage that spider win he was spider and me played in our first band coming out of high school called the spiders so that's spiders drums but he switched it to say prime movers because the spiders had broken up in the american blues as it came into the electric era which was quite long some three famous king names would be bb king freddy king and albert king and they're all great yeah they're all different um i would almost have to say that bb king might be the biggest influence on all young younger blues players and himself that got famous and albert would be a close second and so is freddie king but they're all freddy king was a whole different kind of blues player and i met albert king at the 1969 ann arbor blues festival held in ann arbor where i lived and we played and he had his original 1958 flying v and i asked him if he i said man i could make you a flying v that's wood it's the same color as your skin this black walnut tree that i had and you could tell i was respectful and he came to my house and i drew that up and i made him that guitar so that was 19 he got in 1972 but it could have been the 71 blues festival because the ann arbor had three or four of those this is one we took to a trade show a year ago i just keep it around case we need one to show so it's really doesn't have a home but i think we might get out and sell it one of these days see albert played upside down left-handed i play the guitar this way and he plays the guitar this way so a guy could have a guitar that looked just like albert kings but be able to play it black walnut maple not too much lacquer we wind our own pickups that's popular these days i mean there's so many people that can wind a good pickup i don't want to but one of the guys does it was back 1970. my friend mike richards was a fellow musician and lived across the street back there and he was in art school at u of m and he designed the letters so they aren't any font it just we said let's get what would look cool for albert kang i think he cut those pearls out too i can't remember that so long ago very nice i wish i had a guitar that i have but it's down at johar mckalkin's camp right now i've fixed some guitars for some famous people but the guitar you said have i fixed guitars for so did i fix some mighty famous guitars for famous people there you go but almost a lot of the guitars you do in this business they're called vintage guitars right vintage is a big word now that wasn't there when we were kids it's vintage antiques or vintages and that it's worth more it goes on um what's that oh the roadshow antique roacho it's they say it's a vintage class neoclassical couch from so and so so guitars are that way this is what i mean by a vintage guitar it's a 1955 gibson es295 which is an arch top hollow body built sort of like the es175 with florentine cutaway painted all gold gold silk swing on the pick guard and it sounds killer and this man is a good player and he's had it for quite a while and he sent it in for new frets made a new nut and fit a new bridge on it because somewhere along the line it had lost its original bridge and had kind of imported no good bridge on it so we fixed them up and ups dropped the box and there's a small lawsuit now but they're settling it they must have dropped it 10 feet because we can pack and it bashed the end in there's the re there's a repair job got to look at it this weekend bam so he sent it back it's not my fault because it was bubble wrapped and it split off the end block here and it split here and that's going to be a tricky fix it's not something that we rush into you think about it for a while i can get some access to inside through the pickups if i take them out it's just such a lot of work for rough handling is what i would say so this is pop loose it's not you don't just squirt glue in there you've got to really think it out and have clamps so when everything goes back it's right it's a good thing that it's so beat up like this because it would be sort of easy to hide the work a little bit with some of this gold paint which we can get our hands on turns green with age you see that as it gets down into the bronze powder that's what this is gold bronzing powder like gold leaf in the way i guess but it's not real gold that's what i mean by vintage okay what else would be interesting guitar here anything special this here yeah well this is um it's a strat it's a strat shaped body and it's uh actually these bodies were made by fender or by a company four fender for the very early 60s it was some one of the harley davidson anniversaries so this has the same um buffed aluminum pickguard and i came by a couple of these bodies from a friend that never got finished no necks but it's a bolt-on and i decided to make a guitar because uh i had one once i did when this came out way back then i had gotten my hands on one of these because then a friend of mine from town here is not here anymore did the engraving for the harley-davidson strat ron chasey he had the uh he engraved the pick guards and all that and this one was uh somehow been a reject or i think it was for him to practice on but he didn't need any practice so i got the body i got a few of them and i put very expensive tuners on it i'm going to make a guitar this is going to be called estrational you know the national the national guitar the electric ones the metal ones this is rational what are you going to load it with that's what i'm thinking i'm going to call all all my friends who are some of the best pickup makers in the world i just happen to be lucky enough to grow up in the same era as seymour duncan and lindy fralen and all of these jason waller and the list goes on to pick up makers what would you put into a strategy i'll send them a picture and say what pickup you think would sound best on a metal an aluminum plate in this body what's going to really and they're going to make some pickups that'll be just what they think and i'll be happy but this has been sitting here like this for a year now i got as far as got some uh stainless steel up on the peghead got a sheet of it and cut it up i haven't gotten back to it but it's going to be cool it's got some very special ambrosia maple from i got from the amish out in chester hill there's no lacquer on it's got to get sanded and fretted it either made you happier saying i've got something that's challenging and unique is the reason i think that guys like or girls people like us go into this business because we like to fix things i like to fix things it's i like challenges i like a problem to solve with what i know which is basic woodworking metal work in a bit and a bit about plastics and materials and the tools to work them that's what fascinates me i like creating things making things and they've made it designed a number of tools i've come up with a lot of tools over the years a one would be i'll be right back i'd say this old tool that i came up with for stu mac the jaws fret press i've always been really proud of this this comes down on top of the neck and you squeeze the frets in like you had an arbor press people in production use an arbor press often this did it while the guitar neck was on and it's become real popular things like that in a lot of things i co-designed with don mccrosty and todd sam's one day i said that don mcrosty we used to have the stumac r d shop and the factory out on banjo hill which is out towards shade you go out old 33 and you take a right at the big tree in fact the road is called uh oh it might be called stewart mcdonald road something like that they had it changed i think that's where the stu mac factory was is it still there the building that's still there but we moved out of there and finally moved into the new building stuart has stuff stored in the property and he comes back but i'm sitting there one day with don in his office out there we'd all go out there a lot i said man i wish i had a ruler that could just read the fretboard tell me if it's flat or not and not hit the charts and like three days later he comes up with a tool like this it wasn't as pretty as this but he made one and set it on my desk and that sits right over this is a nice neck on this okay that tells me that the neck itself is pretty good otherwise you have to rely on your eye tools like that and oh i could show you a lot of tools that i'm proud of or just tools in general that we make at stumac i'm retired now but that things that we've come up with in the 34 years i was there have become used all over the world so i'm proud to have been part of that and those tools are still available through mac oh yeah you go to the stu mac the stu mac website now has more stuff than ever because they've grown they've spent money fixing the building hiring more people getting on the internet going out after i would say younger people new people to keep this whole trade and building alive and that's one thing if you ask me something that wasn't difficult that i'm really proud of is that i have helped people to learn since the beginning i've always enjoyed showing what i knew and if somebody had a question i'd stop and actually show them and then realize gosh i could uh train this person then i'd have some help so hello i'm elise calves i am one of dan's apprentices um been here for about four years this will be my fourth year so still going strong and yeah i learn a lot we get a lot done so it's going good she graduated from all you mm-hmm works she's a hard-working girl she worked 11 hours a day before yesterday yeah i was very tired yeah she gets here at nine in the morning goes out and works at a great restaurant outside of town and worked till 11. so that's long days but it'll pay off you have to if you want to get good at this trade you have to just keep doing it a lot that's why you better get home tonight after work and practice dressing frets all right okay so this is uh a 1937 gibson made kalamazoo their ladder braced budget brand this would be considered but it's made all of the same woods and it's just not x-braced and fancy braced it has one simple piece of binding and it has the same nick that would have found on a j45 which wasn't even made yet on the j35 then later at j50 all the gibson necks of the 30s have the kind of a v and it's i just love it because i found out after 60 years of playing a guitar that i'm a small guy playing i've always had the big guitars the d28 i had a j200 and now at 76 years old this shoulder i know has been pushed out of shape from sitting like this doing one of the most enjoyable things i like to do let's play the guitar so i've taken to this guitar and they've made it like this one where i've i've installed this through threaded inserts down the center of the neck up to here and i screw my capos down to it i don't like a capo that clamps it's in my way i can't execute some people can and i've used capo since 1960. i don't have capos on this the one they're making the de11 because this is called a kg11 so they make the neck about an inch and a quarter longer before it turns into a peg head that's because i don't like hitting the peghead just like i don't like hitting the capo so the de11 has an elongated neck it just keeps going with a little extra after the knot and i find that now i can play a b7 chord or certain eight e chords really comfortably without hitting this whole corner so it's uh [Music] it's a sweet gibsony's dulcet the tone i'll show you the capos on this my other guitar which i love too but it's big guitar the last guitar i loved before my little kalamazoo would have been this one and i still get it out because i love the sound of it like i often stay capoed up see the capo only covers four strings the other two if i if i put this capo at the second fret it will be holding down an a chord here i've cabled up to the fourth fret but i put a real capo here it's a whole step below it it's holding down two strings the outside two e's so that means that i have this sound [Music] an octave [Music] like detuning but the rest have never been changed so i could i could still play a g chord g position and have this [Music] you don't have that when you drop d you lower it to a whole nother note which doesn't work so i can get [Music] so [Music] it's good for blues it's kind of like a g tuning there's a bar g chord that's the same [Music] for that because i've closed those open strings but here i get [Music] so [Music] so [Music] that's what the capos do that's a 1939 or 40 j35 that's been somebody put a brush coat of household varnish on it probably a long time ago it was on there when i bought it they sanded on it and then varnished it they sand probably sanded off the lacquer and i started i sanded this out to smooth it and i was thinking of trying to polish it out at one point i had a piece of tape on it when i pulled the tape it started pulling off the finish so i thought oh no and i put a little lacquer thinner on it and rubbed it down and let it sit and said i'm not messing with it because i like the sound they also took off the name gibson they stripped that they did a refinish job on it so that would kill the value of this as a vintage guitar but a player might buy it because it's killer so we made a silk screen and sprayed gibson back on it i also have screw-on cables that just screw right on they're over in a bowl but this gives me the freedom of playing that i really like [Music] that's uh i'd be hitting the peghead right now on any other guitar and i play a lot of playing blues and old country music [Music] i mean if you like that kind of old harmonious melodic semi-modal folk music it's not an open tuning it's just two drop d strings which puts you almost in a drop d chord because you've got d a d and sort of in a drop g chord which is a gibson master tone banjo tuning so i can get banjo licks on it i'm looking for something that should be right out in front of me yeah this is a these are the little capos these are in progress i make them out of a you know a gibson tuna matic bridge on a gibson electric guitar yeah they are this kind of bridge the the old tunimatic on your les paul 335 i make these out of the little thumb screws that hold those on the guitar they're threaded studs and a round plated thumb wheel remember those so i just silver solder those together and then i put them in a little lathe and machine off the solder and face them off and i put a little piece of brazilian rosewood on this one sometimes it's pearl dots make them decorative i put a lot of men's cufflinks these are in there because they're about to be cut off they got to be a certain length so with this little piece i thread it in as deep as i want i cut it right off on the bandsaw and it's perfect length and i'm sending them to a guy that bought the de11 and wants more of these screws let me see if this will go on i can put a thumb wheel on this too i found i like screwing them down because i'm not entertaining [Music] i wouldn't go along without making another tool if i can't find it but i think in cleaning up we're gonna find it all i have so many capos so that would be now i have i'm cape with up whole step just like a regular guitar with the capo and even that is less i haven't shaped this either that's still square edge i shaped them so i just want to i want to play over that i might want to play an a minor chord like that not like this or maybe my hand's getting tired playing in a knee position i'll just go in here then since i like to play with doubles because i like my drop d's if i was playing fancy jazz songs i don't know just i don't think there's any song i couldn't play i'd have to rethink certain chords if i was doing butyl chords and beatles songs a lot of songs aren't easy to get with two drop d's you have to have a different inversion if that makes so now i got two capos on and my little favorite guitar i don't expect that you'll show all this on a television driving crazy [Music] that just makes this guitar resonate i can feel it [Music] so i have [Music] [Music] do [Music] can't go i wish i had could go further [Music] it's good for old country stuff or blues [Music] interesting here's a nice one that's not done but that's that's women i've already used that a lot it's all creased from the strings because i lost one or gave one away and i make it real quick on the aluminum part and this is it's that making this small and sanding has all hand work it's really hard to do it on a machine without wrecking it put it on a little stand when by using hand files and radius off that'll be i'm going to put that in my pocket so i remember to finish it we're down the basement and my wife and a friend of ours who was a sort of an architecture type and studied uh modeling home modeling and design they designed the size of this building so that ron curtis could build it that's a local builder in town that does great work so it holds a pickup truck two fairly big size milling machines that's kind of thing you don't want to move around a lot and a little lathe my metal tools there's a little power hack saw i can store some boxes underneath these stairs coming down and uh it's way more room that i had next door in that in the old garage of the house and in here i have this is a a small efficiency apartment that i have students that come sometimes and stay for a couple weeks and i train them and we stayed in a sausalito across the bridge from san francisco and that's where the heliport was they had helicopter airport yeah and the rock and rollers you know uh electric flag mike bloomfield's band that was their practice room and a heliport quicksilver messenger service um another san francisco acid band i can't remember we were sleeping on the floor and playing these crappy little joints and bloomfield come in one morning says you guys are taking our place at the fillmore tonight and uh to open for eric clapton and the cream and i'd heard i've heard of clapton because of the yardbirds and that was i think before the uh john mayer and the blues breakers that made eric clapton famous to me then but before that i think it was yardbirds and uh we opened for the cream we did what he told us we were kind of nervous we went down there at four o'clock in the afternoon to check in drive across the golden gate bridge were one of those bridges it wasn't the golden gate it was another bridge and bill graham he ran the fillmore west he's at the stage doors we're bringing our little fender amps and he goes you don't need any amps we got amps and he pointed up the stairs to the stage and there was like a stack of marshalls that's clapton and a stack of fender twins and they're all piggybacked together you know and uh my brother michael the boss of the band he says uh no way man if we don't have our own amps we're not playing so we set up in front of all those amps four people with these little i had a little fender deluxe eileen our bass player eileen silverman she had an ampeg b18 you know that one the piggyback that you open up and uh when the curtains opened the curtains opened in the it's a ballroom and they had a fish net all across the ceiling full of must have been a thousand balloons so when they open the curtains they pull a cord and there's a 800 hippies out there and all these balloons falling down and hitting us on the head it just felt like surreal and then we had to start playing in the midst of all that that's my uh only time i ever played at a place that big yep some real good great one tom mccrostie philly jones billy reinhardt [Music] um you

Channel: Tales Of Southeastern Ohio

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Id: CHnUaS02me0

Length: 43min 59sec (2639 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021