Designing for Disappointment

I've been following this thread and was not going to post, for I am not a luthier, nor do I have any skin in the game for either side, however, for better or worse, I feel compelled to speak now...

I wish folks would be able to find within themselves, the compassion to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

It saddens me deeply to see that one person's opinion has made another feel unwelcome or slighted, despite the absence of malice.

If a mutual understanding is not possible, maybe it is possible to agree to disagree without folks feeling that their ego has been bruised? (remember opinions are like belly-buttons, in that EVERYONE has one )

I am no expert in these matters, but I am asking those that have been involved to please forgive each other, at least for a moment, and step back and have a think about what has happened here.

I have no authority, nor do I want any here, I am just an observer trying to facilitate decorum...

Thank you sincerely, for reading my humble words.

I happen to agree with you Pete but I'm just a stubborn old fart like you are. I'm just not sure why you felt compelled to make your case here. Having said that, you do have the right to do so. Just wonder what your motivation is. I read your post simply as a general observation and not as a particular criticism. I also think you were trying to offer some guidance. But even as a beginner builder I ignored most of the guidance I was given as I wanted to forge my own path without regard to what anyone thinks or is doing. And I'm still doing that. We as builders will each find the path that works best for us. I don't see that as something debatable.

Moore Bettah Ukuleles said:

I happen to agree with you Pete but I'm just a stubborn old fart like you are. I'm just not sure why you felt compelled to make your case here. Having said that, you do have the right to do so. Just wonder what your motivation is. I read your post simply as a general observation and not as a particular criticism. I also think you were trying to offer some guidance. But even as a beginner builder I ignored most of the guidance I was given as I wanted to forge my own path without regard to what anyone thinks or is doing. And I'm still doing that. We as builders will each find the path that works best for us. I don't see that as something debatable.

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I'd like to have a clever comment on this post, but I am too busy clapping and vigorously nodding my head in approval. :agree:

I dunno Chuck... you tell me. You got this far

When I first started building ukes, I learned early on what I would allow and not allow for the construction. Never build anything you don't want your name on. I made a few instruments to the specs of the client even though it was against my better judgement. I don't and won't do that again. Never let a beginner/player design the instrument they think they want. I won't build a super wide neck or add long necks on small bodies or small necks on big bodies.

That is simply against my standards and I have lost commissions because of it, but that is OK with me. I also have limited patience with those who continue to ask questions for a long period of time, because they can't make up their mind. I try to build quality ukes with quality woods using quality construction. I try to let the instrument speak for itself. I agree with Pete, good luck to those who want to experiment, but if you want to make a living doing this trade you are going to need more than luck. You have to find out what works for you and the market. If you can't make a wage, you're screwed.

BlackBearUkes said:

When I first started building ukes, I learned early on what I would allow and not allow for the construction. Never build anything you don't want your name on. I made a few instruments to the specs of the client even though it was against my better judgement. I don't and won't do that again. Never let a beginner/player design the instrument they think they want. I won't build a super wide neck or add long necks on small bodies or small necks on big bodies.

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Every word of this is excellent advice IMO. I go one step further in that I won't build anything I personally wouldn't love to own myself.

Moore Bettah Ukuleles said:

Every word of this is excellent advice IMO. I go one step further in that I won't build anything I personally wouldn't love to own myself.

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I quite see where you are coming from and am sure that that ideal is right for you, no questioning or criticism intended but let’s explore the concept. At one point a Luthier who’s a well know member here made some Concert size Martin Style ‘0’ solid Mahogany Ukes, if I won the lottery, etc., then that’s something I’d quite like. Unfortunately he’s stopped building them, that’s his choice but if every Luthier restricted what they built then some very playable, worthwhile and perhaps relatively affordable instruments would not be made. IMHO that’s not a good situation.

My own take on building things or doing practical work of any type (for me or anyone else) is never to do something or let work out of my ‘shed’ which I would be less than pleased to have my name attached to. The job or piece must look right and work well, for me there’s no need for perfection just for functionality, satisfaction, positive reputation and affordability.

I appreciate that what works for me might not be ideal for others, we’re all different.

BlackBearUkes said:

When I first started building ukes, I learned early on what I would allow and not allow for the construction. Never build anything you don't want your name on. I made a few instruments to the specs of the client even though it was against my better judgement. I don't and won't do that again. Never let a beginner/player design the instrument they think they want. I won't build a super wide neck or add long necks on small bodies or small necks on big bodies.

That is simply against my standards and I have lost commissions because of it, but that is OK with me. I also have limited patience with those who continue to ask questions for a long period of time, because they can't make up their mind. I try to build quality ukes with quality woods using quality construction. I try to let the instrument speak for itself. I agree with Pete, good luck to those who want to experiment, but if you want to make a living doing this trade you are going to need more than luck. You have to find out what works for you and the market. If you can't make a wage, you're screwed.

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Having people jerk someone around is understandable, no one wants that, but if you are dealing with someone via email, like how you just dealt with me, you have no idea as to why someone asks questions like I did with you.

People ask questions for various reasons, and if you are calling yourself a professional and dealing with customers, then you need to have patience, otherwise you should not be dealing with customers, and have someone work for you that has the patience.

People like myself ask questions to also get a feel of who we are dealing with, a relationship is an important thing, your building Ukes is more then that, you need to establish and maintain customers, that means keeping future customers.

Everyone makes mistakes, and you need to place yourself in other people's shoes when dealing with them too. Because someone might make things hard for you, and you loose out, maybe if you maintain your cool and professionalism with someone, you might end up making a great long term customer.

I've worked in sales to amount a life time, never try to judge any situation, because the truth is no one has a crystal ball to read the future or tell what's on someone's mind. A sale that is crap in the beginning can end up to be major success in the future.

I have personally worked in sales, selling high end art to rich eccentrics, who would drive you crazy for peanuts, then I'd make a measly sale, thinking what an extreme amount of time for nothing, but because I treated the person with the utmost respect, at a later time they came back and bought like mad from me, because I treated them right and took care of them.

I contacted Mr. BlackBear and only sent him 6 emails with questions and concerns and I was going to buy the Uke concert now present on his site for sale, but because of his lack of patience, whatever you want to call it, he told me I should look elsewhere locally to buy a ukulele, for my many questions and concerns he seemed to not want to be bothered by.

The truth is, I never did anything wrong and this is not being profesional, or considerate, especially how you can hurt people's feelings, just as you hurt mine.

I understand you might have a name for yourself on UU, but you don't know me, I just asked questions, and then you show me as a potential customer a lack of respect.

I don't think you realize, I love Ukes and playing, I have a little money, and if you would of just been professional, you would of had a customer for life! Oh well...

I guess as a business person, somewhere along the line you forgot the saying;

Do unto others as you'd want them to do to you!

ALOHA

Selling an existing product, and accepting a commision to produce a bespoke article, are two different scenarios. The former should be fairly straighforward - you know what you are getting. The latter requires the prospective customer to state a clear proposition, or specification. The maker has the right to accept or to decline the proposal.

You are not a customer until some sort of deal had been agreed.

Little did I know that my post would really poke the bear. Respondents here always argue best from their position. Because we are not government employees, we makers can do what we like and how we like. You don't own us, have to like us or buy our products. It's a simple equation best defined by my own experience:

I don't shop at a particular local store (don't name names unless there is a public health issue that you are experienced to diagnose) because the checkout staff are rude. It's a national chain that seems to cultivate in its employees a complete distain for its customers. When I am in Menai Bridge 25 miles away I shop at the well known supermarket there. The workers have a bonus scheme that is linked to their productivity. Are they polite? You bet! Do they get on with their work and not chat to each other while serving custimers? You bet? Is it a pleasant shopping experience ? Of course. Are they crusty old ex -luthiers? Heck no!

You come looking for a listening ear here or offer what you think is a useful public informatioin service disguising a opersonal beef, you gonna be in for a surprise buddy. We ain't no government agency or grocery store! It is a hard road getting to the point where what you charge is what you SHOULD be paid. Few of us forget the pain of that journey and the mistakes we made taking on anything no matter the mental anguish because we had an impending rent bill to make... Are we going to respond less than generously - some of us are...

Sorry 'bout that. But it's good to know who you are dealing with eh? And hey, I am jsut speaking for myself here.

AlohaKine said:

Loads of stuff...

ALOHA

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Thanks but no thanks for the thread hijack. Please knock it off now.

Also, maybe consider the tone of a post before finishing it with "Aloha".

Thanks.

Lots of stuff going on here. As to the recent posts, of course any business should be able to decide how they relate to customers. And as to the earlier posts, don't know Mary, don't know Rob, and so (thankfully) don't know what any of that was about.

But the central question (I think) about "designing for disappointment" is one that has always struck me as somewhat odd. It seems the idea that deviating from very specific design parameters constitutes experimenting. On the other hand, there are whole classes of luthiers down south who seldom build the same exact instrument twice. That leads to a better and more common understanding of the relations between string, scale, body volume and body shape.

Builders might refuse commissions if a customers ideas seem impractical, but more often they'll just suggest a better approach to whatever the clients particular goals happen to be.

I understand completely what Pete is saying about profitability, and that experimentation has its costs. But while building free form might not meet customers expectations up here, if basically every instrument you build is something new, it's not experimenting anymore. There might be a small surprise; some little variable you didn't take into account but still, these sorts of luthiers are not afraid to "step outside the box". They didn't start out in a box to begin with.

I've done a number of experimental guitars. Most of them I've abandoned, went nowhere. One I'm in the process of developing into my own model. All of this has been done over the last 6 or 7 years when time has allowed. I'm not sure you can call any of it wasted time, even the abandoned attempts inform in some way. Of course the time spent on these experiments really should be tagged on to the price of the eventual instrument that is presented to the buying public. That can be a problem. The public see a finished instrument, they haven't seen all of the work that went into developing the model. I estimate that I have something like 5 or 6 hundred hours in that one model (including the abandoned) and that's before I've built one for the commercial market. That's a lot of money hours to claw back. Just because I like the model and sound doesn't imply that the buying public will. It could sink like the ubiquitous lead weight. It's a risk but I was always aware of that risk even before I started the project.

Doing a lot of experimenting can do you in if you are trying to grow a business. What you need is constiancy, quality and service. I see this over and over in the restaurant business which my family was in. Everyone has some new fantastic idea that is going to be all the rage. This new fantastic idea usually leads to bankruptcy. All they had to do is go a couple of towns over find a restaurant that is killing it and do exactly what they are doing. But God Bless the experimenters and innovators for they have brought us pretty much everything worth anything in this world, though often at great personal expense.

Just catching up on this thread and have a couple of comments: Having made nearly 100 bench-made carbon fiber violins now, I can attest to the fact that there is a certain "Zen" to it, and that every single instrument has produced some small refinement in how I do things. Am I sick of making violins? Kind of. I go back and forth on that. Have I been able to take that big sack of accumulated knowledge over to prototyping a ukulele? You bet.

Repetition -- something I don't come to willingly -- presents endless opportunities for refinement -- unless you behave like a machine and stop thinking while you're working. In fact, you can't really refine something without repetition. This does not necessarily mean that the next made object must be identical to the last made object -- but that you work within certain contained parameters. I periodically rebel and go of on a tangent of an idea. This is healthy, I think, and sometimes even works, in part or in whole. That may result in my own working parameters expanding.

There is, perhaps, a relationship between the art of refinement through repetition and age -- or maturity. Youth tends to bring with it an impatience with constraints and a certainty about being able to do nearly anything. That's a very good thing. Speaking as an old fart I can say that we continuously need youth to shake things up and spark new pathways. We all, I think, need to preserve some of that in ourselves as we age. On the other hand, things often do need to be refined and evolve -- even in very small increments. That requires a level of patience and an expanding understanding of the making process.

One last note: We sell exclusively via our website, and we have sold all over the planet. We offer an approval period, after which a customer may return the instrument for a full refund. We have held the line on our prices and we are very competitive in that regard. Corresponding with our customers tends to come out of my personal time -- when I'm not at the bench making something. I am a little jealous of that time. We also enjoy the luxury of having a waiting list. So, let me say: I am a luthier, not a salesman. Of course I do something like sales because I need to, but it's not my thing. I am, however, typically patient with repeated emails and questions. I have been down the rabbit hole with some folks, though, exchanging email after email, answering multiple questions already answered on our website, expending time and effort that -- in the end -- resulted in no order. After awhile it is natural to develop a sort of sense about this, realizing when a potential customer is becoming too much work to invest in. I'm not a big box store, I'm just a guy making stuff. At some point I get to politely suggest that someone might like to take their business elsewhere. No harm, no foul.

robedney said:

Repetition -- something I don't come to willingly -- presents endless opportunities for refinement -- unless you behave like a machine and stop thinking while you're working. In fact, you can't really refine something without repetition. This does not necessarily mean that the next made object must be identical to the last made object -- but that you work within certain contained parameters. I periodically rebel and go of on a tangent of an idea. This is healthy, I think, and sometimes even works, in part or in whole. That may result in my own working parameters expanding.

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Good points. I changed some things on my newest model and here is the thing: Refinement and change is good, but if you can't identify the change that made the newest model sound great, how are you going to reproduce it in the next model? I worked as scientist in my former life. When things are not working, the temptation is to start change multiple parameters in order to get the desired outcome. This can actually work. Say you change temperature, pressure, the osmoality of the solution and put on new socks and the experiment works perfectly! Yea! What was it that you changed that led to the success? This is when you work backwards. Go back and change one parameter at a time and see what happens. No luck? Change another parameter and see. Still no luck? Change the third parameter only and see what happens. Often times you can then identify the parameter that made the difference using the back tracking method.

Then again here is another problem: It wasn't any one thing you changed but a combination of all them acting together which is when we get into serious head banging territory. The dreaded synergistic situation. It can be hard to chop a stringed instrument into discrete parts because they tend to work together as a system. This is where the art comes in.

I am not a luthier. I consider myself a student of lutherie and I'm still learning. So ok, what have I learned? Three big things:

It is the top (doh!)
It is how the top is braced (double doh!)
And proper scale length compensation at the nut and saddle for the strings to give accurate intonation. (By the way, the intonation on most ukes is an embarrassment if you ask me and some of my own instruments are included.)

Get those three things right and the uke will sound good maybe even great. However, the construction must be structurally sound.... I know that is somewhat over-simplistic so don't flame me too much. There are lots of other little things too. Aloha!

sequoia said:

...put on new socks....

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Damn! I knew I should have changed my socks before shaping that last neck! You knew the secret all along and didn’t tell us?

You are nearly right sequoia...you also have to find a way of driving all the energy to the front. And the socks? Every day; then you have your first constant

sequoia said:

Good points. I changed some things on my newest model and here is the thing: Refinement and change is good, but if you can't identify the change that made the newest model sound great, how are you going to reproduce it in the next model? I worked as scientist in my former life. When things are not working, the temptation is to start change multiple parameters in order to get the desired outcome. This can actually work. Say you change temperature, pressure, the osmoality of the solution and put on new socks and the experiment works perfectly! Yea! What was it that you changed that led to the success? This is when you work backwards. Go back and change one parameter at a time and see what happens. No luck? Change another parameter and see. Still no luck? Change the third parameter only and see what happens. Often times you can then identify the parameter that made the difference using the back tracking method.

Then again here is another problem: It wasn't any one thing you changed but a combination of all them acting together which is when we get into serious head banging territory. The dreaded synergistic situation. It can be hard to chop a stringed instrument into discrete parts because they tend to work together as a system. This is where the art comes in.

I am not a luthier. I consider myself a student of lutherie and I'm still learning. So ok, what have I learned? Three big things:

It is the top (doh!)
It is how the top is braced (double doh!)
And proper scale length compensation at the nut and saddle for the strings to give accurate intonation. (By the way, the intonation on most ukes is an embarrassment if you ask me and some of my own instruments are included.)

Get those three things right and the uke will sound good maybe even great. However, the construction must be structurally sound.... I know that is somewhat over-simplistic so don't flame me too much. There are lots of other little things too. Aloha!

Click to expand...

But it's even more difficult or problematic than that. Changing parameters is all well and good. . . . . but how long did it take? You are then relying on your memory of what it sounded like prior to the change, that could be hours or days. I don't think our memories are good enough, unless it's a pretty obvious change. It's bad enough trying to compare two instruments played immediately after each other, several hours apart is a nightmare. You can't even be sure that you are playing the instrument in the exact same manner. It's all fraught with danger. A very high quality recording might be the best solution and even then you will need some fixed repeatable mechanical solution to plucking the strings. Something like a harpsichord mechanism. Other than that I guess we just do what we can. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if much of the time we are just fooling ourselves.
Then of course there is individual preference. I tend to like bright sounding instruments. Other folk like dark sounding instruments. There is no wrong or right, only opinions. The only 'right' is convincing other people that you make incredibly great sounding instruments.

sequoia said:

Good points. I changed some things on my newest model and here is the thing: Refinement and change is good, but if you can't identify the change that made the newest model sound great, how are you going to reproduce it in the next model? I worked as scientist in my former life. When things are not working, the temptation is to start change multiple parameters in order to get the desired outcome. This can actually work. Say you change temperature, pressure, the osmoality of the solution and put on new socks and the experiment works perfectly! Yea! What was it that you changed that led to the success? This is when you work backwards. Go back and change one parameter at a time and see what happens. No luck? Change another parameter and see. Still no luck? Change the third parameter only and see what happens. Often times you can then identify the parameter that made the difference using the back tracking method.

Then again here is another problem: It wasn't any one thing you changed but a combination of all them acting together which is when we get into serious head banging territory. The dreaded synergistic situation. It can be hard to chop a stringed instrument into discrete parts because they tend to work together as a system. This is where the art comes in.

I am not a luthier. I consider myself a student of lutherie and I'm still learning. So ok, what have I learned? Three big things:

It is the top (doh!)
It is how the top is braced (double doh!)
And proper scale length compensation at the nut and saddle for the strings to give accurate intonation. (By the way, the intonation on most ukes is an embarrassment if you ask me and some of my own instruments are included.)

Get those three things right and the uke will sound good maybe even great. However, the construction must be structurally sound.... I know that is somewhat over-simplistic so don't flame me too much. There are lots of other little things too. Aloha!

Click to expand...

you forgot the strings