koalohapaul
Well-known member
In response to a recent thread, I thought I would share a little bit more about the whole production versus custom topic. I happen to do both and while the physical build remains very similar, they are very different animals.
Wood working, particularly luthery is often associated with a certain mystique - What I like to think of as the mojo factor. This is a combination of skill, experience, and just plain unexplainable mojo. Hopefully, skill grows with experience, which further strengthens the mojo.
However, having all the mojo in the world is useless without skill and reason. Having started as a solely production shop, I've done every job thousands of times. This is where numbers count for something. As a high end manufacturer, the trick is not building a good ukulele. It's doing it over and over again, each time with the highest possible level of consistency. Anyone who has worked with wood before will tell you that it's not that simple. Our raw material is a big variable in the equation. As the foundation for everything that comes later, I would be so bold to say that it's THE variable.
I've graded and milled more koa than most people will ever do in a lifetime. I don't say this to brag, but to emphasize the importance of experience and repetition. The old school way to train a sushi chef was to do nothing but wash and make rice for 5 years. Why? At the end of 5 years, you will know everything about rice on an intimate level. By simply seeing, smelling, and feeling the rice, you'll know good from bad and how to adjust. If you've had bad sushi before, you understand how important the rice is. Like the ukulele, it's the foundation of the dish. Also like the ukulele, sushi is a relatively simple food. It's often the simple dishes that are the hardest to master. There isn't a lot of room for mistakes and each step needs to be done as accurately as possible.
In our shop, we have 6 dedicated 'sections.' They are, milling, parts, bodies, assembly, spray, and stringing/setup. In the customs thread, I mentioned that there are only two people I allow to help me with my custom builds. They are Brian and Kris, both of whom have mastered the skills in each section. While there is no hierarchy in terms of rank, our employees are started in parts, move on to bodies, learn to assemble, then finally spray and setup. Milling, while often the bottom of the ladder, is my job. Again, the wood is the star of the instrument and while skill is needed to create great instruments, starting with the best cuts sure helps. Through sequential training, they are able to learn each section and the associated skill sets thoroughly. They also learn why it's so critical to properly execute each job. As the ukulele move closer to the finish line, any flaws in workmanship compound. It's up to the next guy in line to catch anything that the previous guy missed.
Experience is gained through repetition and skill is polished. Which was my very lengthy point about the advantage of being both a custom and production shop. In doing production work over and over, the actual building technique has become second nature. Very similar to playing the ukulele. Practice makes perfect and the best ukulele players can play on any size, any brand, because moving their fingers have become instinct. They don't think about how or where to move their hands, but focus on the music, instead.
Then we have customs. One off special commissions, tweaked and sometimes blinged out. It's the customs that allow us to both be creative and show off our stuff. I mentioned before, custom instruments from our shop are 90% identical to stock builds in both construction and construction methodology. The little 10% difference is what adds up to something you can see, feel, and hear. Well, that and the extra mojo.
The spirit of an instrument or build is not something I often talk about. Building is ingrained in my heart and I have dedicated my entire adult life to perfecting my craft. I have never reached a point where I think I've learned it all. If anything, the more I learn, the more I realize that I'll never learn everything. Spirit, or mana, is not something that you can measure with calipers, yet it's there in every ukulele. It's tied into the mystique of luthery and those images of a craftsman sitting at a wooden worktable, with a finely polished chisel in hand. A truly great builder learns to find personal balance between the science and skill and heart in his/her builds.
To summarize, there are many, many ways to put an ukulele together. What's important is that the builder have an open mind to changing and adapting, gaining knowledge from new experiences along the way. Do it with heart, passion, dedication to excellence and that person will more than likely create great instruments. There really isn't much of a right or wrong, but there are certainly better and worse ways to do something. By doing them over and learning from mistakes, we get better at our craft. Too many times, I hear about company X doing it this way, so why does company Y do it like that? If it works for one, it may not work for another. Simple as that. Or you hear about Joe X, who builds one ukulele a year, only when the moon is full. Does that make Joe X right or wrong, better or worse? No. Joe is Joe. That's all.
Wood working, particularly luthery is often associated with a certain mystique - What I like to think of as the mojo factor. This is a combination of skill, experience, and just plain unexplainable mojo. Hopefully, skill grows with experience, which further strengthens the mojo.
However, having all the mojo in the world is useless without skill and reason. Having started as a solely production shop, I've done every job thousands of times. This is where numbers count for something. As a high end manufacturer, the trick is not building a good ukulele. It's doing it over and over again, each time with the highest possible level of consistency. Anyone who has worked with wood before will tell you that it's not that simple. Our raw material is a big variable in the equation. As the foundation for everything that comes later, I would be so bold to say that it's THE variable.
I've graded and milled more koa than most people will ever do in a lifetime. I don't say this to brag, but to emphasize the importance of experience and repetition. The old school way to train a sushi chef was to do nothing but wash and make rice for 5 years. Why? At the end of 5 years, you will know everything about rice on an intimate level. By simply seeing, smelling, and feeling the rice, you'll know good from bad and how to adjust. If you've had bad sushi before, you understand how important the rice is. Like the ukulele, it's the foundation of the dish. Also like the ukulele, sushi is a relatively simple food. It's often the simple dishes that are the hardest to master. There isn't a lot of room for mistakes and each step needs to be done as accurately as possible.
In our shop, we have 6 dedicated 'sections.' They are, milling, parts, bodies, assembly, spray, and stringing/setup. In the customs thread, I mentioned that there are only two people I allow to help me with my custom builds. They are Brian and Kris, both of whom have mastered the skills in each section. While there is no hierarchy in terms of rank, our employees are started in parts, move on to bodies, learn to assemble, then finally spray and setup. Milling, while often the bottom of the ladder, is my job. Again, the wood is the star of the instrument and while skill is needed to create great instruments, starting with the best cuts sure helps. Through sequential training, they are able to learn each section and the associated skill sets thoroughly. They also learn why it's so critical to properly execute each job. As the ukulele move closer to the finish line, any flaws in workmanship compound. It's up to the next guy in line to catch anything that the previous guy missed.
Experience is gained through repetition and skill is polished. Which was my very lengthy point about the advantage of being both a custom and production shop. In doing production work over and over, the actual building technique has become second nature. Very similar to playing the ukulele. Practice makes perfect and the best ukulele players can play on any size, any brand, because moving their fingers have become instinct. They don't think about how or where to move their hands, but focus on the music, instead.
Then we have customs. One off special commissions, tweaked and sometimes blinged out. It's the customs that allow us to both be creative and show off our stuff. I mentioned before, custom instruments from our shop are 90% identical to stock builds in both construction and construction methodology. The little 10% difference is what adds up to something you can see, feel, and hear. Well, that and the extra mojo.
The spirit of an instrument or build is not something I often talk about. Building is ingrained in my heart and I have dedicated my entire adult life to perfecting my craft. I have never reached a point where I think I've learned it all. If anything, the more I learn, the more I realize that I'll never learn everything. Spirit, or mana, is not something that you can measure with calipers, yet it's there in every ukulele. It's tied into the mystique of luthery and those images of a craftsman sitting at a wooden worktable, with a finely polished chisel in hand. A truly great builder learns to find personal balance between the science and skill and heart in his/her builds.
To summarize, there are many, many ways to put an ukulele together. What's important is that the builder have an open mind to changing and adapting, gaining knowledge from new experiences along the way. Do it with heart, passion, dedication to excellence and that person will more than likely create great instruments. There really isn't much of a right or wrong, but there are certainly better and worse ways to do something. By doing them over and learning from mistakes, we get better at our craft. Too many times, I hear about company X doing it this way, so why does company Y do it like that? If it works for one, it may not work for another. Simple as that. Or you hear about Joe X, who builds one ukulele a year, only when the moon is full. Does that make Joe X right or wrong, better or worse? No. Joe is Joe. That's all.
