It Takes As Long As It Takes

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of posts before, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about guitar as I slowly learn to play the guitar myself.

One of my favourite recent ones was this history of the guitar, in which guitarist Rob Scallon and classical guitarist/“plucked instrument” historian Brandon Acker walk us through the history of the guitar from its origins to the modern day.

I began watching more videos from both of them after this – I love Acker’s meticulousness and focus on intricacy, and Scallon’s enthusiasm for novelty.

So I also enjoyed this video of Scallon learning how to build a classical guitar with Marshall Brune, who is a luthier^[1] and has his own (though much smaller and more niche) YouTube channel. The video is nearly 2.5 hours, and I didn’t watch it all at once, but it’s so well-made and entertaining that I didn’t just put it on in the background while I worked – I watched the whole thing with my morning coffee over 2-3 days.

Brune has a deep and earned knowledge of guitar-making (and can apparently recognise his guitars by smell – this video and the rest of the series are worth watching), but it also struck me that the guitar in the Rob Scallon video is numbered “96”, i.e. the 96th guitar Brune has made. Of course, he makes other instruments – violins, dulcimers, and he got his start making steel-string acoustic guitars – but, at the time of the video, he’s been working for a decade or more, and has made 96 classical guitars. I love that.

I was talking to a friend about this, and described my feelings, and he said, “Oh, the hipster way of doing things.” And I disagreed vociferously.

Hipsterism as an era was a cultural reaction to a glut of information. The early internet era considered the sudden availability of more and more information as an opportunity, and hipsterism was partly a reaction to that – we had too much information, and had to figure out how to take it in. Some relied on curation, others on compulsive collection, and hipsters reacted by creating a hierarchy by which they were allowed to ignore 99% of everything, because otherwise it’d be too much to pay attention to. Hipsterism purported to be about quality as an identity metric, but it was actually based on perceived or projected quality as a mode of information management.

That’s not what this is. This kind of lutherie is part of a tradition that goes all the way back to the inventor of the modern guitar, Antonio Torres. It’s a craft that has been developed and handed down in an unbroken chain through the decades. These people dedicate their lives to learning the trade and conducting it as they see fit in an age where every kind of efficiency has already been achieved.^[2] They have observed modernity, and chosen the modern methods that don’t compromise on quality, and for everything else, they still do it the same way it’s been done for ages, because they feel it’s better.

And the key thing they understand, and that their customers clearly do as well – given how these instruments are priced – is that it takes as long as it takes. If building a guitar takes long enough that you can only make ten guitars a year, but you’re happy with them, then that’s how long it takes.