Making the Cut

I always get a little nervous when I start prepping a log of future guitar soundboards for milling. Making a good cut takes a good deal of patience and experience that I am always worried I won't have. Preparing the log for the bandsaw and setting up the bandsaw for a straight, consistent cut. I think that it's partially a memory of mistakes that I made in woodworking when I was a growing up, because when I was a lot younger (not that I am all that old now) I usually rushed important steps like prepping the wood for milling - anxious to start the construction of whatever it was that I was building, and I reaped the fruits of that impatience over and over again as I found myself with a lot more waste material than I should have ended up with.

Thankfully I am getting better about this, and recently jumped into milling some new guitar tops out of the western red cedar logs I purchased a couple of months ago. The job went very well and ended with 12 more tops stacked and ready for joining in my humidity room. After the wood is cut, it's hard to resist sorting through the plates and testing their acoustic qualities such as tap tone and stiffness. All of these tops are very nice. There's not a dud in the entire bunch. On the other hand, there is that wood stacked on the shelf above the wood I had just cut - about 5 tops that I haven't used and might never use. 

I kind of felt sorry for them. I'm not too sure why I should feel that way, but I even felt sorry for them after I chose to start milling more wood without even using these soundboards that I already had ready to go. I suppose it's just the fact that I am becoming more selective in what wood I want to use. Sure, it is a very subjective issue and great guitars can come from a wide range of wood qualities, but eventually a luthier finds that awesome top, and she just knows, "huh - this is going to make a damn fine guitar." - - After that, what it means to do your best just reached a new level.

I suppose that I could tell my future customers that sound is subjective, which it might be, but that won't make people talk. 

I feel sorry for that wood that doesn't make the cut like I felt sorry for myself and others when we don't always finish in first place.

But if its your guitar I am building, I think you are expecting me to choose wood that will "make the cut" 

Because just as you -the professional guitarist must pass through the funnel of juries and critics, the choice to be remarkable, to make the cut, has to start somewhere. For me, your choice to be remarkable means that some of this wood, won't be used to build one of my guitars.