{"id":8671,"date":"2017-12-18T14:46:48","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T22:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=8671"},"modified":"2021-03-05T15:15:25","modified_gmt":"2021-03-05T23:15:25","slug":"fretwork-maui-masterworks-from-luthier-john-a-decker-jr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/fretwork-maui-masterworks-from-luthier-john-a-decker-jr\/","title":{"rendered":"Fretwork: Maui Masterworks from Luthier John A. Decker Jr."},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Summer 2017 issue of Classical Guitar<\/em><\/strong><\/a> | BY BLAIR JACKSON<\/p>\n

People do not usually associate classical- and flamenco-guitar lutherie<\/span> with the sun-kissed islands of Hawaii, 8,000 miles from the birthplace of the Spanish guitar. Koa wood ukuleles, yes. Finely crafted concert instruments ready to tackle T\u00e1rrega or Paco? Not so much. But for nearly two decades, John A. Decker Jr. has been handcrafting instruments under the guitarmasterworks name out of his home shop in Wailuku, Maui, selling mostly to Hawaii residents who play classical and\/or flamenco, but also occasionally shipping his custom guitars far beyond the Pacific.<\/p>\n

What makes Decker\u2019s story even more intriguing is that this master wood-carver made his name developing RainSong acoustic guitars, famous for their durable, carbon-fiber (i.e. non<\/i>-wood) construction. \u201cI retired from day-to-day operations with RainSong in 1998,\u201d he says by phone from Maui, \u201cand now I make classical wooden guitars as a sort of low-level occupation. I don\u2019t make many\u2014just a few a year, out of the usual exotic woods. But it\u2019s ironic that I own a company that makes, give or take, a thousand guitars each year\u2014almost all steel-string; we might make half a dozen or a dozen a year for nylon-strings\u2014and they have no<\/i> wood in them whatsoever.\u201d His own classical models do, however, have carbon-fiber rods to reinforce the neck: \u201cParticularly if one is using Spanish cedar for necks, which is traditional for classical guitars, over time the necks tend to \u2018sag\u2019 under string tension, and the carbon-fiber helps to prevent this.\u00a0Otherwise, except a layer of Nomex in the [double-top] soundboard, everything else is wood.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"John
Decker\u2019s three-piece top leaves only the exterior layer of spruce contacting the sides, which he claims makes the \u201csoundboard\/sideconnection as flexible as possible.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Decker\u2019s background was not in music. As he put it in the biographical sketch on his website (guitarmasterworks.com), \u201cI was trained as an aeronautical engineer [at M.I.T.] and a physicist [PhD from Cambridge U.], and spent most of my career as a technical manager, primarily in the semiconductor and aerospace industries.\u201d Those experiences have greatly informed his guitar-making through the years\u2014interviewing Decker about guitars would have been much easier if I\u2019d taken physics and chemistry in high school. But I didn\u2019t, so some of what he said frankly sailed over my head. <\/span><\/p>\n

He first went to Hawaii for a project in 1971, \u201cand I didn\u2019t like it,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t like big cities, and Honolulu is a big city.\u201d When, a decade later, he was recruited to run the Air Force\u2019s optical observatory on Maui (because of his groundbreaking work with computer-controlled optical instruments), he was reticent: \u201cI had no intention of moving to Hawaii,\u201d he notes. But he took the job and quickly learned that Maui was quite a different place than crowded Honolulu, and he was also very impressed with the observatory, which at the time was the world\u2019s best ground-based optical facility, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce I got out here,\u201d he continues, \u201cI got talked into learning enough guitar to lead the singing in our church group. I took [classical guitar] lessons\u2014I never got to be good\u2014and bought a guitar, but the guitar kept coming apart on me,\u201d thanks to the notorious Hawaiian heat and humidity. This got him thinking about making a guitar that could stand up better to that sort of climate, and then the physicist (and chemist) in him took over. The notion of possibly fashioning a guitar out of carbon-
\nfiber or other sturdy materials that aerospace engineers had used on satellites and spacecraft intrigued him, because \u201cI used to run a little department that made optical equipment for spacecraft\u2014rockets and satellites\u2014and vibrations were always a hazard for those. It turned out that the equations for the vibrations in a guitar soundboard are essentially the same as the equations for some funny acoustic waves in the sun that were the subject of my doctoral dissertation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the course of all this, I recruited a classical-guitar maker, Lorenzo Pimentel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His sons Rick and Roberto are still running the company. [See CG<\/i> Summer 2015 for more on Pimentel & Sons.] He was incredibly helpful and basically said, \u2018You can\u2019t just be a scientist and a businessman off on the side.\u2019 If you\u2019re going to make guitars that sound good, you have to really know how to make a wooden guitar\u2019 with, as he put it, \u2018sawdust under your fingernails and lacquer in your hair.\u2019 So I first built wood prototypes, which we then converted to carbon fiber [actually a carbon fiber-epoxy resin matrix\u2014graphite]. And in the process of doing that, which took quite a long time, I became really intrigued with the craftsmanship involved, and I also learned a lot about wood. If you\u2019re going to imitate a wood guitar, you\u2019ve got to know what its properties are. A French lab has done an exhaustive study on the properties of tone woods\u2014density, stiffness, and other characteristics\u2014so I used that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Heel cap on a high-figure bubinga guitar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Decker says it took about ten years \u201cto get a system that was manufacturable,\u201d but once it was rolling, RainSong\u2019s steel-string composite acoustic guitars took off. Unfortunately, the company\u2019s attempts to also sell graphite classical models did not succeed: \u201cIt\u2019s a very tough market to crack,\u201d he acknowledges. \u201cI remember taking one of the RainSong prototypes into one of the really nice classical-guitar shops in San Francisco and I got thrown out as if I had the Ebola virus! There are probably 25 or 30 classical RainSongs, and maybe a dozen flamenco RainSongs, floating around the universe somewhere, but we haven\u2019t made one since \u201996 or \u201997.\u201d<\/p>\n

All along, Decker had been immersing himself in the history and physics of guitar building (read \u201cGuitar Acoustics 101\u201d on his website\u2026 if you dare!), he joined the Guild of American Luthiers and its spin-off, the Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans (ASIA), and \u201cI read everything I could find.\u201d However, typical of this iconoclast, when he ventured into making his own wooden classical and flamenco guitars following his semi-retirement from RainSong in 1998 (the company moved from Maui to the state of Washington three years later), he did not adopt conventional soundboard bracing \u00e1 la Torres, or the more modern (Michael) Kasha bracing in Richard Schneider\u2019s instruments. Instead, he opted for the proprietary brace-less \u201cdouble-top\u201d design he had developed for RainSong\u2014and then licensed back from the company. Again, this went back to his aerospace engineering background, specifically to the concept of \u201caeroelasticity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you want for a guitar soundboard is almost exactly what you want for an airplane wing\u2014you want it be as light at as possible, as stiff as possible, and have no funny resonances. On a guitar soundboard this meant you build a three-dimensional version of an I-beam, with the top thinner than normal, then a spacer\u2014on RainSong we use foam, on wooden guitars we use Nomex\u2014and then a backing plate. It\u2019s sort <\/i>of a double-soundboard, except we discovered very quickly that if those two plates were the same thickness, it was overbuilt like mad. So, I use a regular soundboard\u2014spruce or whatever, typically a half to a third the thickness you use for a plain solid soundboard\u2014backed up with about a 1\/8-inch layer of Nomex, and then a backing plate, as I call it, as thin<\/i> as I can get it; typically 1\/3-millimeter thick. The other thing I incorporate is, unlike just about everybody else who uses a \u2018double-top approach,\u2019 I don\u2019t carry the Nomex and the backing plate clear to the sides of the guitar. That is another old idea from aerospace: You don\u2019t want the vibrations of the soundboard to go into the body of the guitar. It drains energy you really want to project out to the audience. I\u2019ve found that we get a nice response across from bass to treble and it\u2019s loud<\/i>. It shows up particularly in the flamenco. I make really thin-body flamencos, and they\u2019re almost as loud as my full-size classicals.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you scroll through the \u201cGallery\u201d on the guitarmasterworks site (he says he chose the name and writes it as one long word to evoke a \u201cGerman\u201d vibe), you\u2019ll find many beautiful instruments made from combinations of exotic and more typical woods, including spruce, koa, bubinga, redwood, Claro walnut, \u201c10,000-year-old pepperwood,\u201d mahogany, pre-CITES Brazilian rosewood, Cambodian rosewood, Malaysian blackwood, ebony, Caucasian cypress; the list goes on. I ask him if he can hear much difference in the various woods he employs.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can clearly hear the differences between the soundboard materials. I\u2019m a real fan of redwood, for instance. It has a lovely, warm tone as a soundboard material, but I make sure that people understand that it is very fragile. It\u2019s very soft. You don\u2019t want it in a flamenco guitar. If someone has well-developed nails for strumming, you want to stay away from redwood. One of the things I enjoy about making wooden guitars is talking to a customer\u2014what kind of tone do you want? And they\u2019ll play the guitars I have, and they might like the spruce best. A lot of people do. Lorenzo Pimentel taught me how to \u2018listen\u2019 to a piece of wood by tapping it a certain way, to figure out if you\u2019d want to use it on a guitar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is the obsession with rosewood or flame maple back and sides driven more by aesthetics than tone? \u201cFrom where I\u2019m sitting, very much so. But that\u2019s fine. I love beautiful woods. I just built a guitar out of Madagascar rosewood. I\u2019ve got a filing cabinet full of back and side sets, and the client came by and looked through it and said, \u2018I like that<\/i>.\u2019 Then we went through a cabinet of guitar tops, and he chose a Sitka spruce top. Then you go worry about fret boards and all that. I use mesquite as a fretboard material fairly often. It\u2019s sort of a reddish light brown and it goes very well with a redwood top. My wife is from Texas and I happened to stumble on a source for mesquite from this place in the middle of nowhere. It\u2019s very, very hard, perfect for fretboards.\u201d<\/p>\n

About half of the guitars Decker makes these days are custom commissions, the other half \u201cdealer\u2019s choice,\u201d so to speak. \u201cI usually have two or three in process at any given time,\u201d he explains, \u201cand if I haven\u2019t got an order to keep me busy, I crawl through the woods I\u2019ve got and pick something I<\/i> like and make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That sounds about right for what is truly, above all, a labor of love.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Summer 2017 issue of Classical Guitar | BY BLAIR JACKSON People do not usually associate classical- and flamenco-guitar lutherie with the sun-kissed islands of Hawaii, 8,000 miles from the birthplace of the Spanish guitar. Koa wood ukuleles, yes. Finely crafted concert instruments ready to tackle T\u00e1rrega or Paco? Not so much. But for nearly two decades, John A. Decker Jr. has been handcrafting instruments under the guitarmasterworks name out of his home shop in Wailuku, Maui, selling mostly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8674,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[98],"class_list":["post-8671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-luthier"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/John-a-Decker-Jr-guitars1.png?fit=1031%2C605&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15869,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671\/revisions\/15869"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}