
JD Your journey to become a luthier began when you became intrigued while watching a carpenter work at your childhood home. What caught your attention?
WGL I think it was everything about wood: the smells, the tactile sense of working with it that you don’t articulate when you’re a little kid, and the tools. I can still take myself back to the carport while that carpenter was working: I had my little tool set with plastic saws and he gave me a chunk of wood to bang a nail in. And at summer camp one of my favourite places was the woodshop. Later, because I had been playing guitar since I was nine, the idea of building instruments was a blending of my two loves.
Brown mother-of-pearl, lapis, ebony, red coral, walrus ivory, blacklip pearl, turquoise
Full neck and headstock approx. 28″
Photograph: Michael Alberstat