Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of Greater Kalamazoo.

Heritage has always made fantastic instruments.

You were primarily a build to order company, you would call us up and we would build that guitar.

Now we build a standard line of instruments, and we build a lot of the same type of guitar and a lot of the same types of colors.

We can still handle one offs and custom work, but it allows us to be more efficient.

We make more of these arch top style guitars than anyone in North America.

It’s a style of guitar that was invented here, and it’s really the royalty of the guitar family.

It’s the hardest instrument to build.

So guys working in their shops in the basement, they don’t make these.

So we made some 250 of them last year, I think, our nearest competitor made 100.

We make more guitars today.

They’re more accessible throughout the world.

We literally sell our guitars now in every corner of the planet.

So more exposure, more artists.

So we’re really happy and excited about where we’re at right now.

We’re still a relatively small company, in fact, very small in terms of the rest of the industry, but we make more than a dozen guitars, probably less than two dozen guitars a day.

Our staff is relatively small.

We have about 30 people that work here on a regular basis.

includes our administrative staff.

We hire some people here that come in with quite a bit of talent.

And we want to let them express that and grow as much as they can, certainly.

Them being able to do standardized work like we do, allows them to become really efficient and pretty good at their tasks.

I think that’s really what this company is all about.

It’s about the technique and the talent of the employees here, and we really think that’s what sets this company apart from some of the others.

We like to emphasize that when we can show people that it isn’t people just operating machines down here.

They’re actually working with wood.

So this isn’t all of our lumber, by any means, but this is kind of where it starts, and it gives you an idea of some of the lumber that we are using.

I love the wood.

I love the woods.

So looking at wood, grating wood, selecting wood, choosing woods for particular instruments, for artists.

That’s where I find a lot of satisfaction.

So we take great care in sourcing our wood.

We deal with some of the very best vendors in the world, literally.

And we’re particular about it.

Our spruce, for example, we use Sitka spruce that comes from Alaska.

as opposed to Adirondacks spruce, coming from New York or Pennsylvania, as opposed to European, German spruce, so we’re particular, not only about just the species of wood, spruce, but where it comes from.

And that goes for maple as well, which we use an awful lot of, an awful lot of the maple we use, comes from here in Michigan.

But we do source maple from other places, sometimes out west in Washington and Oregon, sometimes down south, sometimes from Canada.

It’s all different.

Trees are all different, so they can come from the same neighborhood, and they can act completely differently.

So, this has all been graded.

You can see this one has a mark on it.

This one has a different kind of mark on it.

Some of these aren’t, some of these are unmarked.

So they’re designating different levels of figuring and cleanliness.

But we’re always grating wood.

We’re always defecting wood.

We’re always defecting the product, as it were.

You know, as we’re building these guitars, if we see anything that we don’t like.

Obviously, the sooner we see it, the better, so we can address it.

We take about a week in each department.

So it really takes us about six weeks to get a guitar from the time it’s ordered to the time we can fulfill the order.

It’s literally hundreds of processes that go into building a guitar.

Yeah, breaking down the pieces.

We do have a bill of materials for each style of instruments, but it’s more than you think.

It’s more than you think.

Well, this is where we’re gonna wheel the wood in, and this is where we’re gonna start to process... These are the big chop saws and the big band saws, start cutting it down to the, like, lengths and widths that we need.

For some of those bigger arch top guitars, We’re taking the flat wood, and we’re carving it.

We’re carving that arch into it.

We’ll take it, flip it over.

We’re carving the arch into the back.

We’ll take a pattern and lay it out, cut that out.

This will be the start of one of our solid art shop guitars.

We’re building the rims.

There’s the sides of the guitars primarily in this area.

Once we’ve got that all glued in.

We’ll sand this down to the thickness we need.

The rim’s ready to go.

So I was showing you earlier, we’ve traced this out.

Now we’ve cut it out.

We’ve drilled some holes into it.

But we’ve got that dish in here that we need to contend with.

What we do is, we put a piece of wood in there, a block.

So this has been shaved down flat.

So now when I put these pieces together.

That’s gonna create a solid block.

From top to back.

The binding is the plastic appliqué.

that goes around the edge of the body here.

And it serves a couple purposes.

It helps disguise where we’ve joined the two pieces of wood together.

It frames the guitar, and it also acts as a little bit of a bumper.

He’ll take one of these boards and flip it into his bench.

He’ll put the guitar on this, put the binding in there with glue, and wrap this all up, wrap the binding in there tight.

Then he’ll unhook the whole guitar and hang it up here.

So this is a stroke sander, a flat belt sander.

We’ve just put this binding on there.

Now we’ve got to clean it up.

This is how we would do that.

And it keeps it smooth, so you’re not digging little holes.

We’re certainly employing more and more technology where it makes sense for us, but no, the handwork here is critical.

We like to think our company is still a little traditional, and maybe a little old fashioned in that way.

But again, we are a small shop.

We’re not really trying to chase these huge numbers that would necessitate, you know, more machinery than we currently have.

It’s one of those things, like we’re using very tried and true recipes down here.

And that’s kind of the best way to put it.

We like to think we have the best chocolate cookie recipe in the world.

And it’s our job to execute that recipe perfectly.

And a lot of research and development has gone into that recipe.

Back in this area, we’re making the next of our guitars.

So you can see here, they’re just starting off.

They’ve channeled this.

He’s now installed the trust rod, put Put a spline over the top of it.

It’s a good looking neck.

And you can see here, we’ve glued these completely finished components to this wood, and now we’re gonna go roll the snack without hitting this fingerboard without ruining this piece of wood.

We’re gonna roll it on this.

This is how we roll our necks.

We’re always checking them, though.

We’re always measuring thicknesses.

The neck has to go into the body straight.

And it’s also on a particular pitch.

And to achieve that, we use a couple different tools.

This is actually one of his pitch gauges here.

Those rods touch the fingerboard.

When this last rod back here touches the top of the body, you know you have it just right.

That’s how he’s doing it, says I’ll put it in there, check it, chisel.

So once the guitars have been built, they come into this area, we call this white wood sanding, because the maple of the guitars looks white in this area.

But what they have to do is they have to look at these guitars now and identify any flaws, any scratches, any little gap between the binding and the wood.

All that has to be addressed before it goes to paint.

The displeasant things?

Uh, paint.

This is when you really start to see the curl appear in these guitars and the real beauty of them.

Pain is very, very labor intensive.

It, you know, it absolutely sells the guitars.

It’s the thing that everybody looks at, but it’s difficult to ask to do.

We do it at a very high level here.

We couldn’t be prouder, but it’s a big ask.

It’s a heavy lift.

You can see we’re sanding between some of the coats of paint.

So you can see here, they’ve got the sides mostly scraped away.

But they’re coming through with little pieces of metal to do this.

This is very difficult task without getting this choppy without digging into the wood.

They’re almost done with the sides.

They’ll come around and do the top, now, next.

Once they’ve done up all that binding, it’ll go back into the paint boot for clear coats to protect everything.

And that’s where it gets tricky.

We’re sanding in between those clear coats.

We’re always measuring our paint.

We want to leave the finest amount of lacquer possible without going through and hitting the paint.

A lot of people use polyaster, water base, and UV cure, and we still stick with the old traditional.

Although it’s very labor intensive, we think the results speak for themselves.

We’re very proud of them.

They very much have that dipped in glass appearance when they’re done.

It’s really hard to quantify.

We always kind of laugh.

It’s really not a guitar until the strings are on it.

Up until that point it’s really just wood.

But once the strings are on it, everything changes, now it is a guitar, and it’s amazing, as you’ve seen, as we walk through here, we’re manufacturer, but we’re manufacturing with organic material.

So each one of these instruments has a very unique fingerprint, so you never really get tired of looking at it.

These are the guitars that have now been buffed and are ready to go.

They’re going to start right here, getting their machine heads put on them.

As we come down a little further, This is where they would install the electronics.

And again, we’ve spent a lot of time polishing and shining these guitars.

Finish is pretty delicate.

Now we’re giving them all these screws and drills, and so they’ve got a lot of protection here to protect the instruments as they work.

And then they finally make it down here, and this is where they actually become a guitar.

They start to get their strings.

The guy will put the strings on them here, tune them all up.

He’s gonna start setting the pickup height, the action height, the intonation, just making sure the truss rod is adjusted, making sure all the controls work properly.

And he’s gonna give it a shine.

And, you know, we’re doing quality control everywhere.

But this is really where it becomes super important.

We’re close to the finish slide now, so we’re definitely crossing T’s, dotting eyes here, and that’s what Armando is doing.

These guitars, he’s already said they’re all good.

They’re perfect, ready to go.

And he goes, Not so fast, let me look at him.

And so he’s looking at them, literally stem to stern, marking anything that he finds, and he’s checking everything.

The paint, the intonation, the electronics, every last little thing.

He’s playing every last little note.

He’s bending it.

But once he’s decided they’re good, and he signed off on them.

He’s gonna put a card in the front of them, saying that they’re done.

So, yeah, they’re literally heading, though, to every corner of your planet.

I just want to impress on you that this place is very much like Detroit for Ford.

When you think of an automobile, the first automobile had a stick that you steered it with, and the wheels were made out of wood.

Now when you look at a car, you’re like, Yeah, it’s got a round steering wheel, and, of course, it does, and there’s a windshield windshield.

Of course it does.

All that stuff was invented in Detroit.

It’s the same thing with the guitar.

You look at a guitar, and it’s got a truss rod that goes up and down the neck, it’s got an adjustable bridge, it’s an arch top laminated guitar.

with P 90 pickups.

Very common stuff.

All the stuff was invented here.

The truss rod was invented here.

Right here.

So I mean, that’s why I keep coming back to this place.

I can’t go anywhere else.

That only exists here, that history.

That’s how important Kalamazoo is to guitar.

It’s like saying Detroit and automobile.

And I had a part in it, you know?

Proud to have a part in it.

Like a lot of teenagers, I took up guitar in high school and had a band with my buddies.

Music has always been prime importance to me.

It’s like, math and music are the two universal languages, right?

Someone actually called me at my job delivery.

pizzas while I was going to college, and they asked me if I wanted to come work at their guitar shop.

So it found me not the other way around.

They knew me a little bit, and I went over there, and I thought this would be a cool thing to do while I’m in college, and ended up just really developing a passion for it, and left college.

I left early.

Since 1998, my day job has been guitar making.

In the beginning, everything is romantic.

There’s these big old machines, there’s the smell of different kinds of wood, learning what different kinds of woods their properties are.

just really exciting and interesting because there was so much more to get into with the instrument than just playing it.

I really did like the... oriented aspect of the work, not just You know, oftentimes a factory can be just kind of running stuff through at a clip.

But I was lucky my teacher, Abe Wechter, was... stickler for high quality, and he helped me get that bar up there for getting things just right.

So I appreciated the challenge of it.

And also the fact that it seemed to be just never ending learning experience.

Like, even now, I’m still learning new stuff and developing new techniques.

I still had my shared workshop, and the basement was empty, and so I just had a workbench here, and then this was meant to be essentially just a showroom for my guitars.

And, uh, this bench was to be, like, after the guitars are painted.

They come up here, get finished out, and then go right up on the wall.

scaled it back to the amount of machines that I just need to get work done.

I’ve had bigger and smaller workshops over the years, but this is really comfortable for a one man shop.

My first shop was in 2003.

So I was still pretty young.

I was, like, 23, 24 years old, and it was a big eye opener to just the aspects of having to run a business while also having to do the work on guitars.

was working for my teacher.

I went back to work for him around 2008, and then he sold his company to Sweetwater, and I was invited to go along with him to Fort Wayne, and decided that, well, now might be a good time to get back out on my own.

I kind of liked that a little bit better anyway.

And then 2008 was the big bubble collapse, and... The customers weren’t what I was hoping they were going to be.

And so I started looking around a little bit, and I found a job posting out in Seattle at Dusty Strings, which is a really reputable shop, and I made that leap to go out there, and that was where I kind of got brought up to a higher level of craftsmanship.

Kal-tone was created because I... wasn’t really comfortable as just, like, me.

Like, I wanted a team with people.

I was surviving as a young guitar maker who no one knew who I was when I first opened up.

I had to take on a lot of jobs, that you kind of maybe wouldn’t wish to.

Like, I filed so many frets.

The hope and the anticipation is that I’m going to have all this custom work coming in.

I can say no to stuff, but the reality of having to make a business work is working on just a lot of bread and butter, guitars like that.

The other aspect was customer service.

Every person that walks in that door is a completely different person from the last person that was in, and they have their own individual expectations, needs.

One of the most important things that I developed.

was an ability to just kind of listen to that person, figure out where they’re coming from.

And then figure out what their knowledge level is with the instrument, and then... explain things to them in a way that they can understand it.

I know a lot of people have their pride and joy.

their one guitar that they stick to, and, um, but a lot of customers have... Half a dozen guitars at home that each do a little something.

and so the mood can change accordingly.

I also had to just learn how to figure stuff out, problem solving is a big part of my day to day.

There’s always some unexpected problem that needs to get figured out.

Oftentimes it’s, do I spend $1,000 and have someone do it for me, or... Do I go buy some materials for $300 and figure it out myself?

Lots of specialized tools for guitar making.

You can.

Kind of make, do, and get by without some of them, but.

Some of them are just plain necessary.

Yeah, that’s for taking necks out.

Yeah, got a little steam.

And I’ve got a little needle that just pops right in there.

Yeah, you just kind of dial back with the controls when you’ve got enough steam in there, and that’s really all it is.

I could probably make something more slick if I sat down for a day, and did it, but it served me very well for more than a decade, so... This is from the late 30s.

It’s a marten guitar, and... Get these clamps off here.

The back was mostly detached.

There was a hole that had been punched through here.

It just needed a lot of work.

So the bat came off, and I did some structural work to the top.

This is so old that it has bar frets in it.

You can kind of see on other guitars, if you look at the side view, it’s kind of like a mushroom.

It’s a straight line that goes into the wood, and then, like, a little dome that comes up on the top, and this is just one, it’s a bar.

That’s the fret.

So before they invented modern frets, there was this.

And that’s... Costs twice as much as a normal refret to replace those.

But, you know, a new set of tuners, a new nuts, a new saddle that I just glued in.

Yeah, it’s it’s ready to play for another 100 years or so.

You can kind of see the, uh, The logo on the back of the headstock there.

It’s the, the way Martin used to do it before they put it on the front.

No label inside or anything.

Well, you know, it starts at like wood selection.

You really have to read that grain.

be willing to discard pieces that aren’t what you want them to be.

So once you have your materials kind of assembled.

Lots of builders have just one or two designs that they stick to.

I’m a little more erratic than that.

I usually do different things each time.

getting that design right.

And then it’s a matter of, yeah, joining those pieces together really carefully.

You know, when you’re making a $3,000 or $4,000 guitar, that top can’t opened up because you just really wanted to go to lunch.

You know, you have to sit with it and make sure it’s done correctly.

So... gluing those pieces up, and then, of course, with the guitar, you’ve got the curved sides, lots of, lots of curves.

The back of the neck, the heel.

And so... You know, there’s a hundred different ways you can make a rectangle into a guitar neck.

You can sit there with one tool and just chop away at it and spend a lot of time doing it.

You can put that into a jig that will take it 80% of the way there, and then... do the rest of it by hand, or you can see and see and get it even closer.

Yep, it’s a lot of small things every now and then you have to really put some muscle into it, but a lot of it is really just, you know, from your elbows to your fingertips, just doing that stuff.

It’s important to me, having been a teenager.

with nothing to do, and getting into guitars and bands, and the whole culture around.

music and live music.

It’s important to me that there’s a place still like that in Kalamazoo, and we used to have three, four, or five really nice, big music shops around here, and they all kind of went away over the past few years.

care about musicians, and I want them to be able to do their thing, and that’s where the shop is coming from.

It’s just enabling helping musicians to do their art.

That’s my push right now, is to build up a business that’s accessible to everyone open to the public.

that relies heavily on its technical abilities.

and make something that musicians in Kalamazoo can interact with and have a touching point.

Sometimes I’ll have several customers in here.

They’ll find connections to each other, people that they know, people get together and jam later, you know?

That cross pollination, there has to be a physical place for that to happen outside of just the venue.

what’s important to me right now is making sure that... After I move on to whatever my next phase is, is that the shop can kind of continue and be around for people.

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