Echo jason walker fingerstyle movie#
Echo jason walker fingerstyle manual#
Echo jason walker fingerstyle series#

I think you can appreciate that just learning to put a guitar together - with very little actual joinery ( sand-flat-apply-glue-and-then-clamp is not a difficult skill to master) or tone-making savvy going on - is not going to provide a realistic foundation for any kind of success. You know: looking good but nothing substantial behind the faГ§ade.

Echo jason walker fingerstyle movie#

The better violin-making schools have a four-year curriculum! A large part of the problem is that many people simply donвЂ™t know that thereвЂ™s any more to making a guitar than its merely being a more complicated woodworking project than, say, making movie sets. In comparison, there are respected schools of furniture making that turn out competent journeymen craftsmen and which put their students through several years of training - which includes design, proportion, a variety of woodworking techniques, history, joinery, and finishing. This education lasts as little as ten days to as much as several months itвЂ™s a great starter kit, but necessarily cannot be more than that. I wonвЂ™t beat the existing guitar schools up for doing the best they can, but their efforts donвЂ™t extend past a beginnerвЂ™s level education in making-and-assembling-guitar-parts. On the other hand, making guitars isnвЂ™t likely to produce lucrative careers under any circumstances, hand skills or not, unless one knows what heвЂ™s doing. This is a costly trade-off, and it ainвЂ™t exactly progress as far as I can see. Entertainment is provided not by ourselves but by electronic devices and use of computers in a myriad ways. Does any of you remember hobby shops, the Revell model kits, fixing up old jalopies (or even newer cars), erector sets, tiddly-winks, ships in bottles, woodburning kits, balsa-wood gliders, paint-by-number pictures, or even making playhouses out of cardboard boxes, or any other long-term-attention-span-engaging activity? Today, most productive work is driven by the need for speed, efficiency, and profit and the element of human judgment is dumbed down through steady reliance on the latest jig, accessory, tool, or set of time-motion guidelines that do a lot of the work for us. When I was young a lot of kids, teenagers, and even adults puttered, futzed, tinkered, whittled, played with clay and plaster, built models, and fixed things. The second is the primitive state of lutherie education.

Echo jason walker fingerstyle manual#

The first of these is the sorry state of the manual arts in this culture: people use their hands less and less to accomplish things these days. Sorry if sound negative, but I gave a lot of reasons for my thinking so in those articles, and none of the reasons have changed. Factories like the Taylor facility are already doing pioneering work in that. All in the service of progress, of course. I donвЂ™t know that I want to repeat all that, but the gist of it is that вЂrealвЂ™ lutherie (in the sense that I understand that word) will probably survive between the cracks of mainstream commercial culture - which is certain to do its best to standardize, efficient-ize, productive-ize, and roboticize the life out of it.

Echo jason walker fingerstyle series#

I wrote a four-part series on the future of lutherie (at least, as I see it) for Fingerstyle magazine back in 2001. As one of the cornerstones of what is often called a new renaissance in instrument making, what are your thoughts on the future of lutherie as an art and as a lucrative career?

You have received recognition from the guitar world, and you are highly respected by your associates and peers.