Guitar Luthier and Inlay Artist Grit Laskin

by Rick Landers.

In the world of fine custom guitars the name Grit Laskin always transforms discussions toward the magical realm of intricate and thought provoking inlay. The guitars he builds are made of hand select woods and crafted with thoughtful design and construction. All are built to delight players with their richness of tone, elegant responsiveness and ergonomic curves. Still, talk always revolves around Grit’s stunning inlay designs where his vivid imagination and skills conjoin to tell playful stories on his guitars’ headstocks and along their running boards.

William “Grit” Norman Laskin studied the craft of guitar building under renowned builder Jean Larivee during the early ‘70s. By 1973 Laskin opened his own studio, producing a series of guitars while honing his craft and developing his inlay skills to a world-class level. In 1988 he became one of the founders of the international Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans (A.S.I.A.).

Grit Laskin is a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with musical talents inspired by traditional and folk music of the British Isles. He plays guitar, mandolin, banjo, concertina, and Northumbrian small pipes. He is also the author of The World of Musical Instruments: A Guided Tour (Mosaic Press, 1987). He has contributed to The Canadian Composer, Guitar Canada, Fine Woodworking and Woodworking International. Laskin's awe-inspiring work has been captured in his book, A Guitar Maker’s Canvas: The Inlay Art of Grit Laskin.

In 1996, Grit and some musician friends established the Borealis Recording Company that aims to promote Canadian Traditional and Roots music. Today Borealis is the home for over 30 Canadian folk artists and a catalogue of 50 titles.

In 1997, Laskin was the recipient of Canada’s most esteemed award for Craft by the Bronfman Family Foundation.

Introductory remarks from Bob Taylor, Paul Reed Smith, Dick Boak and Christian F. Martin, IV

“Many of us know some overachievers. Fewer of us know one who is actually extremely talented in what they do. Even fewer of us know an extremely talented overachiever who works with their hands, making beautiful, artfully crafted guitars. I have a friend, named Grit Laskin, who fits this description.

Most of us are stopped dead in our tracks by the inlay art that Grit embellishes upon his guitars. This is truly capable of causing a traffic jam, but looking past the inlay and to the guitar itself, one discovers a true luthier who is both talented in his execution and talented in his design ideas. Grit's guitars are amazing.

To round out the guy, you can add that he's a great musician, photographer, and writer. He takes care to see that things are done well, and somehow saves time to be a good person; one that is always interesting to talk with, and makes me feel great about the job I do, with his acknowledgements directed toward my efforts. He's a real inspiration to me, and although we talk only occasionally, when we do, our friendship starts right up where we left off.”
—Bob Taylor, Taylor Guitars

“Anybody who has seen his work or read his book knows he is one of the most talented inlay artists of our time. The aesthetics, style and precision of his craft are just off the charts…very high-level work with real style.”
—Paul Reed Smith, PRS Guitars

“Grit is certainly one of the most remarkable talents on the face of the planet. His inlay art is extraordinary, but he is also an excellent performer, singer, guitarist, bagpipist, illustrator, author, comedian and humanitarian. It’s an honor to be his long time friend and compatriot!”
—Dick Boak, C. F. Martin & Co.

“Having seen Grit’s brilliantly fresh inlay designs over the years, I was so thrilled when we finally were able to collaborate with him directly on the "Night Dive" Limited Edition Martin guitars. Those instruments offer a tremendous tribute to Chuck Erikson (Duke of Pearl), Larry Sifel (Pearlworks), and the legacy of our company, but mostly they provide a fitting canvas for Grit’s stunning artistry.”
—Christian F. Martin, IV, C. F. Martin & Co.

Interview

Tell us about your early years as a guitar builder and inlay artist.

Grit Laskin: Well, I worked with John Larrivee for a couple years. I joined him when he just left his basement workshop and he rented his first shop. And for the bulk of those two years it was just the two of us. In the first couple of months there was another guy named Young who’d been hanging around, but then he left and went off to work with another maker.

And then at the latter part somebody named David Wren came in the evenings after his day job and started hanging out and cutting parts. And when I left, he quit and began working with John. But for the bulk of those two years it was just the two of us. This would have been the fall of ‘71 to the fall of ’73, or the summer of ’73.

Did you initially take a low risk approach and work on old guitars or necks or did you work with high performance guitars?

GL: Yeah, I’ve never done repairs, never worked on old guitars. When I started with John it was just after my eighteenth birthday. I was just a kid who was playing music at that time and had been working a bit in a recording studio. I just dived right in to building. And after the first six months with John of just doing various tasks I built my own first guitar in my spare time. Sort of late at night and stuff like that. Once John saw that I could handle a whole bunch of things, after that, I was just right into it. And in the second year he and I built all the guitars together.

In fact, he felt that I was doing so much work on them that my signature should be on the label. There’s up to sixty guitars we built just the two of us together that second year I was with him. A dozen have my signature on the label along with his. We only remembered that many times before we glued the label into the guitar over the reinforcing strip and there’s about that many of them floating around.

There’s an artistic leap one takes moving from traditional geometric inlay designs to featuring a guitar neck as a canvas. Did you take on inlay with an incremental approach or by a leap?

GL: That came afterward. Certainly, when you learn to build guitars you learn to cut a piece of mother of pearl to do simple inlays in the fingerboards. But, even John was just doing simple things in those days. It was well after I left, years after I left, three, four, five years that I started doing more interesting inlays.

But it was a slow gradual process for me until a certain point where I happened to have just looked at the inlay area on the guitar differently than before. It was one of those epiphenal moments. And after that there was no turning back. I began seeing it as a blank canvas to do work on as opposed to a hunk of wood that needs decoration.

Along the way I had been starting to inlay human figures and teaching myself to engrave, especially working on human portraits. And that was coming along. I mean I still remember the first time I picked up a gravure. I hadn’t had the slightest a clue what to do with it and I still describe what I did as hesitant scratches and markings. But you dive in and figure it out. So, it was probably ’75 when I bought my first gravure. It’s not difficult to do traditional complex inlay. It’s just more of the same, you know? Just a big lump of work and I was doing a lot of elaborate things but it was getting into a different approach.

It didn’t happen until the mid-‘70s and slowly evolved.

It probably was, I couldn’t tell you the year, but it would have been in the late ‘70s maybe. But it was when I pulled a figure out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. It was just an artist I admired and there was a character, he often did characters, people playing roles, often it was him and it was him modeling as court figures or were suppose to be royal court figures and there was one that looked like a baker and I had this baker walk on to the peg head. The body language was saying “I’m in the act of taking a step”. You just saw him walking on and that gave me, got motion in there, so it was my first little inkling of thinking differently.

I didn’t ever study art. So I was by accident and by osmosis, sort of picking up little elements of what you can do within a frame, whether the frame’s a canvas the headstock of a guitar or whatever it might be. Or looking thru the view finder of a camera you’re only getting a portion of the scene, but you’re trying involve enough information to capture enough for the viewer to give the viewer’s brain a picture. So that kind of stuff was popping up in my consciousness.

What are the key tools an inlay artist must buy to learn the trade

GL: Well you need something to cut the shell and stone and the various materials, metals, whatever it might be.

And those are typically something called a fret saw or jeweler’s saw that you’d get from a jewelers supply. And of course, you need to inlay it in to the guitar parts so you need a tiny little router. A Dremel of some sort is most commonly used. Dremel’s a brand name. But it’s little mini-routers essentially with tiny cutters so that you can excavate the cut and insert the inlay materials. After that the engraving is not done by a power tool. It’s just a little hand tool called a gravure. And they come from metal engraving and they’re still available thru jeweler’s supplies, various shapes of them. Those are the essential tools.

So should a novice inlay artist take an old beater guitar and experiment with it?

GL: That’s up to people if they want to experiment and play. It depends. If you’re self taught that’s a route. But, there are lots of places to take courses to get people started in instrument making these days. Certainly, more than there were thirty, thirty-five years ago.

Have you developed some of your own Laskin techniques?

GL: Oh, certainly. There’s no question. I mean, some part of that is just the nature of the trade. Whether it’s guitar making and people coming up with unique jigs and tools to finally get that job done better. That happens all the time. It’s part of the creative process of building.

But certainly with inlay, because I’m stretching the boundaries of what’s done in every way in design, in the degree of realism in the medium wherever inlay was done, whether it was done on a table or an ancient instrument from an Egyptian tomb or turn at the 20th century when elaborate banjos were popular. Whatever it might be I’m pushing the limits of what’s done within the medium. And that appeals to me. I’ll return to your question, but I’ll veer off here for a second.

To not only push the limit on what concept can be depicted, but enjoying the challenge of figuring out how to depict a concept with the medium, with the hard materials and the tools at your disposal and put it on this narrow canvas that also has to avoid frets, that has to be played with sweaty fingers that has machine heads up there and still make it work on a working tool that an instrument is.

So, I certainly do love all those challenges. But they force you to come up with techniques, because people haven’t been doing it the way I’m doing it. Especially when it comes to fingerboard.

Because I’m often doing what I call “full narrative” inlay, quote unquote, it means telling a story and the whole storyline’s down the whole neck. That’s what I mean by “full narrative”. It’s just my own internal term for it. And so there may be a lot of work on the fingerboard. And it’s not just a playing surface, it’s a radius playing surface and the neck angle is critical. And all of that is the nature of what a guitar is and that has to be done right or it doesn’t play properly and not serving its function.

So I have to to inlay hard materials that don’t flex over radiuses and underneath frets that are hammered in. And all those parameters have forced me to come up with techniques to do it and make it work with the function of the instrument down the road, being played, being re-fretted.

You know having to maintain the radius for all kinds of reasons, from playability issues, certainly force some new techniques and things like that. Obviously I’m not listing specific ones for you because that could be very esoteric. But you get the idea that you’re forced to andou have no choice. It's like, “Okay, I’m at this crossroads. What am I going to do now? “Okay, let’s think this one through?”, “What can I do with these materials?”, “How can I get them in there?”, “How could I get the inlay in there that let’s me re-fret the guitar? That lets me re-fret the guitar, which happens down the road, if it’s played, without harming this brittle material that the inlay is made of?” That if you’re not careful could crack as you hammer the frets in and things like that.

I suppose you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that solves one of those challenges?

GL: Oh, yes I do I suppose. But more often it’s uh, to be honest; it’s when I’ve got to solve a problem that's happened. And, “Oh God, look what’s just happened here? That’s never happened to me!” You have about six seconds of anxiety and then you calm down and you remind yourself of the standard phrase that the mark of a good crafts person is not whether you make mistakes but how well you solve your mistakes. That’s standard. It’s an old, old adage that’s been around crafts for a long time and perfectly valid. And then you say, “Fine.” And you say, “Let’s get that brain in gear!”

For example, I’ve had inlay material crack with the stress of frets going in even thought I’ve done everything I can to avoid that. And so now, with finished inlays and frets in I now have to replace one part that’s surrounded by other engraved finished areas that I don’t want to touch. I have to get it in there, get it flush with the surface and re-engrave it without touching anything. Stuff like that.

It’s happened and I solved it. But those are the things, you’re right, you’re in bed, okay, and you walk through each idea you have, if I do that and think, “What are the consequences, “If I use that tool?” and “What if I went in there with a chisel?”

You know, whatever it might be. And once you’re in the “challenge to solve” mode and to solve it can be enjoyable actually. And then it’s even more satisfying when you’ve done it!

You work with natural materials and, in instrument making in general, you’re pushing all of the limits of the materials to the edge of their tolerance to be a tool. It’s one of the highest uses of woods and those natural materials. You’re always going to have those things happen because you’re right on the edge all the time. So, I think it’s just part of the process to getting in the mode of thinking that helps you problem solve.

Do you give a lot of consideration to the life cycle of a guitar that will serve a working musician over a lifetime?

GL: Certainly and you do what you can. There’s a couple ways. On the headstock actually, some years ago, six, seven, eight years, I not sure exactly now, I stopped putting a complete full finish on the inlay. You may have noticed even on old instruments that say “The Gibson” on it you’ll see little white marks all around the inlay and that’s just where the wood around it has expanded and contracted in its normal way.

But the harder shell material doesn’t do that, so there’s been a tiny loss of adhesion of the finish right at the joint and it shows itself as a tiny creamy white line. And that just shows that right at that exact spot some parts moved and some didn’t and some and the finish go both ways. It’s lost a part of its adhesion. And that’s just normal on a finished instrument. But there may also be a complex machine head, washers, squeezing down, never mind the movement of the wood underneath, different from the shell.

I got frustrated by doing a perfect job and within a year or two you’d see little white crease lines around the joints of the materials…all aesthetic. So, now it’s coated in a very strong coat of a sealer which protects it but isn’t thick enough to not be flexible and not crease like that or not lose its adhesion when things move in the different weathers. So that’s one little aesthetic thing I’ve solved. But another thing you mentioned is wear and tear on the finger boards. And it’s routine even old banjos. Old banjos need to be re-engraved seventy five years later. You not only wear through the filler in the engraving, you wear through the engraving.

That can’t be helped. It has to be accepted.

And what I try and do when the design allows and the customer allows is to have more of the more heavily engraved portions of the inlay away from the more heavily played areas. So you’re at least slowing that process of natural wear and tear.

But to some degree it’s just gotta to be accepted as the nature of the beast.

Have you ever tossed a project while well in to working on it out of frustration. Or do you always work out creative solutions to mistakes or accidents?

GL: It’s rare that you would toss something out. Usually it’s well before that. I’ve had situations where various parts of the guitar, something happens to them and you’ve gotta throw that top away and even you’ve already put in a rosette in and you’ve braced it, you know? Stuff like that, but you catch it well before.

Part of the reason is, when you’re a solo builder and your output is low, you just can’t afford to put a guitar out there that’s not up to scratch. Never mind the fact that I’m building to order with a waiting list. I wouldn’t feel good delivering anything that’s not as good as I could have done. So, no, you problem solve as you go and if something has to be thrown in the garbage, it happens. Or a piece of wood just ignored and never used. That’s just the way it is.

What’s your annual production?

GL: I complete a dozen.

That’s a low productivity. There must be a lot of complexity involved in each guitar you build?

GL: There is, I don’t do inlay on every one, but certainly on a lot of them. And sometimes they’re very complex. There could two guitars worth of hours in those instruments, but half of those hours were on those customized bits. Part of that is this is my main profession, my main gig, but I do have my fingers in other pies that use up my time.

I’m involved in folk music label Borealis Records and that probably sucks up two guitars from my time a year in the hours that I actually have to give it, never mind the extra-curricular hours, but sort of day time hours. But it’s still five days a week in the shop building guitars.

You must be pretty disciplined or structured in the way you manage your interests.

GL: I am. Stop there, I’m very structured. It’s just what I’m comfortable working with and that’s just me. I’m very disciplined. If things don’t get done I stay late to do them. I certainly have routines and I stick to them.

I work in pairs. If you’re curious, I don’t know if you can add this, but people might find it interesting. So, there are two guitars at any given stage. I’ve got two that are in finishing. I’ve got two that are being built, two where the backs and tops are in the early prep stages and that wood’s being prepared. So, that half-dozen are in the cycle at any given time.

Early on I tried building one guitar at a time. But that's inefficient and you won’t make a living. I found three or four at a time became boring returning and doing the same routine with each one of them. And that didn’t interest me, so I cut back to two and that’s what I’ve done for most of my career.

So you have enough work to do and you can shift to another guitar and work on some other bit of work and not get bored.

GL: Yeah and yet it’s not too many of the same routine. Because it’s, you know, there are certain jobs on guitars that are just elbow work. Scrapping bindings and doing physical stuff and your mind starts to wander because it’s tedious. And that doesn’t happen if it’s only two, for me anyway.

What types of inlay do you like to use and which are the most demanding?

GL: Materials per se? Hmmm, that’s an interesting question. They’re all different. I certainly use all the various shells. There are probably nine different kinds of shells I use. In the stone world there are probably fifteen or sixteen different kinds I use there. Perhaps those, surprisingly, are a little more challenging because some of them can be very brittle and easy to cut and all that, easy to engrave, but you’re gently clamping them into place and they’ll shatter or they’ll fracture and you have to really need to watch it. They’re all roughly equivalent to work with, some more of this quality and some less of that quality. But in general, I don’t find issues with the materials.

Besides the illustrative side of your work, there’s the dimension of liveliness brought forward by your use of colors and subtleness of hues that you choose. Have you studied the use of color and the golden triangle and other fundamentals?

GL: Or the color wheel that takes you through the seven primary colors and all that. I certainly know all that stuff and make use of it frequently. There’s lots of stuff I do by intuition. But certainly there are times when I’m quite conscious and I want to follow some rules and put certain colors adjacent to each other or make use of those because I’m making a point about art or the art world. I borrow certain guidelines like that and make them visible.

But you’re kind of touching on something that is important to me and yes the subtle gradation of color helps you get a degree of realism. It’s another aspect besides accurate engraving and things like that and what you get with shading and shadowing. All of those aspects are the exciting part for me because it just brings something to life!

But, in this medium it’s a bit like stained glass or the same effectin that there are hard edges to each piece. You don’t have the lead going through it. Each piece is isolated and it isn’t like you do water color. You can do wonderful blends of colors and subtle gradations as it moves from shade to shade. I’d love to be able to do that. And I puzzle over that and I try and get the effect by my choice of materials. For example, many different shell species will on occasion do gradations of color within the piece. And I’ll try and make use of that. And I’ll set aside those pieces when I have them and when I find them. And really covet them, so they’ll be just waiting there for the right moment to use the right thing.

This approach borders on pointillism or how electronic pixels combine to evoke a discernible image.

GL: Yeah, and you know you are right and that is actually something that I have been looking into. Of doing some inlay almost in a pointillist style so you have to stand back a ways to see the whole effect. So the overall effect will be that blend. And the same way they do it in carpeting where they do it tuft by tuft of different colors which each has there own edge. But you stand back a ways and everything flows.

It sounds similar to the Abraham Lincoln painting by Salvador Dali where you have to back away twenty feet before Lincoln’s image becomes evident.

GL: I can’t bring that to mind. I should know his stuff. Right, I do know what you mean. Well that kind of stuff is where my personal interests lie, but I’m also balancing that with the interests of my clients. You know my designs are my own, but still I want their input because they have to live with this guitar. So, I start with themes that are important to them and we discuss approaches for depicting and all of that.

Then it’s my design. But only when I’m confident I’m going to deliver something they’ll be happy with. It’s an interesting situation to be in because it isn’t just decoration. It is art. It’s not like you’ve walk into a gallery and you’re staring at a bunch of paintings and you say, ‘That one, I don’t know. That one, I don’t know. But, oh this one I just love!” They don’t get a chance to see it before they own it. They’re paying me for it so I really want to be confident I’ve understood that I know where they’re coming from as far as the theme.

And I want them to be confident and we’ve had many conversations. It’s a long process. And it’s very personal, but I do enjoy that aspect of it. And I also like the fact that it’s making a custom instrument that’s personalized in all the ways any builder would do, that has this additional dimension that’s very personal and another layer of creative process built in to it.

So you must be a pretty good listener.

GL: Definitely. I listen, I take notes. I write down the exact words people use to describe something so I have their adjectives in front of me when I’m reviewing where I’m going. And I have peoples’ cell phones and home numbers and everything so I can get them at a moment’s notice when I’m right in the middle of it. “Okay I’m working on this sketch and I can go two ways here…” And I want to find them when I want to find them. It’s very selfish! [Laughs]

Do you find you enjoy the collaboration?

GL: Yes, I do. And I’ve had many customers overseas in both directions and thereare a lot of e-mail these days. Some files just on a single guitar project can be almost half an inch thick. I mean e-mails that have gone back and forth where people start with some sort of wide philosophical viewpoints of things that moved them or are important to them in their lives.

And then we narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow and bring the focus down. As I like to say that some people like to start with a novel, but if I’m going to make this into a movie I need to find the short story narrative in the novel. I’ve only got two hours on the screen! It’s that kind of equivalent.

Have you ever decided to work strictly with a guitar in black, white and shades of gray?

GL: I have done that. It’s not that often that I get that request but I have stayed strictly to light and dark, if not specifically black and white, for effect. Sure.

Tell us about some of the guitars you’ve built and satisfied them not only for those who like the artistry of the guitars, but also for the instrument.

GL: Let’s start with the latter part of it. In terms of the music and the guitar, we discuss everything first. The inlay’s the last thing we talk about. It’s the one that’s purely subjective.

So, we get all the practical things out of the way that determine body size, scale length, and the kinds of sounds they we’re liking from other guitars. The things they didn’t like about previous instruments. The things they liked about other ones of mine they heard which led them to me. Here’s what I play, here’s how I play. All of those things come into the discussion determining “Which body size are we going to play with the scale length, materials?” “What woods are we going to use and why?”

Then we get to playability issues. That’s the time to bring up any ergonomic problems they’ve been having which will determine things like shape of the neck, radius of the fingerboards, scale length, action and other things we can do to ease left arm fingering problems. Like the things we can do to ease right arm plucking problems.

I build in arm rests on every guitar and sometimes the back bevel and the rib rests. And sometimes I’ll combine that with wedge bodies, like Linda Manzer’s wedge bodies, so you get the same air volume, but you feel like you’re playing a shallow body guitar.

So it’s a nice easy reach, but you’re not paying an acoustic price. I’ve done that a few times when there are issues, actually, at least a couple of times for female players. I just have to be blunt. They were large breasted. And what that meant was that there was even more of their body holding the guitar away from them. So the reach from their shoulder was even tougher than guys have.

And they were looking at problems starting from that strain on their shoulder. You know, ergonomically all those things about the guitar are discussed. Understood is that they will get an excellent sounding guitar. And they should expect that from any top builder.

Continued on page two »

---