Gerald Sheppard temporally installs the neck on the 12 string dreadnought guitar.
(Lee Talbert / Johnson City Press)
Engineer. Craftsman. Musician. Making guitars takes a world of talent
By Doug JanzPress Tempo Writer
djanz@johnsoncitypress.com
Making a great guitar takes healthy doses of patience, analysis, musical knowledge and woodcrafting skills — someone with a nose for engineering, an ear for music and the touch of a master craftsman.
Gerald Sheppard is a Kingsport luthier and musician who brings these qualities together. A former quality control engineer at Eastman Chemical Company, he brings an organized, mathematical mindset to the instrument-building process. Since he retired from Eastman in 1993, he has built a reputation as one of the country’s finer guitar makers, selling 10 or 12 custom acoustic guitars a year for prices ranging upwards of $20,000.
His instruments are made in his basement shop and are created to fit the specific needs of each customer. Plenty of factors go into every guitar’s construction: Will the customer play the guitar on the couch at home, or set after set on stage? Are they older? Do they have arthritis, back problems, stomach problems or ergonomic issues?
People also get to choose the kinds of exotic woods used to make the instrument and can order various elegant embellishments that raise the aesthetic appeal. A finished Sheppard guitar is a sight to behold, often with fine inlaid pearl offsetting the glossy shine of deep, striking wood grain.
But the sound is what matters most to Sheppard.
“Good players can hear and feel the difference,” he said. “There’s a science of resonance, of how you want the resonance to be projected.”
“Serious guitars for serious players” is what he calls them. “I have a set of standards and a process, and the guitar has to first meet my standards before it even meets the customer’s standards. All mine are designed for tone. I don’t spend any more time on my most high-end guitar than I do on my least expensive one.”
Sheppard has been repairing, refinishing and building guitars for 25 years, and doing them for a living for 17 years. Since 2003 he has been staff instrument builder/luthier for Guitar Week at the renowned Swannanoa Gathering near Asheville, N.C., where guitarists in attendance can see his work in progress, learn about guitar woods and learn how to match their playing style to a personal guitar design.
He has written or been featured in articles in a variety of magazines, both regionally and nationally, including Guitarmaker, Acoustic Guitar Magazine and Woodcraft Magazine. He has become friends with many of the world’s finest acoustic fingerpickers, including Al Petteway and Muriel Anderson, and they sing the praises of his guitars.
Sheppard became a guitar player in his teens, enjoying the music of Chet Atkins and The Beatles, and spent time playing in bands, but before long he discovered he had a passion for playing solo acoustic guitar using the fingerpicking style, which combines melodies with harmonies and solos. It’s a different sound and style than rock, bluegrass and other kinds of guitar playing, incorporating all the song elements into one instrument.
Sheppard is an accomplished player, performing at local open mic nights in Kingsport on a regular basis and releasing a CD, “In The Mornin’,” released in 2009 and described as simply “a guitarmaker’s offering to the landscape of solo fingerstyle guitar.”
But, he admits, it was quite an education to start building guitars.
“I played guitar 25 or so years, and there were a lot of things I never knew about guitars until I started making them,” he said.
He will work patiently, step by step, on each project, often spending 12 hours a day in the shop and doing several projects simultaneously. It’s a world apart from the structure of a company like Eastman, but Sheppard said he enjoys the life.
It is definitely a business, though, and he’s taken on each aspect of the profession with the same analytical approach. He markets himself via the Web and at conferences and workshops, networking with musicians and other builders, and does his own Web design and studio-quality photography as well as videos of himself playing his guitars.
Sheppard’s quality-control skills are put to use determining the most efficient way to make his instruments. He has fine-tuned the process, setting up his tools and equipment in the most streamlined way — from storing the wood parts to cutting fine holes, grooves and bevels, from bending the wood into the right shape to spraying finish to inlaying pearl.
His guitars are all wood, with the only plastic being the thin, clear pick guard barely visible on the face of the instrument. He orders rosewood, blackwood and walnut from places like Brazil, Africa and Malaysia, opting to get almost all the wood for his guitar bodies, except for the top, or soundboard, from outside North America. The type of wood helps determine the tone of the guitar.
The entire process requires precision and Sheppard’s perfectionism takes over. He can ill afford mistakes when using Brazilian rosewood, which costs from $4,000-$8,000 for what he uses in one guitar.
He prefers making guitars with a cutaway feature that allows the player to access high notes better. A hole, or sound port, on the side allows more air flow and a little more volume. Another of his favorite features is the beveled edge of the guitar body that presses up against the player’s chest, making it more comfortable to play.
For visual effect, Sheppard enjoys using book-matched wood grain, where the wood is split, laid flat and side-by-side and then glued together so the same grain matches up on each piece, and when done right, there’s no discernible groove connecting them. It creates a striking design.
His shop is kept at 68 degrees with 35-percent humidity, good mid-range conditions for guitars that can be shipped to places like the dry climate of Arizona or the thick, wet heat of Hong Kong. That way the adjustment isn’t too dramatic for the wood and it won’t split or swell once it arrives at its new home.
Sheppard also loves pushing his knowledge and trying new things. No two guitars are made exactly the same way.
“The fun runs out of it if it’s all the same,” he said. “There’s no more romance in it.”
One of his favorite things about the business is dealing with his customers. For them, deciding to buy a high-end, customized guitar is a big moment, equal parts excitement and nervousness about committing so much money up front for something they can’t immediately take home with them.
Sheppard said he tries to help them feel relaxed from the outset and make it a good experience from start to finish, from the time they first talk to him until the day they receive their guitar, rather than taking a custom order and then not communicating with the customer until the job is finished.
“Why not give somebody a great memory,” he said. “So I send him a detailed description of what I may do to make his guitar, and later I take all the pieces of wood I can use and take a photo and e-mail it to him and let him pick out the wood he wants.
“Maybe later I’ll contact him about neck widths or something like that, and continue to make it a collaborative effort. And he’ll be able to tell all his friends about what he’s doing along the way. The anticipation builds, and when he finally gets that guitar, it’s a result of his efforts, too.”
Sheppard sees his role as being more “a consultant than a salesman,” helping each customer find the solution for what they need and can afford. And with each job, it’s one more carefully made, beautiful guitar brought into the world.
“It’s nice to create something, to build something and breathe life into it,” he said.
For more, visit www.sheppardguitars.com.
Doug Janz is a Tempo writer for the Johnson City Press. Reach him at djanz@johnsoncitypress.com.