My First Guitar by Julia Crowe

Author:Julia Crowe [Julia Crowe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780285644076
Publisher: Souvenir Press
Published: 2018-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Bob Taylor

Bob Taylor is the cofounder and president of the California-based Taylor Guitar company.

I was ten years old when I received my first guitar, and it had no brand name that I recall. No artists had inspired me to play — it really had been the kids who lived on my street who had persuaded me to get a guitar because they all played one, too. I did not play any other instrument back then, though I can play a banjo and a ukulele now. My family saw my guitar playing as a kid’s hobby. It wasn’t regarded any differently from a kid who would like to play piano, like my sister did, or someone who would like to play football. They never saw me as being obsessed with it, not at that age! When I started building guitars they started taking notice that I was intimately obsessed with it.

I wanted to buy a guitar in high school that I could not afford, so I just made one, and this seemed like a normal approach for me. I was in auto shop and told my teacher that I wanted to get into wood shop class so I could build a guitar. He let me transfer classes in tenth grade, and I used the wood shop to build my guitars. I had already been building stuff in industrial arts class from seventh grade onward and had won state fairs in metalwork, so I knew I was good at making things.

I found a little book on how to make classical guitars, and though I did not make a classical guitar, I used some of these construction methods. I also looked at other guitars, dissected them in my mind and simply went at it and created a 12-string guitar. It had the body of a Yamaha guitar (traced from a friend’s Yamaha) and the peghead of a Japanese guitar that was actually a copy of a Gibson, though I had never seen a Gibson at that time to know this. I had never seen any good guitars at that time like a Martin, Gibson or Fender.

During my junior and senior years in high school I ended up making three acoustic guitars and a banjo. I spent a lot of time in wood shop, and had a teacher who left me on my own to do my thing. He did not know how to make a guitar, but he gave me the room to experiment and work on these projects. As a result, I started to learn how to do some inlay work. This was in the days when you could go snorkeling off the coast of San Diego and catch abalone for your dinner, so I would catch abalone and grind the shells down to do inlay work. The guitars I made were crude by today’s standards, but I still have one of them today.

I like guitar music and I’m not a great guitar player. When I graduated from high school in ’73,

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