Upstairs, the house in the dense Parker subdivision is familar: the airy, white kitchen; the “great room” with kids running around. This is the home of a mid-level manager at Verizon, you think. Maybe the owner of a couple of Subways. A chiropractor.
But then you descend into the basement.
Tools everywhere. Work benches. Bottles of glue. Wood — lots and lots of wood.
And people, wandering around in protective glasses and stiff aprons, their faces, their hair, their shirts and pants and shoes coated with sawdust.
This is not the home of an IT jockey.
It is the domain of , a luthier, which means he builds wood instruments, mostly guitars.
O’Brien is known around the world for the quality of his craftsmanship, but in the small world of lutherie, he is truly famous for his teaching, for the classes he holds and for the videos he sells online.
And now O’Brien is teaming up with another lutherie legend, , who started fixing broken guitars more than 35 years ago in Canada and built that into a thriving business in Denver. Dick even invented an instrument, the banjola, which is a banjo made from wood and shaped like a lute.
Dick’s school, called the , has maintained a fairly small presence for the past decade, sticking to two classes of six students a year. Dick is so busy building and fixing guitars for clients like two-time Grammy winning instrumentalist that finding time to teach has been a challenge. But with O’Brien beginning to teach classes at the school, Dick hopes to grow enrollment, and do more teaching himself.
Between O’Brien’s basement and Dick’s brick-walled, wood-floored shop on , the guys are turning Denver into a lutherie destination. In addition, also has a lutherie school, one O’Brien started nearly a decade ago before heading off on his own.
People fly to Denver from around the country to take classes with O’Brien. On a recent weekday, John Sharp, 57, a vascular surgeon from Iowa, was finishing a guitar he had spent nearly seven days, and about $3,000, to build.
He had “zero” woodworking skills before flying to Denver, said Sharp.
“I just wanted to learn more about the guitar,” he said in the basement, as his guitar waited for final applications of lacquer. A few other students fussed over their guitars-in-progress as Sharp waited. “So I came here.”
His story is common. Middle-aged person — often guys, but gals are students too — desires a fresh challenge, something tactile and absorbing and artistic. About half of O’Brien’s students are woodworkers who have never strummed a guitar; they just appreciate the puzzle of building a guitar. The other half are musicians who know nothing about woodworking.
“It’s such a different thing from sitting in front of a computer screen all day,” said O’Brien. “It’s like therapy for most of them, and they admit as much.”
Therapy or kicks, in the end they walk away with fancy guitars when they finish class.
The instruments often are no-going-back kind of propositions: Make a good one, and you’ll never buy a guitar from the rack again.
Denver tech worker Tracy Leveque, 46, has built several guitars, but he said the the last, which he built under Dick’s instruction, was especially fabulous. Still, he sometimes visits guitar shops, and goes straight to the lock-and-key rooms where guitars begin at $5,000, and gives them a whirl.
“And nothing compares,” he said. “I never found something I would buy.”
“There is a difference in sound,” he said. The notes that emerge boom, but the guitar has a “light touch,” he said. The sound is “woody.”
It’s not just middle-agers hunting for new hobbies who sign-up for lutherie classes. Twenty-somethings are common, too.
Dave Vanderweele, 22, was a bored undergraduate at when he met a luthier, began poking around on websites, and found a class taught by O’Brien at Red Rocks Community College. He moved home to Parker, took a class, and has built a few guitars.
For Vanderweele, the class didn’t launch a new hobby; it inspired him to build a new career as a luthier. During a recent afternoon in O’Brien’s basement, he cradled what O’Brien called a “home-run” guitar, an instrument where the craftsmanship became evident the moment Vanderweele began plucking on its strings.
No matter the student, the guitars all begin as stacks of lumber.
O’Brien and Dick provide the tools — some of them are a bit obscure and expensive — and the hands-on know-how. The students learn how to sharpen chisels so finely they can be used for shaving; the detail work with instruments is so exacting that wood is peeled away in paper-like layers. They turn blank slabs of wood into curved, elegant necks. They brace the shapely guitar fronts and backs, attach frets, hold things together with glue.
And then, after 50 or more hours of detailed toil, they attach strings and hope for the best.
“It’s a moment of anticipation but also a moment of panic,” said Tom Crump, a former structural engineer for who became bored with computer work, opened his own custom-furniture shop, and then turned to lutherie. He now works as Dick’s apprentice.
Both Dick and O’Brien say lutherie is addictive.
“It gets in your blood,” said O’Brien, who built his first guitar in 1997, after working in IT in Brazil, going to music school to study guitar, and building his own log cabin in Georgia. “Maybe we need 12-step programs. After I built my first one, I couldn’t stop. I was laying awake at night thinking about this stuff. I lost weight. I was like, what’s going on?”
When an IT gig dried up, he turned to general carpentry, then became serious about lutherie. He started the program at Red Rock Community College, and soon began videotaping different aspects of lutherie and selling the DVDs online and, now, through his website.
The teaching took off. He has students around the world; his website receives about 2,500 hits a day.
Dick has been at it for much longer, in different spaces — usually cramped — in Canada and Denver. For a year, though, Dick has mostly worked in , his South Broadway guitar store, shop and lutherie school. People file through the wood-filled space all day, lugging guitars and banjos and mandolines and ukeleles. They present them to Dick, hoping he will agree to sell them on consignment. They sit down on stools and play. They show Dick the busted necks, the dinged bodies, hoping he can bring them back to health.
Sometimes big stars in town — Lou Reed, Joe Walsh, the Indigo Girls — need quick work on their instruments. And they turn to Dick, who performs emergency surgery on their guitars.
Denny Brown, a retired Montana surgeon now living in Boulder, spent decades fixing people, and he thinks some of what drew him to surgery informs his passion for lutherie.
Only he’s not interested in guitar surgery as much as guitar conjuring.
Brown, who learned to build his first guitar a few years ago — he wanted to give it to his guitar-playing son as a present — has now made four, with more in the wings. He has written two tooks, to accompany O’Brien’s online classes. When his son stopped playing guitar, trading it for mountain biking, Brown took his son’s place with the guitar lessons.
Brown said his obsession with lutherie and guitars is “beyond certifiable.”
For Brown, each guitar presents new difficulties, and novel opportunities for improvement. His approach to lutherie is similar to the way he worked at surgery — keep building the same kind of guitar, over and over, until you gain a certain fluency in the process.
“It’s the continual practice of something that is never going to happen, which is perfection,” he said. “There will always be something more, where you could do better.”
And lutherie, too, presents an extra oomph, something more magical than sitting down in a just-built chair.
“The production of sound is the eternal mystery,” Brown said. With lutherie, everything influences the sound — the wood’s type, age and moisture content; the bracing that holds the body together; the fretting; the design; the lacquer. Even the glue.
“It is a mystery that has gone on for millenia and will go on for more millenia because there are so many variables,” he said. “It is difficult to control them all.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
