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What's your job: Linda Manzer, guitar maker for the stars

Sometimes Linda Manzer finds emails from famous people in her spam folder.

Like the time Gary Larson, creator of the bizarre Far Side comic and apparently a part-time acoustic noodler, sent the Canadian luthier a message asking her to craft a guitar for him.

“I could easily have missed it,” says Manzer, adding that Larson was a blast to work with.

But the cartoonist is a bit of an outlier on the luthier’s list of clientele, which includes virtuoso players like Carlos Santana and Pat Metheny and folkies Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot among others.

From the right angle, the 62-year-old looks like she could be Joni Mitchell’s sister or at the very least right at home in the folk movement of the late sixties. And she was a folkie, for a time, before she found her way to the craft that would earn her legendary recognition as one of the country’s best luthiers – shaping and building acoustic guitars for collectors and prolific musicians alike.

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But a Manzer guitar doesn’t come cheap. At $20,000 to $30,000 on the low-end, the luthier only produces a handful a year.

“Each guitar is different – I’m not organized in such a way that I’m a machine cranking them out,” she says. “If I’ve got one on the go and I want to stop it for any reason or if there’s something else I’m connecting with I’ll go do that, I make about ten guitars a year now.”

Linda Manzer
Linda Manzer

We chatted with Manzer about her busted hands, the schizophrenic stringed instrument she built for Metheny and Canada’s luthier legacy.

I heard your big luthier epiphany came after watching Joni Mitchell playing one of those weird Appalachian dulcimer stringed instruments at a show in Toronto.

Yeah, I saw her playing a dulcimer at the Mariposa folk festival in the mid-60s and I was in high school and after the concert I went to buy one. I couldn’t afford it but there was a kit for half the price that the fella who was at the store talked me into buying it.

Have you talked to the shop owner since?

No it was long time ago. I was probably 16 or 17 years old.

It'd be interesting to go back and chat with him, be like “hey look what I do now.”

I never thought about that actually, I probably should get in touch with him and say thank you for talking me into it because it changed my life.

I’m assuming you ended up building it?

Yep I brought it home and assembled it – it was half way there so I didn’t need any tools. I got to see what it was like make something and string it up. That moment is pretty magical when the wood and it all comes together like that. It still is.

What’s the process like?

I might work on a couple at a time. My schedule is quite erratic compared to some people. First of all you have to have the design. Standard guitars I’ve already designed have the molds already so I bend the sides into the guitar shape. I’ll glue the back and top on and then make a neck, spray it and polish it and then assemble the neck to the body. Then I put on the frets and the bridge and string it up.

That’s an insanely simplified version and I’ve missed about 100 steps. If it’s a special design guitar then there’s a lot more interaction with the client before I start. I’ve made lots of instruments with more than six strings. If it's really weird then I’ll send them a life sized 2D replica made in cardboard so they can get a sense of how it’s going to feel for them. 

I would have loved to see Pat Metheny’s face when you sent him the cardboard cut out of that Pikasso guitar you made for him with the 42 strings. It's almost schizophrenic, there’s so many different elements going on. I play several different stringed instruments and still find it perplexing.

Well in that case it was really simple. He just asked me for a guitar with as many strings as possible and it all evolved from that statement.

It's just something else. Pikasso is a proper name for it, it really is.

Somebody wrote that I designed it inspired by Picasso. Which isn't true at all. I made the instrument to be functional but after it was finished people kept saying that it looked like a Pikasso painting. I changed the spelling because I didn’t want to get sued.

Yeah you wouldn't want the Picasso estate coming after you.

Interestingly enough Pat Metheny's lawyer is actually the Picasso family lawyer. So apparently I’m covered there.

That’s convenient. I know your guitars sell for $20,000 to $30,000 on the low end but what would a high end one cost?

I’m not really too interested in making another Pikasso guitar but if I was to make one of those, I would charge over $100,000 for it.

And I’m sure you’re clients would pay, you boast a pretty renowned clientele, what’s it like working with people like Paul Simon and Bruce Cockburn?

Each client is fussy about different things. Some people don’t care what it looks like; others want to be on the artistic forefront in design of guitars. Some are just collectors. I’ve met them all but the two clients I’ve worked with the most are Pat Metheny and Bruce Cockburn. Those two are really consistent people who I consider good friends. I’ve really learned a lot about designing guitars and building guitars from them.

What about when you first play them? I’d imagine it would be heartbreaking if it sounds awful the first time you test it out.

Actually I don’t look at it that way. Guitars change, they grow. I find that if I make a guitar that isn’t happening at the beginning of its life doesn’t mean it’s not going to do something eventually. A lot of guitars take time to open up. I’ve noticed nowadays a lot of guitar makers will build guitars that sound great as soon as you put strings on them but sometimes they don’t develop or grow because they’re built thin so the wood is already maxing out its potential.

When I started as an apprentice I was told guitars needed to be played and broken in, to get rid of that sound.

It must be nerve-wracking if the doesn’t sound good when you’re handing it over.

It is. You never know for sure what it’s really going to sound like. You have an educated guess but there’s still a lot of mystery in it. Some just have a little more life in them – I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out exactly why.

Tell me about the process. How long does it take?

It varies but start to finish about three months. I would say for a flat top about 100 hours, for an arch top shape about 300 hours.

300 hours of splinters, I bet. How are your hands after forty plus years of this?

My hands are the main tool I use, it’s my first contact with all the stuff so I have to be fairly pain resistant. I’m constantly cutting myself. I have quite a few pairs of tweezers and I’ve had to cut quite deep to get splinters out.

So you're not squeamish then?

Oh totally (laughs) I don’t like seeing blood but it’s part of my job. If you’re working with sharp tools you’re going to cut yourself. It's physically very hard to do it. People think you’re just chipping away but you’re slogging large pieces of lumber onto a table with the sawdust and all that – it can be dramatic. You see peaceful people at tradeshows and guitar shows standing behind their guitars but there’s a little warrior in each of them.

It's weird to think of the violence that goes into the process to create something that sounds so pretty.

There is that vibe to it but you also have to be really quiet, tapping the wood, checking sounds – there's the full spectrum.

You were an apprentice of legendary Canadian luthier Jean Larivée in the seventies right and later Jimmy D'Aquisto in New York right?. Canada seems to have a bit of a legacy when it comes to guitar building, what’s up with that?

I think there are good builders everywhere but I would say Ontario and Quebec’s success has a lot to do with apprentices of Larivée. He was the father of guitar making in Canada and out of his shop has come people like Grit Laskin, Tony Duggan-Smith, George Gray, David Wren, Sergei de Jonge and we all know each other and have been working together and supporting each other for years.

For me, the whole thing started with an old fashioned internship. I had to sweep the floor and go for coffees and work for no money too. My energy and keenness is what got me that first apprenticeship and job.