When talking with Nashville luthier Paul
McGill, you get the impression that he’s perfectly
content to talk about his inspirations,
the people he looks up to and who he is
inspired by.
He celebrates the work of his
peers, which is alternately surprising and
refreshing, considering that McGill has been
atop his craft for over 30 years, working
closely with phenomenal players like Earl
Klugh, Chet Atkins, Peter White, Marc
Antoine and Nato Lima. Paul has made a
quiet name for McGill Guitars in circles
where players look for instruments embracing
both a sense of American tradition and
unique character. He frequently finds himself
hustling to keep from getting behind on
orders, despite generally avoiding the spotlight
of the press and eschewing advertising.
I recently sat down with Paul for an interview
about the long road he’s been on;
before the tape rolled, he expressed little
desire to talk about his guitars – revolutionary
designs like the nylon-stringed Super
Ace or his gorgeously robust steel-stringed
MKS. Instead, he wished to spend our
time looking back on a career spent planing
tops in a Vermont hideaway, bending
sides in a Georgia kitchen, making ends
meet in Wisconsin, stringing up in his
Nashville workshop, and getting his story
down on paper.
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Let’s start right at the beginning –
where did the motivation to get into
this crazy business of building guitars
come from?
Well to be honest, it came about because I
became aware, through some friends, of
people who had gone to a guitar making
school somewhere. And for me, at that
young age, that was quite a revelation. I
loved to play music, but I didn’t really feel
like I was good enough or had the right
temperament to be an artist.
So you headed to the Earthworks
School of Luthiery in Vermont at age
18. What was the general atmosphere
like at that point?
That was back in a heady period when people
decided that you
could build guitars. If you
go back before about
1970, the idea of building
a guitar in this country, as
an individual, was not
really something that you
could even think about.
Back then if you told
someone you made a
guitar their jaws dropped
– now they tell you about
two others they know
who do that.
Why was that such a
jaw-dropper back
then?
Because there wasn’t a
lot of knowledge available,
and also because
there weren’t many
outlets where you
could buy the necessities
– the tools, the
equipment and so on.
Nowadays, guitar makers
use electric routers
for building at
home; before 1960, if
you didn’t have a shaper
table and a lot of expensive
equipment to do the
operations, you weren’t
gonna get it done. The
stuff we have today
didn’t even exist back
then. So when people
talk about building guitars
by hand, I think it’s relative
to the period of time
they were working in and
the economic realities of
that time. Many builders
today could not build guitars using nothing
but hand tools, like the old European
builders did.
Describe what the experience in
Vermont was like, being surrounded by
like-minded people and finally getting
to build guitars.
I worked for six weeks with Charles Fox.
Charles had been a schoolteacher in
Chicago, and he moved to Vermont with
this dream of setting up a guitar business.
He worked there as a schoolteacher for a
short amount of time and built this incredible,
octagon-shapped log house and a couple
of buildings called yurts. They were
supported by a cable that ran around the
top of the wall, all the way around the
building, but the walls all leaned out. The
roof was covered in some green foam
material, but originally the covering for the
corrugated roof was dirt.
It was kind of an interesting time – this was
1976, and we were coming right out of the
counterculture generation. There were eight
of us, and we all lived in those yurts. We
got up early every morning and went up to
the shop and listened to Charles lecture for
an hour, and then we sort of worked
through the guitars together each day, one
process at a time.
Charles was a very good teacher, and he
knew how to use hand tools and such.
Thinking back on that
experience, that was the most valuable
thing I got out of it. He really did teach us
how to work, and he taught what was
possible and what was not. Of course, a
lot of the building methods we were
using have long since been abandoned,
and a lot of the approaches we used
then, I don’t use today. But whenever I
pick up a hand plane and start planing a
top, I use those basics he taught us. It
was a good foundation.
After your six weeks in Vermont, did
you go back to Georgia and make it a
point to go into the guitar business?
I don’t know if you could call it a conscious
effort to go into a business endeavor – I
just wanted to build guitars. I had spent several
of my teenage years in Georgia, and
lived with some friends when I returned. I
actually worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant,
and as a cabinetmaker in a lumber mill
while trying to figure out how to build guitars
when I had time. Nonetheless, by the
time I left Athens, I had already made
something like eight guitars.
Classicals?
Actually I was building both classicals and
steel strings at that time. I figured out early
on that trying to make a living building classicals
was pretty much impossible. I really
didn’t get serious again about trying to build
classicals until 1984, and then I built quite a
few classicals. When I moved to Nashville
in ‘85 that was really all I was focused on.
What was the motivation to move to
Nashville?
Starvation [laughs]. I got a job offer down
here at Gruhn Guitars, and it was kind of a
lark. I called up and talked to George one
day, and when he found out I knew Robert
Ruck, he was very interested in me coming
down. I shipped them a guitar I had built
and then was invited to come work for a
week. At the end of the week I was asked
to sign on and I moved to Nashville.
When you started at Gruhn’s, you did a
lot of repair work. What was the biggest
adjustment you had to make
there?
You get exposed to everything in a place
like that. My biggest struggle was trying to
figure out what was appropriate to do on
each job – how much time you would
spend on this instrument, as opposed to
another one. You could go way overboard
and waste a lot of time on something that
didn’t have a lot of return. Gruhn’s was a
commission environment, and so it was
critical to not waste your time.
You’ve mentioned in previous interviews
that Gruhn’s was a professionally
competitive environment. Did that push
you to improve your work?
It was the only time in my life where everyday
I was around other people with abilities
that were parallel to my own. The foreman
of the shop was Kim Walker, and the person
who I came in to replace was Matthew
Kline – Matthew now does most of the
CNC operations here at the Gibson factory
in Nashville. Kim and I became good friends
during those years, but it was kind of brutal
because we did try to outdo each other, no
question about it. Years of experience were
passed on in that shop and it was a special
thing to have been a part of.
What was the most over-the-top operation
you performed there?
Well, George had a 1927 00-28 that had herringbone
around the top and in the rosette
and there was just a big, gaping hole right
where the bridge sat. There was no area to
glue a bridge on. And George said, “Fix it.
Make it go away.” Well, that guitar sat
around and sat around and no one would
touch it.
So one day, I pulled it out and was laughing
at what George wanted us to do, which was
patch something right in the middle of the
top – to keep it original. So I went and visited
him, and said, “This is ridiculous, we’re
not going to fix this top. It is beyond reason;
why don’t
we just replace the
entire top?” He never wanted anyone
to replace a soundboard,
because he wanted all of the
binding and rosette to stay original. So I said,
“Look, I’ll put the rosette in the new top, and
I’ll drop the top inside the original bindings,
and I’ll make it look like it never happened.”
He finally relented, and I developed a technique
for routing in a top to fit inside the
binding channels. You basically just attach a
top to the soundboard – you can use carpet
tape – center it up, and then use a routing
tool where you calibrate the width of the
bindings. You route the top outline out so that
when you put in the new top it is as close as
you can fit it to the original herringbone. Next,
you take a routing tool, go around and ever
so carefully trim the wood away from the
black line. Then you brace the top and it just
slides right back into the guitar. You might
have to do a little fitting, but at the end of the
day, that guitar had its original binding work
and rosette in it. I used a 35 year old German
top, did a shellac finish over it and then slightly
distressed it, so it looked original.
How has that affected your own work
as a luthier, having worked so closely in
those traditional settings, where
George doesn’t want you to replace
anything?
Not really very much, I would say. The thing I
would take away from it all, which is most
relevant to building my own guitars, is to look
at the longevity of the instrument and to see
just what long-term stress will do to a guitar.
The impact of the
various designs is very telling
and it was a good yardstick for understanding
the history of American guitar making.
Your guitars have been in some famous
hands – Earl Klugh used one of your
guitars on Solo Guitar, a seminal guitar
album. I’m sure a lot of luthiers would
jump at a chance like that. How did that
come about?
In my experience, the best way to work
with well-known guitar players is to not try
to work with well-known guitar players. I
did not know Earl Klugh when he bought
that guitar or made that record. Likewise, I
didn’t know who Muriel Anderson was
when she bought one of my guitars – she
bought it from someone else in 1986, and it
was a guitar I had made in 1983.
You know, the guitars really just go out and
if they’re good, they’ll find their way. If
they’re not good, they won’t. It’s just that
simple.
But what’s it like getting to hear the
music made through something you
put together with your hands? That’s
got to be difficult to describe.
I feel a little humbled when someone who
is as skilled as one of these great players
would choose what I make to work with.
And that’s something that’s important to
distinguish – I’ve never been a guitar maker
who goes out there just trying to get ahead
by giving away guitars.
The few occasions that I’ve
attempted to do something like that, I’ve
regretted. It never really works out.
The only way it ever works out is if there is
a true artistic connection between a player
and a guitar. You’re not going to take Willie
Nelson’s old Martin away from him. And
when that guitar was made, whenever it
was made, it wasn’t made for Willie Nelson.
Nobody was thinking, “This guitar is going
to be one of the most famous Martins ever
made.” And I think some of that happened
with me, in a fortunate way, early in my
career. But it was somewhat frustrating
because you didn’t see the benefits of it
right away; there wasn’t success just
because so-and-so played your guitar.
Which is another thing to be aware of – a
lot of people’s approach to the business
today is to chase the players. I don’t know
if that’s a good thing for anybody, to be
entering into those kinds of relationships. I
think it’s much better if it comes about in a
natural way and if people develop a true
affinity for their instrument.
And at that point, the artist’s expression
will be truer.
Absolutely – at that point, it becomes real.
You can build something really good but it’s
not necessarily going to be good for everybody.
You can say, “Okay, I’m going to take
the bold step and make a deal with some
artist, and I’m going to give them a guitar in
exchange for their endorsement.” But I’ve
seen that happen a lot of
times where that process yields an
unhappy artist and an over-extended guitar
maker. So the artist feels obligated, and the
guitar maker doesn’t quite understand why
what he built isn’t good enough. I just
wouldn’t want to be promoting myself in
that way, because to me, it’s not a real honest
interaction.
Could you talk about your connection
with Chet Atkins?
It mostly happened because we both lived
in Nashville, and because there wasn’t a lot
creatively that went on around here that
Chet didn’t know about. Around the time I
arrived here in ‘85, a mutal friend introduced
me to him and it was a very cursory introduction.
I doubt he would have even
remembered it.
But one day I was working at Gruhn’s, and I
got a call to come down to the showroom.
So, I went downstairs and Chet was there
with a later model Martin D-41 Tony Rice
had given him. He pulled it out of the case
and said, “I was wondering if you could pull
a little bit more sound out of this for me.” I
looked it over – and I was a little bit intimidated,
obviously – and I said, “Well, sure,
we can loosen it up a bit for you.” I was
kind of shocked and amazed that the guitar
was setup with nickel-wound strings and
the action was real low – so low I couldn’t
have played it. So I opened it up some, and
sent it back to him.
Later on, in 1990, I wanted to shoot a video,
and I asked Muriel to perform on it, a few
months after she won Winfield [the National
Fingerpicking Championship].
She and John Knowles did this video for
me, and after the shoot she was going to
go over to Chet’s office, and invited me
along. So I went over and when I was introduced
to him I was standing across the
room from him; when he heard my name he
came at me like some sort of very happy
pet, like he was very enthusiastic. It was surreal.
He just talked my ear off for 15 minutes,
wanting to know everything I knew about
guitar making.
I learned later in life from John Knowles
that Chet tried to overcome people’s reactions
to him by putting them on a pedestal
and treating them like that.
Did you work with Chet after that?
Well, I became very friendly with Chet as
years went by. When I started building resonator
guitars for Earl Klugh in 1992, I
called down to Chet’s office, told him what
I was doing and asked if he could loan me
a Del Vecchio to look at. And he said,
“Sure, stop by the office tomorrow and I’ll
have one here for you.” So I went down
and picked up one of his Del Vecchios,
and took it to my shop to examine it. I
told Earl what I had, and he said, “Wait,
that’s not the guitar that I want you to
build for me. He’s got a little
one with a short scale length. I’ve got
one here that’s not very good but I’ll send
it to you.” And he sent me this modernera
Del Vecchio, and I sort of started
building resonators from that.
After I made it, Earl asked me to build a
bunch of them and he gave one of them to
Chet. From that point I made Chet two more,
and sometimes he would come by the shop
while I was working and just hang around,
tell stories and jokes. He was very amusing.
Our relationship was so unassuming, really.
One day he was hanging around the shop
and somehow the subject of Hank Williams
came up. And I, in a very nonchalant way,
because I thought he might know the
answer to the question, said something like,
“Chet, who played guitar for Hank
Williams?” And he whipped around and
said, “Well, I did!” And I honestly didn’t
know that! It had gotten to the point where
it was like hanging out with your friend, and
that was a bit of a reality check.
The thing about Chet was that he never forgot
what it was like to be struggling. He had
an uncanny way of extending his hand at a
moment when he knew people where having
a hard time. Doyle Dikes told a story
once where Chet called him over and gave
him a guitar when his musical career was
down. Tommy Emanuel talks
about getting letters from Chet when he
was a child in Australia, with tapes going
back and forth.
He was a very special guy, and the experience
of being in the Ryman Auditorium
when his casket was walked out of there –
it was a feeling of energy collapsing on the
isle as if the whole room just wanted to go
out that door with him.
You make a wide range of guitars – it
seems like a lot of luthiers try to pick
one design and hone it. Your versatility
is impressive, and I’m wondering where
it comes from.
Well, one of the blessings and curses of my
career is that I started building guitars in a
time when there wasn’t the big handmade
marketplace that’s developed in the last 15
years. The result of that was I couldn’t rely
on just one thing; as much as I wanted to
build classical guitars, I was never going to
compete with Robert Ruck or José Uribe,
because the market was so small and
those guys were so well established by the
end of the ‘70s. Classical players would look
at their guitars before they’d look anywhere
else, so if I wanted to build classicals I’d
have to sacrifice in order to be good at it.
Earl Klugh gave me a real gift – he helped me
quite a bit 15 to 20 years ago. There were a lot
of tough times
when he would buy a guitar
from me just to keep me going. He told me
one day, “I want you to build one of those Del
Vecchio guitars,” and I was very negative
about it, because I was the artiste building
classical guitars, right? The guy with the big
flaming ego.
But he kept after me for months about doing
it and I couldn’t tell him no. So in August of
1992 I decided to take the whole month and
build this Del Vecchio-style guitar. There are
pictures of me stringing it up and somehow I
felt that my career was over, because I had
built this thing that would ruin my respectability
amongst the snobs that buy classical guitars.
I probably actually even gave a damn
about that back then, which was a big mistake.
After I finished it, I was surprised by how
many players of all different types wanted
to see it. I had three or four people waiting
outside my shop for me to string it up that
day. And Earl immediately asked me to build
more of them. I was so frustrated trying to
make a living from something that was traditional,
and then I saw all this enthusiasm
for something that was non-traditional, and I
said to myself, “What am I seeing in this picture
here?” All of these people that I’ve
known for a long time, that have such conservative
tastes in instruments, were actually
responding to this thing in a positive
way. And that’s when I realized that I don’t
have to be like everybody else to be successful.
I kind of changed gears, into a different
way of thinking about things after that.
And you’ve been doing your own thing
since?
You know, it’s always been up and down. I
think if you’re established and doing what’s
popular, it’s easier in some ways. But if you’re
building instruments that have their own aesthetic,
then you have to get people to understand
what it is, and that takes a little more
time – you have to be patient. I built my first
Super Ace guitar in 1998, and by the spring
of ‘99 Peter White [award-winning jazz artist]
was touring on it. In fact, he spent the first
few years touring on one of the first three
that I ever made – one that I just called a
“prototype.” Once he had it and saw what it
did, he didn’t want to play anything else.
So, I knew that I had something that really
appealed to the people who needed it,
because someone like Peter could play anything,
but this one seemed to fill the bill the
best. I feel like it takes three or four years
before the buying
public catches up with a reality like that.
Could you explain the modern structural
system you developed and use in all of your
guitars?
I am very taken with what is going on
in Australian luthiery. I really don’t feel like
building guitars with tops that are paperthin
and with all this graphite and balsa
wood in them is for me. They are some of
the loudest guitars ever made, but I would
never want to place a warranty on one. I
started looking at how to take some of that
conceptual knowledge in what they do and
translate it into my own instruments. What
it’s really all about, in my mind, is how to
release more of the string’s energy into
the soundboard, and part of that is to fully
reinforce the structure to eliminate ambient
modulus, which may mute or deaden
frequencies you need. I started from that
concept and built something that was more
original to me.
I can tell you this: before I started doing
it, it was a lot harder to sell instruments. It
just adds a different motor to the sound of
a guitar. It evens out things that might be
dead or too powerful and it provides solidity
in the low-end. I feel like the string
energy factor just adds a certain amount of
output.
And it’s not like this is the loudest guitar in
the world – that’s what they are doing in
Australia, trying to build the loudest guitars
the world’s ever heard. If you want to push
the parameters that far, well, okay – push
your strength to weight ratio as far as you
can get it. But I think if we can add some
power to a traditional sound, a majority of
players would be happy to have an instrument
that’s responsive and has more of a
musical tradition to it than some of these
newer designs. Mind you, I’m not putting
those guitars down, because I think
they’re conceptually brilliant, but I wanted to
approach it a different way.
Do you have thoughts about your legacy
in the industry?
I started building guitars in the mid ‘70s,
and it was right at the downward slope
of the guitar making renaissance in this
country coming out of the late ‘60s. The
reason that I was even aware of it was
because I used to go to Colorado in the
summertime – I was in Boulder – and there
were two guitar makers around that area.
There was someone that my sister knew
who had a guitar made by Max Krimmel,
and they were very nice guitars. There was
another builder out there whose name was
Monty Novotny, who worked in Longmont,
Colorado. And the reason why I bring this
stuff up is because after 30 years – do you
know who these people are?
I really don’t.
Exactly. If you were to read their resumes –
Monty Novotny built guitars for John Denver
and a host of other really big name artists
in those years. Max Krimmel built guitars for
Stephen Stills and Jerry Jeff Walker, among
others. It’s kind of like… history is fleeting.
Some things seem important at one point of
time or another. And after 30 years of doing
this I just wonder, have I done enough to
leave something behind that people will recognize,
that will be memorable?
To me, it’s not just about whether you’ve
made guitars for somebody that everyone
knows. If you look back at the early 20th
century, at what we had for instruments, you
had the whole Gibson mandolin family thing,
which was really created so you could have a
new musical aesthetic. In the ‘20s you had an
expansion – the L5 and the Lloyd Loar period
– which is favored by so many traditional
musicians today. In the late ‘20s, you have
Martin’s introduction of larger-bodied steel
string acoustic guitars and in the early ‘30s
they took over with that concept. Everybody
remembers these names and these people
– they did something that was relevant, like
Dobro, National, Martin and Fender. Every
period of time we have these milestones,
and people remember what they are. I guess
I hope some of what I do may someday be
viewed as credible in that way.
Do you view this as your art? Your
expression?
You know, I do, and I struggle with the
whole concept of how do you make more
of them, because I’m so rooted in the
artistic aspect of it. It’s hard for me to think,
“Well, I’m just going to trash this approach
because I can do something else more
efficiently.” I’m currently trying to get some
stuff that I’m doing oriented for CNC parts
manufacturing, because [the Super Ace] is
a fairly complex guitar to make otherwise.
So you struggle at the crossroads of
commerce and artistic expression?
Yeah, I do, because I think I’m a lot more
content when I’m just doing something
new and winging it. It’s like you do something
once and then you’ve got to reproduce
it. Sometimes, the reproduction part
isn’t as fun as the anything-goes side in the
beginning; that feeling of creating something,
using your senses and knowledge,
that will appeal to somebody.
So looking back, how’s the ride been
for you?
You know, I’ve had a lot of opportunities
to interact with a lot people that I never
thought I’d have known in
my life. PBS was having a fundraiser recently
and they were replaying the Glen Campbell
Good Time Hour from the late ‘60s, early
‘70s, and there was Glen Campbell and
John Hartford singing “Gentle on my Mind.”
When I was that age, I would never have
thought that I would know John Hartford,
that he would come over to my house for a
party and that we would sit around sharing
stories about mutual acquaintances. I never
thought I would have known Chet or Earl, or
so many remarkable people.
What’s left to do?
Really, I think… how do you really know
what’s going to happen? I guess make as
much money as I can [laughs]. I figure if I
build an extra guitar every other month for
the rest of my working life, I can go on selling
guitars until I die.
McGill Guitars
mcgillguitars.com