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    To begin with, the wood is chosen for the top, the body and the neck. One corner of the custom shop building is stacked with piles and racks of Sitka spruce, figured maple and mahogany, as well as cedar and other species. From these will be chosen the wood for each guitar. The tops will be glued up into 2" thick blocks,while the backs will be either solid or glued together. On some models, there are specific gross weight tolerances which must be rigidly followed. After the wood selection, the back will be machined and joined to the top, or, if it is a carved-top guitar, the shape will be rough-cut and then placed in a pin router that will carve out the final shape according to a pattern mold which the router follows. This is one of the only steps which is fully automated, but even here, the heritage is unbroken, since this process has been machine-done for many years. In fact, some of the patterns are almost as old as the company!

The neck on a Gibson guitar may consist of up to three individual pieces, carefully selected, then laminated and finally cut to shape. Wing blocks are added to the headstock (the section of the neck to which the tuning pegs are attached)in order to provide the required width, both for the tuners and to allow for the trademark Gibson headstock design. Last but not least, the fingerboards are assembled, generally from solid rosewood or ebony. They in turn are radiused, surface-ground for precise flatness and shape, and then hand-fretted. Eventually, as the neck takes shape, the truss rod hole will be milled, the fingerboard mounted and the binding installed, almost exactly as it was done in the 1950s. What is truly fascinating, however, is not the steps in building a guitar, but to watch the actual work being performed. At Gibson, it is done by people who love their work and show a pride seldom seen in most workplaces.

While in the Nashville plant, I was shown the operations by Mike McGuire, Gibson Guitar Custom Divisions Director of Professional Services. He is a gregarious veteran of the guitar wars. A self-taught guitar builder, his license plate reads, succinctly, LUTHIER. He is a master spokesman for the products he represents. Mike is also a character of some renown in the guitar world. In the music business since 1963, he knows virtually everybody who is, or was, somebody. Back in the heady 1970s, Mike owned Valley Arts Guitar, a company which did repairs and built custom guitars. It later became Valley Arts Custom Guitars, and had built up quite a reputation when he sold the company to Korean music giant SAMIK Music in 1993. It was while working as a consultant for SAMIK that Mike was approached by Gibson to come to Nashville. And come he did, lock, stock and son Micky, who is a painter in the custom division. To watch Micky spray the famous cherry sunburst on a 59 flamed maple top Les Paul is like watching poetry in motion. It takes only a few minutes, but it is artistry nonetheless .

Once the wood selection and top carving is completed, the guitar, still in pieces, will follow a general construction sequence, although different models require different procedures and not all require all the same steps. With hollow bodies, the assembled sides are set in a form, and kerfingstrips of beveled and sectioned wood is placed around the inside for top and back support. As I watch, Phil Asevarth glues and clamps kerfing into a Super 400. Across from Phils bench, Chip Phillips is binding a Les Paul. Binding is the colored inlay made from many materials, including PVC, nitro-based plastics and cellulose, which usually surrounds a guitars edges, top, bottom, neck, and sometimes even the headstock and pickguard. It can be up to three different pieces, called triple binding, usually in two colors, and is placed in rabetted grooves and glued. Following this, it is wrapped with cloth tape to hold it in place. The process seems to take less time to do than to explain, and the perception is of watching a mummy being wrapped in gauze. The necks and bodies are then hung till the glue dries.

Everything in the custom shop seems to blend together, despite the large size of the building. Not far from binding, Butch Wallace cuts the rabbets for the binding process on a large shaper, while nearby, Gary Winsett shapes a headstock, using vernier calipers to check his progress. Elsewhere, Felix Wallace is busy placing binding inside the f-holes on a Wes Montgomery model top, prior to mating it to the rest of the body.

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