Smokehouse Guitars

• Resonator
• Curly Cherry Neck
• Padauk fingerboard
• Padauk reso cover
• 610 mm scale

Very rarely do I see something that shakes me like this.  Take a few minutes and stop whatever bullshit you’re doing right now.

This is a video about a monstrous, child murdering, raping son of a bitch who has victimized tens of thousands of children.  This is a video about how we can stop him.

I’ve been pretty quiet over the last couple of months.  Many messages have come my way asking if I’m still out there – if I’m still doing my thing.  To answer all that, yeah, I’m here but I’m getting burnt out.

I just checked my e-mail last night for the first time since December.  There were over 2,000 messages to read through, 97% of which I’d estimate was spam.  Facebook spam, CBN spam, Nigerian Prince spam, you name it.  Out of the whole mess, maybe 4 or 5 messages that actually required my reply.  This just illustrates what I’ve been feeling lately.  I’m doing a lot more running around in circles than what it is I love to do.  I’m spending more time being worried about dates, concerned about who is owed what guitar, getting status pictures posted, and answering every little question e-mail that comes my way.  There’s just too much stress right now.

Let me stop for a minute and talk about my grown up job – the one I do in order to pay the bills.  I’m what could be considered a moderate to high level engineer at Panasonic Avionics.  I’m a lead engineer on a major product at this company that involves satellite communications and passenger connectivity.  I’m not going to spend a great deal of time on the particulars of my job but I can offer this: It’s my job to make the system work.  I get all these little pieces and parts from other folks at the company and then I slap it all together and figure out how to make it pass inspection and fly.  I have a highly skilled team that works with me to make this happen but even so, it is not unusual for me to find myself working on hot items for over 24 hours straight and at times I can easily clock 90+ hour work weeks.  This is time spent in a lab and also on test aircraft (when it’s called for) and I’m a guy who is terrified to fly!  I don’t complain that the job is hard because I realize I’m lucky to have it.  I’m damned lucky to have so much work that it’s coming out of my eyeballs.  The alternative is pretty nasty and there are a lot of people who don’t have my skill set or abilities who are living through that right now and I’m very aware of that.

On top of keeping all that going, I also have this guitar thing that I do on the side, which I started doing initially for the love of it.  The original plan was to just make one or two and maybe speak with some other folks about it and trade some ideas.  My problem is that I’m not the type of guy that can just do anything casually.  People joke all the time about being bitten by the CBG bug (their new obsession) but you have to understand: for me, it’s really like that.  I can remember when every waking moment was consumed with thoughts of guitar making.  Every free moment I had was spent in a shop that was rapidly being built up and outfitted with new tools and equipment.  I did everything I could to learn as fast as I could, to improve as much as I could.  I would look at the work of others and take it as inspiration – but not a way that was necessarily healthy or correct.  I wouldn’t look at a guitar and think, “Man, I’d like to build something like that at some point.”  My first thought was always, “I’m going to be better at this than that guy.  His stuff looks cool, but it’s going to look like tinker toys compared to what I’m about to do.”  Of course I kept these thoughts to myself because they sound childish and rather douchey when spoken aloud.  Still, if I’m being honest, this is what I thought.

Soon (much sooner that I could have anticipated) I started getting some attention from some pretty impressive sources.  My abilities and notoriety grew as did the price I could command and the equipment and supplies I could afford to buy.  This did nothing to help the situation, obviously.  I started cranking faster and faster.  I would take any client that came my way no matter what my work load was and take on various other guitar-related obligations besides.  At one point, I was busting out one complete guitar per month, holding myself to a ridiculous schedule because I thought that no one would be willing to wait longer than that.  This became too much too soon eventually and I had to give myself a little latitude there.  Anyone who has ordered from me recently knows that part of my new terms and conditions is that I don’t do deadlines.

So more and more people were coming to me for a very niche kind of instrument (even more niche than a typical CBG).  Most people think CBG and consider the old school “primal” aspects of the instrument.  I (and a few others as well) have taken the instrument and elevated it to a quality where it will easily stand up against any of the respected big name guitar manufacturers in the world.  This isn’t ego talking as I don’t think I was the only guy to take the CBG in this direction.  I can think of a few friends right off the bat who have done similar things in their work (my buddies Juju and Bill Jehle come immediately to mind).  But I can say that I was certainly a part of it.  And I can’t say how gratifying it has been to see more and more people take on more advanced techniques from traditional luthierie and adapt them into what they do, especially after having written a book on the subject.

So, given all that, you might be wondering what my problem is.  Well, bluntly put, I’m bored.  I seem to have hit a plateau in the last year or so where all my new clients have been wanting me to repeat myself.  Instead of asking for instruments that force me out of my comfort zone or stretch the limits of my abilities, they’ve mostly been pointing at existing guitars that I’ve made in the past and saying, “I’d like one of those but maybe with a different box.”  Even customers who have the most exacting of tastes (the ones I enjoy the most, in other words) still tend to just look at some existing models and change up the pickup configuration a bit or maybe the wood type, if anything.  I don’t hold this against any of them.  What I figure is that my skills have really just reached a parity with the desires of the general guitar playing public.  If I actually wanted to make a solvent business out of this, this is probably where I’d look at expanding and automating parts of the work flow.  No thanks.

My problem is that I’m not really having fun if it’s not hard and this hasn’t been hard for a while now.  So let’s imagine that I have all these orders to fill without the fire or passion to see them through.  In other words, this has gone from being an enjoyable diversion to a job.  Even worse, it’s a job that doesn’t pay well.  Yech!!!  Add to that when people send me irate e-mails because I haven’t responded to their inquiries immediately after they sent them to me.  I’ve had this a couple of times.  Look, I’m pretty good about responding to my e-mails (well, I was until December, anyway).  Sometimes I miss one or it falls through the cracks in some way.  When I’d find out that happened, I’d respond as quick as I could and do what I could to patch up.  But some people out there seem to think that I’m a full on production shop and that I do this for a living and so speak to me as though this is the case.  I’ve been blessed with fantastic customers since this whole thing started – I have not once ever had a client whom I disliked working for.  This is due mostly to the fact that the assholes get declined (oh, and if I’ve ever declined to build a guitar for you, please don’t think that you’re automatically lumped into the asshole category – this is not the case either).  But still, you get an e-mail every so often where you read it and think, “Geez, settle down, will you?  You’re not talking to a sales rep from PRS.”

Then there’s the unmitigated amount of garbage that constantly comes rolling through the inbox.  This is my fault mostly.  You start putting your contact info on a lot of things, you’ve got to expect a lot of spam.  But good lord, you wouldn’t believe how many requests for sponsorships, charity events, product endorsements, SEO services, etc, etc, etc I’ve had to wade through in the last four years.  It’s this (coupled with the fact that I had a very inconvenient PC change in late November) that caused me to stop bothering to check my e-mail regularly back in December.

And you know what happened when I stopped logging in every day?  It felt fantastic.  It was like a vacation I’d been needing forever.  Time kept passing by and I kept telling myself, “Boy, you better log in and see if anything important has happened…” but I just kept putting it off.  And I just kept feeling more relaxed and free.  Suddenly I wasn’t avoiding going into the shop anymore because, hey man, I’m just gonna goof around in there a while and maybe something serious starts to happen.  Maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe I just go make a pile of wood chips and then go do something else for  awhile.  That was when I realized: if I need a vacation from my hobby, something is seriously wrong.

So, effective immediately, shit’s gonna change around here.  I’m no longer taking customer orders from anyone unless it’s something that peaks MY interest (or at the very least if the job is with a musician I admire – I usually give those away for a song just so I can know that a musician I love is doing what he does with one of my instruments).  Now, I do have three or four custom orders left to finish up.  If you are a person to whom I still owe a guitar, do not fear.  I’m working diligently to finish your instruments up right now (I’m moving with new found fire since having made this decision).  But after that, I’m going to build what I WANT to build and I’m going to do it at the pace that pleases me.  When I finish things, I’ll put them up for sale for the price that I WANT to sell them for (not what i think is a competitive price point) and if they sell, great.  If not, okay, I’ve got a top rate one-of-a-kind instrument that I can play with whenever I feel like it.  Within the next few days, all of the information hosted at this site will be updated to reflect this change.

Also, I’d like to incorporate a lot more music into this site.  I’m thinking about starting an interview series with musicians that I admire (I’ve met quite a few of them now) but haven’t put any feelers out.  Just an idea I’m toying with…

Until next update, please be cool and be good to each other.

- Josh Gayou

Features

• Four String
• Red Oak Neck
• Poplar Fingerboard
• Solid Body
• Custom Bob Harrison single coil pickups (reverse wound for noise cancellation)
• Cocobolo bridge, control, and jack plates
• Gold Tuners
• Zebra wood volume knob
• Three way selector switch
• Buffalo bone nut and saddle

Features

• Lacewood Neck
• East Indian Rosewood Head Plate
• Gabon Ebony Fingerboard
• MOP Inlay
• 24 Fret neck
• Gold Evo Alloy Fretwire
• Solid Body (Poplar)
• All gold hardware
• MOP Top Dome Knobs
• Coil Tapped Neck and Bridge Mini-Humbuckers (Volume, Push/Pull Tone)
• Hard Tail String-through-body Bridge
• High Gloss Lacquer finish (box)

Making very good progress on the neck.  I expect the frets to be fully dressed out tonight and the finishing process can begin.