Bio and View

My interest in the guitar began at the age of eight, when I was gifted a short-scale, Chinese-made Memphis electric guitar and a 5-watt Gorilla combo amp by my father for Christmas. I immediately began taking lessons and spent hours practicing in my room, seduced by the instrument’s form, sound, feel, smell, and the emotions it evoked in me and others. In retrospect, I now understand that a big reason the guitar was so powerfully alluring lay in it’s ability to transport my awareness from unrelentingly repetitive and destructive thoughts and land me squarely in the moment, within the body and its senses.

 

I am a lover of music of all descriptions and find great joy and satisfaction in listening to music, playing music, writing music, and thinking about music. For me, the guitar is the ultimate tool to explore and manifest this impulse. I would go on to play guitar in bands in high school and college and was heavily influenced by, and involved in, the Chapel Hill music scene of the late nineties and early 2000s. During this time, the town was bursting with brilliant and talented musicians, and I spent most evenings going to live shows at one of the myriad venues in town, or playing music with friends. All of my friends were in bands, and all of their bands were excellent.

 

Both of my parents are artisans. My mother is a writer, metalsmith, and mixed media artist, and my father is an excellent woodworker and stained/fused glass artist who professionally built stained glass windows and entryways for churches and patrician homes. In addition to my parents’ preternatural creativity, my identical twin brother Mathew is also a craftsman. Matt is a superb luthier and gifted furniture maker, having worked for Bill Collings at Collings Guitars for many years while living in Austin, Texas. Matt builds inventive and beautiful bespoke furniture these days at his Wabi Sabi Woodshop in Durham, NC. Matt is also a musician. Given all this, I suppose my career path was somewhat inevitable.

 

I made my first guitar under the tutelage of Sergei Dejonge in 2001, during the summer between graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attending graduate school. My time with Sergei was magical and kindled a fire within me that would only intensify over the coming years. While studying for my MA in International Education at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT, I apprenticed with Ivan Schmuckler at Leeds Instrument Making School in Northampton, MA. When not in class, I was either shadowing Ivan at the Leeds collective, with celebrated luthier Bill Cumpiano in the adjacent workshop, or building guitars in the living room of my small Brattleboro apartment. Guitar building was all-consuming and left little room for anything else.

 

It was around this time that I acquired Roy Courtnall’s (now known as Roy Summerfield Shapiro) astonishing book, Making Master Guitars, and began building instruments in the Spanish tradition with excellent results. Roy’s wealth and depth of knowledge on the subject was inspiring, and I yearned to discover what other secrets he held not shared in his book. To my parents’ chagrin, I made the decision to drop out of graduate school and move to the UK to study classical guitar making at the program Roy designed and directed at Newark and Sherwood College in Newark, Nottinghamshire. In addition to Roy, I had the privilege of studying with the brilliant makers Tony Johnson, James Lister, and Malachi Brady.

 

While in Newark, I attended an enlightening lecture by renowned guitar maker Gary Southwell, and was afterward invited to attend a course with him during the summer break at his shop in Nottingham. Gary is a genius and the consummate craftsman. Witnessing Gary’s process and absorbing his ideas was an indelible experience and served to galvanize my desire to be a professional luthier.

 

Following my time in England, I moved to New York City and spent two years learning fretted instrument repair and restoration under a paid apprenticeship with the guitar repair guru, Robert M. Jones of Park Slope, Brooklyn. In Bob’s shop, I was allowed to study and restore fretted instruments of all descriptions. I also had the good fortune of getting to know many virtuosos of the instrument, and learned how to set up their guitars for maximum comfort, playability, and sound, specific to each individual’s unique style and needs. During my second month at Bob’s shop, I was tasked with restoring a 1956 Robert Bouchet guitar, which was an absolute revelation to me at the time, embodying all the qualities of a true masterpiece of guitar making.

 

Confident in my abilities and knowledge gained through studying with these wonderful and talented craftsmen, I moved back to my hometown of Durham, North Carolina in 2006 and hung up my shingle for Danser Guitar Works. In the early years of my career, I spent much of my time repairing, trading, and selling Spanish guitars. Having had the good fortune to own and study the guitars of the masters—including those of Francisco Simplicio, Enrique Garcia, Marcelo Barbero, Miguel Rodriguez, José Ramirez, Manuel de la Chica, Herman Hauser Sr., Christian Aubin, John Gilbert, Robert Ruck, and Thomas Humphrey, to name a few—I learned what a great guitar can and should be. These instruments continue to inspire awe and inform my work enormously.

 

When not performing repairs and restorations, I built a handful of guitars each year until the beginning of the pandemic, when I made the decision to build classical guitars full time—something I had wanted to do for years but was not supported by conditions. While not a terribly popular move with many of the wonderful musicians I’ve worked with over the years, this change has allowed me the time and mental latitude to explore modern ultra-lightweight composite top construction. While my heart belongs to the Spanish guitar, my current interest lies in building modern double top guitars that retain the qualities I appreciate in the traditional fan-braced instruments of the masters I have intimately come to know and love.

 

I strive to build a responsive instrument with reserves of power, headroom, and volume, but not at the expense of tonal complexity, sustain, and warmth. In my opinion, a superior composite top guitar should possess a wide tonal palette, balance between the bass, mid, and treble registers, a good fundamental note surrounded by lush overtones, even duration of sustain between notes (especially in the trebles high on the neck), and well-defined note separation throughout the scale. I find that a finely machined balsa wood core between veneers of spruce, cedar, or spruce and cedar allows for a more natural, woody sound rather than the other synthetic, space-age materials currently in use. I want my guitars to be enjoyed for generations, so structural integrity is very important to me. Rather than impose my own will on a timber, I allow each individual component of wood to guide me as to how best reveal its full sonic potential.

 

Guitar making is a spiritual endeavor for me, and I use all five sense faculties to connect and feel into what the wood wants. Absorption in the creative process is one of life’s greatest joys, and I achieve the best results when I set my own ego to the side. Throughout my travels over the last 25 years, I have visited sawmills, wood auctions, and retiring luthiers/woodworkers all over the world and amassed a vast and varied collection of domestic and exotic hardwoods, as well as most species of spruce, cedar, and redwood, which I have re-sawn for guitar construction. This collection includes approximately 100 sets of CITES-certified Brazilian Rosewood. Nothing excites me more than beautiful, resonant timbers, and my quest for supreme tonewood borders on pathology.

 

Each instrument I make is aesthetically unique and, while time-consuming, I enjoy the creativity of designing and executing varied rosettes and purfling/binding schemes to complement the timbers used in a particular instrument. When designing a guitar for commission, I prefer to meet in person to discuss the sonic qualities most appealing and appropriate for an individual’s style and repertoire, to observe a player’s right and left hand technique, hand size and strength, and nail condition to arrive at an instrument most suitable for the player. My highest goal is to realize a tool that allows the artist to fully express their vision without hindrance. I also enjoy involving the buyer as much as possible in the conception of their guitar’s aesthetics and appointments. I relish pawing through my stacks of wood to find the perfect back, sides, and top woods to be used in the construction, dependent upon the player‘s sensibilities and preferences.

 

Of course, of utmost importance is the sound and capabilities of a guitar, but I also believe a guitar is an integral work of art that wants to be as visually appealing as it is sonically.  I live in Durham, North Carolina with my wife, Shelley; daughter, Clara (14); son, Jack (9); Bodhi, my dog; and sisters, Cleo and Coco, the cats. My shop is located in old north Durham near Duke University.