Guitar maker Ric McCurdy is known for both his passion and his commitment
By RALPH GARDNER JR.
June 13, 2016 7:13 p.m. ET
Career advice these days runs something like this: Figure out what you love to do, what makes time stand still, and success will follow.
Ric McCurdy takes a slightly more practical approach. “The best advice I got was, ‘Take what you love and make it your hobby.’ Then you’re not going to be broke your whole life.”
However, his chosen work—making custom guitars in a small workshop overlooking Hudson Street in Tribeca—seems equal parts career and calling. “Repairing guitars pays the rent,” he explained, his tools neatly arrayed above the workbench behind him. “Making guitars feeds the soul.”
To survive as a guitar maker in New York City, “you’ve got to have a niche,” Mr. McCurdy said. “My niche is performance jazz guitars.”
His clients include jazz great John Abercrombie and Jimmy Vivino, who leads the house band for the TBS show “Conan,” as well as the Blue Man Group and singer and songwriter Kenny Loggins.
Mr. McCurdy’s initial acquaintance with the instrument came as a musician playing bass in Southern California in the early 1980s. Then one evening, a drunk at one of his gigs emerged from the men’s room shouting, “You’re the musicians—the toilets are overflowing.’”
“I broke like a twig,” Mr. McCurdy confessed and told himself, “I’m never playing music for money again.”
Fortunately, a guitar that he had made and was playing—he has been good with his hands since his father proudly displayed the cars, boats and planes he made as a child to their Connecticut neighbors—attracted the attention of John Hawk.
“He’d made guitars for Keith Richards,” Mr. McCurdy recalled.
Mr. Hawk needed an assistant and offered to pay Mr. McCurdy and teach him everything he knew.
Such generosity distinguishes the artisanal American guitar-making industry, especially the New York scene that Mr. McCurdy has been a part of since he moved into his shop in 1991.
An example is John Monteleone, a Long Island guitar maker whose instruments have been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He’ll take an hour out of his day to help me with a technical problem nobody else could help me with,” Mr. McCurdy said. “That’s the whole industry.”
And there’s a small shrine in Mr. McCurdy’s workshop to John D’Angelico, a guitar maker who died in 1964. Mr. McCurdy describes Mr. D’Angelico, who grew up in Little Italy and had a shop on Kenmare Street, as “the Stradivarius of jazz guitars. They sound like God made them. They respond to the slightest touch.”
Mr. McCurdy, 60 years old, compared the process of making a guitar to fitting a client for a custom-made suit. “Some are built like lumberjacks and beat the heck out of it. And some play very lightly. So you make the guitar to match the client.”
Each guitar costs approximately $10,000 and takes 100 hours to make. Some have beautiful inlaid work, such as a guitar with the Chrysler Building carved into its head.
Then there are the ukuleles that Mr. McCurdy made for his children, now 21 and 19. “My wife said, ‘Build the kids a guitar so they have something when you’re gone.’ ” But he considered ukes more fun. “George Harrison always traveled with two in case he met someone who wanted to jam.”
So Mr. McCurdy crafted one for his son, with a skateboard trailing flames, and another for his daughter, an aspiring baker, featuring a cupcake.
What distinguishes the best guitar makers, for Mr. McCurdy, isn’t necessarily a way with wood or planing tools. “It’s not skill. Skill comes with repetition. The thing that makes a guitar maker is drive.”
The drive to make a hollow box ring like a bell. “Every piece of wood is different,” he explained as he “tap-tuned” a guitar in progress, listening for the vibrations. The sound changed depending on whether he tapped in the center or along the edges of the wood. “You can’t just measure and go. If you build them all to the same measurements, they won’t sound good.”
Mr. McCurdy strummed a few chords of the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” and Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary” on one of his guitars.
Both the instrument and the musician sounded excellent. “If you can bring joy to somebody’s life,” he said, “if you can bring pleasure to someone 100 years after my children are gone, what more do you want from life?”
— ralph.gardner@wsj.com
(for more images: http://www.wsj.com/articles/picking-work-that-you-love-to-do-1465859624?tesla=y)