GPOTD 10.01.15

Kerouac

Kerouac

weird musical dildo
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Cripple Creek "MM" series 2010

This "MM" Series Cripple Creek guitar was built in 2010 and strung in December of that year. It spent about 1 1/2 years in "High Desert Guitars" in Santa Fe New Mexico and has been at Lucci Music in Colorado springs for the last year. I'm sure either of these stores would give information about the instrument and it's value. There are a couple of very minor dings on the top. The playability is excellent and the sound of the guitar is full and clear, with the subtleties of age becoming apparent after these 4 years. The Top is European spruce, sides and back are Honduras mahogany and the neck is laminated Honduras mahogany with a double acting truss rod. Fingerboard and peghead overlay are East Indian rosewood. The rosette and bridge are Macassar ebony, the binding is black ABS and the top purfling is "Corral Snake" by Michael Gurian. The finish is a wipe on poly varnish and the sides and back are open pore. The size of the instrument is very similar to a OOO Martin and the top is X-braced. The tuners are Gotoh 510 Delta Chrome and the pickguard is black, teardrop style. The scale is 25.7" , 14 frets to the body...21 frets overall and the nut width is 1 3/4". There is a L.R. Baggs LB6X pickup installed.
 
I like some things.

I dislike other things.

It's pretty meh in my book, but I can understand if someone else likes it.
 
"Subtleties of age apparent after 4 years", when it still has the original strings? I'm guessing it didn't get played a whole lot, and it's the playing that opens up a guitar.

There are some things I like, and some things that I don't, so I'm going with "meh."
 
I'm not sure -- it hits a lot of right notes, but I'm not sure how I feel about the package as a whole. I'd sure like to give it a spin, though!
 
Hmmmm..... Not crazy about the purfling on that. But...I am down in the Springs every week. I wonder how much they are asking for that. I should go check that out. Overall nothing special - but I do like it....

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Denverdave said:
Hmmmm..... Not crazy about the purfling on that. But...I am down in the Springs every week. I wonder how much they are asking for that. I should go check that out. Overall nothing special - but I do like it....

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Click to expand...

You should. I'd really like to find out about it, if only because I'm always interested in smaller builders I like that.
 
Kerouac said:
You should. I'd really like to find out about it, if only because I'm always interested in smaller builders I like that.
Click to expand...

Article about the builder. Posting it here becasue they make you do some stupid survey to read it online....

Down a wood staircase behind a shop counter in Manitou Springs lies a dark, cool world of musical magic.

Welcome to the basement of Cripple Creek Dulcimers where, tucked behind dusty rows of musty-smelling woods, you’ll find Andy Bennett’s workplace.

In this windowless, cubby-filled basement, Bennett soaks, heats, bends and carves wood to make beautiful instruments.

Bennett is a guitarmaker — or luthier — and he has been making and repairing guitars and dulcimers from this warrenlike basement for five years.

Amid a renaissance of interest in acoustic guitars and instrumentmaking, the 61-year-old is pursuing a craft he learned 40 years ago, and fine-tuning it into an art form.

“Andy, first of all, is one of the best craftsmen I’ve ever seen,” said Paul-David Almond, a local musician who has played guitar around the Springs for 22 years and owns nearly a dozen guitars.

“He has elegant designs, and the tone he gets out of his guitars, especially for the size, is just phenomenal.”

Instrumentmakers in the Springs echo Almond; Nathan Fisher, a guitar repairman with clients who own Bennett guitars, said Bennett is a “meticulous craftsman.”

No two instruments are alike with their variations in wood and styling, and design touches such as abalone-shell inlays. It explains why someone would pay $6,200 for a Bennett guitar, as a customer on Martha’s Vineyard recently did.

“That guitar will be a collector’s item,” said Bennett’s older brother, Reb, a retired luthier. “Nobody has a guitar like that. He’s going to open that case up and people will fall over backwards.”

What sets Bennett apart from most instrumentmakers is that he has had a career as a luthier, his brother said.

Many luthiers are retirees who take up guitarmaking or folks who make them as a hobby; few devote their livelihoods to the profession, like Bennett has since he accepted his brother’s invitation to work in his small guitar shop in Longmont in 1970.

Bennett learned under Reb and his partner, banjo- and guitarmaker Monty Novotny, at NBN Guitars. It became well-known among musical legends including James Taylor, Paul Simon and Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills and Nash.

NBNguitars.com includes an archive of news stories at the time documenting the shop’s cult status, including photos of Stills and others playing NBN guitars.

Boulder in the 1970s was a popular destination for many popular musicians including members of Buffalo Springfield and James Gang, Elton John, Tom Petty and John Denver, according to GetBoulder.com, and many of them showed up at NBN.

Catering to the greats created many fond memories for the Bennett brothers.

“We would shut down and play volleyball and drink beer when they’d show up,” Andy Bennett said. “We just sat there with our mouths open and watched these guys play guitar.”

Those days are long over. Reb Bennett is retired, and Novotny died several years ago.

But Andy Bennett is carrying on from his Manitou workplace. He figures that during his career, including a 15-year stint at Guild Guitars in Maryland, he has made or helped create more than 90,000 guitars.

He stepped away from guitarmaking a few times, working in carpentry and Pilates-equipment industries.

Bennett came to the Manitou Avenue shop after hearing the owners, Bud and Donna Ford, were looking for a guitarmaker. Bud Ford said he knew of NBN Guitars from an instrument show they had all attended in the early 1970s in Kansas. Ford was happy to bring Bennett to the shop, and Bennett embraced his basement workspace.

Wood is stacked along each wall and piled on chairs and worktables: mahogany from Honduras; rosewood from India; cherry, maple and birch. Some of the wood is nearly as old as Bennett’s guitarmaking career. It comes from a business Ford purchased in the late 1970s and had been piled in the basement for nearly 30 years when Bennett was hired.

Wood is an essential part of the luthier’s craft; it can make or break an instrument’s sound, and it gives handmade guitars individual voices.

“The woods are the whole deal,” Bennett said. “This was a tree in Africa probably 10 years ago, and all the trees are different.”

Bennett’s guitars are expensive partly because of the time each takes to create. He spends 75 to 200 hours on each guitar, and he makes about 12 a year.

The process begins with wood selection; he then planes the wood with old, industrial-era equipment to a thin sheet he can shape into the guitar back, sides and front. After the parts are roughed, Bennett shapes them with heat and water and fits all the parts together. He carves the guitar necks by hand, and finally coats the instrument with several layers of shellac and varnish — a two- or three-week process.

Despite the tough national economy, Bennett’s businesses hasn’t slowed down. In fact, there’s a six-month wait for people interested in buying his guitars, which sell for about $2,000 to more than $6,000.

Even after so many years, each guitar is a new experience for Bennett.

“There’s nothing like finishing one out and stringing it up,” he said. “There’s just nothing like it.”

Bud and Donna Ford hope Bennett stays indefinitely.

“Somebody asked me what I’d do if he moved on down the road,” Bud Ford said. “I said, ‘Well, after I finished crying, I’d figure it out from there.’

“He’s one of a kind, as are his guitars.”
 
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