(twangy acoustic guitar music)
[ROY MCALISTER] There's something deeply, almost spiritual
about making musical instruments that
it's about as close to creating life
out of raw materials, wood and
strings and tension and steambedding these things.
But they really take on a life of their own.
♪♪
I’ve been making guitars for about 40 years.
Professional woodworker for almost 50 years.
I began playing at ten years old, playing the guitar.
♪♪
At 15 years old,
I was offered a woodworking job in this woodshop, restoring old antiques.
That began me being around tools.
And immediately I started thinking of my guitars.
You know, how can I customize them?
How can I fix them? Start tearing apart.
How do these things get made?
A species of Madagascar rosewood.
It's absolutely phenomenal tone wood.
♪♪
In my heart, I really love singer songwriters.
So there was a tone that I could hear
that goes better with voice in my mind.
Making it speak.
(hollow thud)
Yeah. So um...
(hollow thuds)
You can just,
you can hear it.
German Alpine Spruce.
Different flavors of tone wood, what they do to add to the voice of a guitar.
(hollow thuds)
Beautiful.
There weren't too many luthiers making a living
so guitars were more of a hobby.
I was ultimately offered a job
at Santa Cruz Guitar Company.
It was fantastic,
made extremely high end guitars.
♪♪
It was my relationship with David Crosby that that really helped me out.
We built him a couple of guitars
and he saw some of my work while I was working there.
He loved the craft of lutherie.
And he was talking about a guitar that he'd always wanted but never found one.
(sanding wood) Well, I'm going to make him one.
And he ended up falling in love with this guitar.
(laughter)
Has used it on every recording, has toured with it.
(cheering and applause)
That changed my life right there.
An article had come out in Acoustic Guitar Magazine
of David Crosby speaking highly about my guitars, and the phone just went crazy after that.
And then within a week I got
a call from Marc Cohn, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne.
Since then, I had built for Michelle Willis and Becca Stevens,
guys like Jeff Pevar and Shawn Tubbs,
Warren Haynes.
When I first started working with Jackson, he likes to work face to face,
so he’d come up to my shop and we'd hand guitars back and forth.
He'd want this tone or wanted that tone.
He’d show me what he liked about certain guitars, playability, tone.
He was at our house playing.
He's joking around, “Oh, guitar can sound good when you play it quiet, you know?
But when you... when you...” He’s kind of just joking.
“So you play it really hard is when you...”
And he just starts strumming that the hell out of the guitar
and my daughter's right behind him and it started startled her.
She's only about two years old and she puts her
hands over your ears really fast, you know, while he's playing.
And but it's hilarious.
He loves the photo.
He's got one in his house.
(sandpaper scrubbing)
One of my favorite songs that that he wrote was a song called “These Days”.
He wrote when he was 16 years old.
He used my guitar to play that song
every time,
every concert for the next, I think 15 years.
It still chokes me up.
♪♪
I built David, probably a dozen guitars for him
and a lot for his friends.
We really became close over the years.
He really was one of my biggest advocates.
And then I got diagnosed with cancer.
And so we were both in this
nursing ourselves
and keeping an eye on each other.
You know, up to the day he passed,
he and I had been talking regularly.
We were really concerned about each other
and we had been talking and laughing just days before he left a message on my
my cell phone, I think two days before he passed.
And his last words were, “I love you.”
Last time I hear his voice is him saying, “I love you.”
And so it ripped me apart.
When when he died, I really lost a dear friend.
The music world lost a very creative
and driven man.
♪♪
When you finish one, it goes out in the world
and you hear it come back to you.
A piece of furniture doesn't do that.
You build a piece of furniture, you take a picture of it
and you enjoy the picture of it and a guitar is different.
You've created this thing that will then go on and develop
and have a voice and and you'll hear it
in different ways.
♪♪
It's very rewarding.
You know, I never get tired
of making the guitars because you never know where it's going to go after that.
You don't know who's going to be playing it, who's going to be recording with it.
♪♪
It is more than just a musical instrument.
It can be a musical partner.
♪♪
For more about Roy’s gorgeous handcrafted guitars
and the artists that play them, go to mcalisterguitars.com.
♪♪
Catch Art Zone Friday nights at 8
and anytime online at seattlechannel.org/artzone
♪♪