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SHOP TALK
FACING PAGE Scott “I just want to do things that make me excited to
Holiday’s six-string come to work,” he adds. “I get what I call slow-forming
Super Chief photographed ADD. Outside of the Banshee, most of what we make
at his home in Huntington will have a lifespan of about four years, then I want to
Beach, California
make something new. I will never get rid of the Super
Chief either. That is everything from 12 or 13 years
of doing this, all accumulated into one guitar.”
ALTERNATIVE TONEWOODS
Kauer’s modest quest for originality encompasses not
just aspects of his guitars’ designs but also materials.
The Californian enthusiastically embraces new
materials and components that might fall outside
the internet’s flavour-of-the-month ingredients and
subvert many guitarists’ expectations, and frustrate
so many builders in the process.
“We were early adopters of a couple of things,”
he says. “Juha Ruokangas turned me onto Spanish
cedar, which we renamed ‘Spanish mahogany’, seen
as it’s not cedar and it’s not Spanish, it’s a mahogany
variant. That was a great bit of advice. It’s 99 per cent
of what the Kauer sound is. It checked all the boxes
I wanted from a wood. It sounds superb, the weight’s
great, everything about it is really good. That was an
early-on thing for us.
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“We went through the gamut of fretboard woods
and, early on, we did a guitar with a wenge fretboard.
I hadn’t heard of wenge but ended up falling in love
with it. It isn’t environmentally impacted like many
of the rosewoods were. We switched permanently to
that within the first year of Kauer as a business and
it’s paid dividends, especially in the past few years.
“It’s tough. Both Spanish cedar and wenge aren’t
the rubber-stamped formula that everybody knows
and it took a while for people to trust my word that
they were great. When the rosewood restrictions
happened, everybody had to face the reality that,
especially with wenge, there are lots of other great
woods out there that aren’t so impacted.”
This talk of fretboards gets us onto another Kauer
departure, this time from the popular line on tonewoods
and their supposed impact on a guitar’s overall sound
– namely, the significance (or lack thereof) of this
thin slice of timber in the final brew.
“Frankly,” says Kauer, “I think fretboard wood choice
is way overblown. I’ve found from experience that if
you want to drastically change what a guitar sounds
like, changing what the neck is made from and how
it’s made is a very different equation. But as much as
people hype what the fretboard wood is, I don’t find
much variation in the sound of fretboards. We pick
fretboards for their stability and sustainability first,
then how they machine and hold a fret, and then how
they look. The lowest of the low is what they sound
like, because it’s a one per cent difference at best.”
FINISHED PRODUCT
Many guitarists and makers also rail against finishing
processes that deviate from the ‘best practices’ but this
is another area in which Kauer is willing to trust the
empirical evidence. As with wood choices, there are
environmental reasons for reconsidering the supposed
supremacy of nitrocellulose lacquer. As for objective
assessments of the results, Kauer says there are
reasons there too to consider the alternatives.
“We’re in California and I have restrictions about
spraying lacquer in the first place,” he says. “We quickly
surpassed the amount that we could get away with
spraying legally. I switched to [poly]urethane and was
so nervous about it. I didn’t talk about our finishes for
a while because I was anxious that people were going
to be like, ‘Oh, it’s not nitro so it can’t be good!’ I’ve
never heard any difference between those guitars and
I’ve had plenty of examples on both sides.
“The UV finishing made a monumental difference
in the quality of our finish,” he adds, “not to mention
the turnaround time. The quality went through the
roof. That’s when I just stopped worrying about that
stuff. There are so many individual components and
pieces and steps and techniques, and I’m happy with
the sum. I’m not hung up on how we got there.”
Visit kauerguitars.com for more