New York Luthier Report
This interview was
conducted in June of 1983 at Jack Kirk's workshop
in Brooklyn, New York. An edited version of this
appeared in Soundboard Magazine.
The following is an unedited transcript of the
tape made that day. Names are named and myths
debunked.
Jack Kirk, Master
Luthier
Born in Sheldon,
Illinois, Jack L. Kirk began building guitars
after studying classical guitar for twelve years.
 Martha Nelson put Mr.
Kirk in touch with Charles Fox who, at that time,
conducted a six week course for guitar builders
at Earth Works in Vermont. That is the
only formal guidance be received. Of course, in
the eight years since then, Mr. Kirk has built
instruments in both traditional patterns as well
as the experimental. To Mr. Kirk, experience is
the best teacher. [Picture above right, author in
Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1983 playing(!) Kathy
Szedenik's Kirk Concert Guitar.]
The guitars Mr. Kirk is
currently producing are small guitars employing a
short scale length. These instruments ere built
in the style of Torres guitars and are indeed
exceptional. Mr. Kirk’s guitars ere highly
sought after by area recitalists and their owners
will play no other instruments.
Jack Kirk produces a
small number of instruments per year, running a
one-man operation. His instruments may be seen
and purchased at Antonio David’s shop at the
American Institute of the Guitar, 204 West 55th
Street New York, N.Y. 10019.
Q:How did you begin
building guitars?
A: Well, I became
interested in building while I wee studying the
guitar, ah, I thought it night be interesting to
attend a few sessions with a local builder. I
called a few people and tried to find out if
there was someone in the area who built guitars
who would let me go into his shop, you know, and
sort of hit a brick wall on that. One fellow I
met down in the Village, named Hahn (sp?) [said]
“Well, I haven’t got the time” and
this and that, he really didn’t want to take
on any apprentices. So, I had mentioned to Martha
Nelson at the Guitar Society that I wanted to
build and asked if she knew any schools for
guitar builders. “Oh yes, there’s this
place up in Vermont”, at that time it was
called Earth Works, run by Charles Fox. I
called him end he sent me a. brochure. I went on
a waiting list of about a year end I did go up
there for a course of six weeks, and lived at his
place. He took on six students at a time and you
built a guitar in six weeks. Pretty fast! It was
seven days a week, except Saturday afternoon. So,
Ah, that’s essentially how I learned the
Basics. when I went up there, I didn’t know
a screwdriver from a chisel. My real interest in
building didn’t develop until then. My real
love for it developed shortly after I came back.
I realized that eventually what I wanted to do
was build, even more than play. I studied
classical guitar, you know, for twelve years. I
studied with a number of people including Albert
Valdez Blain for a while. So now I don’t
play all that much anymore but I keep my fingers
limber playing the same old pieces over and over.
Essentially, that is how I trained; I had been an
apprentice to no one. Basically, I’m
self-taught, except for the basics taught at that
school. He teaches the Spanish method of building
up there, from the top down, then the neck, sides
into the neck, it’s the Spanish method as
opposed to the European method, which puts the
top on last.
Q: Which
Luther’s work has influenced you, either pro
or con?
A: Luthier?
Q: Yes
A: Well, many have
influenced me, but only recently have I really
made any determination of who I really follow.
Ah, well, that’s a pretty big subject.
Torres and Hauser are my idols in the
guitar-making field and I like Romanillos; I like
his approach. For a while Ramirez fascinated me,
ah, I built a few Ramirez—style guitars, big
guitars with a long scale length, but I’ve
pretty much come full circle now and returned to
basics. By that I mean, when it’s all said
end done, I think the Torres and Hauser designs
will be the optimum design of a classical guitar
because I think big guitars are, as we say, out
of focus when compared to smaller instruments.
What you’re really looking for is balance,
clarity of tone and evenness of notes, I
don’t believe you can beat a smaller
instrument. A large guitar has certain unique
tone qualities, dark sound, very Spanish. Some
pieces sound great on it.
Q: In what ways do
you feel your instruments differ from and/or
improve upon the works of these luthiers who have
influenced you?
A: (Laughs) How they
improve on it? Well, tone wise, I don’t
think I can improve on Hauser or Torres. I can
only hope to equal what they’ve done as far
as tone. Ah, I think I’ve tried to look for ways
to improve bridge construction, things like
that bridge. [A bridge he showed me employing two
small dowels anchoring it to the face of the
guitar.] I don’t see any reason why a bridge
should have to pop off. I use a method to fasten
bridges where they won’t pop off. There are
those who will shout me down for approaches like
that, you know, “you must not leave an
instrument in a way that cannot be
repaired!”, if you put a bridge on with hide
glue, it can be removed with a hot knife. My idea
is why not put everything on very solid so there
will never be any need for repair?
Q: Those dowels go
through the bridge and into the top?
A: They go under the
tie—block decoration. They go through the
bridge after the bridge has been glued to the
face of the instrument. Then the tie—block
decoration goes right on top of that, you
understand, that’s oh 3/32 of an inch thick
and it covers these two little dowels there. The
dowels go right through the top, you make the
dowels just long enough so that when you put your
hand in through the sound hole, you may feel them
sticking out. After they’re on, you can take
a piece of send paper and sand them flush with
the top. I don’t think those bridges are
going anywhere! They’re [the dowels] only
1/16 of an inch, just little pieces. In no way do
they detract from the sound or anything. I use
maple dowels ‘cause that’s what’s
available at [my supplier]. If I could get spruce
dowels, I’d use them.
Q: Tell, me all about
your construction techniques, bracings, etc. How
far will you change your designs to accommodate
any particular customer’s whims?
A: I’ll accommodate
a customer. I’ll do anything they want,
within reason. If someone says: I want a red
guitar, if they put a deposit on it, I’ll
make a red guitar! And then, when they come and
say “I don’t like it”, I’m
stuck with a red guitar! Most common thing is the
deviation from the standard size guitar. I look
at the Hauser and Torres as the standard size
guitar although many people have gone bigger
— the bouts are wider, searching for more
volume, see? That’s a myth. It simply
isn’t true that a bigger guitar is louder,
in fact, it can be weaker in volume. Modern day
classical guitar strings only are capable of
giving off just so much energy. Until they come
up with a better string, they’re going to
have to stick to a smaller instrument. There is
so much experimenting going on, in guitar making.
You see, there is no experimenting going on with
violin making, changing design, they’re
simply trying to find out how to match the
plates. You have three factors there. Back and
top and the air cavity inside. So you’re
trying to couple the top with the back and
they’ve learned how to do that with
electronic instruments. Now, I have some
electronic equipment whereby I can locate the
resonating frequencies of the top end the back. I
found out, after a little experimenting, that I
could just about, ah, tell what that is by
tap-tones, an years—old way of just rapping
and telling if you’re close. The most
important thing, I think, is to know if
you’re close, preferably within a
semi—tone of one another. Ah, to know what
note in particular a plate is tuned to,
isn’t all that critical. With guitars,
you’re sort of restricted by — I
don’t think a guitar plate will go any lower
than say, ah, G, probably a G 196, any lower and
the plates would be very, very thin. Let’s
say G up to a B as highest. So most guitar sound
boards run from G to B. Backs are a
semi—tone lower or higher then the tops. The
point I started to make was, you know, many
people are taking the scientific approach now to
guitar making — electronic equipment. Have
you heard of Fred Dickens? He’s a friend of
mine. A few years ego, during my playing career,
I owned one of his instruments. So we became
friends after I began building. Ah, I went over
there and found out that he had given up building
and the only guitars he would build were those in
connection with his research. The work he does
now, this guitar research work, is done for the
Acoustical society. They have some very technical
studies going on. Fred writes for them about
guitar acoustics. So, what I wee going to say was
that I was fascinated by this scientific approach
to guitar building and I went out there. He has a
chart recorder in his shop plus essentially the
same equipment I have here — a function
generator with a counter, an automobile speaker
and a mono amplifier. You take a little terrarium
send, put it on the plate and vibrate it. When
you reach certain resonating frequencies, the
sand begins to dance on the surface and forms
patterns. These patterns are very telling as to
what you’re looking at, and there are many
modes these patterns travel through, end if
you’ve ever heard someone say “the ring
mode”, the ring mode on a plate is celled
mode five and that would indicate that the plate
is in tune with itself. What I’ve just done
is take a big subject and condense a few facts.
In violin making, when they tune plate
e1ectronica1ly, they keep carving and shaping
until they get this ring mode, and that plate is
then considered to be in tune, and it will give
all it could possibly give. That’s the most
you can get out of a plate.
Q: You do that with
guitar tops then?
A: It’s very
difficult with guitar tops. Fred was researching
for a ring mode — it took him over a year to
get his first ring mode. He went through all the
modern bracing systems, Ramirez especially,
Bouchet, with the arched brace under the bridge,
end I’ll tell you exactly where be found his
one ring mode after one year on a Torres pattern
— seven symmetrical fans with a vee. He
didn’t come close to it anywhere else. So,
ah, then he was doing experiments with the depth
of the guitar and, ah, to find out how the air
resonance is affected by making the guitar
shallower or deeper. Learned all kinds of
interesting things to write about, but he’s
really not found any way to build it into en
instrument. I still haven’t seen a
so—called great guitar that was built using
electronic tuning. You know what I mean? I think
science is telling us why things sound like they
do, but whether they’ll be able to
build a greet guitar, I don’t know. I always
tell that to everybody. I believe that the
world’s great guitars will continue to be
built by the empirical method, by people building
to a pattern, by experience. I haven’t seen
anything different on the horizon. This group,
this Cat Gut Acoustical Society is made up
of a bunch of physics engineers, scholars,
teachers, ah, very knowledgeable people.
Acoustical experts, and their main purpose was to
study the violin, violin acoustics, to find out
how to duplicate a Stradivarius — and
they’re doing good work. They still
can’t duplicate it though. And they claim to
be building great instruments, but you never hear
about them. Just like “how-to” books,
There are just a few books on guitar making, and
you’ve noticed the people building the great
guitars don’t write the books about it. You
have Sloan, I’ve never seen a Sloan guitar,
have you? So I’d say the more you build and
the more you study the art, the more you talk to
people, you find out that there’s all kinds
of hokum floating around about what’s good,
bad, and what works and most people don’t
really know the difference...ah, there are so
many old wives’, tales.
Q: Getting back to
your bracing....
A: I consider the Torres
bracing system...ah, lets put it this way —I
think that if a person were going to use no other
bracing system, was looking for just one system
to use and said “give me one”, I’d
give, them seven symmetrical fans with a vee. Now
the vee, I don’t think you really need it.
All the vee does is simply supply the lower bout
with some extra stiffness. Seven symmetrical fans
seems to Le a good system that, if you don’t
stray too far from that, ah, it will work.
You’ll come out with a good sounding
guitar...providing everything else went along
with it, which is saying a bell of a lot!
There’s no mystery about guitar bracing,
nothing mystic. All braces do is provide
stiffness in certain areas. You could carve, if
it were practical, a guitar soundboard without
braces. All you’d be doing is removing mass
and adding stiffness. The two best guitars that
I’ve ever made have been small instruments,
plain and simple Torres bracing. Kathy’s and
Monty’s (Kathy Szedenik and Louis
“Monty” Jones, two area musicians with
Kirk~ guitars) are both essentially the same
bracing system. Monty’s is a little deeper.
Q: You don’t use
any exotic materials, do you?
A: Ah...well, I built
four redwood-topped guitars. They’re
standard string length, but the bodies are
Ramirez size. Albert Blain told me he liked the
shape of this Aria guitar he has so I said~
“Alright, let me trace it.” So I
brought the Aria out here and traced it. I made
those four guitars (to that shape). It is a
rather pretty shape, except I thought they were
too big and I told Al about this. I also said
“Al, there’s nothing new about
redwood, in fact redwood gets bigger marks as a
tone wood than spruce or cedar.” You must
learn how to work with it, though. These redwood
guitars came out sounding pretty good, especially
Leo Rivera’s. There is the mate, over there
[points to guitar in room] and the other two I
took up to Tony David [Antonio David, 204 W. 55th
St.] ‘cause he wanted two guitars. Redwood
will be accepted as cedar was. As Ramirez made
cedar famous, someone will make redwood famous.
Basically though,
I’ve settled down to spruce end the
Torres/Hauser that’s the name of my game
from now on. There’s no other way to go for
me. I think one of the finest guitars around
today is one that Julian Bream has — that
little Romanillos guitar he’s got. If
you’ve heard him play it in a big place, it
sounds like he’s playing on an amplifier!
That’s what you can get out of a small
instrument. Essentially I’m working towards
possible, evenness of notes, and above all,
playability. A guitar that sounds great is
not worth a damn if it’s unplayable —
and there are many of those around!
I don’t, you know,
try to kid myself about this art. This is always
bigger than I am. All I hope for is just to make
as many good guitars as I can. It’s very
difficult. It keeps me humble!
Brooklyn, New York
25 June 1983
Harry Pellegrin
Soundboard
Magazine Fall 1983
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