Kevin Muiderman Guitars Workshop Profile

The Luthier Bench Knowledge Base

Kevin Muiderman is a reconstructive plastic surgeon by day, and a guitar maker by night. After medical school, Kevin decided to learn more about guitar building and trained with master builders at the Leeds Guitar Maker's School in Massachusetts. By combining advanced materials like kevlar and carbon fiber with wood and traditional guitar building wisdom, Kevin builds double-top acoustic guitars that are as technically brilliant as they are beautiful.  Production funding is provide by the North Dakota Council On The Arts and by the members of Prairie Public.

Transcript

00:00Kevin Meiterman is a reconstructive plastic surgeon by day and a guitar maker by night.

00:09After medical school, Kevin decided to learn more about guitar building and trained with master builders in Massachusetts.

00:16By combining advanced materials like carbon fiber with wood and traditional guitar building wisdom,

00:22Kevin builds double-top acoustic guitars that are as technically brilliant as they are beautiful.

00:28There isn't a single moment when I'm in here making guitars that isn't joy.

00:41I'm Kevin Meiterman and I'm a guitar maker and I've been doing that for about 18 years and I'm also a plastic surgeon in town.

00:49I've been a guitar player since I was about nine years old.

00:53For some reason, the tone of the guitar, the first time I heard a guitar played well, it just thrilled me to no end.

01:06Since I was quite a young person, I've always built things.

01:10When I was in high school, there was a guitar maker there.

01:12He had a guitar store where he would sell regular guitars, Martins and Taylors and all those things you hear about.

01:20The guitars that he was making sounded better, intrinsically better, and I wanted to know why.

01:32Then I went off to medical school residency, but then when I started my practice,

01:37I decided I wanted to recapture some of these things that make life special.

01:41So I would take my vacations from my job and I would go off for a week or two at a time to a guitar making school in Massachusetts

01:50and work with these master guitar makers.

01:52Once I learned what I needed, I started building guitars myself and I've been doing it ever since.

02:00It's meditative. People ask oftentimes how this relates to surgical skills and surgical training.

02:07I think that it really is very much the same.

02:10In other words, my joy for working with my hands, I suppose, came first

02:15and it manifested in my job, which is surgery, but also my working with wood.

02:22And surgery is, I love doing it, but there's an intensity to it.

02:26And this is sort of the antithesis of that intensity.

02:29It's peaceful and is completely without tension.

02:33And that's lovely.

02:36And so once the shape is determined, then you determine the woods you're going to use.

02:40And sometimes that's a purely aesthetic choice.

02:42Sometimes certain players want a certain wood for a certain tone.

02:46So I kind of get all those things, literally put them on the bench and start designing when it's just raw, rough hunks of wood.

02:52This is where everything begins. I buy the wood in a rough form.

02:56For example, here's some East Indian rosewood that still has the saw cuts on it from the mill.

03:02These mashing sides are here, and these are also rough, but they'll be eventually thinned on the sander

03:08and then bent into their shapes.

03:13And so I used to have only two shapes of guitar.

03:17I now have collected eight or ten different sets of work boards.

03:24So here's how a neck begins, a big hunk of wood.

03:29But then at some point, you get down to just whittling it, basically.

03:42These are little surgical lights that I bought from a surgical supply house.

03:46I also learned that in the operating room, there are always two lights, one over each shoulder.

03:50So no matter where you're working, you're eliminating the shadow.

03:53And so when I'm working, I'll often use my two little lights, and I'll have one light coming over each shoulder.

03:58And so no matter where I'm working, there's never a shadow.

04:03And it makes for some great detail work.

04:05It's fun to see, as you start scraping back, bringing the wood's level and getting the glue off of there,

04:11it's fun to see the lines pop.

04:13This is rosewood, and this is poplar.

04:16And it's fun to see, as you're scraping, the result poke through.

04:20And then I assemble the back to the sides, and I have the first step.

04:25And then I start on the top. I choose those woods.

04:28All right, so this is the way I make my tops, using the composite materials.

04:33So traditionally, a top for a guitar, which is the vibrating element of it,

04:39comes out of a single book-matched set of wood.

04:44These days, people are using composite materials to try to get a guitar top that is as resonant and is as strong,

04:52but is actually lighter, so you get more sound and maybe even more controllable sound.

04:58From the audience perspective, no one would know there's any difference.

05:01For example, this is a double-topped guitar with all the composites and all the fancy things inside the guitar,

05:07but you'd never know it.

05:09All guitar tops are not just a piece of wood, but they're braced somehow on the inside with a series of braces.

05:16Traditionally, these are solid wood.

05:18I use a little thin sheet of carbon fiber, sandwich that between two thin pieces of wood,

05:26and you get a brace that is inflexible because of that, almost like an I-beam on the inside.

05:33It's very strong.

05:34If I get a request from a guitar player for something, I'll work it up in a prototype first

05:40so that I can change one element at a time to try to hone in on the sound that they're looking for

05:46without having to build a whole new guitar.

05:48So...

05:51There's a six-string.

05:52Here's a 12-string prototype.

05:55This is a Nara wood guitar.

06:02It's got a really big sound.

06:10I look forward to coming in here at the end of a long day.

06:13I guess I'm sort of a geek.

06:15In other words, I don't do much besides my work and spend time with my family

06:19and then make instruments and play in guitar concerts.

06:22It's really a good life.

06:24It's a simple life, but it's mine, and I like it.

06:35Prairie Mosaic is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund

06:40with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 4th, 2008,

06:45the North Dakota Council on the Arts,

06:48and by the members of Prairie Public.

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