When you think of people making their own guitars, a few big names come to mind.
You think of Leo Fender, Les Paul with his iconic namesake Gibsons, or Brian May of Queen with his own guitars he made with his father. And, of course, there's Eddie Van Halen and his legendary “franken-strats.”
In Barrie, there is Dave McQueen, a retired real estate broker and appraiser who also spent 20 years working in the field of computer application programming.
He was recently discovered by accident by a BarrieToday reporter, as he was sitting and playing on a stool in his driveway by his open garage door, riffs ringing out through the neighbourhood in the south end of the city.
A little bit of CCR, Steely Dan and The Band was emanating from a small homemade-looking wood amplifier at his feet.
McQueen says he began constructing his own electric guitars in 2012 and has since made around 20 instruments.
As do many amateur luthiers (the name for a craftsperson who builds or repairs stringed instruments that have a neck and a sound box), he created cigar-box guitars out of readily available materials found all around.
He felt he needed something smaller and easier to play as an instrument.
“I played guitar, but my hands are old now,” he tells BarrieToday. “They are too stiff.
"I always wanted to make one, and I saw these things (cigar-box guitars) and thought maybe this is something I can do."
McQueen shopped around for parts to use — a cigar box from Michaels, the best one-by-two-inch and quarter-inch oak he could find at Lowes, guitar tuners bought online, guitar strings and various other small parts — and away he went.
His material costs were minimal at the time: six bucks for the neck, five for the fretboard, 11 for the cigar box, and 10 for piezo crystals.
“I made the original pick-ups out of piezo crystals. You can get 10 of them for 10 bucks or something. They are basically your buzzer alarm in a clock radio, but they will also act as a pick-up,” says McQueen.
Total cost, he says, was around $50 or so to build a guitar.
He says they wouldn’t take very long to make — around a week.
Construction was fairly easy, according to McQueen.
“The neck goes into one end of the box and butts up against the other end of the box, and I was using furniture screws or glue. And that’s it,” he says. “That’s your body.
"So the time is in making the neck, making your fretboard,” McQueen adds. “Once you’ve got the headstock on, rounding the neck is just a Stanley surform rasp and a furniture scraper, which I got from Mountain Equipment Co-op, as they use them for scraping old-style cross-country skis.
“You could rout out a neck in three-quarters of an hour. You made a lot of slivers and it was hard on the hands, but you could do it."
Real guitar-tuning pegs and metal frets are used in the making of his guitars.
“These things aren’t loud unless you plug them in,” he says of his creations.
“I have a little Fender amp, and that’s nice and all, but I felt it would be really nice to have a homemade amp to go along with it."
For the guitar amps, he found stereo amplifier boards online, and bought speakers locally when they were on sale.
“I built the boxes, and I felt it wasn’t very loud and I needed a pre-amp, so I found karaoke boards, which is a little pre-amp for putting output to a karaoke machine. They have two inputs for guitar jacks, they have a reverb and a pre-amp. They sound really good,” he concedes.
McQueen has played guitar since he was a kid, but never took it too seriously.
“I was always a not bad, really, really amateur guitar player,” he says.
He never played in an actual band. It was just fooling around with friends, he says.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever build another one, but I am glad I built them because I play them all the time," McQueen adds. “They bring me a lot of joy.
“Friends used to play every Wednesday and a bunch of guys would show up with their amps,” he says. “I would tease the guys — ‘well, you have your Martin guitars, I have my martini.’"
He says he has sold many of the ones he has built and they have become conversation pieces.
He loves to show them off whenever he can, especially to passersby when he’s plucking away on one outside his garage on a pleasant day.
