Andrew Revkin's 1994 profile of the masterful luthier Linda Manzer. Blending spruce, sweat and sawdust, Linda Manzer builds guitars that dazzle. Photos by Peter Sibbald https://petersibbald.visura.co Linda Manzer: https://manzer.com Andy Revkin: http://j.mp/revkinlinks

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Article
byANDREW REVKI N wit11
pliotography
byPETER SIBBALD
LINDA MANZ!lll ANXIOUSLY ClR-
cles the tool-strewn workshop
in her old brick house in
Toronto's Cabbagetown dis-
trict. She islooking forjust the
right piece of wood. And she
has plenty to choose from.
Stacked in corners, piled atop
filing cabinets and poking out
fromshelvesare planks,sheets,chunks
and strips of aged maple, spruce, cedar,
mahogany, ebony and rosewood .
She lifts a metre-long slab of South
American mahogany from the floor
and laysit on a workbench. Squinting
at the rust-red wood in the glow
of a dented aluminum spotlight, she
takes a wh ite grease pencil and be-
gins to sketch out the lines of four
oddly shaped guitar necks. Shestudies
the slab from every angle, trying to
match the planned necks with the
speckled flow of the grain.
58 • MARCH/AJ>RIL 1994
Manzer isbehind schedule, and she
breaksinto a slight sweat asshe plunks
the mahogany onto the platform of
her Rockwell band.saw,plugs her ears
and puIlson her goggles.Even though
she is one of the world's top guitar
makers,regarded by peers as "fearless"
in her work. she still feels gnawing
panic each time she sets out to trans-
By tapping a.nd listening- to a
spruce top , facing page, Manzer
guid es her ca.rving by ea.r ; the
goal is a.nother Pika.s so, above .
form several mute hunks of
wood into a resonant musical
instrument. And today is no
routine challenge. All four
necks she is preparing to cut
are destined for one extra-
ordinary guitar.
The plans for the instru -
ment, laid out on a rumpled
scroll of paper on anearby table, look
like a map ofa chaotic freeway system.
The guitar will have 42 strings-
sevt:n Limes the number in a basic
model. Because of its fragmented, ab-
stract look. Manzer callsit the Pikasso;
a friend calls it the SwissArmy guitar.
Some weeks from now, the real test
wiJI come when she tightens the
strings and burdens the guitar's
wooden body with half a tonne
of tension. If she does her work well,
the instrument will singwith the rich-
ness of a Gregorian chant and the
LINDA MANZER

3. sweetness of a lark. Ifshe fails,it will
crumple like a beer can under a car
tire. Taking a deep breath, she linesup
for the first cut. She kicks the on
switch, sending the ribbon like blade
whirring. "Here goes," she yells, and
pink dust begins to cascade to the
black linoleum floor.
LINDA MANZER JS ONE OF A RARE BREED
of artisans who hand-build guitars,
carefully shaping each piece of wood,
mother -of-pearl and bone in an end-
lessquest for excellence. While mass
manufacturers turn out dozens of
guitars each day, Manzer produces
only ro to I 5 a year,each taking 70 to
200 hours of painstaking labour. A
woman in an overwhelmingly male
field, at the age of 42 she has risen to
the top. Her guitars are renowned
worldwide for a sound and style that
can come only from the hands of a
strong-willed artist with an intuitive
feel for wood, the courage to innovate
technically and the patience to invest
60 • MARCH/APRIL I994
She
picks
upone
of
thenecks,
andher
forehead
wrinkles
indismay
. "A
crack.
Oh,damn.'
'
dozens of hours in the fiddly craft de-
tails that accumulate into a one-of-a-
kind instrument. Flip Scipio, one of
the most respected guitar restorers in
North America, says:"Linda does in-
credible things with wood . She has
90-year-o ld hands on a young body."
Like many compulsively driven
artists, Manzer can cite the exact mo-
ment that her life's calling became
clear. In the winter of r974, she vis-
ited the Toronto studio of guitar
maker Jean Larrivee. At the time, he
was inventing a new tradition of
Canadian guitar craft to challenge
American legendssuch as Martin and
Gibson. ''I'll never forget that day,"
says Manzer . "This young guy was
gently sanding a finely carved classi-
cal-guitar peghead. There was all the
warm colour ofthe dust and the lamp,
and he wassitting on an old stool, and
I walked in and thought, 'Th is isit . I
want to do this. I want to besitting on
that stool.'"
After two decades at her craft,
Manzer has built more than 2 50 in-
struments, focusing mainly on steel-
string acoustic guitars. American jazz
guitarist Pat Metheny and Canadian
singer-songwriterBruce Cockburn are
repeat customers; rocker Carlos San-
SPOT PHOTOS OF FIN ISHED GUITARS, LINDA MANZER

6. ----
------ -- --- -- - - ------- ----- ----- -- ------------ - ---
with wood that's very grounding," she
says. "Wood doesn't Lie.If you don't
cut it the right way, it betrays you. If
you work with it, it rewards you."
AJl the guitars that Manzer makes
-even the Pikasso-in-progress-
share the samebasicanatomy. lo every
detail , form fits function. Th e nickel-
silver frets that climb the fingerboard
Likea ladder's rungs have to bealigned
and filed perfectly, both to render the
scale accurately and to prevent buzz-
ing or spurious vibration. The curve of
the guitars waist must accommodate
the player'sthigh. Even the seemingly
decorative trim around the instru-
ment 'sborders serves a purpose, seal-
ing the porous grain of the wood to
prevent moisture from invading.
The main design goal for any in-
strument isto produce the best sound.
The wooden structure must translate
the quiet hum of a taut metal string
into a booming bass or ringin g treble
note. If a player plucked strings that
were attache d just to a wooden stick,
they would move solittle air that they
would generate only extremely weak
sound waves-hardly enough forceto
send a melody acrossa crowded saloon
or concert hall. But when those same
vibrating guitar strings are connected
to the centre of a large wooden sur-
face-t he soundboard of a guitar-
the vibrations are transferred to the
wood, which then vibrates and pro-
jects sound. A well-constructed guitar
top absorbsthe energy from the string
and begins to "pump" the air around
it like the cone ofa stereo loudspeaker.
Meanwhile, the back helpsproject the
sound forward, Lik
e a speaker cabinet .
The stiffnessofthe neck contributes to
the 'sustain," the length oftime a note
lingers before fading.
The central paradox of guitar de-
sign lies in the need for both sensitiv-
ity and strength. The soundboard,
generally built of spruce, has to be
Lightand responsiveto react nimbly to
the vibrations of the strings. But it also
has to be braced on the inside to resist
the 80-to-90-kilogram pull on the
Using a hot -water -ta.u.kelement mounted inside a copper pipe, a.hove,
Ma.nzer steam -heats a guitar side into sha.pe; with a ha.nd-opera.ted
jeweller 's sa.w, facing page , she ca.i-ves delicat e mother -of-pearl inlays .
bridge, the dark plate in the centre of
the soundboard where the six strings
are anchored.
Complicating the shaping and brac-
ing of a soundboard is the fact that
every piece of wood is unique. Man -
zer lifts the broad sheet of spruce that
has been warming beneath Billy-Bob.
Composed of two identical sheets
glued along a seam,it hasa tight ly stri-
ated grain, each line representing
a year's growth in the centur ies-old
German spruce from which it was
sliced. The growth lines are farther
apart toward the edges than at the
centre. "That means it'll be more flex-
ible near the edges," she says. As she
sands the top, she will vary its thick -
ness to take into account the variabil-
ity in the elasticity of the wood.
Manzer holds the Pikasso'stop by a
corner and raps it sharply with her
knuckle, producing a distinctive, if
muffled, tone. "You want to make the
wood sing in its very best voice," she
says. "How? As you carve a piece of
wood and tap it, you just get to a point
where it sounds Likeabell. Ifyou take
too much off,it starts tosound boomy,
dead. There's an ideal note for every
piece of wood, and that's where the
touchy-feely part comes in."
MA.NzERS
ADVENTUR E IN LUTHIERY BB-
gan in 1969 when she and some
friends sneaked into the Mariposa
Folk Festival by q_uietly paddling a
canoe across to the Toronto Islands.
Hearin g Joni Mitchell's dulcimer,
Manzer had to have one. During her
art studies at Sheridan College of Ap-
plied Arts and Technology in Oak-
ville, Ontario, she began spending all
her free time in the wood shop, where
she started building dulcimers from
scratch. (She suspects that she was
partly drawn to woodworking asa re-
action to early life experiences: in
grade school in the 1960s, she had
been banned from the shop and forced
to study home economics and serve
tea and biscuits to the boys.) During
further collegestudies in Nova Scotia,
she met a guitar maker and became
consumed with the notionofbuilding
that instrument.
After seeing the pioneering work of
young Toronto-based guitar maker

7. t
•
J
Jean Larrivee, Manzer, while working
part-time as a telephone operator,
began to pester him with long-dis-
tance calls, pleading to become an ap-
prentice. He resisted. 'Tm a chauvin -
ist, you know," he said, chuckling.
An avid classical-guitar player, Lar-
rivee had opened his own shop in
I97I for building the nylon -stringed
classical instruments. He switched to
steel-stringed acoustic guitars to sat-
isfya demand fuelled by the rock- and
folk-music explosion of the time. Be-
fore Larrivee, American companies
such asMartin and Gibson had virtu-
ally defined the steel-string guitar.
Ignorant ofthat tradition, Larrivee in-
vented a new style that has distin -
guished most Canadian acoustic gui-
tars ever since. It features abody with
rounded shoulders, a slim waist and a
broad belly,distinctive decorative de-
tails such as a mosaic of tiny coloured
piecesofwood around the sound hole,
and a set of unique bracing patterns
supporting the soundboard.
In I974, a weary and broke Manzer
decided simply to turn up at Larrivee's
studio, hoping to win himover with a
Nordic lyre she had built. It turned
One Manzer
supplier
harv
ests
woodonly
from
treesthatblew
downin thewind.
out he liked her work on the joints
and soimmediately put her to work-
asan unpaid gofersweeping up, fetch-
ing coffee, sanding small blocks of
wood. "It was fabulous," she recalls. "I
was getting this free education."
Slowly, she graduated to such pre-
cision work as shaping the wooden
sidesof instruments over a heated cop-
per pipe and manipulating the string -
"IJ'nder
the watchful eye of feline colleague Billy-Bob , Manzer applies
wooden clamps on the freshly glued Sitka spruce struts of Pikasso II.
64 • M A R C H / A P R I L I 9 9 4
thin blade of a jigsaw to cut out elab-
orate shapes from brittle tablets of
mother -of-pearl and ahalone. After
many evenings and weekends of
painstaking piecework, Manzer com-
pleted her own first guitar."The joy of
putting strings on your first guitar for
the first time isunbelievable," she says.
''I'd given birth to this thing. To me, it
sounded like heaven."
Manzer's first big break came in
I977 when she met a friend of Carlos
Santana who asked her to build a gui-
tar as a Christmas gift for the Ameri -
can rock legend .The night before she
delivered the finished instrument, she
used a trick she had learned to
"awaken" the wood. "Guitar wood is
sort of like a dancer's body," she says.
"It's stiff at first. Your body is really
tight when you wake up. You have to
stretch." She placed the guitar in front
of a stereo system and blasted it all
night-with John Denver's Christmas
album. Santana loved the guitar.
Eventually, Manzer felt that it was
time to go out on her own and build
guitars under her own name. Lar-
rivee's operation, then based in Victo-
ria, had taken on the feel of an assem-
bly line. "For a year, I was strutting
three tops and three backs every day,"
saysManzer. The day shewas packing
to leave Victoria, a friend called to tell
her that an ancient red cedar log from
one of the nearby forests had washed
up on the beach and that it looked like
great wood for guitar tops. Manzer
jumped into her car. "It was a hot sum-
mer day. I remember sweating furi-
ously, sawing away with my handsaw
asfastasI could. I had a ferry to catch.
I tried to take the biggest hunk I could
fit in my car." All the way back to
Toronto, she savoured the punge nt
smell of the cedar on the backseat.
Manzer points to a seriesof reddish
brown sheets ofcedar stacked in a rack
like record albums, waiting to become
guitar soundboards. They were all
sliced from that beached hunk of
cedar. At one point, she mislaid the
wood in someone else's shop and

8. didn't find it until a full five years
later. "It was like meeting an old
friend, finding a piece of gold."
Manzer remains almost obsessed
with making use of any odd scrap of
wood and wasting nothing. Part ofher
concern comes from knowing that
many of the most prized guitar woods,
such as African ebony or Brazilian
rosewood, come from vanishing trop -
ical rainforests. Half of her hesitation
in sawing the four Pikasso necks was
to lay them out so as to waste as little
of the precious South American ma-
hogany as possible. Like many con-
temporary builders, Manzer encour -
ages suppliers to seek mahogany or
rosewood that has been harvested in
an environmentally sensitive way.
And knowing that the best spruce and
cedar for soundboards comes from
threatened ancient forests of the
northern hemisphere, she has struck
an unusual arrangement with a cohort
in Oregon. He hi'.kesinto the temper-
ate rainforestsof the PacificCoastwith
asmallchain sawand extractshunks of
instrument-quality wood- but only
from trees blown down by the wind.
Manzer's concern about waste also
derives from a lifelived mainly on the
edge. For the first three years back in
Toronto, Manzer lived frommonth to
month, sleeping on friends' floors,
scrounging tools. She was selling just
enough guitars to get by.Her career as
an independent luthier wasfinally as-
sured in the summer of I982, when
Pat Metheny came to town.
A fan ofMetheny's soaring, impro-
visational jazz style, Manzer rushed
to get tickets when she heard that he
was playing in Toronto. At a friend's
urging, she sent a note asking Meth -
eny if he would be interested in seeing
her guitars. After his show, she man-
aged to see him, then raced back to
her shop to retrieve ·two guitars
for him to try out. He tried the first
guitar but didn't comment . He
couldn't put the second one down.
"He sat on the bed cross-legged with
my guitar and basically played the
With practised skill , Ma.nzer binds the Pika.sso top with awning twine
to help the glue set on decorative rosewood strips, called purfling .
whole concert again," Manzer recalls.
Metheny remembers that night as
well. "Over the years,I've had dozens
of guitar makers come to me and ask
me to play guitars," he says."The only
one I ever got really interested in right
off the bat was Linda's." At 3 a.m.,he
put the instrument down and said,
'Td like one." Manzer wasstunned. "I
just said, 'Okay,' but inside, I was like
a volcano going off."
She disappeared into her shop and
emerged five months later with two
guitars-just in case.Metheny loved
the first one and still usesit routinely
to compose."Every year,it gets better
and better ," he says. "Her workman -
ship is incredibly evolved . She has a
very advanced senseof what makesan
instrument in the broadest senseof the
word. There is something more hap-
pening than just the wood and the
strings and the bone."
As Manzer's relationship with
Metheny blossomed, she built him
more instruments, including a guitar
with a sitarlike twang, miniature gui-
tars and a fretlessclassicalguitar. Most
presented novel challenges . "Pat al-
ways pushed me to the limit," ·says
Manzer . On the sitar guitar , for in-
stance, she made a plate in the bridge
that can be adjusted until it nestles
next to the stringsjust enough to pro-
vide the distinctive sitar buzz, but not
so much that it mufflesthe volume.
EQ..UI N OX • 65

9. Thanks to her work with Metheny,
Manzer has had no shortage of other
orders. Bruce Cockburn has commis-
sioned four instruments, including a
blue-green-coloured model whose top
was the first built with the cedar from
that beach in Victoria. "After I played
this guitar from Linda, I got rid of all
ofmy other acoustics," saysCockburn.
"I didn't need them any more."
Manzer'.smost unusual commission
began with a simple question Meth -
eny posed in the fallof 1984. Sitting in
his studio near Boston, he casually
asked, "How many strings can you
put on a guitar?" Just as casually, she
replied, "How many do you want?"
Metheny just smiled. On a scroll of
computer paper, she sketched a layout
for several dozen parallel strings-
something like a harp. When she
showed the drawing to Methen y, be
waved his bands in the air like a wind -
mill and said, 'No, like this!'"
Over the next few months, Manzer
worked feverishly on plans for what
would eventually become the Pikasso.
Early on, it was dubbed the 3M42,
meaning "42-stringed Metheny -
Manzer Madness.'' Through the win-
ter, Manzer sent Metheny a series of
letters in which she sketched different
string layouts, sometimes accompa -
nied by a life-size cardboard cutout of
-the guitar shape. After finalizing the
number of strings and general layout,
she spent her time trying to mould the
design to fit the natural movements of
Metheny'.s hands. Finally, it was time
to cut wood. With more than 450
kilograms ofstring tension to consider,
Manzer had to design an entirely
new bracing pattern for the spruce
top . The rosewood sides were re-
inforced with dense mahogany back-
ing . She added two small rosewood
door's to the sides, prov iding access to
the internal electronics .
Finally, after five full-time months
of work on the Pikasso, the moment of
truth arrived. "When I put the strings
on for the first time, that wasthe scari-
est moment of my life,"says Manzer .
66 • MAllCH/APRlL 1994
Cockburn
selects
a
Manzertoplay
hisencore.
"Icould
dienowandbe
happy,"
shesays.
She liked what she heard. And so did
Metheny .Wh en Manzer delivered it
to him at his studio in the summer of
1985,be played it for eight hours .The
instruments layexs
ofpianolik e sounds
and its unlimited tunings-the extra
strings can be tuned to an Indian or
Orien tal scaleor a straightforward do,
re, mi-push aoy player into un
charted terri tory. "Its scary,"saysgui-
tar restorer Scipio. "You hit strings
and frequenci esstar t to work, and be-
foreyou know it,-y
ou just move your
hand and the thing is playing itself.
MA NZ ERSSANDWICH IS GONE AND HER
tea iscold,but the cracked guitar neck
for Pikasso II is still there , taunting
her. She stares at the tiny fault and
grimaces. She is feeling a bit over-
whelmed by this project. "The first
Pikasso almost killed me," she says.
"Thank God, I kept t he plans aod
took pictur es." Manzer manipulates
the wedge of mahogany, looking for a
way to avoid the crack. She runs it
back through the handsaw several
times, shaving away the cracked por-
tion bit by bit , seeing how far it sinks
In the sha.dow of the best-la.id pla.us
for the Pikasso, Ma.nzer toils
tena.ciously on her 1,000 -hour job .
into the wood . She thinks about flip-
ping it over, but that would lose the
"wonderful" way the grain follows the
shape of the neck. Finally, Manzer
puts it down. ''I'llsleepon it," she says.
There is plenty of other work yet to
be done. She pulls out the thick folder
of background she has compiled for
the inlay on the guitar: photocopies
and snapshots and magazine clippings
of the great builders and guitarists of
the past 150 years. A stack of her trac-
ing-paper sketches of Orville Gibson,
John D'Angelico, the Dopera broth -
ers,Paul Bigsbyand the rest slidesonto
the table. She spreads the small draw-
ingsout over the sprawling guitar plan
and shuffles them like playing cards .
"A bunch of men - and me," says
Manzer with a chuckle . As she pon-
ders the design, she runs her fingers
through her long hair, eliciting a
sprinkling of mahogany dust.
That weekend, Manzer drives to
Guelph to see Bruce Cockburn per-
form. The rousing two -hour show has
the packed house singing along on al-
most every tune. The crowd roars and
pounds the floor, insisting on an en-
core. Cockburn comes out, 1ooks
down in the shadows at three guitars
and selects the Manzer. Twenty rows
back, the instrument's creator smiles
ecstatically at his choice. "As a guitar
builder, you have certa in people you
aspire to build instruments for," she
whispers. "Pat was one of them. And
Bruce was really the other. I could sort
of die now and be happy ." The guitar's
lacquered cedar top, salvaged from a
beach solong ago,gleamslike an emer-
ald in the spotlight . Even with its
sound hole stuffed with foam to stifle
any feedback howl, und er Cockburn's
touch, the guitar makes the rafters
shiver and the audience dance. l(t-
Andrew Revkin isaiithol'oftheaward
-
wi,i»ing The Burning Season: The
Murder of Chico Mendes and the
Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest .
Peter Sibbald is a Tol'onto
photographer.
Thisisthe
firstEQ.UINOX appearan
c.e
forboth..