Instruments Known for Quality, Unusual Shapes : Guitar Maker Carves His Design on Pop Music
Hoyt Axton, the prototypical big-bellied, hard-living country-western singer, leaned over a small workbench and eyed Danny Ferrington, who is a half-foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter.
âYou know,â Axton said in his deep, slow Oklahoma way, âyouâre the most expensive male friend Iâve got.â
Ferrington laughed. He can afford to. He has people like Axton paying him thousands of dollars for the pleasure of self-indulgence.
There he sits inside a second-floor loft in an industrial section of Santa Monica, a place without a phone--heck, without a stairway some days--burying himself in an intimate dialogue with slabs of spruce and rosewood.
Calvin Klein of Guitars
Ferrington, an enthusiastic, irreverent man who says his goal is to be the Calvin Klein of guitars, is establishing himself as designer to some of the more adventurous stars of rock ânâ roll and country music. For $2,000 to $3,000, he crafts instruments whose design shatters the mold of centuries.
Traditional, comfortable curves are replaced by jarring angles and unexpected twists. The color may be determined by something as whimsical as a singerâs favorite lipstick. The wood may be chiseled, lacquered and painted to resemble the jagged frame of the acoustic guitarâs bitter rival, the electric guitar. The elaborate mother-of-pearl trim that Ferrington cuts with a jewelerâs saw and lays into the wood may duplicate the heart-and-crossbones tattoo on one starâs arm or highlight memorable dates in anotherâs life.
Or, as in the case of a guitar Ferrington built for Axton in 1979 in Nashville, even more esoteric combinations may arise.
Axton wanted the neck of his guitar to be lined with a âtree of lifeâ design he had seen on a turn-of-the-century folk guitar. (âI love that fancy stuff that glitters.â) Using mother-of-pearl and abalone, Ferrington fashioned 16 angels and assorted other figures.
Axton also wanted a buffalo at the base of the instrument. Not just any buffalo, but, as he put it, âan anatomically correct albino buffalo.â
The buffalo must have had deep symbolic meaning, a visitor suggested recently when Axton came from Lake Tahoe to see Ferrington. âWell, it did at the time,â Axton said. âI canât remember what it was.â
Ferrington, 32, the son of a Louisiana cabinet-shop owner, grew up enamored with woodworking and guitars, spent five years refining his trade in a well-known Nashville guitar repair shop and came to Los Angeles in 1980 to open his own business.
Long before he arrived here, he said, he had grown bored with the look of the acoustic guitar. He wanted to tinker with its symmetry and its bland blondishness. He wanted to make weird shapes.
âThe craft of guitar has sort of been frozen,â he said. âIt just doesnât seem that thereâve been acoustic guitars that are keeping up with the fashions and the trends.â
Second Floor of Auto Paint Shop
His workshop, whose doors open onto a Southern California Edison power station, is part of the second floor of an automotive paint shop. You get to it through a twisted stairway-and-corridor journey that is blocked off when the shop is closed. So when he wants to work odd hours, Ferrington snakes his compact frame up a rope dangling from his shop.
Inside, Ferrington walks over to where a couple dozen esoterically shaped guitar body frames are hung. âThatâs the one I made for the kid with Van Halen,â he said. âThis is J. D. Souther, thatâs a bass for Elvis Costello over there, one for Lindsey Buckingham, that oneâs for Stephen Bishop, there is Richard Thompson, Nick Lowe, Carlene Carter, thatâs for the guy with the Cars. . . .â
Ferringtonâs flamboyant design is creating âa new aestheticâ in guitar-making, according to Tom Wheeler, editor of Guitar Player magazine, who added that the tonal quality of Ferringtonâs instruments is as highly regarded as their look.
Ferrington shares a house with singer Linda Ronstadt, whom he first met in Nashville, but describes Ronstadt simply as âmy roommate--period.â In a high-voiced twang, he gossips knowledgeably about rock and country performers, talks like an electronic engineer discussing the subtleties of âequalizingâ an acoustic bass guitar in a recording studio, and waxes dreamily about one day licensing his various designs for mass production.
âBeyond making money, I would love to see kids going down to the store and seeing these guitars on the shelves,â he said. âItâs just like clothes. If there was only a tweed coat you had to pick from, itâd be very boring. . . . The Martin (the brand regarded as the class of acoustic guitars) is a wonderful guitar, but I see it more like a lute.â
Four-Week Process
The construction and design process takes about four weeks. Ferrington said he confers with a client and traces a frame that fits the buyerâs technical desires and fashion preferences, hopefully capturing the essence of the performer.
âItâs exciting to sit down with someone and not know what youâre gonna come up with . . . a completely unique instrument that never existed before. When you confront a guitar player, they all have ideas, but theyâre hesitant about asking me âcause they think Iâm gonna laugh at them.
âIâve played so many guitars and listened to so many guitar players--thatâs where Iâve learned so much from, trying to poke in there and get certain adjectives from them, about what kind of sound theyâre trying to get, trying to get them to impart a little bit of what they know.â
Developing the critical relationships that determine the instrumentâs quality and tone--the thickness of the sides, the thinness of the top, the dimensions of the braces--is a process Ferrington says is largely intuitive.
âThatâs just where good sculpture and good art come together. Itâs one of those things like walking, where you donât think about it. You develop certain instincts. You couldnât tell Willem de Kooning where to put a big blue swipe. He just puts it there.
âRapport You Get With Woodâ
âI think of guitars as being sculptures. Thereâs real rapport you get with wood. When I make a musical instrument, it has to have a certain amount of life to it. It has to have a sensual feel to it. It has to have a certain resonance. If I let down in any of those areas, Iâve failed.â
Ferrington prides himself on âfunctional art.â When one guitar required a flying horse, he found a Mobil station and convinced an attendant to cut the oil company emblem off an old air filter.
Recently, Axton asked Ferrington to solve the annoying problem of playing guitar on a bus or airplane: The neck of the instrument tends to jut out into the aisle, tripping folks. Ferringtonâs response was a $3,000 âbus guitar,â about half the size of a normal guitar but built solidly enough to be tuned to concert specifications.
On his workbench one recent day was another, similarly sized guitar Ferrington had built for Ronstadt, featuring inlaid mother-of-pearl bunnies and blossoms. Somebody asked if that, too, was a bus guitar.
âNah,â Axton interrupted. âThatâs a Lear guitar.â
It's a date
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