Custom-Guitar Craftsmen Thrive in Groton

“I begin with an idea. It all starts with the idea. The idea being exactly what I am trying to achieve for this specific musician.” This is how master guitar maker Aaron Green describes the process that takes place in his Gratuity Road woodworking shop across the road from the family residence. Although he still spends a fair amount of time in New York City meeting with prominent guitar players and locating vintage guitars, most days his commute takes him no farther than his workshop in Groton.

Although Aaron’s 25-plus years of experience building classical guitars is always useful, he believes this process of being able to translate a musician’s desires into a physical instrument that seamlessly meets their needs that is the primary skill an instrument maker must develop to become sought-after by top musicians. Aaron currently has a two-three-year backlog of orders for his instruments which are also quite a bit more expensive than a factory-produced guitar and much of the purchase price is due well before the instrument ever reaches a customer’s hands.

The actual building process starts with raw materials which, for a classical guitar, means the exotic woods from which most high-end guitars are built. Sourcing extant exotic materials from other woodworkers is a big part of how Green acquired his collection of materials. Aaron considers himself a serial entrepreneur and is active in the instrument making community.

As these exotic woods have become more and more scarce and as increased government regulation has made it very difficult to buy them on the open market, instrument makers must stockpile and trade in these materials as part of their craft. In the workshop he pointed to a piece of wood the size of a railroad tie and told me, “that piece of ebony beside you is older than you are.” At one point Aaron even developed a software product to help others deal with regulatory compliance in exotic woods but could not get support within the agriculture department to market it.

Aaron’s prefers to build guitars in batches which range from four to eight guitars in a batch. Generally, it takes about a year to complete a batch of guitars. Most of the woodworking is done with hand tools rather than power tools because as Aaron describes it, “I work at machinist level tolerances with hand tools. Power tools require less skill but are simply not accurate enough to provide this precision.”

The guitar’s pieces are glued together with an animal hide glue which has been used by instrument makers for generations because it is both reversible and binary in that it is either holding or not—nothing in-between. Knowledge of this gluing process is critical when Aaron is repairing vintage instruments, which is yet another of his guitar-related businesses. If a failing joint on an instrument was glued with hide glue, it can easily be restored. The skill in restorations is often figuring out which glue was used by the original maker or on a previous repair.

A classical guitar’s finish is also made from an all-natural animal byproduct. The shellac used to finish Green’s guitars is actually ground-up shells of a beetle which is imported from India. Aaron mixes the finely ground shells with pure alcohol to make a finish which he applies to the guitar with a rag in the traditional “French polishing” technique. Here again regulations are challenging his choice of materials—pure alcohol cannot be sold in local stores in MA or NH, and in Vermont, it can be purchased only by a resident. If he needs alcohol to mix a batch of shellac, he needs to drive to a liquor store in Connecticut or Rhode Island.

Although the various piece parts of a batch of guitars cannot be done strictly in parallel due to limitations in the number of molds and other tools in the workshop, the batch is usually assembled, finished and fine tuned together. Once completed the current batch will be shipped to customers on both coasts of the US and as far away as China.

Green has another guitar-related businesses. Besides the classic guitar repair business, which he does with a collaborator, Aaron brokers sales of vintage instruments. These particular businesses came about as a circumstance of his early trips to New York City to learn his craft by viewing vintage instruments. He became a familiar face to these instruments’ owners and they began to ask him for help repairing, acquiring and selling their instruments.

Surprisingly, Aaron Green is not the only guitar maker in Groton. There are at least two other well-known professional guitar makers, Julius Borges and Tom Knatt performing their guitar-making craft in Groton. In addition Neil Ward, who operates a professional recording studio in town, is considered by the group to be a serious hobbyist guitar builder. Just across the Groton-Shirley town line Ken Fallon, who is the touring guitar technician for the Rolling Stones, and also operates a guitar building and repair business.

Although nobody can point to a single cause for this high concentration of skilled guitar craftsmen, Aaron for one is happy to be here. Aside from the pleasant environment for him and his wife to raise their family, Aaron appreciates Groton’s unique concentration of top musical talent in the area that can be heard at Indian Hill Music Center and at the Kalliroscope Gallery Concert Series.
There are pictures of Aaron, his workshop and a few of his guitars on the Groton Herald web site. Aaron’s own website is https://goo.gl/TDKDrG