Sadowsky Guitars Ltd.
www.sadowsky.com
1600 Broadway #1000 New York, NY 10019, USA TEL ++1 212 586-3960 FAX ++1 212 765-5231 sadowsky@bway.net
Sadowsky guitars
Sadowsky Guitars is based in a quite unusual place for guitarbuilders: on the tenth (top) floor of an old skyscraper on Broadway / 48th Street, close to Times Square, in the middle of New York City. Roger Sadowsky started building acoustic guitars in 1972 and then worked in the repair trade in Philadelphia for 5 years before founding his own company on Broadway in 1979. Around 1980/81 he first thought of developing his own guitar models and building them, but found that among his clients and on the market in general there was a particularly great demand for Fender basses. They were liked best by sound engineers in recording studios because they caused little trouble. As a result,
Fender Jazz Basses or Precision Basses were generally preferred for recording.
Roger Sadowsky's basses are identical in shape with the Jazz Bass but have a slightly smaller body than the original and are therefore somewhat lighter. While the neck is almost a copy of the original, the shape of the peghead is unique and the trademark of his models. With these models he reflects the predominantly conservative tastes of bass and guitar players, and success has proven him right.
The door to the workshop is open for everbody from 9 to 5, Mondays to Fridays, and visitors are always welcome. Sadowsky employs five full-time staff and one part-time worker. The workshop is split up into several sections. Expensive wood with beautiful grain pattern is stored on the corridor next to the entrance. Another area serves as a repair-workshop and a third one is equipped for spray-finishing in the course of repair jobs, a dust collector exhausting the dust and fumes from the 10th floor straight into the clean air of New York. The main area of work of Sadowsky Guitars is repairing guitars; this also explains its rather unusual and expensive location: being situated so close to all the big recording studios on Broadway is indeed a great advantage when an urgent repair job is called for.
In the picture on the right you can see Roger Sadowsky filing a bone nut, and the one below shows Ken Fallon, the Vice-Presi- dent of Sadowsky Guitars, at work, tuning and setting the intonation of an acoustic guitar that has just been repaired.
Repaired instruments are stored in a separate room, and the bodies are fine-sanded in another. In the rear of the company premises there is a showroom where one of each of the models that can be ordered should be on display on the wall, waiting for a potential buyer to check them out. The walls are covered with greeting cards and pictures of musicians singing the praises of Sadowsky's instruments. Seeing so many well-known stars gathered there in this way was very impressive.
Before visiting Sadowsky Guitars I had expected to find all stages of the guitarbuilding process gathered there, on the New York premises. But like many other major guitarbuilding companies Sadowsky Guitars has moved with the times and has “outsourced” many steps of work: well wrapped up, the different parts leave the house several times to be given their final shape in workshops all over America. Neck blanks and fingerboards are sent to a CNC-router from where the custom-built necks return, with installed truss rod and glued-on and slotted fingerboard. Only first class timbers are used. The maple necks are made from flatsawn timber. The truss rods are ordinary compression rods. Rosewood or pau ferro are used for the fingerboard. The neck is then fine-sanded and fitted with frets on the 10th-floor premises in New York. Particular care is given to fret dressing.
The picture on the right shows Norio Imai, who, after attending a guitarbuilding school in Japan, joined Roger Sadowsky in 1990 and has been working for him ever since. Here he is busy dressing the frets. Being a left-hander, he finds working with the fret press with its right-hand side arm difficult; he therefore prefers the traditional method of knocking the frets in with a hammer. Otherwise all the frets at Sadowsky Guitars are pressed in. The neck that Norio is working on has some tiny imperfections which have been pencil-marked by the boss himself and need to be corrected.
The bodies are also routed outside New York. After returning there, the alder or swamp ash bodies, often with a figured maple top with pretty grain pattern, are carefully fine-sanded. Then the bodies and the necks leave the New York premises again for finishing before they return one more time for assembly, settingup and testing. All being well, they are then sold and never to return again.
One of the specialities of Roger Sadowsky's guitars is the builtin active electronics system. The picture on the right shows Chris Swope fitting such active electronics on the bass of one of Sadowsky's clients. Chris, who started as an amateur guitarbuilder, has been working for Sadowsky Guitars since 1995. Before applying for work with his present employer he built his first
Paul Reed Smith Guitars www.prsguitars.com
107 Log Canoe Circle
Stevensville, MD 21666, USA
TEL ++1 410-643-9970
FAX ++1 410-643-9980
guitars by assembling ready-made Warmouth necks and bodies. He told me that he considered the fact that he had had no special training when he joined Sadowsky Guitars as an advantage because he could learn everything from scratch and did not have to change any of his ways of doing things. All the work at Sadowsky Guitars is done with the greatest care. With his good reputation at stake Roger Sadowsky understandably demands work of the highest quality from his employees – a 3000-dollar guitar obviously has to be near-perfect.
Sadowsky Guitars also builds Strat-style guitars with beautiful curly-maple tops. Another model which is in high demand is a feedback-free Electric Nylon String Guitar with piezo pickup.
PRS guitars
PRS Guitars is based in the U.S. state of Maryland, about two hours east of Washington D.C. by car. Soon after Annapolis and after crossing the 4-mile (7km)-long bridge spanning Cheaspeake Bay you get to Stevensville, where the PRS factory is situated within a large industrial park on the outskirts of town. When I was there, the air in this area was unpleasantly muggy and humid. A huge gas tank in front of the building is needed to heat the factory and to keep the humidity of the air inside the factory at a constant level (55 per cent). There are guided tours every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday starting at 1:30 p.m.
Paul Reed Smith, the founder of the company, is himself a musician; he built his company, which now employs more than 70 people and is known across the globe, virtually out of nothing. He built is first guitar as a school project and got an “A” for it; it is now on display in the lobby of the factory.
Being a good cross between a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul with a scale length of its own (25"), PRS Guitars combine “the best of two worlds”. The beautiful timbers used, the first-class finishing, the quality of work and the good sound have earned these guitars world-wide fame. But to get there was not easy. Paul Reed Smith writes that when he started he used to
hang around for hours at the local concert arenas trying to make friends with the roadies who set up the stage, hoping to get a backstage pass which would enable him to peddle his guitars to whoever was playing that night and to have them checked out by a star. In this way he would manage to sell about one guitar in ten nights. With his first guitars he drove around, from music shop to music shop, until he had got enough orders to start his own company. With the help of his wife, assistants, engineers, lawyers, salesmen, machinists and friends he acquired the necessary know-how and capital enabling him to finally found
PRS Guitars.
These days PRS Guitars has its own wood buyers who supply the company with wood from all over the world. In well-heated rooms this wood is then rough-cut to the dimensions needed for the bodies and the necks, as well as being stored and dried to about 5 per cent moisture content. In the so-called “private stock” the most-beautifully-grained wood can be found, which is only used for the tops of very special guitars. I also saw big stacks of first-class rosewood fingerboards, just waiting to be used.
The bodies are glued together with a special UV-glue that hardens within 60 seconds when exposed to an electric current. Most PRS guitars have a a maple top glued onto a mahogany body. After the body has been rough-cut on the bandsaw it is moved to a CNC (computerized, numerically controlled) milling machine.
The rough-cut neck is then dried a second time now. Its strangelooking shape makes stacking easier.
PRS Guitars uses computer-controlled milling so that the typical PRS body shapes can be cut from the blanks in a very short time. The movements of the milling machine, moving line by line and layer by layer over the wood surface, can be followed in a long coordinates list displayed on a computer screen.
The router table with the body fastened on it can be moved forward, backward and sideways, and the router itself can be raised or lowered by computer. The whole appliance is placed behind two glass sliding doors and has a system for collecting wood chips integrated into it.
But before the curve is routed, the body is placed with the top facing downwards on the table and the body, the electronic cavity and the tremolo spring cavity are cut out.
In the same (computer-controlled) way the necks plus angled peghead are cut from one single block of wood.
By manufacturing the guitars on the assembly line, where a lot of people do the same bit of specialized work every day, 700 guitars are made each day. The workers have a four-day, 40-hour working week.
After the body has been routed it just needs fine-sanding. Because the body has two horns and the front pickup is fitted
right next to the end of the fingerboard, the neck has a speciallyshaped heel which allows inserting the heel under the neck pickup. Small pieces of wood are glued to the peghead to save material. After the truss rod has been installed the fingerboard is glued on and the entire neck is fine-sanded. The frets are pressed in after the application of a bit of glue on the fret ends.
PRS Guitars' great speciality is finishing. All bodies are stained with a mixture of waterand alcohol-based stains to highlight the pretty grain pattern of flamed maple or curly maple. Before the finish is applied all the grease is removed from the wood by wiping on naphta and at the same time the “highlighted” surface is carefully inspected for flaws. The man who does this (pictured on the left) takes his job very seriously.
The top of the body and the fingerboard are masked with tape and several coats of finish are applied. Regular sanding is required in between coats. These are applied in the following order: first three coats of polyester finish, then the color coats and finally four coats of polyurethane finish. The thickness of
each coat is carefully measured and all coats are applied as thinly as possible. After the final coat has been applied the guitar is hung up for some time and allowed to dry before being buffed and polished to a perfect finish on big buffing wheels.
The mounting of the electronics made me think of an operating room: the entire body as well as the neck and the peghead of the guitar were fully covered with a cloth and only the control cavity was visible.
PRS Guitars even winds its own pickups. On the self-developed winding machine three coils can be wound at a time before they are fitted together in pairs as humbuckers. As I noticed with envy, PRS Guitars has no difficulty getting hold of flat magnets – the large quantities they need put them in a better position in that respect than the smaller guitarbuilder who needs much smaller quantities. All kinds of flat magnets, ceramic ones as well as Alnico 2, 4 and 5, are there, all ready for use.
The wound pickups are exposed to a vacuum in a hot waxbath; this serves to remove any air from, and to better saturate, the windings. The wax is kept from getting too hot by means of glass marbles floating in it and cooling it down.
As so often with things you enjoy, the guided tour I took part in at PRS Guitars was over far too soon. And although I got a good general idea of what goes on there, some questions about details I wanted to ask only came to mind when it was too late.
Taking pictures in the finishing room was not permitted for reasons of safety. If you are interested, PRS will send you a 15minute “factory video tape” (VHS-NTSC format; cost: approx. US$ 5) that will also give you an insight into the production process at PRS Guitars.