Potter had postponed our interview due to an emergency repair on a musician’s guitar that had been “smashed by an airline.” The guitar’s owner, who remains a mystery, was headlining that weekend at “a rather large show at a high-profile London venue,” Potter said.
“It’s way more rock and roll than my usual work,” he added.
But there is a rock and roll of sorts that can be heard from his workshop in the New Forest National Park in England. It’s more the roll of hand planes over wood, and the rocking of a hundred-year-old handsaw to split timber.
Potter shared by phone how he came to his craft and how he translates the traits of the timber into making the finest traditional instruments.
I had been rather unwell as a teenager, and I was looking at options. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. I’ve always loved instruments, and I’ve always been fascinated with carpentry. I found there was a course running in London that I could take, part-time, if I needed to. I turned up on the first day, barely knowing which end of a chisel was which.
It quite confused my granddad at the time, who was really happy that I was going to university, but very surprised that I was going to university to learn to be a carpenter. You have to remember that for the majority of his career, he was working at a time when craftsmanship was kind of taken for granted. If you were a carpenter, that wasn’t necessarily considered a very highly skilled, very highly respected, or particularly well-paid occupation. He, therefore, saw it as a difficult way of earning a living. I had to explain to him that things had changed a bit since then, because there are far fewer people that have these skills. They are more valued, and you now have a lot more control over the work that you do.
It was only when I started bringing him the things that I was making, and he was actually able to hold them and see them, and to see that what I was doing he would consider to be a good job, that he actually really opened up about his experience and started passing on some of the wisdom that he'd acquired over the many years of his career.
It is a job where, generally, once you get established, people do it for a very long time. Certainly, in 10 years’ time, you are going to find a huge imbalance in the number of people who are retiring against the number of new people who are starting.
This has caused a certain number of problems. Firstly, there are a very limited number of trees in the world that fit the criteria. This has led to overexploitation of certain species—not purely for musical instrument making, but certain species are now essentially endangered that people consider to be traditional guitar woods. Things like rosewoods, in particular, ebony, mahogany, mostly tropical timbers that in the past were taken in huge quantities out of South America, the Amazon Rain Forest, West Africa, and from the islands in the Indian Ocean.
We use a lot of spruce in instrument making, and spruce is an incredibly common tree. But the spruce that is good enough is a tiny fraction of the total number of the trees in the world. So even the little pockets that tend to be growing at very high altitudes in the mountains have to be carefully managed now. We have to become a little more creative with the timber that we’re using and where we’re getting it from.
With my workshop in the forest, I am able to source materials as locally as possible, rather than relying on imported timbers. By working with local tree surgeons, I can sometimes even visit the site where the tree is felled and work out which parts can be used as it is being cut. In some cases, I’m going to where the trees are stored and looking at an entire tree that has been cut into planks and choosing one or two planks so that I‘ll know they’ll make a good instrument. It’s a very time-consuming process.
When you’ve got the timber that you’ve decided you want to use in front of you, you then have to be able to interpret it, understand it to a degree, so that you can plan how you are going to use it: what the particulars of this instrument are going to be. Because when you are building instruments, you can never make them from a completely identical template. You have to work with the material that’s in front of you to get the best results.
That really is what sets a handmade instrument apart from a factory-made instrument. A factory-made instrument will have every single part machined to exactly the same dimensions, regardless of what the piece of timber looks like or what its properties are. Whereas, no two handmade guitars are ever quite the same.
After that point, almost everything that I do is done by hand. People sometimes expect I would use machinery for cutting the wood to the correct dimensions and getting things to the correct thickness. But I greatly prefer to do everything with hand tools, because all the time you are doing it, you are monitoring how the wood is moving, how it’s flexing, how thick it needs to be in this place that might be different from how thick it needs to be in that place, and so on.
If you were to visit my workshop, honestly, it looks like it’s a carpenter’s workshop from 100 years ago, in many respects. I have old-fashioned handsaws, a dozen different kinds of planes and chisels, carving chisels, and rasps and files, and all the old hand tools that are not very fashionable in these days of electric saws and drills and everything like that. But it does ultimately produce a better product, although it obviously is a far more time-consuming way of going about things.
For a full-sized guitar (I do make some smaller instruments), they’re going to start at about 1,500 pounds (approximately $1,970), which is low for a handmade guitar. I am still fairly early in my career and trying to build a reputation, so it’s more important that I can keep making them and consistently selling them. The price is equivalent to a mid-ranged Gibson, Martin, or one of any number of well-known brands. On the one hand, it’s not incredibly expensive, but on the other hand, you are also competing with that share of the market, which is not always easy.
There are a number of comments that I always get. The first one is that they’re incredibly lightweight, which always makes me laugh. It’s true, because factory-built guitars are often overbuilt to compensate for the fact that everything is made to the same dimensions, so they’re built for tolerance, where theoretically nothing will ever break, which is why they’re heavier than they need to be.
It does tend to surprise people who’ve never played a handmade guitar, because they feel different, they sound different, and they’re very easy to play. That’s because a lot of attention is paid to the setup. This covers small but important details like leveling, reshaping, and polishing all of the frets by hand; and making sure that the strings are the optimum height from the fretboard by making tiny alterations to the slots in the nut and the height of the saddle at the bridge. These adjustments can take a solid couple of hours on a new instrument, and there is no real way of automating the process. You need a skilled person to sit down and do the work. That doesn’t necessarily happen on a factory-made guitar.
It’s a lovely feeling to hear something that you have spent hours of your life making, in the hands of someone who can really play.
