Haines custom guitar maker strikes a cord with experience

"The only thing that exists is that edge and the wood that it's moving through," Haines luthier Rob Goldberg said as he worked with a chisel, carving the braces that will hold a guitar's sound boards together.

"You can't be thinking about what you're going to have for dinner or thinking about your girlfriend or thinking about anything else."

He speaks from decades of experience, building world-class custom instruments at his Mud Bay workshop, several miles south of downtown Haines.

That attention to detail and artistry has brought Goldberg praise from musicians around the country who have had the chance to strum one of the 65 guitars he's produced in his career. He learned the craft in Massachusetts, operated his own shop in the 1970s, and then took a hiatus until 2008 after he settled in Haines.

Now, guitar making - along with painting - are his main crafts, despite the challenges of doing it from the isolated town. He works late into the night from his modest shop covered with tools and mementos from his decades of practicing the art.

"He is the official mad scientist - you look that up in the dictionary and that's Rob," said Richard Gilewitz, a Chicago-based fingerpicker who plays a Goldberg guitar. "He looks like a character out of Lord of the Rings."

The instruments sell at a starting price of $6,000 - not cheap, but affordable compared to other custom guitars, Goldberg said. And each of them is a work of art customized for the person playing it.

He will talk to musicians sometimes for hours to figure out everything from the ideal shape of the guitar to make it ergonomic, the type of wood so that its characteristics match their style, and the motifs on the elaborate inlays of glass or abalone.

"Based on what people are getting for custom-made guitars, his are a bargain," said Tony Tengs, a musician who grew up in Haines. "He puts a lot of soul into them and he's an artist."

Musicians like Tengs say Goldberg's guitars sound better than even top-notch, brand-name guitars like Taylor and Martin.

Goldberg said that's largely because of the care he takes carving the bracing. Instead of flat, straight pieces of wood that hold the top of a guitar like two-by-fours, Goldberg carves the bracing into elegant curves thicker where the tension is highest and lighter where the strings aren't pulling against the soundboard. That saves weight and allows the instruments to sing.

"The lighter you can make the bracing the more it will sing, but too light and strings will pull it apart," he said. "There's a lot of art and craft that goes into sculpting these."

Wood used for the soundboards and bodies of the guitar can also have a big impact on the sound.

In 2010, Goldberg saw the need for a resonant guitar to match Haines musician Burl Sheldon's deep, strong voice. He settled on a large-bodied guitar he designed with a custom template with a Sitka spruce soundboard, a strong and stable wood that could take Sheldon's physically powerful playing style.

"The back and sides are Cocobolo, a rosewood that reflects back all the high harmonics. The rosewood sounds really crisp and clean," said Goldberg.

For a newcomer to guitar like Juneau musician Marian Call, Goldberg chose a more forgiving curly maple.

For Call's guitar, he added several other touches. Call had mentioned the discomfort from playing guitars. "She said, 'Every guitar I've ever held feels like a bad bra. It just cuts into my side.' And I said, oh, I can take care of that," said Goldberg.

His solution was a bevel on the back edge of the guitar, which will hopefully solve the problem.

Goldberg also puts days into the inlays and aesthetics of the guitar. For Call, he chose a sea-green gingko leaf Art Deco design he found online bordered in copper. The rosette around the sound hole has 124 pieces - four pieces for each leaf. There are other lines of alternating black and white wood pressed around the sound hole too.

"You just have to have a lot of patience to carry through something like that," he said.

For Call, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest collecting abalone and sea glass, he decided to add one more custom touch: a pale green lacquering over the back and sides to harken back to her oceanside upbringing.

"It just sort of matches her personality too," he said.

A guitar he designed for Washington-based musician Tracy Spring has silvery formline figures that dance up and down the neck from the first fret to the last. The design caught the attention of guitar builders from around the country at an annual guitar-making festival she and Goldberg attended, Spring said.

"He said he was gonna blind the first two rows of the audience," said Spring.

Hanging from the wall of Goldberg's shop are two unfinished sound boards with intricate inlays and jarring cracks down the middle. They're casualties from the ever-changing humidity, which presents one of the biggest challenges to his operation.

A hygrometer hangs near the entrance of the shop. He regularly looks up at it to make sure it's sitting somewhere between 30% and 40% humidity. A dehumidifier hums behind him.

In October, when the temperature drops, the humidity can drop suddenly from near 100% to 10%. If Goldberg's not there at that moment of that transition to turn off the dehumidifier and plug in the humidifier, his months of work could be lost.

"I've ended up making new soundboards on a couple guitars because they've cracked," he said. "It's really frustrating."

There's also the issue of getting the guitars out of town. Goldberg is ultra-particular about his packing, first placing it in a fiberglass case he orders from Amazon. He puts the case in a box with padding, and puts that inside a bike box before shipping.

There are some advantages of working in Haines - namely the wood. Upstairs above his shop he has hundreds of soundboards made from the hefty Sitka spruce logs he's shipped in from Hoonah and Thorne Bay.

He cuts the spruce into wedges that he saws into thin sheets before letting them dry.

Building a guitar can take upward of 200 hours, so the hundreds of soundboards are far too many for Goldberg to use in his own lifetime. He said he sells the soundboards to guitar makers around the country.

Guitar making holds a special place in his heart. "Paintings are nice to look at. But I've never seen one that could get a room full of people up and dancing."