DOUG KAUER GUITAR MAKER
More so than the makers, it’s probably the customers of the boutique-guitar market who have romanticised human hands: bodies and necks must be hand-carved, pickups hand-wound, finishes hand-sprayed. Ask makers to speak candidly, however, and many will admit to superior and more consistent results when automation is allowed to play its part. Doug Kauer, head of California-based Kauer Guitars and a luthier with a growing reputation, is one of them.
“There’s that question of how we can take something to a level that the hand simply cannot match,” says Kauer. “And that’s what blows my mind. The CNC is a legitimate tool that opens up all kinds of possibilities we didn’t have before, and then the Plek machine is the next level. We’ve been taking guitars that I thought were the pinnacle of my experience and the best-playing guitars I’ve ever done – and then you put them on the Plek and realise that they’re good but could be noticeably better.
“It’s amazing to see how many cottage industries have sprung up from people who are taking advantage of – and this is going to sound very bourgeois – the democratisation of technology,” he adds, “using CNC machines, CAD/CAM software and stuff like that.”
EX MACHINA
Stuff like that seems to come naturally to Kauer; it’s in his blood. He was born
