You Will Be a Builder of Musical Instruments

By Edward Victor Dick

Edward Victor Dick began life as a simple farm boy but was always attracted to music. Growing up amidst the cultural revolution of the 1960's was fertile ground for his exceptionally active imagination. A dramatic epiphany in his early 20's led him to pursue a career as a builder of musical instruments. This is the story of that journey, how he navigated the world of guitar-making and lutherie, and some of the the musicians he met along the way. It describes the obstacles he had to overcome, what he learned, and the philosophy he developed as a professional musician and a builder of musical instruments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667862767

Book preview

Before the Beginning

This is the tale of my life as a luthier. It is not my complete life story by any means, but it is the account of my work and my passion and the vocation that some would say I have been obsessed with for the past 50 years.

Nor is the tale over yet.

But I do want to scribble down some of these stories before they get lost in the sawdust, swept up, and recycled with the rest of humanity.

First I need to provide some context—some background about who I am and how I came to be.

I grew up the middle child in a family of seven in a small town called Leamington at the very southern tip of Ontario, Canada. Same latitude as northern California—handy info if you are in a geography trivia quiz.

We had a small farm where we grew peaches, potatoes, asparagus, corn, cabbage, cauliflower, green beans, tobacco and tons of tomatoes. Leamington is known as the tomato capital of Canada and the home of Heinz Ketchup. There was even a monument of a giant tomato smack dab in the center of town.

Everyone was expected to help on the farm and so I was working at a very early age. One of my earliest memories is walking alongside my mother in the asparagus field at age two or three, carefully cutting spears of asparagus with a very sharp paring knife and placing them in her basket.

I loved tools, learning new things, and working on the farm. My parents were very good at turning tedious tasks into games— counting how many baskets of peaches we could pick or bags of potatoes we could harvest in a single day. I was encouraged to continuously work harder, and be more efficient in my movements.

I mention this because later in my career it turned out to be a very useful habit.

Dad also employed a very clever strategy of rewarding good work results with ever increasing degrees of responsibility. I remember how proud I felt when I was finally allowed to go off on a tractor all on my own to till the land.

The work was arduous and dirty and I grumbled a lot, but secretly I enjoyed most of it.

I loved playing any and all sports and was reasonably adept at most things. I spent a good deal of my youth believing I would grow up to be a professional hockey player.

As a hockey player in 1959 and 1969

I learned to trust in my instinct when trying to accomplish things. I took risks easily and often, made many mistakes and had numerous injuries, but always seemed to recover quickly. I was good at doing things I liked and reasonably clever at avoiding those I didn’t.

As a child it was often suggested that I had an over-active imagination. I couldn’t (and still don’t) understand why people didn’t use their imagination to create the world they wanted instead of the one they were presented with.

There was a little country airport a mile away. I would frequently find myself staring at the sky watching airplanes take off and land, and creating stories about where they were going or where they had been. Imagining myself flying off into the unknown someday.

We were Mennonites and so my family went to church a lot, didn’t drink, didn’t dance, and spent a good amount of energy in a sincere effort to be righteous. It was a good wholesome life but one I sometimes found boring. I seemed compelled to do what I could to disrupt things—if for no other reason than to make things more interesting—and of course much to the chagrin of my parents.

School was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I had frequent conflicts with my teachers and issues with authority in general. Homework was not my thing—if I didn’t have farm work to do when I got home, I wanted to play. While in the classroom I would typically do homework for one subject while pretending to listen to another. This worked out pretty well until the 9th or 10th grade when I gave up on homework entirely. My arrogant (and perhaps correct) belief was that if you couldn’t learn it in class, it wasn’t worth remembering.

I attended a Mennonite private high school at the unequivocal insistence of my parents. My father had not been allowed to go to high school himself —he was needed on the family farm—and so naturally he was very keen on education and went on to become chairman of the school board.

But this was the 1960’s, the age of social change and rebellious youth. I aspired to be a hippie. This didn’t at all mix well with my austere Mennonite environment and in the end it proved to be a great motivator for me to me to leave home sooner rather than later.

This is about my life as a luthier, however, and so perhaps I should talk about music in my childhood.

In my early years there wasn’t much. We sang in church and my sisters played piano. As a young child I loved singing - I even sang a solo at the church Christmas concert when I was six.

In the fourth grade I am eager to join the school choir. One afternoon we are practicing for a local competition when the director stops us mid-song to ask, Who is making that horrible droning sound?

I am standing beside a tall boy by the name of Roger, and he points directly at me. I am stunned and embarrassed. And promptly removed from the choir.

Thus ended my singing career—it took me at least 10 years to open my mouth in song again. To this day I am curious as to whether or not it truly was me…

My love for music went underground but in the 8th grade I tentatively asked my father if I could take piano lessons like my sisters. His response was to ask if I was willing to give up hockey. This, for me, was simply not an option.

In my high school, as in most, students divided themselves into one of two groups—the jocks and the artsy-fartsy types. I liked playing sports but found my teammates tedious and trivial and so I sought out those at the other end of societal spectrum.

There was a group of four boys who had a band and they became the envy of my eye. I did whatever I could to befriend them, even pretending to be their manager. By this time the belief that I myself was not musical was firmly entrenched. However, I came up with the idea that perhaps I could become a drummer and I would regularly go out to the barn and bang on paint cans.

I also practiced at the dinner table, using my fork and knife as drumsticks and assorted plates and bowls as my percussion devices. I’m not sure my family appreciated my rhythmic interpretations.

As a teenager, one of my favorite activities was to go with my father to the township dump every month or so. The purpose of this was obviously to get rid of stuff but if I insisted loudly enough, I was also allowed bring one thing back home. I sought out speakers and radios and slowly built up a nice little stash of electronics.

My basement bedroom became a workshop and with a bit of experimental tinkering I actually managed to get some of these contraptions to work. I had an old cabinet style radio from the 1920’s with five bands of frequency. I hooked the antenna up to the lightning rods of our house and this worked great until late one night I was awakened in the midst of a lightning storm by a giant explosion and the smell of burnt wires. Fortunately, the house didn’t catch fire but I did have some ‘splainin’ to do.

I managed to get the radio working again, alas with a more moderate antenna. I would sit late at night (with a very early set of earbuds so my parents wouldn’t know that I was still awake) and dial in stations from North Carolina and Oklahoma. Occasionally I even got Cuba and what I thought might be Russia. I salvaged a