My luthier’s career

A love of music and woodworking skills do not make you a luthier

Lew Dite on autoharp singing Katy Dear

By Stephen Pate – This morning I put Ian Sylvia’s Four Strong Winds and three songs in Sylvia starts strumming the autoharp.

Boy that brought back memories of the 1960s. Before I got my first good guitar, a 1969 Gibson J-45, I had an autoharp just like the one in the amateur video of Katy Dear. Sylvia Tyson had a more expensive one but mine worked pretty well.

Along with strumming on an old Yamaha guitar, I could hold my own on the autoharp back then. It’s not that hard. You only have to push down on the buttons to get chords while strumming in time. Back then Yamaha guitars were one step up from the Star guitar. Today they are pretty good mid-range guitars.

Autoharps were very popular with hill music like the Carter Family. Mother Maybelle Carter played the autoharp. Judy Collins played one in the 1960s – that was very folkie. And Sylvia Tyson played one.

Oscar Schmidt had the market cornered and still does. I plunked down about $185 for mine and played it for 5 or 6 years at parties, hootenannies and on the doorstep at 3 am some nights in heat of those Montreal summers.

After getting the Gibson, it occurred to me that my autoharp wasn’t very loud. For some reason, Oscar Schmidt made a series of them with no sound holes.

Then Oscar Schmidt realized their mistake and started making them with sound holes again.

What was I to do having an Autoharp with no sound hole playing against a very loud Gibson?

Did I tell you in Jr. High and High School I won the Shop prize every year? I made all sorts of wooden things, including bookcases but had never attempted a musical instrument except bongo drums. I saw a guy make a Fender Strat in shop once. With me it was mostly bowls and bookcases.

One Saturday morning, like this one, I decided it was time to add a sound hole to my autoharp. Couldn’t be that hard. I’m a musician and a woodworker I thought.

So out came the tools, off came the autoharp strings and within a few hours I had the most wonderful sound hole in the autoharp. There was some sort of wood behind the autoharp top, a strut they told me later. I sanded it off like the sound hole, put a little lacquer on it and re-stringed the thing.

It was almost great. It didn’t sound much louder. The hole didn’t have those fancy white rings like in the picture. Friends asked if I had done it myself. I had to tell the truth since I was a JW back then and they always tell the painful truth.

The results were less than splendid so I put the autoharp away in its case, in the closet. The Gibson J-45 is a great rhythm guitar. All my spare time was spent practicing Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot songs on the Gibson.

A year later on another Saturday I was looking for the autoharp and took it out. Somehow the sides had come to meet the middle. The top had risen up and was pressing against the strings, in the middle where the sound hole was.  There was a crack from the top to the bottom.

The luthier at Steve’s Music said I’d cut the main support strut making the hole and ruined it. He was right and that was the end of my career as a luthier.

These days I take all my instruments to Denis Larocque. He’s got the training and experience not to wreck stuff. I do change my own strings though.

One of these days I am going to replace my broken Autoharp. They aren’t that expensive at Amazon.com.

Featured image – Miss Bargain Huntress – exactly like mine before I ruined it.