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Pat Webster
Pat Webster and her lapsteel with Fimo inlay.
Building The Music – Talks with a Door County Luthier
By Roger Kuhns
20 November 2001 for NewMonth Magazine
Have you ever thought of playing a guitar? Even if you do play one, have you ever thought of building your own guitar? In the tableaux of musical fellowship the writers and players and aficionados afford the luthier a special status in the ranks because without a fine instrument the music cannot be played.
Webster makes all sorts of instruments, such as this hurdy gurdy.
The making of musical instruments from fundamental materials found in the forests and hills is as old as human vocalizations. Most of our modern instruments have origins rooted deep within indigenous cultures around the world. Some, such as African and Southeast Asian drums, Indian stringed instruments, and South American woodwinds have become objects of intrigue and utility as young people rediscover unusual sounds and apply them to modern music. But these innovations are not constrained to the past, and are in fact on-going right here in Wisconsin. Door County is blessed with an abundance of music makers, from the classical and percussion-oriented performances at Birch Creek, to the wide variety of coffee house musicians, rock bands in the bars, blues, ethnic and pop performances at the Door Community Auditorium and Camp David, the wonderful traditional and original music performances of the American Folklore Theater, and many others. Amid all of these performers there is one person in particular who endeavors to build musical instruments. That person is self-taught luthier Pat Webster. Pat lives with her husband Bruce and their three cats in Sturgeon Bay. She’s been playing music since she was a young girl, having learned on her mother’s old arch-top Maxwell guitar.
I first became aware of Pat’s craftsmanship when I spotted one of her original electric guitars and the ever-interesting hurdy-gurdy at Sturgeon Bay’s Java On Jefferson coffee shop. I learned that she made her first instrument, a dulcimer, from a kit about fifteen years ago. That was what really hooked her, and she’s been building musical instruments ever since. Pat is originally from Cedarburg, just north of Milwaukee, and attended college at Stevens Point where she studied art and biology. Her claim to fame from that era is her illustrations in the book “The Prairie Garden” by Robert and Beatrice Smith (1980, UW press). In 1984 she moved to Sturgeon Bay and now works as a drivers license examiner for the State. Says Pat, “All my free time is spent building instruments.”
The walnut resonater with parts scrounged from junk shops - the creative solution to making instruments!
In the family of stringed instruments, guitars have captured the bigger part of Pat’s imagination. She has constructed lap steel, resophonic, acoustic Weissenborn-style (with hollow necks), and electric guitars, as well as several dulcimers, a hurdy-gurdy and a mandolin. She also makes cigar box and cookie tin banjos. Innovators such as Christian Frederick Martin and Orville Gibson in the mid-1800s developed the modern guitar styles. Pat is perfecting her design techniques with the same creative flair, and an open mind to new styles and designs. One of her favorite guitar types is the resophonic guitar, also known as a “resonator guitar”, so called because of the metal amplifying resonator cone set inside the guitar where the sound hole would be on acoustic guitars. A famous example of a resophonic guitar is the National. These early 1900’s design instruments had metal bodies and the resonator amplified the sound in the days before high-quality sound systems were used. The Dobro is a similar type resonator, but its internal parts are of a different design.
An example of a National-style guitar Pat has built is her black walnut bodied brown resonator with the cherry neck and black walnut fret board. When Pat plays her resonator guitar the distinctive hybrid guitar/banjo-in-a-can sound emanates from the instrument. It is a rich pleasing sound.
Pat’s innovativeness is in her 9-string guitar design. Why build a 9-string guitar? Pat said, “I thought I’d just make this design up to see if I could do it and how it would sound.” This guitar has the first three string positions (the G, B and high E strings) doubled like a mandolin or 12-string guitar. So this is sort of a 6- and 12-string guitar hybrid. The 9-string guitar has a cherry back and sides, a cedar top, mahogany neck and lacewood fretboard and headstock.
Heres an example of one of Webster's custom spalted maple electric guitars.
Although Pat on occasion uses exotic wood types in her instrument construction, she favors the use of local native species. Black walnut, cherry and maple are three that she uses often. For example she used a spalted maple on one of her 6-string electric guitar designs. The spalting pattern is caused by a virus that attacked the wood when still alive, leaving behind a black marbled pattern. On her blond National-style resonator guitar she has used worm-tracked sugar maple for the top, birds eye maple on the fretboard and headstock, black walnut with a bit of flame for the body inlayed with strips of cherry.
Inlay work on a guitar gives the instrument distinctiveness and adds to its beauty. Pat uses mother of pearl for some of her inlay work, but has also come up with some creative and attractive alternatives. On a guitar neck, most commonly starting at the third fret and continuing up between every other fret are small round inlay dots (to help the guitar player immediately identify which fret he or she is about to chord). Pat has come up with the idea of using thin cuts of aluminum tubing in-filled with plastic Fimo modeling clay instead of commonly used white plastic or mother of pearl. The Fimo is baked at 270oF, and then inlayed into the guitar. She also noticed that if aluminum is used then it does not tarnish like silver wire sometimes applied to inlay patterns. These alternatives of metal and plastic let her inlay with many colors and styles not easily done with traditional inlay materials.
These innovations are one aspect of Pat’s endeavors as a luthier. But one of the most interesting aspects of her instrument building, especially the resonator, is her search for unusual building materials. A fine example of this is on a 7-string resophonic electric lapsteel guitar where, as Pat says, “Standard parts just wouldn’t work and I had to be creative about it”. For the metal resonator cone she used a 1950’s vintage spun aluminum popcorn bowl she found in a junk shop. The cover plate is simply a steel pan lid with a hole in the middle and a hand rest added. This she set into light-colored aspen wood and used standard electric pickups to electrify the laptop guitar. On her walnut resophonic 6-string guitar she used a fancy serving dish from the junk store as the cover plate. In this way Pat has made a unique instrument, and that’s creative guitar making at its best.
A nice example of Webster's lapsteel resophonic guitars.
When asked what is the most difficult aspect of guitar making, Pat said without hesitation, “Time!” She wants more time to practice her craft. But a very challenging part of making a guitar is ensuring the fretboard is perfect. If the frets are not correctly placed, then it will not let the player chord the strings properly: this will sound terrible! Therefore much care is spent measuring and setting the frets. Pat does all of this work in her basement with a simple assortment of tools. Between her modest workbench and the washing machine she’s set up her drill press, router, board planer, belt sander, table and band saw, and a home made wood bender. Her husband Bruce made the wood bender, which is a length of fat pipe with a 500w halogen bulb inside and soup cans on the ends – this heats up enough to allow the one sixteenth inch thick strips of water-soaked hard wood to be bent into guitar body shapes. Pat spends one to two months of time to make a guitar.
The often long and solitary craft of guitar construction stands in sharp contrast to the very public performances in which the guitar is commonly played. A talented luthier is the first very important link towards music performance by virtue of building a quality instrument for the player. Pat Webster is traveling down the luthier road by building quality instruments and I, for one, hope that I will one day be playing one of her guitars in one of my performances.
NOTE: Pat Webster can be contacted through her website at www.geocities.com/lapsteel.geo/ or by e-mail at bwebster@itol.com or phone (920) 743-8126. She does take orders to custom build guitars.
