Susan
Galloup (B’91) is testing a shipment of Sitka spruce from Alaska
to see if it makes the grade to become a top for a Galloup guitar. “I
was talking on the phone to the guy who sends it to me. He said that
all he’s got up there is God and a chainsaw. I started to laugh,
and then I realized he was serious,” Susan says, laughing anew
and wiping fragrant sawdust from her hands.
What
Susan and her husband Bryan are serious about is craftsmanship. From
their shop in Rogers Heights, just south of Big Rapids (a prefabricated
building that looks like the kind of place where circuit boards for
refurbished computers are assembled), they are making some of the best-made
acoustic guitars on the market. Producing about 100 instruments a year,
the Galloups are creating guitars to satisfy professional musicians,
serious amateurs or even weekend players who want an ax that at least
makes them look good.
Building
on the Basics
Appropriately,
Susan and Bryan met at a free concert in Big Rapids in the late 1980s,
when Susan was still a Ferris student. At that time, Bryan was establishing
his reputation as one of the best instrument repairers around. He learned
the trade from legendary builder and restorer Dan Erlewine who created
Albert King’s “Flying V” guitar as well as a custom model
for the late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia.
Together,
the Galloups are making a name for themselves in the micro-builder market
the old-fashioned way—by training craftsmen and bringing apprentice
workers into the business. The front of the Galloup’s building
is classroom space for up to eight students who learn both acoustic
and electric guitar construction and repair. At well-equipped worktables
students learn how to brace a guitar, join an instrument’s neck
to the body, apply a pickguard, install frets and sand the instrument
to a final finish.
Ferris
State founder Woodbridge Ferris would certainly approve of the Galloup’s
approach to teaching the craft. “Bryan will drill students in a
procedure over and over again until they have it down perfectly,”
Susan says. “A lot of our students are in the middle of changing
careers, so you’ve got to be sure when they leave they can go into
a place and get a job. If they can’t, you’ve failed—and
failure is not an option.”
Fretting
the Details
The
word that best summarizes a Galloup guitar is “clean.” When
Susan talks about how clean a Galloup instrument is, she means both
its construction and its design “When we make a guitar, we want
it so that you could take a mirror, look inside, and not see a bead
of glue or a sanding scratch.” The same goes for the guitar’s
look. A Galloup guitar has classic lines with masterful touches such
as a delicate three-ply maple strip mitered to highlight the instrument’s
heel, and the Galloup’s trademark inlaid open-ring silver fret
markers.
Which
is not to say the instruments don’t have their own sense of the
dramatic. That Sitka pine Susan meticulously checks for quality is also
being eyed for a “bear claw” pattern to the grain. The Galloups
look for the most pronounced grain they can find. A recent review of
their guitars took note of the amazing quality of the wood, saying the
tree it came from, “must have experienced hurricanes and tornadoes
and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes…to have produced wood so
beautifully disfigured.” The same review called the workmanship
inside the instrument, “unnaturally perfect,” and pronounced
its sound (the real test) “radiantly focused and boomingly loud,”
comparing it to a classic 1950s Gibson.
Given
the youth of Galloup’s employees, Susan sees such reviews as a
testament not only to Galloup’s craftsmanship, but to the their
school as well. Sam, who crafts the fine pieces of Sitka spruce into
tops, and makes sides and backs from maple, Amazon rosewood and Hawaiian
koa, is just 20-years old, while Russ, who works on making sure the
final product is flawless, is all of 24. Both are Galloup School grads.
The
Future Perfect
The
company plans to expand its workspace and increase production by as
many as 50 instruments a year, up to 250 a year—although Susan
and Bryan want to be sure they can produce those “unnaturally perfect”
guitars in that quantity.
The
Galloups look to the future buoyed by the success of their most popular
model, the G-2. Tired of the “dreadnought” style popularized
by the Martin company (a big, wide-bodied guitar), Susan designed a
more curvaceous instrument capable of the delicate tones of finger-picking
style, but still able to carry the broad sound of bluegrass. Their new
G-3 model has a slightly smaller body, and the rosette around the sound
hole is more elaborate, with a thin wood binding on both the inside
and outside of the abalone inlay.
At first,
Susan worried that the addition of the extra layers detracted from the
cleanliness of the design. Although she has changed her mind, it’s
the kind of thing both she and Bryan think deeply about. They know that
while God may be in the Sitka spruce, the devil is in the details. Galloup
guitars plan to keep mastering those details to make their guitars sound
as heavenly as humanly possible.
