Applying For the Apprenticeship
On the bottom of the contact page of Ervin Somogyi’s website, he has a section titled Apprenticeship Opportunities. While looking there for a different reason, I saw that and it got me thinking. I decided to write and enquire about it. I heard back from Ervin. The first steps were some references, some photos of my work, and a letter about myself.
Here is that letter:
Dear Mr. Somogyi,
Thank you for the information about a possible apprenticeship. After thinking about it carefully, I’ve decided to write this letter telling you about myself, and the reasons why I want to study with you, in order to start the evaluation procedure.
A bit about my life and journey into guitar making.
I was born in May 1993 in New Britain Connecticut. I was lucky enough to have a background in music from a young age. Like many kids, I started out with piano lessons. Around 10, I picked up the French horn, which I played for several years in school and various other local bands. I started playing guitar at age 13, first on a steel string acoustic, then electric.
In January 2009, when I was 15, my family and I moved to Rotorua, New Zealand. It was initially going to be for 6 months, but we liked it so decided to stay. There, I completed my final three years of high school, and then moved to Wellington, where I studied Music Composition at New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University.
The story now moves to my dad. For as long as I can remember, his hobby has been woodworking. He has made most of the furniture in my parents’ house. I have some early memories of “helping” in the workshop, there are photos of me in there, a small child hard at work. When we moved to New Zealand, he brought with him most of his hand tools, and eventually he set up a workshop in a large shed next to the house. While I was at university, he went for a guitar building course, where he built a Les Paul style guitar, and gave it to me as a gift. I wanted to upgrade the instrument, so I took it to a local guitar tech. At the time he was looking for someone to help in his shop, so he ended up taking me on, where I did mostly fretwork, setups, and some basic upgrades. I learned a lot while there and became curious about the possibility of making a guitar. In order to do that, I enlisted my dad’s help, and together that’s what we did. At the time, I was working part-time doing the fretwork and setups, while simultaneously doing various unskilled jobs. Looking for a change, but unsure of which direction to go next, I decided to take some time to travel. I bought a flight to San Francisco, with the intention of making my way from there down to Patagonia. I spent a few weeks in the USA, then headed into Mexico continuing south through Central America and South America. When I set out, I didn’t know what I’d do when I got back. But at some point, late in the trip, the idea of working as a luthier formed in my mind. Dad’s workshop was already there, that’s where I could work while living at home at first to keep expenses down. I had the experience from doing the setups, I’d already made one guitar, what more did I need?
After 7 months I reached Patagonia and returned to New Zealand via Buenos Aires. I moved back in with my parents and started working in dad’s shed building guitars. I started a company, Hamurana Guitar Works Ltd, and after a year and a half and 8 electric guitars built, I managed to sell my first one. The learning curve was steep at first, but little by little, I managed to develop some skills, and create a somewhat reliable process. Although I was just doing solid body electrics at the time, I had an interest in acoustics and I purchased your Responsive Guitar books, along with a couple others on the topic. Just as I felt some momentum building for my business, COVID hit, and we went into lockdown. I took that as an opportunity to finally do what I had been thinking about for a while. I set about figuring out how, and then building an acoustic. My learning process for this (and other things) was pretty simple. First, get a rough picture in my head of the entire thing, all the parts and how they go together. Books are good for this, they are mostly organized in a systematic way to cover all aspects. Then, start making it. When I come up against something I don’t know, go find out the answer either in a book, on the internet, or just by thinking about it/drawing it. The first time through the process is very slow, constantly searching for information and figuring things out. I type up my whole process as I go, then when I realize my mistakes and figure out easier ways to do things, I can go back and edit the word document. That way, the next time through will be easier and I won’t make the same mistakes. Each build I update my process as I go. I do the same for all my other builds. This resulted in build number 014 on the gallery page of my website. In the process of building this guitar, I took in a huge amount of information, reading multiple books including your Responsive Guitar books, as well as spending countless hours trawling the internet looking for information. Through this experience I developed a fascination for the acoustic guitar. Because we were in lockdown, I was limited to using what I already had. There was some magic in pulling wood off my shelf, cutting, shaping, and gluing it back together in specific ways, resulting in a sound producing instrument consisting of not much more than the wood from the shelf. And throughout the process seeing how deep one can go in the quest to optimize the function of the instrument. The depth of knowledge, skill, art, and science of acoustic vs electric building is in my eyes, really chess vs checkers, day vs night, 3D vs 2D, color vs black and white. After completing that build, I continued doing mostly custom commissions of solid body electric guitars. I set aside time to build two additional acoustics, with the goal of selling them. Although I didn’t track time for the first acoustic build, the second and third each took me in the range of 400-500 hours per build (this says something about the efficiency of my process). I realized that although acoustics were what I was most interested in building, unless they were commissioned, I couldn’t justify spending that amount of time on them if the chance of selling one for a fair (from my point of view) price was quite low. Since then, I’ve had a steady stream of commissions coming in, which has kept me busy building solid body guitars, basses, and even an electric resonator guitar. I’ve been waiting for an acoustic commission, but so far it hasn’t materialized.
My situation now, how I want it to be in the future, and how to get there.
I live in Hamurana, which is a rural suburb of the small town of Rotorua, New Zealand. My parents have 8 acres of land out here, and I am staying in a secondary house on the property. I work in the shed which is about 100 meters away from my house. This situation is ideal to be completely focused, and to put in the consistent work required to gain a level of skill. I’m able to use dad’s workshop, which was already well equipped before I arrived, keeping costs down at the beginning, and saving money by living at home. While here, I’ve done very little besides working. For the first few years, most weeks I’d work 7 days. Only recently have I been making an effort to have a bit more balance in my life, in order to create a pace which is sustainable in the long term. Regarding my business, I’ve built it up from nothing to the point where it is now. I have a following in New Zealand. I’ve consistently put out quality work, to the point where I have developed a reputation that I am proud of. Now I’m looking to put that aside, to move across the world and do something way outside of my comfort zone. Why? This relates to my goals which are:
- To live a good life, without regret, spending as much of my time as possible doing things that feel meaningful and worthwhile.
Related to and following this is:
- To reach a very high level in lutherie. This includes many aspects – quality of the work I’m producing, reputation, income (I’m not interested in getting rich from building guitars, but I’d like to feel like I’m fairly compensated for my skilled work, and be able balance work, and life outside of work.)
Building guitars is the thing for me. The way I am – my personality, interests, what I am good at, match up really well with lutherie. To me, the work feels meaningful, even the repetitive and boring aspects. I think time is one of the most valuable things, it’s something you can’t buy or get more of. In my limited time here, I want to use it as well as I can, and making guitars for me feels like time well spent. I know what the work of making guitars is. I’m likely approaching 10,000 hours learning about it and doing it. Working towards my goals, I feel like I’m bumping up against some limitations due to my current situation. It’s a bit isolated out here. The New Zealand market is small, and often doesn’t put much value on hand work. I feel my business, skill and knowledge development, and personal life, is stagnating. My approach to this whole thing has always been to put most of my energy into becoming as good as possible at making guitars. Or, as Steve Martin puts it, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” I think entering into an apprenticeship with you would be the best thing I can do to become as good as possible at making guitars. If I do that, I believe the rest will follow. It would allow me to do the work of acoustic guitar building, which I greatly prefer. I’d be able to connect with like-minded people. I like your approach as far as I can see it from reading your books. Intuitive understanding, broad principles, use of your senses to gather data. It resonates with me a lot more than the formulaic approach shown elsewhere.
So far, I’ve been self-taught. This has some advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
- Develop problem solving skills, and confidence that I can solve them as they come up.
- Without someone teaching you directly, I think you develop your own style a bit more.
- Learning related things in search for the answer. Searching for information, you end up stumbling on a bunch of related (sometimes unrelated) information. Through this process, over time you end up building up broad knowledge.
- Learning how to learn independently. There is a ton of information out there, we live in the age of it. Finding it, filtering it and applying it is a learned skill.
- Making lots of mistakes. This is an advantage and a disadvantage. I think mistakes are an essential part of the learning process. I was thinking about how you could define a “master.” What I came up with was - someone who has made every possible mistake. Not a perfect definition, but I like that it speaks to the connection between mistakes and learning, and the unattainability of mastery as there are always new mistakes to make. Figuring out how to better fix mistakes is the other aspect of this, which contributes to a broader base of skill, knowledge, creativity, and confidence.
Disadvantages:
- Miss out on a lot of learning. I’d imagine you can shortcut the process by learning from other’s mistakes without having to make them on your own. Also learning someone else’s process, the workings of their business, observing how they interact with customers etc.
- Miss out on connecting with people, networking.
- I’m sure there are many more, which I’d like to find out.
What I’ve learned about work/life balance.
Over the past 5 years, I’ve worked a lot. Seriously. There were multiple occasions where I’ve worked over 50 days in a row. For me this pace was not something that I could sustain long term. In order to become really good at something, you need to accumulate a LOT of hours of practice. These hours necessarily are spread over many years. In order to spend many hours over many years doing something, you need to not burn out. In other words, it’s a marathon and not a sprint. So, it’s important to me to have a life outside of work. Included in this are hobbies, and spending time with friends, family, and a significant other. My hobbies include martial arts (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu), travel, photography, hiking, languages, and playing music.
Miscellaneous thoughts and my approach to the work.
- For each build I try to do one or more new things that I’ve never done before.
- I’ve found the quickest way to build a guitar, is to do every task once. In other words, don’t rush, and take your time to do everything as well as you can. Time saved is quickly lost again when you’re trying to be quick and then do something dumb.
- Good enough isn’t good enough. As I said above, I try to do everything as well as I can.
- Motivation comes and goes; it can’t be relied on. That’s where self-discipline and work ethic comes in, working towards a goal, or a vision of the future.
- I’m big on safety. I’m not good with numbers, I need all my fingers to count. I also need my brain, lungs, ears, and eyes, so I’m careful to protect them.
- Things I’m better at – the work itself. Things I’m worse at – the business side, networking, marketing, salesmanship. This correlates to where I’ve spent more time practicing.
- I know I have a high potential. I want to take this as far as I can. I don’t want to look back and wonder what would have happened if I had kept going.
Hopefully this letter gives you a bit more of an idea about where I’m coming from, and where I want to go. Let me know if you have any questions on anything. If you’re interested in taking things further, then we can discuss next steps. Thank you for your time.
Yours sincerely,
Jeff Silverman