In an old auto-body shop on an industrial spur outside Burlington, a group of luthiers have built an independent, nose-to-tail acoustic manufacturing haven.
The exterior of the building, touted as the largest spherical structure in the world, is covered in 580,000 square feet of LED displays. The interior, capable of 16K resolution, adds another 160,000 square feet of displays. It’s perhaps the most exciting music venue in the world, and on four consecutive evenings in April, Buchwald watched legendary Burlington band Phish play it.
Buchwald, 46, has been a Phish fan since the ’90s, so to see his hero Trey Anastasio, the iconic frontman and guitarist of the band, playing on the hottest stage on earth, accompanied by the sort of psychedelic visual atmosphere befitting the band, was a thrill. But for Buchwald, there was an even bigger, personal treat: On three of the four evenings, Anastasio played an acoustic guitar Buchwald had built.
The dreadnought was made with gorgeous, hand-picked “mother of curl” Koa back and sides. The top and bracing are 100-year-old German spruce; the neck is 75-year-old mahogany. The appointments are stunning: holly binding and trim, Waverly titanium tuners, black pearl inlays indebted to American artist Roy Lichtenstein. The instrument was commissioned by Phish keyboardist Page McConnell after he and Buchwald crossed paths in a Burlington paddle-ball group. Buchwald, who owns and operates the guitar brands Circle Strings and Iris Guitar Company alongside luthier-supply outfit Allied Lutherie, was honored to take up the task.
There are plenty of high-end 6-strings on the market from trusted legacy brands like Martin, Taylor, or Gibson, but Anastasio chose an instrument from an independent guitar builder in a small northeastern city to bring to Vegas. So how did Buchwald’s acoustic end up centerstage at the Sphere? You can find the answer in a red, aluminum-sided 15,000-square-foot shop space in an industrial spur on the edge of town, near Burlington’s airport.
Principal luthiers Adam Buchwald and Dale Fairbanks joined forces back in 2019, and along with a team of talented guitar-builders, like CNC expert Will Hylton, they now design and build all their instruments under one roof.
“I never wanted to put my name on the headstock.” —Adam Buchwald
The sprawling, labyrinthine single-level space, which takes up part of an old auto-repair shop, is an acoustic guitarist’s dream. Four distinct brands live under the one roof: Circle Strings, Iris, Allied, and luthier Dale Fairbanks’ Fairbanks Guitars. On a video call, Buchwald walks me through the building. We snake from the front office through to the shop floor, where racks of wood planks tower over Buchwald on every side. There are molds where the wood is bent into shape, and nearby are hulking custom-made CNC machines (including a Haas VF-2 and a Laguna M2). A 3D printer sits alongside them. Further along, there’s a finishing area complete with a spray room. “Smells like delicious chemicals,” quips Buchwald when he pokes his head around the room, where bodies and necks hang like slabs of meat in a butcher shop.
In an adjoining production area of wide workbenches, someone labors on a neck for an Iris guitar; Fairbanks, headphones on, plugs away on one of his own creations. A sanding room juts off from the main floor, where a mask-clad worker smooths out the top of an unfinished body. Through another set of doors is the setup workshop, where head of setup Storm Gates is hunched over a stringless, caramel-colored dreadnought. Finally, there’s the recently opened showroom and store, Ben and Bucky’s Guitar Boutique, where Iris, Circle Strings, and Fairbanks acoustics hang on the wall for people to try and buy. There’s a snappy collection of amps for sale, too, plus other odds and ends.
Buchwald moved into this space in 2018, after years of building his Circle Strings guitars in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. Since he was 10 years old, Buchwald has been obsessed with guitars. His parents were constantly driving him to local guitar stores around his hometown of Bedford, New York, to check out “the best of the best,” he says, and after high school he went to the University of Vermont to study music theory and composition. He wanted to be a performer, but when he needed money back in New York after school, he took up a spot in his father’s manufacturing company, Circle Metal Stamping. “I worked on machines and saw how a factory worked and got experience using my hands and all the tools and everything in front of me,” he explains. Around that time, Buchwald began tinkering with his guitars and had a realization: “Wow, I could actually build these things.” He had all the tools he needed at his disposal. After a guitar-building course and apprenticeship at a New York City repair shop, and a job running the repair shop at Brooklyn’s RetroFret Vintage Guitars, he started to build his own acoustics.
Buchwald always drifted toward acoustic music: Bluegrass, newgrass, classical, and jazz were his stomping grounds, so it followed that he’d build acoustic 6-strings. Around 2005, he started his own company, Circle Strings, a nod to his family’s business. “I never wanted to put my name on the headstock,” he notes. In 2008, he, his wife, and their newborn baby moved north to Vermont, where he taught lutherie at Vermont Instruments, and worked at Froggy Bottom Guitars for a spell. He built his Circle Strings guitars out of his garage before moving into a proper shop space in Burlington next to his friend, electric guitar builder Creston Lea.
Orders for Buchwald’s guitars began to take off, and before long, his boutique acoustics were fetching more than $5,000. Even so, he’s not terribly precious about his work. “I can sit here and try and bullshit my way around this whole conversation and tell you I’m tap-tuning and voicing tops,” he says. “I’ve studied all that shit, learned different methods and people’s theories on brace carving and how they’re played and how thick they are. I just feel like we came up with a formula that works, and we just stick to it. To me, it’s more about picking out the woods and how I’m piecing them together. That’s my way of thinking about voicing.”
Obviously, Buchwald’s approach works. Phish’s Anastasio is far from the only convert. New York-based fingerstyle guitarist Luke Brindley has been playing Circle Strings acoustics for nearly a decade, and he just got a new one this year—a 6-string OM-size made from German spruce and Brazilian rosewood. “I’m not sure how Adam does it technically or whatever,” says Brindley. “I know he’s an expert on woods and obviously a musician himself, but ever since the first guitar I played of his, I felt like it perfectly suited my “voice.” I don’t know. It’s just like a perfect combination of the craft and then a little bit of magic and intuition.”
Phish’s Page McConnell commissioned this Circle Strings acoustic as a gift for bandmate Trey Anastasio, who recently took it to the stage for three nights at Las Vegas’ Sphere.
Photos by Shem Roose
In 2018, Buchwald launched Iris Guitar Company, which would produce more affordable, less decorated models for players who couldn’t shell out for Circle Strings instruments. The following year, he took another leap. He bought Allied Lutherie, a wood and supply company based in Healdsburg, California, that was up for sale, along with all of their materials, for a fair price. The owners gave Buchwald a good deal, including interest-free payments over the next few years. The lumber was shipped from coast to coast, and Buchwald and his team in Burlington loaded their score of tonewoods, plus a boatload of other materials, into their shop. Now, Buchwald could sell guitar-building materials to any and all comers, and Circle Strings and Iris instruments would be produced, nose-to-tail, under one roof.
Soon, so would Fairbanks guitars. Dale Fairbanks loved the old acoustic guitars he had when he was young, but he had no idea how the hell people managed to build them. How could luthiers force the wood to contort and hold the shape of a guitar’s body? Answers came in the form of William Cumpiano’s 1984 book Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology. It became Fairbanks’ bible, but eventually he needed to go beyond the page, so he drove up to see Massachusetts luthier Julius Borges and badgered him with questions as long as Borges would stand it. Fairbanks’ 1933 Gibson L-00, which he bought in his early 20s, has always been his benchmark for acoustic excellence, and after 10 trial-and-error runs of guitars, he started selling his creations around 2009. He’s never been without an order since then.
For years, Buchwald and Dale Fairbanks had talked about joining forces to share overhead, production costs, staff, even ownership. When Buchwald bought Allied, he pitched Fairbanks again: Come up to Burlington and build guitars under the same roof, with a load of wood at our fingers. Fairbanks and his wife wanted a change from central Connecticut, so they packed up their house and headed north to Burlington in November of 2019. Soon, the two luthiers were settling into a new, expanded shop space complete with a large spray and finishing booth, and Buchwald’s newly launched Iris line promised to keep a steady revenue stream while they produced their more time-consuming, intricate instruments. Like Tom Petty sang, the future was wide open.
Fairbanks’ made-to-order acoustics, like this gorgeous tobacco burst F-20 model, can cost more than $10,000. From the start, Fairbanks has been committed to uncompromising quality.
Then the pandemic hit. Offices shut down, layoffs rocked working people, musicians went silent, and budgets shrank as business ground to a halt. Millions went into survival mode. For a time, it seemed like the purchase of Allied might nosedive into disaster. Buchwald was saddled with a small forest’s worth of wood, and it seemed like no one had the money to put him to work on it. If things got bad enough, reasoned Buchwald, he could sell off the wood at least. But surely no one would be lining up to buy high-end acoustics for a while. “It was terrifying,” says Buchwald. “I’m like, ‘Fuck, I just bought this business, I just rented this shop, I just got all this equipment, and then the pandemic happens.’”
“Now, I have to give up control to other people with my guitars, which took some getting used to. Luckily, we have a really good crew.” —Dale Fairbanks
Luckily, Buchwald’s fears didn’t come to pass—if anything, the opposite happened. “Everybody bought wood, everybody bought guitars, and the businesses took off,” says Buchwald. He was able to pay off Allied, expand the Iris lineup, and invest in new equipment and people to pad out the operation. The Iris models, quicker to produce while still being high-quality guitars, paid the bills so he and Fairbanks could spend more time and care on their custom projects.
While some elements of Fairbanks’ builds have been changed by the new production facility, they still retain key Fairbanks qualities: They all have glued dovetail necks rather than rather than the bolt-on mortise-tenon joints Buchwald prefers, and Fairbanks still builds most of them himself after the body is assembled, although he’s also adopted some of Buchwald’s techniques.
For Fairbanks, this type of collaboration has been a lesson in letting go. He had worked alone as a one-man operation building his Fairbanks guitars for 15 years before shacking up with Buchwald, and suddenly, other hands were working on his instruments. “Now, I have to give up control to other people with my guitars, which took some getting used to,” he says. “Luckily, we have a really good crew. So many talented people have come from different parts of the country to work here.”
One of those people is Will Hylton, the “chief CNC wizard” at the complex. (Hylton had to reschedule our first interview time because he was working on a replacement guitar neck for Keith Richards’ ES-335. “It’s the dream come true, really,” he says. “One of the reasons I got into guitar building to begin with is like, ‘Man, I want to build guitars for my favorite guitarists.’”) Hylton says that with Iris, he and his colleagues have endeavored to apply the Toyota Production System—a set of lean manufacturing principles developed by the Japanese automaker in the decades after the Second World War—to prioritize efficiency in their processes, while safeguarding the more time-consuming parts of the Circle Strings and Fairbanks builds. “With the higher-end guitars, there’s more problems to solve and things to work through that are pretty fun, depending on the mood,” says Hylton, who designs and programs the CNC cuts. “Iris is more my engineer side, while the Circle and Fairbanks stuff, I get to appease my artistic muse.”
With four different companies under one roof, Hylton’s days can vary. “It could be working on figuring out a way to speed up a process in the production realm, or it could be working on a $3,000 inlay, or it could be fixing a machine,” he explains. “There’s always a big curve ball.”
Burlington musician Zach Nugent, who played with Melvin Seals and JGB and helms the Grateful Dead act Dead Set, swears by his Fairbanks acoustic. “There are a lot of really high-end boutique guitars that are great on paper, but just don’t move me,” says Nugent. “Each brand new guitar feels like it’s got a hundred years of gigging and amazing stories in the sound. Every person that I introduce to this guitar, I say the same thing. I know how stupid and whatever this sounds: ‘This is the best guitar you’ll ever play.’
At the heart of the Burlington operation—and the seemingly magical acoustics produced there—is the vast collection of old, rare woods that Buchwald purchased from Allied Lutherie and various other sources.
“I know $2,000 is a lot of money for a lot of people, especially for a guitar. But once you get a better guitar and you sound better and you play better and it feels better, you bond with it, and you’ll get better as a musician.” —Adam Buchwald
“I don’t know if Dale is just stopping in and making guitars for the humans for a little bit, but something really special is going on with those guitars.”
None of the guitars that Buchwald, Fairbanks, Hylton, and the rest of their colleagues build are what you’d call “cheap.” Iris guitars still cost upwards of $2,200. People say all the time that the “affordable” line isn’t all that affordable. Buchwald doesn’t mind. “I say, ‘The only way to get it done cheaper is to have it made overseas,’” he says. “It won’t play as well, it won’t look as good, they won’t use as nice materials, and you won’t be supporting focused, dedicated craftsmen like what we have here. I know $2,000 is a lot of money for a lot of people, especially for a guitar. But once you get a better guitar, and you sound better and you play better and it feels better, you bond with it, and you’ll get better as a musician.”
That belief in the irreplaceable value of a carefully made guitar is probably part of the reason why Circle Strings, Fairbanks, and Iris are unlikely to ever take up entire display walls in your local music stores, like other acoustic brands do. “I don’t necessarily want to make 500 guitars a week like Taylor does,” says Buchwald. “I want to keep the quality of it as high as possible and limit the supply so there’s always some demand. I like having guitars that are sought-after.”
Earlier this year, an investor proposed a plan that would have doubled the production and output at the Burlington warehouse. It “scared the living day-lights” out of Buchwald. “I knew that the people that I hired to do this work would look at me after two months and say, ‘Fuck this, this isn’t what we want to do, we’re not some huge manufacturing company,’” he explains. “If we can expand, we’ll expand slow and steady.”
From 1942 to ’45, the period known as the “banner era,” Gibson had emblazoned on their headstocks a yellow banner that reads, “Only a Gibson Is Good Enough.” This J-45’s decal has proudly stood the years.
I’ve brought my own guitars to Tom’s shop a few times since then, and when I took on the task of writing this article on the history of the Gibson J-45, I was looking forward to another opportunity to connect.
“Do you know George Gruhn in Nashville? Mark Stutman in Ontario? John Thomas, the guy who wrote Kalamazoo Gals?” I ask in advance of our conversation, listing some of my other interview subjects, previous and planned. Tom knows them all, and they all know each other, as well as the rest of the established names in the vintage business. (It makes it feel small, which it kind of is.)
We gossip a bit, and I feel as though I’ve been welcomed into the coven of vintage-guitar repair pros and historians. Tom shares that, in his current inventory, he has the earliest known J-45 from the Gibson banner era (more on that later). He hands it to me, and with a single strum I feel affirmed in why I’m writing this in the first place. And so, the following is the result of my conversations with two performers, a producer, an author, a documentarian, and three middle-aged and elder statesmen of guitar repair in North America on the story behind one of Gibson’s most beloved and ubiquitous acoustics.
NYC-based luthier Tom Crandall, owner of TR Crandall Guitars on the Lower East Side, has the earliest known J-45 currently in his inventory.
Photo by Kate Koenig
“What fascinates me about the guitars is the evolution in their design, the haphazardness of their build. I’ve become very knowledgeable in the morphology, for lack of a better word, of the J-45,” says vintage-guitar repairman and historian Mark Stutman. We’re talking on the phone as he drives to work at his shop, Folkway Music in Waterloo, Ontario. When it comes to vintage-guitar repairpeople, Mark’s a bit on the younger side—having just turned 50—and he claims that he probably won’t have much to add to what historian George Gruhn, my first interviewee, had to say. He then proceeds to share an encyclopedia’s worth of detail on Gibson guitar history—with remarkable accuracy.
Mark first explains that the J-45, which entered into the Gibson lineup in 1942, was made in the image of its predecessor, the J-35, and that the idea for the J-35 was built upon Gibson’s Jumbo model, introduced in 1934. A 14-fret acoustic with a sunburst on every side and a lower-bout width of just over 16", the Jumbo was about a half-inch wider than the standard dreadnought, and Gibson’s biggest flattop at the time. It had sloped shoulders on its upper bout, with a greater curve than the more squared-off shoulders of a traditional dreadnought. Martin had released the first dreadnought, the Model 222, in 1916, but the body shape didn’t really catch on until their later introduction of the D-18 and D-28 in 1931.
Country singer/songwriter Kacey Musgraves plays a 1957 J-45, which she’s named “Janice,” at the Royal Oak Music Theatre in Royal Oak, Michigan, in 2019.
Photo by Ken Settle
“I’m sure Gibson introduced their Jumbo guitar to compete directly with Martin’s dreadnoughts,” says Tom, back at his workshop. “I think that’s really what it was. It was starting to take off, and Gibson and Martin were competitors in the flattop world.”
Both brands were racing to move away from the production of the then-more-prevalent smaller-bodied guitars to meet the shifting demands of the zeitgeist. As Stutman says, “[That was what] people wanted, as the whole cowboy-singer, Jimmie Rodgers, railway-switchman-entertainer thing happened in the States. They needed a guitar with a lower-frequency response so that their yodeling could be heard on top of it and not be fighting with the guitar.”
The original Jumbo was listed at $60. “It was just about the height of the Great Depression, so it didn’t sell well, because nobody had 60 bucks to spend on a guitar in 1934,” Stutman comments. In response, Gibson scrapped the Jumbo just over two years later and replaced it with the J-35, which sold for $35. The J-35 had the same outline, scale length, and 14-fret neck design as the Jumbo, but to manage the reduced sale price, Gibson trimmed back the Jumbo’s accents, removing the sunburst from the back, sides, and neck, as well as the pearl headstock inlay, back binding, and high-end tuners.
The interior of a J-45 (left) and a J-35 (right)—the former with two tone bars and the latter with three.
The first J-35s were built with three tone bars—the braces placed at a slant within the bottom half of the X-bracing—which made them powerful and cutting. But because the market was asking for guitars that were more bassy and warm, Gibson decided to reduce the tone bars to two by 1940. And that wasn’t the only adjustment that was made.
“They changed the angles that the X makes under their top,” Stutman says. “And about a year later, they changed that X angle again, and they put scalloped bracing in. They changed the size of their bridge plate. They messed around with how thick they wanted the top to be. As a result, J-35s that we find today vary tremendously from guitar to guitar and very much from year to year.”
Then, in 1942, Gibson debuted the J-45 and J-50, both the same model, but with a sunburst and natural finish, respectively. They priced the J-45 at $45, and charged $5 more for the J-50 (Stutman guesses because they had to use higher quality wood under a natural finish). The original design featured a mahogany neck, back, and sides, a spruce top (first Adirondack, later, Sitka), and a Brazilian rosewood fretboard and bridge. They also kept the same shape as the J-35. “The last of the J-35s were made in the early ’40s,” Stutman shares. “By 1941, a J-35 is kind of the same guitar as the J-45, but most of the world doesn’t know that.
“Even out of necessity, in 1944, they discovered a way to make a guitar that today is one of the most sought-after, great-sounding guitars in the world, out of mostly indigenous hardwoods.” —Mark Stutman, Folkway Music, Waterloo, Ontario
The year of the J-45’s release, Gibson also made a few modifications to their acoustics, replacing the more “lumpy-looking” prewar pickguard with the smaller teardrop pickguard. They designed a new headstock shape, where its sides were concave rather than straight. And, cue the fabled “banner era”: “[Gibson guitars] from ’42 through ’45 have a yellow, silkscreen, script Gibson logo on the peghead and a decal banner that says, ‘Only a Gibson Is Good Enough,’” shares vintage-guitar historian George Gruhn, owner of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, over the phone. “And there are collectors who pay extra for the guitars from that period.”
This vintage sunburst-finished model displays the classic J-45 look.
The release of the J-45 happened in the midst of global calamity, coinciding with the U.S.’s entry into World War II. A change in ownership occurred later during the war when, in 1944, Gibson was purchased by Chicago Musical Instrument Company (CMI). (Ted McCarty was later appointed president in 1950.) And, as young male luthiers were required to comply with the nation’s draft, several women were instated at Gibson in their place. “I have on the record the president of Gibson at the time testifying in front of the war production board that his company was being run almost entirely by women,” says John Thomas, the author of 2013’s Kalamazoo Gals. Women not only did much of Gibson’s administrative work, but were responsible for producing at least 25,000 guitars—many of which are highly coveted today. That aside, the period also presented manufacturing limitations due to the federal government’s wartime rationing of various materials.
“They had written regulations as to what percentage of metal they could have in proportion to the weight of the instrument,” explains Gruhn. “Musical instruments were very, very highly regulated, as was almost everything in manufacturing during World War II.”
“Epiphone came out with a slogan, ‘Good Enough Is Not Enough’—and Gibson dropped that banner like a hot potato.” —George Gruhn, Gruhn Guitars, Nashville
This meant that Gibson did not have the necessary supplies to make their adjustable truss rods, which they’d been using since 1921 and patented in 1923. The solution was to return to their previous method of installing a triangular wooden block of maple, roughly an inch-and-a-half wide, in the neck near the headstock. “They did that for strength, but it would also make the neck way bigger,” says Stutman.
“It was variable, but many of the necks [from those years] are 1 3/4" wide. And the depth at the first fret—I’ve measured some that are almost 1.1" deep. By comparison, a ‘big’ electric guitar neck, like on a ’59 Les Paul, might be 900 thousandths deep.”
Yet, even more impactful than the shortage of metals was the decreased availability of woods. “It was just hard to get rosewood from Brazil during World War II when there were German U-boats all over the Atlantic,” Stutman points out. “And more importantly, for Gibson, their mahogany supply was running low, ’cause it came from the same place.”
“I think that’s the magic to her sound,” Lucinda Williams’ guitar tech Justin Bricco told Premier Guitarof Williams’ most played J-45 in her 2014 Rig Rundown.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
This led to inconsistencies in J-45 features. During that time, Gibson began using multiple pieces of maple—or even a combination of different woods—to create necks, as it was also harder to acquire individual pieces of a larger size. “It could be a 5-ply neck for strength,” comments Gruhn.
“From 1943 and ’44, sometimes you find fretboards and bridges made out of gumwood instead of Brazilian rosewood,” Stutman elaborates. “So you get these really interesting J-45s from the late banner era. You might find a guitar that has a maple back and sides, a maple neck, a gumwood fretboard and bridge, and a spruce top—that’s almost entirely built of North American woods, which is pretty darn cool. Even out of necessity, in 1944, they discovered a way to make a guitar that today is one of the most sought-after, great-sounding guitars in the world, out of mostly indigenous hardwoods. Anyways, what happens is, the war ends, metal comes online again, Brazilian rosewood, mahogany. It’s all back in 1946-ish.”
The banner era had also come to a close by 1946. Gruhn adds, “I’ve been told that one reason for that was that Epiphone [which wasn’t acquired by Gibson until 1957] came out with a slogan, ‘Good Enough Is Not Enough’—and Gibson dropped that banner like a hot potato.”When the war had ended, “this little blip of really exciting guitars from 1942 to 1946 that have all sorts of unique characteristics and interesting tone and feel and uniqueness and charisma … those go away,” Stutman shares. Gibson standardized their specs across their models, though at first some J-45s were still made with parts left over from the banner era. But by 1947, the design was fully solidified, and the J-45 as we now know it was born. “The sound of a J-45 that we’re all familiar with, that thing that we all love about the J-45, that strummer, singer/songwriter, country guitar kind of thing, is a sum total of how it’s built with that light scalloped bracing of the Sitka top in particular; a 1 11/16" nut; mahogany back and sides; that short scale; and the style of neck carve. All that stuff adds up to having a J-45 be a J-45. Then, from ’47 to ’55, not very much changes with it.”
“This is the tool of the storyteller. This is the tool of the songwriter. You want an acoustic guitar—you hit the J-45 button.” —Ted Wulfers, J-45 documentarian
There was, however, a significant change in 1956—the issuing of the adjustable-height bridge with a ceramic saddle, labeled the J-45ADJ, for “adjustable,” which was sold, at first, as a second option for the consumer. “And then they became a standard feature,” Tom says, showing me one of the J-45ADJs he has in his inventory. “So this is an adjustable bridge. It’s kind of heavy. It’s got big brass pieces underneath. And because of all that weight and this sort of disconnect, you can hear a compressed sound.” (I play it, and, for the record, hear exactly what he’s talking about.)
Then, there was another less-than-desirable modification in the early ’60s, as told by George Gruhn: “Around ’63 is when the J-45 had those horrible, hollow plastic bridges rather than a wood bridge. It didn’t function, but it would look like the actual adjustable bridge was bolted through the bridge plate.” Those bridges ended in 1970—coinciding with when the Panama-based conglomerate Ecuadorian Company Limited (ECL) acquired CMI, then renamed themselves as the Norlin Corporation. “Gibson has not used them since, but now there’s a lot of variations of J-45 historic reissues.”
“It’s a very personal thing,” Aimee Mann said of her J-45 to Paste in 2010. “You want to play a guitar that’s an extension of you.”
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
Most of my conversations with Stutman and Gruhn are focused on the J-45’s early history, so I venture further to fill in the blanks of what happened with the guitar in the decades following. Over a Zoom call, I spend about an hour absorbing J-45 lore and geeking out about guitars in general with Ted Wulfers, a filmmaker who has been putting together a documentary on the history of the J-45 for the past several years. In the process of making the film, he’s interviewed 180 people from 14 countries. “We’re going to be expanding to about six more,” he says.
“In 1968, they switched the J-45 to the square shoulder, and that remained until 1984, through the Norlin era,” Wulfers explains. Gibson added a volute to the neck, to compensate for the weakness of the area where the neck becomes the headstock. But, “People kind of got sick of them, and they went out of fashion in the ’80s.”
Due to waning popularity, Gibson briefly discontinued the J-45 in 1982. But in ’84, they brought it back with the slope shoulder—in very low production. They also introduced some new finishes, including a whiskey burst and an amber burst. Eventually, in the ’90s, as Wulfers shares, Gibson fully restored their production of J-45s, and reinstated the ’40s-style slope shoulder and tuning pegs to the design. “I think that’s one of the reasons why they went out of fashion in the ’70s and ’80s—they weren’t playing as good as the guitars from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. They came back into fashion once they started making the guitar like the older versions,” he laughs.
“A great guitar is the tipping point of being held together and being pulled apart. So, I’ve always had a theory that my favorite guitars are really on a fulcrum’s edge of that.” —John Leventhal
Yet, as Tom suggests, it took a few more years before the J-45 was reinstated to its earlier popularity. “I’ve owned quite a few J-45s, and I was buying them in the ’90s for like $800, $900. I always thought, ‘Wow, these things are so undervalued.’ So I would buy them, fix them up, maybe sell them for 1,200, 1,300 bucks. Then somehow, in the early 2000s, they started to catch on again.”
But what about the J-50, if they’re truly identical models beyond the finish? “I think a lot of the reason why the J-45 has become so popular is because they’re gorgeous,” says Stutman. “Gibson sunbursts, back then, were exquisite. They just got it right. And even though the J-50 was [originally] more expensive, and today it’s a way more rare guitar, the J-45 is still more valuable. That’s simply because people love a good-looking sunburst. And when you pick up a J-45, you feel like you look the part.”
A closer look at the two-tone-bar interior construction of a classic J-45.
Photo courtesy of TR Crandall Guitars
According to Tom, his friend John Leventhal—the six-time-Grammy-award-winning producer, musician, and recording engineer—has long been a fan of J-45s and J-50s. “He just came out with his first solo record at 70 years old, and he used the J-50 that he got from us on a lot of those cuts,” he says.
When I connect with Leventhal on the phone, he strikes me as a straight shooter. “I really don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he quips, when I ask him if he has an audio-engineer interpretation of the J-45’s physics (a question inspired by my personal scientific bent).
He offers, instead, “Why Gibsons are different from other guitars, I couldn’t really say. ’Cause basically, the physics of all these things are more or less the same. A great guitar is the tipping point of being held together and being pulled apart. So, I’ve always had a theory that my favorite guitars are really on a fulcrum’s edge of that.
“Whatever it is about the construction of the J-45,” Leventhal continues, “is that really good ones have what I would call a strong fundamental tone in which the overtones don’t really get in the way or don’t confuse the sonic output of the guitar. I have my own recording studio, and I notice everybody’s pretty happy when they play these things.”
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“How many guitars do you have?” I ask Steve Earle over Zoom. (Steve is a frequent visitor at TR Crandall; coincidentally, Tom receives several texts from the country-rock guitarist while we’re chatting in his workshop.) Steve’s just labeled himself a “degenerate collector,” saying that among the instruments he owns is every Gibson flattop except for a J-100, an L-2, and a Dove.
“I just did the inventory. I think it’s 187 instruments, counting banjos and mandolins. And I do count ’em.”
Earle’s been playing Martins for several years now, but his time with J-45s and J-50s goes way back. “I hitchhiked up to Nashville when I was 19, you know, to do what I do,” he shares. He had a Martin D-18 at the time, which he traded for an Alvarez Yairi when no one in town could repair the Martin’s bowed neck. “When I got to Nashville, I was the only guy with a Japanese guitar sitting around in a room with a bunch of Gibsons and Martins, and it started to embarrass me. So the very first check I got when I signed my publishing deal, I went down to George Gruhn’s and bought a 1956 J-45 for $250. That’s about what they went for in 1975.” He later traded it to Jerry Jeff Walker for $500 and a ’65 J-50ADJ (whose hollow bridge had been replaced with a solid one). “That was my guitar for years. I recorded part of [1986’s] Guitar Town on it.
“So, the very first check I got when I signed my publishing deal, I went down to George Gruhn’s and bought a 1956 J-45 for $250.” —Steve Earle
“I own one now,” he says. “I’ve got a really good 1950 J-45. I had this belief that that’s like, the perfect year for a J-45, ’cause Ray Kennedy owns one. All my acoustic tracks on [1997’s] El Corázon were recorded on his guitar because when I got outta jail [in1994, after a 60-day stint], I didn’t have anything. The one I have now, I bought from [NYC luthier] Matt Umanov. It belonged to Adam Levy before me.” He says the one he’s used the most, however, is Kennedy’s.
Grace Potter - "Mother Road"
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Country-rock guitarist and songwriter Grace Potter has a signature Gibson Flying V, but she’s also been an ardent J-45 player for years. “A J-45 was actually the first guitar I ever bought,” she tells me, when we connect over the phone after Wulfers points me in her direction.
“I was 19 and I walked in cold to a music shop in upstate New York called Dick’s Gas, Guns, and Guitars. In the back was this incredible guitar shop that felt like a novelty in the moment.”
With $860 to her name, she made a deal with the owner, who let her make a partial down payment on the $900 guitar. “It was a 1999, and I bought it in 2002,” she continues. “The second I picked it up, it transported me to the 1940s and an open window of potential. It sang so beautifully. And I just remember the feeling of the body of the guitar against my chest, curling my body around it, and feeling like I just met a long lost aunt that I didn’t know I had. And that’s when I started writing songs on guitar, immediately.” Naming the first two albums she produced with her band the Nocturnals, she adds, “Every song from Nothing but the Water, and some of the songs on This Is Somewhere, were written on that J-45.”
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On my call with Wulfers, we’ve taken a detour from the J-45 subject, and I’m now enthusiastically telling him about the specs on my Washburn and Taylor acoustics. He’s into it, but helpfully brings it back to the main topic—on which he’s clearly, passionately fixated.
“It was fresh off the factory floor, but the second I put it in my hands, it transported me to the 1940s and an open window of potential.” —Grace Potter
“The J-45 has the bass, but that midrange, too; it cuts, but it allows the human voice to shine,” he asserts, “whereas a couple other guitars and styles of the Gibson line, of the Martin lines and others—they cloud the vocal. Sometimes, when I’m working with an artist here in my studio and they have my J-150 or a big Guild or something, I’m just like, try the J-45. And they go, ‘Oh my god, everything sounds better.’ Well, you know, sometimes it isthe guitar.
“This is the tool of the storyteller. This is the tool of the songwriter,” he continues. “If you want delay, you hit a delay pedal. If you want reverb, you hit a reverb. You want an acoustic guitar—you hit the J-45 button.”
