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. Itās 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 ā90s, 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 āmother of curlā 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 Buchwaldās 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 Burlingtonās 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.
āI never wanted to put my name on the headstock.ā āAdam Buchwald
The sprawling, labyrinthine single-level space, which takes up part of an old auto-repair shop, is an acoustic guitaristās dream. Four distinct brands live under the one roof: Circle Strings, Iris, Allied, and luthier Dale Fairbanksā 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, thereās a finishing area complete with a spray room. āSmells like delicious chemicals,ā 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, thereās the recently opened showroom and store, Ben and Buckyās Guitar Boutique, where Iris, Circle Strings, and Fairbanks acoustics hang on the wall for people to try and buy. Thereās 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 āthe best of the best,ā 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 fatherās manufacturing company, Circle Metal Stamping. āI 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,ā he explains. Around that time, Buchwald began tinkering with his guitars and had a realization: āWow, I could actually build these things.ā 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 Brooklynās 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 heād build acoustic 6-strings. Around 2005, he started his own company, Circle Strings, a nod to his familyās business. āI never wanted to put my name on the headstock,ā 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 Buchwaldās guitars began to take off, and before long, his boutique acoustics were fetching more than $5,000. Even so, heās not terribly precious about his work. āI can sit here and try and bullshit my way around this whole conversation and tell you Iām tap-tuning and voicing tops,ā he says. āIāve studied all that shit, learned different methods and peopleās theories on brace carving and how theyāre 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, itās more about picking out the woods and how Iām piecing them together. Thatās my way of thinking about voicing.ā
Obviously, Buchwaldās approach works. Phishās 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 yearāa 6-string OM-size made from German spruce and Brazilian rosewood. āIām not sure how Adam does it technically or whatever,ā says Brindley. āI know heās 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 āvoice.ā I donāt know. Itās just like a perfect combination of the craft and then a little bit of magic and intuition.ā
Phishās 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 Vegasā Sphere.
Photos by Shem Roose
In 2018, Buchwald launched Iris Guitar Company, which would produce more affordable, less decorated models for players who couldnāt 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 guitarās body? Answers came in the form of William Cumpianoās 1984 book Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology. It became Fairbanksā 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. Fairbanksā 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. Heās 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 Buchwaldās 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.
Fairbanksā 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 forestās 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. āIt was terrifying,ā says Buchwald. āIām like, āFuck, I just bought this business, I just rented this shop, I just got all this equipment, and then the pandemic happens.āā
āNow, 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.ā āDale Fairbanks
Luckily, Buchwaldās fears didnāt come to passāif anything, the opposite happened. āEverybody bought wood, everybody bought guitars, and the businesses took off,ā 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 Fairbanksā 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 heās also adopted some of Buchwaldās 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. āNow, I have to give up control to other people with my guitars, which took some getting used to,ā he says. āLuckily, we have a really good crew. So many talented people have come from different parts of the country to work here.ā
One of those people is Will Hylton, the āchief CNC wizardā at the complex. (Hylton had to reschedule our first interview time because he was working on a replacement guitar neck for Keith Richardsā ES-335. āItās the dream come true, really,ā he says. āOne of the reasons I got into guitar building to begin with is like, āMan, I want to build guitars for my favorite guitarists.āā) Hylton says that with Iris, he and his colleagues have endeavored to apply the Toyota Production Systemāa set of lean manufacturing principles developed by the Japanese automaker in the decades after the Second World Warāto prioritize efficiency in their processes, while safeguarding the more time-consuming parts of the Circle Strings and Fairbanks builds. āWith the higher-end guitars, thereās more problems to solve and things to work through that are pretty fun, depending on the mood,ā says Hylton, who designs and programs the CNC cuts. āIris is more my engineer side, while the Circle and Fairbanks stuff, I get to appease my artistic muse.ā
With four different companies under one roof, Hyltonās days can vary. āIt 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,ā he explains. āThereās always a big curve ball.ā
Burlington musician Zach Nugent, who played with Melvin Seals and JGB and helms the Grateful Dead act Dead Set, swears by his Fairbanks acoustic. āThere are a lot of really high-end boutique guitars that are great on paper, but just donāt move me,ā says Nugent. āEach brand new guitar feels like itās 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: āThis is the best guitar youāll ever play.ā
At the heart of the Burlington operationāand the seemingly magical acoustics produced thereāis the vast collection of old, rare woods that Buchwald purchased from Allied Lutherie and various other sources.
āI 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 youāll get better as a musician.ā āAdam Buchwald
āI donāt 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.ā
None of the guitars that Buchwald, Fairbanks, Hylton, and the rest of their colleagues build are what youād call ācheap.ā Iris guitars still cost upwards of $2,200. People say all the time that the āaffordableā line isnāt all that affordable. Buchwald doesnāt mind. āI say, āThe only way to get it done cheaper is to have it made overseas,āā he says. āIt wonāt play as well, it wonāt look as good, they wonāt use as nice materials, and you wonāt 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 youāll get better as a musician.ā
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. āI donāt necessarily want to make 500 guitars a week like Taylor does,ā says Buchwald. āI want to keep the quality of it as high as possible and limit the supply so thereās always some demand. I like having guitars that are sought-after.ā
Earlier this year, an investor proposed a plan that would have doubled the production and output at the Burlington warehouse. It āscared the living day-lightsā out of Buchwald. āI knew that the people that I hired to do this work would look at me after two months and say, āFuck this, this isnāt what we want to do, weāre not some huge manufacturing company,āā he explains. āIf we can expand, weāll expand slow and steady.ā
Jose GonzaĢlez's Cordoba Rodriguez model is based on a 1970s instrument made by the famed Rodriguez family of luthiers from Andalusia's city of CoĢrdoba. It's large, but lightweight, with five rather than the more typical seven braces.
"I wish I was faster, but I am slow," he says. "I feel like I'm doing a style of music that isn't trend-sensitive, so I think I'm allowed to take my time. Even if I wanted to push the pace, that would be a very unnatural rhythm."
JosƩ GonzƔlez - Line of Fire (Lyric Video)
Local Valley is anything but an interruption of GonzƔlez's natural rhythm. The collection of astral, quietly textural compositions for solo fingerpicked nylon-string guitar and voice evokes an ephemeral sense of solitude, creating its own realm in which listeners can, like GonzƔlez, distance themselves from external pressures. It's an extension of the same reality GonzƔlez designs for himself.
That's not to say that he hasn't had a full, successful career. His music has been placed in TV shows, including The O.C.,Ā One Tree Hill, Bones, House, and Friday Night Lights, and in 2011 he went on a tour with the Gƶteborg String Theory that spotlighted 11 arrangements of GonzĆ”lez's songs for orchestra. In 2013, he worked with Ben Stiller on the soundtrack of Stiller's remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which features GonzĆ”lez's solo work along with music from Junip.
"The existential lyrics are more acute now than they used to be, in a good way, because I'm comfortable with the finite nature of reality."
When discussing Local Valley, GonzƔlez reflects frequently on how he's changed as a musician over the years, both in terms of his approach to music and in his life philosophy. Out of everything, growth seems to be his priority. The album was wrapped in March 2020, and its release was put on hiatus for what has now been a year-and-a-half, due to the pandemic. But like the rest of GonzƔlez's work, it has a timeless quality that no doubt stems from that progressive mindset.
Existential Stead
The process of making Local Valley goes all the way back to 2017, when its songs were seeds, in the form of early demos. The following year, GonzƔlez got a residency at an artists' retreat in Grez-sur-Loing, France, where he decided he was going to begin more seriously writing and recording. There, he composed almost half of the album.
TIDBIT: Like most of his solo albums, this year's Local Valley was recorded by GonzĆ”lez in his preferred settingāat home. That approach allows him to work at his own pace.
"I had an ambition to go back to my first album and do short songs that were pretty melodic and guitar-oriented. Once I had those songs, I allowed myself to experiment a bit, put the producer's hat on, and not so much be the one who wants to impress people with just this one guitar." He decided to use a looper for some of the tracks, and on the songs "Tjomme," "Lilla G," and "Swing," he used a drum machineāwhich he says he's always wanted to do. Using the two devices also allows him to create more layers that he can effectively recreate alone when playing live.
During this timeframe, GonzƔlez and his partner, Swedish designer Hannele Fernstrƶm, purchased a summer house in Hakefjorden, an hour outside of his home city of Gothenburg, Sweden, where GonzƔlez was then able to record in a quieter environment. (All but his second album were home-recorded.) Onsongs such as "Visions" and "Lasso In," you can hear his field recordings of local birdsong.
Photo by Jim Bennett
The songwriter's guitars of choice are an Esteve 9 C/B and a CĆ³rdoba Rodriguez. The former is equipped with a Fishman Prefix Pro Blend pickup. Both guitars feature something else that's crucial to GonzĆ”lez's recording preferences: very old strings. "I try to vary how old they are for the different songs to get different sustain," he says. "There's something about the lack of treble that I like." A couple of GonzĆ”lez's other recording tricks include using a wooden percussion stomp box run through an octave pedal, and using a de-esser on the guitarāa favorite technique that takes away the "metallic-sounding frequencies. I'm allergic to 2 kilohertz," he says.
For the first time, GonzĆ”lez wrote lyrics in Swedish and Spanishānearly half of the songs on the album are written in both of what he calls his native tongues. The use of the latter was influenced by his daughter Laura, who was born in 2017. When Laura was a toddler, he spoke to her in Spanish, which helped to keep the language alive in his mind while he was writing the album.
āJosĆ© GonzĆ”lez's Gear
JosĆ© GonzĆ”lez plays live at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. in 2015. GonzaĢlez uses Fishman pickups in his nylon-strings and places duct tape over the soundholes to help control guitar tones when playing in large rooms.
Photo by Matt Condon
Guitars
- Esteve 9C/B with Fishman Prefix Pro Blend pickup
- CĆ³rdoba Rodriguez
Amp
- Schertler Jam (wood)
Effects
- Boss OC-3 Super Octave
Strings
- D'Addario Pro-ArtƩ Silverplated Wound, Nylon Core EJ46 sets
No matter the language, GonzĆ”lez's lyrics consistently match the nature of his music in their poetry and philosophical style. That's something that happens to have been influenced by Laura's birth as well. "Becoming a father and having parents that are getting older puts me in the middle of life position where I realize that I'm older than what my father or mother were when they had me," GonzĆ”lez expresses. "I think more about death than usualānot because I have to, but it just comes with the territory. The existential lyrics are more acute now than they used to be, in a good way, because I'm comfortable with the finite nature of reality."
Varied Voices
Before he got into guitar, GonzĆ”lez played the recorder and explored a Casio synth as a child. Then, around the age of 13 or 14, he and his friends discovered their passion for music. He began playing bass in a hardcore punk band called Back Against the Wall, and, at the same time, discovered his affinity for the nylon-string guitar. "I always felt like it sounded better to my ears than steel-string or electric guitar," he says. His dad, who used to sing in an Argentinian folk band, would ask GonzĆ”lez to learn songs by the Beatles and bossa nova artists like JoĆ£o Gilberto to accompany him.
By the time he began to record his debut, he was committed to the instrument. "I felt like everyone else was playing steel-string guitars and they were really into Americana, and I had my Latin-American roots," he says. "Also, the '60s, '70s folk singers from Sweden ā¦ all of them had Spanish guitars and there was something nostalgic for me with that soundāthe lack of treble and sort of earthy sound."
"I write the guitar slightly above my skill level. I need my time to rehearse quite a lot."
The mindful, sedate colors of GonzĆ”lez's music are not so unlike those of English singer/songwriter Nick Drakeāan artist GonzĆ”lez has often been compared to. GonzĆ”lez actually hadn't heard of the songwriter before his first album, up until one of the last songs he wrote for itā"Stay in the Shade"āwhich he says is essentially a "Nick Drake rip-off." His preference for very old strings is another thing he's borrowed from Drake.
Otherwise, GonzĆ”lez's influences tend to fall mostly outside of the realm of Western music, stretching globally to include the leader of the Nueva Trova movement, Cuban guitarist Silvio RodrĆguez; the Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa; Brazilian composers Caetano Veloso and JoĆ£o Gilberto; and jazz singer Monica Zetterlund and jazz pianist Jan Johansson, both Swedes. On Local Valley, says GonzĆ”lez, you can also hear the influence of West African guitarist Ali Farka TourĆ©, the Tuareg band Tinariwen, and Tuareg singer/songwriter Bombino. "Valle Local" and "Head On," from the album, happen to be inspired by a jam session with Bombino, says GonzĆ”lez. He adds to the list Ghanian high-life, dance-oriented music from Congo, Afrobeat from Nigeria, and raga Bhoopali.
GonzƔlez's recording strategy included making field recordings of the birds around his home, and those appear on several of Local Valley's tracks, including "Visions" and "Lasso In."
Thenāand we're still talking about influencesāthere's economics. "From the second album and on, I started to let myself be inspired by books and not only write about internal feelings, but more about an extroverted view on the world," he elaborates. "I try to push myself into not falling into cliches in terms of ideologies, but really try to understand difficult subjects, including economics. I've been reading [books by economists] Joseph Stiglitz, Mariana Mazzucato, and Angus Deaton." The song "Head On" mentions rent seekers and value extractors, concepts that GonzĆ”lez says have negative connotations on both the right and left. He says it was his ambition to write a song that was angry without being irritating to listeners of either political leaning.
Aural Analysis
GonzƔlez is not what you'd call a prolific songwriter, and that's something he's perfectly comfortable with. He likes to take his time, to the point where, when working on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, his gradual approach caused Stiller to adapt from his original idea of having GonzƔlez write the entire soundtrack to instead inviting in another composer, Teddy Shapiro, to complete the score. (GonzƔlez is featured six times on the soundtrack: four times as a solo performer and twice with Junip.)
Particularly with his solo music, GonzĆ”lez says, "I write the guitar slightly above my skill level. I need my time to rehearse quite a lot, and that's one of the main reasons why I'm slow. I set the bar a bit higher than my skills." He crafts his guitar parts somewhat analyticallyāsomething he relates to his experience of having pursued a PhD in biochemistry before he devoted himself to his music. "I do a lot of trial and error before I have my final product."
GonzƔlez performs on the Bigfoot Stage at the 2015 Sasquatch! Festival in George, Washington. He was accompanied by a percussionist for a set mostly of songs from his first solo album.
Photo by Debi Del Grande
"I have my different tunings and that allows me to not think in terms in chords, but to think in bass lines and arpeggios," he continues. "Nick Drake has been a big inspiration in terms of tuning and using the thumb to do the bass, and having arpeggios to do the body of the song. Then I always think about the highest note as an extra melody. That's how I try to make the song as dense as possible with only one guitar." GonzĆ”lez uses a variety of alternate tunings. On "El Invento," the tuning is in drop D. On "Visions," it's DāAāDāAāBāE. Other tunings on the album include EāAāDāAāBāE and BāAāDāAāBāE. He also has a proclivity to avoid the thirdā"either major or minor." Although, "Nowadays, I'm more okay with major chordsābut I'm still avoiding minor."
Over the years, GonzƔlez has simplified his songwriting process. He says he used to follow a set of rules, inspired by Danish film directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who set limits and edicts for how they could make films with their director-centric "Dogme 95 Manifesto," created in 1995. Two of GonzƔlez's primary rules are not writing verse-chorus-type songs, in favor of more linear writing, and avoiding using "me" or "I" in the lyrics.
But if the gentle, organic progression of his career says anything about GonzƔlez, it's that he's eased up quite a bit on himself since he started out. "Since then, I've been okay to not have any rules," he says. "Nowadays, I'm just happy to make things up."
JosƩ GonzƔlez at Michelberger Hotel - Jim Beam Welcome Session #3
JosƩ GonzƔlez is well in form as he performs "Valle Local" from his new album, showcasing his expert fingerpicking on nylon-string guitar while accompanying his softly sung vocal.
