Chad Henrichsen (in photo) and Gonzalo Madrigal are the two master builders in charge at the Gretsch Custom Shop in Corona, California. Henrichsen arrived at the shop in 2008.
Master builder Chad Henrichsen pours his creativity into Falcons, Jets, Penguins, and other axes that soar, including the Tom Petersson 12-string signature bass. His secret: experience and micro-attention to detail.
The art of guitar building lies somewhere between Zen and a lightning strike. The watercourse way of experience dictates some processes, their workflow eased by years or decades of practice. Other turns come in a flash of inspiration and leave an instrument that will give off a distinctive creative charge for decades.
Chad Henrichsenās inspired builds for the Gretsch Custom Shop are exemplary. Online, you can see his matching Bastogne walnut Duo Jet and Penguin models, as resplendent as Louis XIV furniture, but with a whole lotta music inside. A little searching also reveals a Baritone Jet in an explosive nitro silver sparkle metal flake finish, showing how high a low-tuned instrument can fly. Thereās a ā59 Penguin Relic in sonic blue that boasts a vintage voice to match, via TV Jones TV Classic pickups, and a paisley-and-goldburst ā55 Relic Duo Jet with a hiply retro catās-eye f-hole, Seymour Duncan DynaSonic pickups, and a Bigsby B3C tailpiece. The guitar looks as if plucked from George Harrisonās dreams.
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Thatās just a handful of the multitude of guitars Henrichsenās made with equal measures of precision, inspiration, and love since 2008, when he joined the Corona, California-based Custom Shop, where he and Gonzalo Madrigal are the master builders. āMy mind is constantly running at about a million miles an hour,ā he says. āI am always thinking of a different way to do things, like how can I change the internal body chambering structure to maybe make a guitar sound a little bit different? Sometimes those thoughts are fleeting, but when I get one that really sticks I might write out a spec sheet just to have it saved, and go back to it later and build off of that original idea and play with it.ā
Those ideas sometimes become the spark for the instruments that Henrichsen makes for the Custom Shopās annual online dealer events, which he describes as āsort of a mini NAMM show for us. We come up with our own builds and really play around with our ideas.ā Some of the results get ordered for top dollar; others are not so lucky. But either way, Henrichsen feels he walks away a winner. āWhat sticks and what doesnāt gives me a chance to see if Iām in line with the customer base. Some get great reviews; some kind of fall flat, and so you go, āwell, let me focus on something else.āā
āThere were so many little things I had to take in bite-sized chunks as I went along. When I was faced with something I hadnāt seen before, I had to figure it out.ā
Henrichsen describes his ascent to master builder as ākind of a weird journey. I actually went to school to be an audio engineer. I wanted to work in a studio and play with faders and all that stuff, but the timing was less than desirable, meaning I got into it at the time DAWs started coming out, and recording technology became widely available to home consumers. That shift happened as I got out of school, so I took a detour. My bandmate at the time got a job here at Fender [which owns Gretsch] and helped me get hired as a setup tech, and then I quickly progressed into doing repairs.ā
Heād already been rehearsing for that gig. āI was really interested in guitars and Iād been tinkering around with them,ā he says, āswapping pickupsāreal simple thingsāand then started working here and really dove headfirst into it. I talked to a lot of the builders that had been here a long time. I got a lot of good pointers, and luckily I had a little place at home where I could go and make some sawdust. I was no stranger to saws. Maybe not so much routers, but I knew how to handle them, and I looked at it from a thousand-foot view and realized, āthis is just geometry.ā You can make things very complicated if you like, and especially in the Gretsch world, where our designs often dabble in the complicated side of things. But if you want to build a Strat or a Tele, itās not that much work. So, I started building my own guitars at night and on weekends, and it just snowballed from there. I kept upping my game and kept trying different things, like āNow I want to do a carve top,ā and āNow I want to do a set neckāāand just kept developing my skills.ā
Although Henrichsen can build any Gretsch guitar from scratch, his specialty is necksāthe most important aspect of an instrumentās playability. āAs far as making necks and bodies, we keep it very old school,ā he says.
Henrichsenās first home-builds were āreally models that I wanted for myself and just didnāt have the money to buy. My very first was like a SoCal-style Strat, with a humbucker. The second was basically a copy of a ā54 Les Paul with P-90s and a wraparound tailpiece. Thatās where I dove into carve tops. I made a carve-top Telecaster with some FilterāTrons in it. In building my own instruments, I could make them to an exact thickness, make the neck shape exactly how I wanted it. Itās fun to watch it take shape throughout the process, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment after a few months of toiling at home after work when you see it come together and finally get to plug it in and make some noise. Itās the greatest feeling ever, really.ā
āWe take a problem and we find a solution with what we have to work with: chisels, drill presses, handheld routers.ā
After about 18 months at Fenderās Corona factory, Henrichsen transferred to the distribution center. āI worked in the inspection and repair department that deals with all the import models that come in,ā he recounts. āWe do checks on all that stuff, and if things need to be fixed, we do that. I ended up supervising that line for a couple years, and I applied for the Gretsch position a year before I got it.ā
Asked if he hit any serious roadblocks while developing his building technique, Henrichsen replies, āThere were so many little things I had to take in bite-sized chunks as I went along. When I was faced with something I hadn't seen before, I had to figure it outāwhether sketching it out on paper or making real rudimentary drawings in CAD, like āOkay, hereās my bridge height, hereās the thickness of my body, the rise of the top.ā A lot of people do this very differently. Some do actual full-size, one-to-one-scale sketches. It was a lot of little things and I slowly chipped away at them.
This gorgeous walnut G6134 Penguin is one of Henrichsenās recent creations. It has a natural stain finish, tortoiseshell/cream binding, chrome hardware, a mahogany neck, an ebony fretboard, and a mother of pearl inlay at the 12th fret. The TV Jones TV Classic pickups enjoy a treble-bleed circuit and a no-load tone control.
āIn the Gretsch shop, we hardly use any CNC. We do use CNC for the logos and the inlays, just for speed and consistency, but as far as making necks and bodies, we keep it very old school. We actually have an old copy carver, a purely analog machine, and if we want to do a solid top, we actually use that old copy carver. We actually take a lot of pride in not having fancy new machinery. We donāt have engineers that need to program things to make something happen. With Gonzalo and myself, we take a problem and we find a solution with what we have to work with: chisels, drill presses, handheld routers. We obviously have a pin router for things, but other than that, itās a lot of hands-on work, and I love that.ā
So do customers who order a guitar from the Gretsch Custom Shop, which has eight staffers in total. āWe have a very small shop and itās just filled with woodworking tools: joiners, planers, pin routers, edge sanders. It is not fancy by any means,ā Henrichsen says. āItās like a very small cabinet shop. Gonzalo and I have help with finishing and binding, but we basically oversee the whole process. Gonzalo focuses mainly on bodies. I focus mainly on necks, but if either of us has a build that we want to doā¦. Iāll dive in and make bodies and heāll make the necks, so our jobs are very intertwined. But just for the sake of efficiency, we tend to stick to those two areas so we can move as fast as we can yet still retain that handmade vibe the Gretsch Custom Shop is known for.ā
āGretsch is kind of known for gadgetry throughout the years, and so to have all those switches.ā¦ To me, itās kind of like piloting the space shuttle, but weāll happily build whatever they want. I like the surprise orders. And tone is very subjective.ā
Exactly how long it takes to deliver a guitar once an order comes from a dealer or player depends on the complexity of the build, as well as how many orders are in line before it. āSomething like a standard ā57, ā59 Duo Jetāwe can get those out pretty quickly. But a custom Falcon with three pickups and custom inlays and things like thatāthat all adds to the time,ā the luthier says.
One of Henrichsenās favorite instruments to build is the Tom Petersson Signature 12-String Falcon Bass, which is tagged at $12,999. āIt is such a monster, and the reason I like it is because I have to do things very differently from all of our standard necks. For a Jet or a Penguin or Falcon, I have jigs that I use on a shaper table, a pin router.... That speeds things up a little bit for me. But that 12-string bass neck? I literally have to do most of that on a standard router table by hand. That makes you think a little bit differently, keeps you on your toes, and thereās really no room for error. Itās a measure twice, cut once sort of situation.ā
Hereās a close-up of the Tom Petersson Signature 12-String Falcon bass, focused on its pair of Custom Seymour Duncan SuperāTron pickups. But for Henrichson, the 3-way switch electronics are a snap. His favorite challenge is hand-shaping, without templates, the 12"-radius neck, which has a 30.5" scale length.
Electronics are another matter. āI love playing with different types of pickups,ā he says. āIf somebody wants that classic Gretsch twang, then I would go with a TV Classic or maybe a Ray Butts Ful-Fidelity, or if somebody wants a little bit more output, then maybe a PowerāTron. We do a lot of 3-pickup guitars, where you might have a SuperāTron in the bridge, and maybe a DynaSonic or a TV Jones T90 in the middle position. I love mixing pickups because it expands your tonal palette. We could get into the arguments about tone pots or tone switches. Iām not a big fan of the tone switch, but there is a place for them, and some people love āem, and it doesnāt matter to me when a customer order comes down. You get what you want. But most of the guitars that I come up with are going to have a tone pot. I do enjoy the no-load tone pots, so most of the time that toneās running wide open. Iām a big believer in trying to keep that signal path as short and as clean as possible. I had a Falcon order a few months ago where the customer wanted a blower switch for the bridge pickup. He also wanted a phase switch for the pickups, and coil taps for each pickup. It took me a couple days to map that out, but it was great fun! And Gretsch is kind of known for gadgetry throughout the years, and so to have all those switches.ā¦ To me, itās kind of like piloting the space shuttle, but weāll happily build whatever they want. I like the surprise orders. And tone is very subjective.ā
āYou donāt want to think about your instrument at all. You just want to be that instrument.ā
Given that, what does Henrichsen do when a buyer asks for a ācrunchyā sound, or something bright and biting? āI reach out to the customer and have a conversation, to say, āOkay, what is your idea of brightness or grittiness,ā or whatever adjective theyāre using, and try to narrow down as much as I can, so then I can offer suggestions about pickups. But thatās a tough one, so I try to talk it out and offer different options. We explain that, in our experience, if you use this pickup with this body style, this is the kind of sound that youāre going to get. Obviously if you want a really tight focused sound, a full-size hollowbody may not be your thing. All those little things factor in.
Henrichsen sands a neck in the Custom Shop, which he says looks very much like a small woodshop from decades past.
āIf I want that really open, big-sky sound, Iām going to go with a Falcon. But if I want something a little tighter, Iām probably going to go with a Jet and maybe even a center-block jet, to tighten it up even more. Iāve done some builds in the past where our Jets and Penguins, even though we call them solidbodies, have not been very solid. Theyāre highly chambered inside, and Iāve played with the floor of that chamberālessening the depthāto see how that changes the sound. Thatās part of the fun I have as a builderāplaying with those dimensions and seeing the results.ā
The endgame of all this, of course, is to create a great-playing and -sounding guitar. The key, says Henrichsen, is āattention to detail. That is one of the things Iām most proud of about the shop. All of us really are paying attention 100 percent of the time. Of course, we make mistakes; weāre human. When you are doing some of the run-of-the-mill operations, itās easy to let your mind wander and you think about, āOh, Iāve got to feed the dogs when I get home,ā or whatever. But we really try to be cognizant of that and get that tunnel vision, in a good way. With woodworking, if youāre not paying attention for half a second, things can go sideways, or you may miss a little hairline crack in that wood and it may rear its ugly head later on when youāre trying to put a finish on it. If every little piece that makes a final product is the best it can be, then that final product is going to be even greater.
āThe player can immediately recognize when the proper attention has been paid to details,ā he continues. āWe do a lot of binding over frets, for example, and when you have those fret ends nice and smooth, it feels comfortable. Things are balanced. The last thing you want as a player is distractions. You donāt want to think about your instrument at all. You just want to be that instrument. It needs to be a part of you, not something that youāre fighting. When the customer picks it up, and it just works and it feels great, and they have no complaints whatsoeverā¦. Thatās our end goal every time.ā
Busted stompbox? Here are tips from a tech on when to repair and when to despair.
It is a cruel world out there, and no quarter is offered to your pedals, no matter how carefully you proceed from gig to gig. Just like an amp or guitar, your pedalboard can become an instrumental part of what you do as a player. But broken pedals are natural given theyāre instruments that you step on, so getting them repaired is something weāll all need to confront. While weād love to have nothing wasted and everything working, whether or not something can be fixed reasonably is not always cut and dried.
The value of the pedal is an important factor. Since the cost of labor and expertise is so high, it can be very easy for repair costs to quickly exceed the value of the thing being repaired. For example, thereās a multitude of guitar effect pedals available between $30 and $40. Should one of the footswitches in those pedals fail, a replacement footswitch goes for 25 percent of the pedalās entire value, and thatās before any work has been done to make an actual repair. At typical labor rates, spending 15 minutes fixing a broken footswitch can bust the bank on a budget pedal. As sad as it is, some stuff just isnāt worth having it be fixed professionally.
Conversely, a great candidate for repair is something like a vintage Nobels ODR-1. The values have skyrocketed, so thereās no question itās worth fixing. Since minimizing labor is critical, it is triply good that they are simply constructed, made from mostly sourceable components, and contain relatively basic analog circuits with widely available circuit diagrams. But there are high-value pedals that arenāt as tech-friendly. Our benches have seen pedals plagued with complication and no documentation, constructed from unobtanium parts and assembled like a house of cards. In such cases, a technician will need to disassemble the box, study the circuit long enough to understand its operation (despite the fact it is not currently working), deduce what is malfunctioning, and spend time sourcing replacement parts. The tech will then have to decide how little to get paid for all that work, since after developing this plan, the client can simply say no to the repair if the price is too high. Repair work is brutal. Bake your technician some cookies.
Repair work is brutal. Bake your technician some cookies.
A horde of critics will complain that no one should be able to charge the hourly rates that most repair work demands. Most of them have not had the misfortune of actually running businesses. The unvarnished economics is that a busy tech can choose to either work on something at a discount, or pass and move on to something that will put food on the table. The obvious answer means that thereās a great deal of gear out there that, hypothetically, could get fixed, but, practically, canāt get fixed.
If you have a new production pedal that is malfunctioning, I highly recommend first contacting the manufacturer. Most manufacturers, particularly boutique builders, are extraordinarily helpful when it comes to getting their customersā pedals working again. As the creator of your device, they will have all of the experience and documentation to make quick repairs and a vested interest in giving you an optimum experience. Most builders recognize that a repair can be an opportunity to take a situation from bad to good, since going the extra mile serving a customer may more than make up for any bad feelings associated with a pedal that suddenly stopped working properly.
For pedals made by larger manufacturers, check and see if there are any authorized service centers. Companies like Line 6 often outfit local repair shops with the equipment and resources needed to repair their products. This can save you the hassle of sending your pedal across the country or the world for repair. These types of shops are often limited to major markets, but if you live in or near an urban area, you may have access to local repair.
DIY is another great avenue! There is a ton of information out there, and a person who learns how to replace footswitches, jacks, and potentiometers will be able to fix 50 to 75 percent of all the broken pedals in the world. But if youāve no interest in self-sufficiency and want to keep your maintenance costs down, buy effects that are simple circuits or buy from companies big enough and benevolent enough to provide easy-to-access long-term support. May the odds be ever in your favor!
Dirk Wacker shares what the last six months have been like for him and his guitar-tech business in Germany.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month's column is a very special one for me. Since I started writing for Premier Guitar back in 2005 (heck, it's really 15 years now), it's the first time I'm writing something personal instead of talking about mods and technical stuff. But don't worry, I won't get political or bore you with another COVID-19 complaint. Lay down your soldering iron and relax, and next month we'll get back to business as usual.
I'm happy to say that I receive a lot of emails from readers all over the world, with all kinds of suggestions, questions, comments, and the like. Much of this correspondence was the reason for columns in the past and will also inspire topics for future columns. Soon after the lockdown, I noticed the tenor of many emails changed from guitar-related stuff to more personal inquiries, like how the pandemic situation in Europe and especially inside Germany is, if everyone at the shop is well, etc. I also received messages with questions like: How is it going inside the workshop? What do I have on my desk? What am I doing during lockdown? After discussing this with my editor, we decided I should write about it. So, here is my personal COVID-19 experience.
I never thought something like the pandemic could really happen in our modern world, so in early February we still made plans for the Musikmesse trade fair in Frankfurt, Germany, in April. I also saw no reason to cancel my stay in Switzerland for the middle of March. I have to ask myself now, in retrospect, how could someone be so careless and ignorant? I will never forget the conversation between two friends and myself, talking about the Musikmesse show. One of them wondered what we should do because traditionally there are many Asian exhibitors there, and in early February COVID-19 still seemed to be a problem only affecting China. My other friend and I didn't waste any thought about this, being sure that in three months the problem would be solved ā¦ how wrong we were!
Unsuspecting as I was, I booked our tickets for Musikmesse, including railroad tickets. I also went to Switzerland in March to visit some friends to go hiking and mountaineering. On March 16, the lockdown hit me like a hammer when Switzerland closed all borders. Within a New York minute, I was stranded in a foreign country that isn't a member of the European Union. It took me some time and effort to leave Switzerland, but thankfully I have friends there, so I had a roof over my head and no bigger problems of any kind. Lesson learned!
Being back in Germany, I had to face that COVID-19 was definitely not just Asia's problem and that it would affect all facets of life in Germany. Shops, bars, clubs, restaurants, schools, universities, cinemas, theaters, gyms, barbers, churches, and all stages closed. Most companies established reduced working times, countless people had to work from home, public authorities closed their doors, and every day there were new COVID-19 calamities on all news channels.
The situation in Germany was strange, at least for me. Suddenly everyone had to wear a face mask, most stores had closed, people started to hoard toilet paper and yeast, for weeks you couldn't see anyone on the streets, traffic was reduced to almost empty streets even on the highways, and for weeks I hadn't seen a single jet trail in the blue and sunny sky. Within a few weeks, guitar project orders went down to almost zero, which wasn't a real problem because it gave us time to work on everything that was still in the workshop on a waiting list. After this was done and the workshop was empty, I started to make plans on how to keep myself busy: spending more time with the dog and the two horses, doing extended rides with them in the woods, restoring some old vintage wristwatchesāsomething I really love to do when I have time for it. I decided to take additional shifts as a volunteer paramedic in the EMS of my neighbor county, something I also really love to do. I made plans to watch all episodes of Star Trek: Picard on Netflix again, read some new crime thrillers, and to do some aesthetic repairs in the shop and in the house.
I was sure there would be no boredom in any way, and this time I was totally right, but in a very different way than I thought. Before I could even dismantle the first watch to see what the problem was, guitar jobs suddenly went from zero to over the top. We began receiving several guitars each day to repair, to restore, or to modify, and within two weeks our storage area was more than filled with guitars, waiting for their treatment.
After thinking about this and talking to some customers it was clear what caused this new situation: Everyone had unexpected time on their hands now and virtually no one really needed all of their guitars because it was impossible to gig, rehearse, or play, and no teacher could give any guitar lessons. So why not send in guitars that need work done that was long overdue? Instead of restoring vintage watches, I found myself restoring vintage guitarsāalso something I really love to do. Suddenly we had plenty of work and still do, now operating with a waiting list. The DIY caucus also had some time on their hands, and we received lots of parts orders again, and much more than ever before. But this was a real problem for our international customers. While shipping inside Germany and most other European countries was no real problem, DHL immediately raised prices on deliveries abroad. We always choose the best, fastest, and cheapest way of shipping parts to any country. Normally sending some parts like pots, caps, wires, hardware, etc. to the U.S. is around $14, including insurance and online tracking. Suddenly the cheapest (!) way to send anything out to the U.S. with DHL was $64.
This lasted from early April until September, and then DHL switched from shipping by plane to sea cargo, so shipping times raised from the usual 6-8 days up to six weeks and longer, for the same price as before.
I was surprised again by orders from a lot of international customers, many of them being first-time buyers. Usually people expect their parts to be shipped out immediately. Most customers were not keen on paying $64 for shipping on some parts that cost less than half of that, and most of them were totally relaxed about the situation and agreed that we should send out their parts when shipping prices returned to normal. I think the worldwide pandemic slowed down most of us to a certain degree, but I was really honored that so many people trusted us in such a way. Our storage room started to fill up with packages that couldn't be shipped yet. For weeks we were creative in storing away and piling shipping boxes, but this āGuitar Parts Tetris" game couldn't last. At the end of August, we had to face that we were out of storage room. Since some of the orders were from late March, we decided to look for an alternative shipping solution, and UPS offered us a very fair deal if we shipped out all the boxes at the same time. We took the lemon and pulled the trigger, and within 10 days all orders reached their destination without any problems.
As I write this, we're in the middle of what's being called a āsecond wave" over here, with rising COVID-19 infections daily. DHL is offering shipping with extended arrival times, but for a reasonable price again, our guitar storage room is staying full, and our local DHL driver is going in and out several times a day.
So, is everything bad about the pandemic? Mostly yes. But it was a good lesson for many people to slow down in such a way to be able to think about the important things in life. My impression is that humanity and good will are more natural again. I hope you could get a little insight into the situation over here. Please stay well and mighty, and we will try and do the same.
Next month we'll discuss what I like to call āAlien Tasks in Lutherie," which refers to a typical task where two arms and two hands are not enough. This time it's about installing humbuckers in a plastic frame or a pickguard, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!