LUTHIER’S CORNER PHIL DAVIDSON Perhaps best known for building Captain Corelli’s mandolin, Phil Davidson also builds many other high-quality instruments, including bespoke ukuleles featuring detailed inlay work. Andy Hughes discovers how passion leads to premium product. small children, so I thought I’d have a go at making one, and it was quite successful, and someone wanted to buy it so I made another one, and so on and so on. In 1988 I got made redundant; I was working as an engineer, so I moved into making and repairing instruments. The first banjo I made I did in my mobile workshop in the back of a Mercedes van. It took me nine months.’ That time frame gives a glimpse into the amount of intensive handcrafted labour and love that Phil puts into the instruments he builds. ‘When people are considering the price of a handcrafted instrument, I tell them to consider what they would spend on a packet of cigarettes every day for five years, and then think of that over a hundred years, because the instrument will last at least that long, and if you work it like that they are not expensive at all. The other way to think of it is how much you would spend on a car that lasts for three years; it puts it into perspective.’ Anyone who has seen the beautiful works of art that are the instruments that Phil builds will be aware that the visual impact of his work is at least as important to him as the resulting music that is made. ‘It is to me, certainly. I am making a mandolin for Louis de Bernières, the author who wrote Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I have built a couple of instruments for him. Louis loves cats, so he has had mother-of-pearl cats f you visit the website of luthier Phil Davidson – www.davidsoninstruments. com – you will find this quote by John Ruskin: ‘Quality is never an accident’. There is also a conversation with Phil – who works in a converted piggery off the M4 near Bristol - which proves that he has absorbed that ethos, along with a deep love and affection for the instruments he builds, and the woods and other materials from which he crafts them. Phil began his career repairing banjos - first his own, and then those of friends. ‘I did. I started to learn the banjo in the early Eighties,’ Phil remembers. ‘I am a mechanic by trade; I had a toolkit for my fifth birthday, which gives you an idea how long I have been fixing and making things. Naturally I started working on the banjo that I had, and working on friends’ banjos, and I used to meet different musicians, so I started working on guitars, more or less anything really. I couldn’t afford to buy the banjo I wanted because I had two I on the fingerboards of the instruments I have built for him. Phil has made a speciality of building ukuleles, an instrument which grew in popularity in the 1920s and 1930s largely because it was such an inexpensive instrument to buy. So what is the advantage of a handcrafted ukulele from Phil, which will relieve you of £750? His argument is convincing. ‘Because they are loud and clear and well made, and when you first touch them you can feel the quality; the thing is almost alive. If you hold it in your hands and talk to it, you can feel your voice in the strings. It’s a quality musical instrument. I believe my ukuleles may be the only ones in the world with a dovetailed neck joint. My ukes get the same level of attention as my guitars. Everybody else just glues the neck on, sometimes with a tenon, but it’s usually just glued on. If you leave them in the boot of a car on a hot day, the neck will come off. I take them seriously; I believe the ukulele is a serious musical instrument. I believe the quality is as high as anything I make. They take a lot less time and work than a fancy mandolin, which is reflected in the price: £750 for a soprano, which is a lot of money compared to what other people are doing them for. But I use quality tonal woods in the manufacture; I have taken a lot of ukuleles apart over the last 30 years or so, and I know what makes them loud, what makes them clear, and what makes them fall apart. I think I have come up with something special. My soprano is bigger than a Martin or a Gibson; that’s because people are bigger than they were in previous generations. The human race is generally larger, so people have bigger hands, so I make a slightly bigger ukulele which has a bigger voice and is more comfortable to play. I do occasionally get an order for one made to the original scale, which is 352mm. I usually make them at 360mm because that puts a little extra tension on the strings which makes them sing a little bit better, and I do the same on my mandolins. But I am always prepared to listen to the customer who wants a slightly smaller one, especially the ladies. What you get is a bespoke musical instrument to your own specification, not a mass-produced factory model, with thousands made the same way.’ And the secret to getting a good sound from a ukulele? Good wood is the heart of a good sound. Phil explains. ‘The thickness of the wood is the most important thing. It is much much thinner than guitar wood. A guitar will be 2.8mm on the front, whereas a uke is 1.5mm or 1.6mm. It does depend on the stiffness of the wood; the 126 Acoustic December 2008 LUTHIER’S CORNER stiffer the wood, the thinner I can make it. With a spruce top uke I will take it up to 1.8mm or 1.9mm. I use offcuts from guitar wood and I will tap-tune the wood just as I would for a guitar; I tap it until it has the right resonance. Koa wood is the favourite because it is Hawaiian, and all the Hawaiian ukes are made with it. I usually buy it in planks, 50mm thick (about two inches) and over a metre in length. I buy different lengths, and I have the machinery to cut it myself, so I can cut it with the grain the way I want it to go. It’s much better than buying quarter-sawn pieces and then carefully cutting it myself with a bandsaw. I prefer to have the bigger pieces and cut them the way I want them.’ The main reason for visiting Phil Davidson, apart from the superb craftsmanship and love he invests in every instrument he builds, is the willingness he extends to make sure that the customer gets what the customer wants, and this applies particularly to the custom inlays that Phil and his wife will create. ‘Inlays are very personal, frequently birds and flowers,’ Phil confirms. ‘I did one with a marguerite on it because the guy’s mother was named Marguerite, Rita for short, and she had died and left him some money, and he was using that to buy a ukulele, and he wanted the design to remind him of her. I like that.’ So does Phil have a favourite size of ukulele to build? ‘I don’t really have a favourite, I love them all. I do enjoy making baritones because I hardly ever make them; it’s a question if I have made more than a dozen. I enjoy making them because I make less of them; they are lovely things.’ Like any craft, there can be unseen problems awaiting the craftsman and, for Phil, the devil is the detail. ‘You can find a pitch pocket in the wood. It happens less in a ukulele because you find it when you are cutting the wood initially. A pitch pocket is a lump of resin buried deep inside the wood which you may not find for days into the manufacturing process. I have a wood-burning stove, and all the mistakes and accidents finish up in there. You can have a blunt edge on a cutting tool, and get a fuzzy edge where you are trying to put binding on. My stuff is getting better and better because I am less tolerant of my own mistakes, so more and more stuff goes into the stove. Money is not such a consideration these days; I don’t have to worry about wasting the odd bit of wood now.’ As someone who has made a career out of lovingly creating bespoke instruments, and repairing those which have had less of the care and attention that they deserve, Phil knows that repairs are required for reasons many and various, but even he was surprised by the damage caused to a friend’s pride and joy. ‘I have a mandolin hanging up in front of me that got run over!’ he confirms, his voice echoing the incredulity he obviously feels. ‘It’s a £4,000 mandolin that I made only a year ago. The owner was putting his kids in the car, his wife was rushing to get somewhere, so he put the mandolin down, and his wife drove over it. If it had been a smaller car the case would have withstood the weight, but it is badly damaged. Everything is repairable, though. It belongs to the guy who built my website; it’s there on the mandolin page.’ It is apparent that Phil has found a craft that he loves and from which he can make a career, but what about advice for anyone tempted to follow in his footsteps? ‘Come to terms with poverty,’ is Phil’s instant and probably personally experienced advice. ‘Get used to being skint, long periods of being skint, and then a load of money will come in all at once and pay off your overdraft, and you will have nothing left. It takes a long long time for the money to get steady, unless you are doing lots of little repair jobs, and I prefer not to do them but to concentrate on building my instruments. This morning I have a banjo rim on the lathe, so I have cut some channels and glued in some purfling on that, so that will be left until tomorrow. I’ve done a bit of work on the headstock of the same banjo, and that is waiting for my wife to do some inlay work. I am going to carve a mandolin neck next, and then I will sand the neck and give it a wash, and then tomorrow it will be ready for some more sanding; that’s another little process. I have a bouzouki neck to carve, maybe this afternoon; I don’t know, I’ll see. I do as I please all day every day; isn’t that fabulous?’ Andy Hughes December 2008 Acoustic 127