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Guitar maker strikes right business chord
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Leaning slightly over the Benedetto electric guitar before him on the workbench, Joe Wilson checks its finish and decides it needs another light sanding.
“Guitars, especially when they’re played professionally, tend to take a little bit of a beating,” he says as he works his away around the curves of the instrument. “In this instance, my job is fairly straightforward. I’m just trying to reinvigorate a well-cared-for instrument. A lot of times, the work I’m asked to perform is a lot more extensive.”
He motions toward a $10,000 instrument he is refinishing for well-known jazz guitarist Jerry Bruno. The entire rim of the instrument is smashed in, looking as if someone took a sledgehammer to it.
“The owner says he fell down a flight of stairs with it,” Wilson says, his eyes registering a hint of mystification. “Now this, this is going to be a major repair.”
At a time when most independent music instrument retailers are struggling against the expansion of national chain stores into the region, Wilson, his son, Bryn, and business partner Phil Thomas have created something akin to their own business cluster on Coleman Boulevard in Mount Pleasant.
Their retail store, Precision Guitar and Music, provides lessons to aspiring musicians, thereby creating a customer base, while their new vintage guitar business—the Shem Creek Vintage Guitar Studio, started last September and already active on the vintage guitar show circuit—seeks to serve the higher-end niche of stringed instrument ownership.
Without question, the centerpiece of the operation is Wilson’s Guitar Workshop where Wilson specializes in handcrafting both acoustic and electric instruments, as well as repairing guitars, mandolins, violins and the occasional exotic string instrument.
Arranged all around Wilson as he reminisces about his career are the extensive tools of his trade: lathes, driers, molds, screwdrivers, pliers and hammers, along with hundreds of pieces of raw wood and tiny electrical parts.
“At first I got a little nervous when I was working with anything that was real expensive,” he says. “Now I do collector’s items all the time.”
He pulls one such instrument from a wall-mounted display rod. To the untrained eye, it looks much like any other small guitar with a large discolored splotch between the sound hole and the fingerboard.
This, he says, is one of the most challenging projects in his shop right now. The modest-looking instrument was built in France in 1862.
“It’s definitely one of the oldest instruments I’ve worked on, and the problem I’m having is finding a piece of wood that would match both the appearance and the tone of the original,” he says. “The other thing is somebody obviously tried to repair it at least once before and made a bit of a mess of it. Repairs of other’s repairs are another big part of my work.”
When accepting a repair job, Wilson must determine what can be fixed, what parts should be replaced and, in some cases, how to tell a prospective client that the cost of repairs would far exceed the true value of the instrument.
“I probably have between 125 and 130 instruments here right now in need of some kind of repair,” he says, admitting, “I couldn’t even hazard a guess how many I work on each year.”
He also handcrafts another 15 to 20 instruments a year, including a half dozen or more acoustics and roughly double that number in somewhat less time-consuming electric guitars.
Of these, the most unusual of all was one of his earliest—a double-neck guitar for a member of Alabama during their bar band days in Myrtle Beach.
As for the repairs, Wilson says many of the most fulfilling fall into the category of the tear jerker, such as when a young man visited the shop several weeks after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Hugo.
“His family’s home had been severely damaged during the storm, and the guitar, which had belonged to his father, evidently was blown four or five blocks, banging along the street for considerable amounts of that distance.”
Later, when the son came by to pick up the repaired guitar, he had his entire family in tow.
“They cried. Shared family photos with me. That kind of job really makes you feel good.”
As a result of his reputation for being something of a miracle worker with mangled instruments, Wilson now receives warranty work from major guitar manufacturers such as Gibson, Taylor and Fender guitars.
The network of contacts he made during his days as a independent sales representative now results in requests for luthier work from throughout the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia and other points up and down the East Coast.
“When people find out what I do all day long, they will often say, ‘Oh man, what a life! I’d love to be doing what you’re doing,’” Wilson says. “To which I always say, ‘Well make me an offer.’
“Not that I could ever really sell the business,” he quickly adds. “This (job) is my retirement. I wouldn’t want to retire if I could. I’m truly one of the few who’s gotten the cake and is eating it too.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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