Its not about me, its all you.
Let’s see what happened this week. I worked on the guitar: bound it; broke the gold mother of pearl purfling and glued into place; sanding and scraping the guitar ready for finish. The body is ready and now we embark on the neck. The first thing is to make a new neck jig set at 8 degrees and block the neck. As I think and dream about this next step, I ask myself how can I make it special, unique, one of a kind for Noel. It think proper fitment to the body and playability is key. He’s been playing his current guitar for almost 20 years now and I’m 100% sure he is comfortable with it. My goal is to make it similar but better. I need to connect with him in these next steps. Asking him about fitment to hand, what pisses him off, what he wants from this guitar when playing. This is my critical step when contemplating the neck. Getting the neck right is what will form the relationship between him and this guitar.
Beyond the build of the Guitar, filming the documentary with Jonard, building relationships with the guitarborn team, this blog celebrates a milestone in the project. We’ve been awarded the AFA grant. Three times in the making, persistence and commitment paid off. It gives justification to our project. As I’ve written in my last blog, the direction of our project has naturally evolved into something more purposeful and meaningful to our community which we are trying to serve.
With this ideology, the purpose of our grant has evolved. Originally, it was simply about paying for the material and labour for guitar, paying for Noel’s guitar lessons; marketing; filming and editing and that was it. It was very transactional and served the purposes of our simplistic goals.
Now that we are changing course we need to be strategic about what we use these funds for. We need to rid our selfishness and really connect with our purpose. This means that I am building this guitar at substantially less than what it would typically cost - basically whatever materials we require specific to the build: rosette, tuning pegs is all that the grant would be used for. There will be money allocated to our marketing, new filming equipment and of course filmography, directing and editing services provided by our talented Jonard. With all this accounted for, we will have funds left over.
This left over is deliberate, created by sacrifice by Noel and I. We don’t need the money, what we need is to perpetuate our vision, create authenticity to our project’s mission statement. So the money will be used on other unique stories like ours and share them along side ours. We are now looking for people in our lives and in our hearts that deserve this tiny light to be shone on them. Create a movement by creating a mosaic of like stories. We don’t have our strategy defined, however, my initial thoughts is that it will be artistic; each vignette will contain the common theme of people following their vocation, their calling in life. Each story should contain subtleties of how to start, continue, and perpetuate throughout a legacy.
Send us an email if this is you.
-- Cliff
