A 15-year-old from La Broquerie has found a passion for building guitars, and has built both electric and acoustic guitars.
Christian Gauthier says building guitars takes a lot of skill.
“You need to have woodworking abilities, you need to have guitar abilities, you need to know what everything is, where everything goes, what you all need. You don’t want to all of a sudden be missing something by the time you reach the end and realize it doesn't work.”
He explains how he got into the hobby.
“I started playing guitar about last year, got into that, I found my grandpa's old Strat. And I got into woodworking about two years ago. And put those two things together and you're building guitars.”
Gauthier shares what made him want to pick up and learn how to play his grandpa’s guitar.
“I liked the way it looked, and I've always loved rock music. I thought I should learn to play guitar.”
The first song he ever learned was Smoke on the Water.
Gauthier shares some of the details about one of the guitars he has built.
“This is made with a two-piece cherry body. A yellow cypris neck and a white ash fret board. The color that I chose is iced lilac.”
Gauthier says it took him about a month to build the guitar, as school takes up a lot of time.
He says even without school, building guitars takes a lot of patience.
“I could only do a few things a day with drying paint and drying glue and waiting for parts, that was the main thing, waiting for parts to arrive.”
Gauthier describes what it is like hearing a guitar you built play music for the first time.
“It’s a good feeling because you spent all these hours and all this money, and all of a sudden, you can play the guitar. It's a great feeling.”
He notes building an acoustic guitar is more difficult than an electric guitar.
“I would say an acoustic is much harder, I don't know why I chose to make that one first. An acoustic you need to put all the bracing inside, all the bracing needs to be very specific to get the right sound, you have to bend all the pieces because it's hollow on the inside, so you got the thin piece of wood and you need to bend them with heat and water to get the nice shape.”
Gauthier says the coolest part about building guitars is seeing them get played.
“It's just nice to see, like even when I let other people in my family play it and I just get to see that they're playing a guitar that I made, even when I play, it's like it's my guitar and I'm playing it.”
He says it would be incredible if he could turn this into a small business one day.
“That would be my dream job.”
With files from Dave Anthony