“But it’s OK,” he says, “because the world didn’t lose a good musician. “I was just irresistibly drawn to monkeying around with these things,” says Ford, 65, a born storyteller with advanced chops as a mandolin player - until about 10 years ago, when his arthritis acted up. A wry-humored fellow with an owlish demeanor, he is widely regarded as a confoundedly brilliant restorer of instruments. Ford, at this moment, is in the back, running the repair shop, devising new schemes - he uses high-tech dental tools - to leave not a trace on the 1905 Gibson mandolin he’s restoring. As is Ford, son of a Menlo Park pharmaceuticals manager who came home each night to fix everything in sight, his true avocation. Thing is, Johnston, who grew up on a peach farm in the Central Valley, is still smitten with acoustic sounds. He appraises instruments for “Antiques Roadshow.” And here he is, after 40 years, still behind the counter of the shop he helped start fresh out of college, when revolution was in the air and he was smitten with the country blues of Mississippi Fred McDowell. He is co-author of two authorized histories of Martin guitars. Mind you, Johnston, 62, is a foremost expert on vintage American acoustic guitars, banjos, mandolins and ukuleles. Instant diagnosis: It’s worth about $2,200 and fixing it is no big deal. He peers inside to check the internal bracing. Johnston gently spins it in his hands, looks over its mahogany back and the sunburst finish on its face. “There’s something funky going on,” she tells him.
She hands it across the counter to Johnston for inspection. on a Monday: middle-aged, carrying her Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar. “Guitars are a world.”Īnd world-famous Gryphon is a magnet for folks interested in all sorts of acoustic, fretted stringed instruments. They all drop by because they speak “the same secret language,” says Richard Johnston, who cofounded the shop in 1969 with his pal Frank Ford. It’s a cozy institution, a gathering spot for beginning guitar strummers, advanced pickers and a cadre of vintage instrument collectors. Off the beaten track in Palo Alto, it is more than a shop, and better than an Internet chat room. Here we are in the age of cutthroat Internet retail sales - low prices, no service - and here, still, is little Gryphon Stringed Instruments, as fine an example as you will find of that endangered species known as the neighborhood guitar shop. Compared to soprano or even tenor models, however, they are hard to find, and today a Martin concert uke like the one shown here sells for about twice what the equivalent soprano model would bring.OK, let’s figure this one out. The concert model appeared in Martin’s catalogs until 1965. The Style 1 Concert, however, survived and went on to become an important member of Martin’s more limited post-World War II lineup. Before too long, the company was offering a 4-string version, and in 1924 this new uke variant, called the Concert, appeared in Martin’s catalog described as “a large ukulele with a tone of great carrying power.” Of course Martin didn’t stop there-it offered tenor ukes four years later, but the concert uke was the first “large” ukulele, although it certainly doesn’t seem large today!īy 1931, the Great Depression had put an end to Martin’s already slow taropatch sales and they were dropped from the catalog.
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Probably the most noteworthy exception was Buster Keaton, who owned and played a Martin taropatch and even ordered one with his name on the headstock.īut even a movie star like Keaton wasn’t enough to boost the popularity of the taropatch-it was the least popular model in Martin’s ukulele line. Ukes were supposed to be easy-to-play, carefree instruments, but taropatch players often found themselves spending more time tuning than playing. The problem, however, was that with its friction pegs and all those extra strings, the taropatch was difficult to tune, and also much more expensive. The bigger body and twice as many strings made the taropatch a real powerhouse when compared to a typical soprano uke. Martin called them “taro-patch fiddles,” a name linked to the romantic notion that Hawaiians took them to the fields when harvesting taro. The strings were tuned in pairs, much like a mandolin, but in standard ukulele tuning and of course with gut strings.
Just a few months after Martin introduced its line of soprano ukes in 1916, the company offered a larger model with eight strings, called the taropatch. Shown here are three Martin mahogany ukes: On the left is a Style 1 soprano from the late 1940s in the middle is a Style 1 taropatch from the mid-1920s and on the right is Martin’s concert model, also from the late ’40s.