00:00Kevin Meiterman is a reconstructive plastic surgeon by day and a guitar maker by night.
00:09After medical school, Kevin decided to learn more about guitar building and trained with master builders in Massachusetts.
00:16By combining advanced materials like carbon fiber with wood and traditional guitar building wisdom,
00:22Kevin builds double-top acoustic guitars that are as technically brilliant as they are beautiful.
00:28There isn't a single moment when I'm in here making guitars that isn't joy.
00:41I'm Kevin Meiterman and I'm a guitar maker and I've been doing that for about 18 years and I'm also a plastic surgeon in town.
00:49I've been a guitar player since I was about nine years old.
00:53For some reason, the tone of the guitar, the first time I heard a guitar played well, it just thrilled me to no end.
01:06Since I was quite a young person, I've always built things.
01:10When I was in high school, there was a guitar maker there.
01:12He had a guitar store where he would sell regular guitars, Martins and Taylors and all those things you hear about.
01:20The guitars that he was making sounded better, intrinsically better, and I wanted to know why.
01:32Then I went off to medical school residency, but then when I started my practice,
01:37I decided I wanted to recapture some of these things that make life special.
01:41So I would take my vacations from my job and I would go off for a week or two at a time to a guitar making school in Massachusetts
01:50and work with these master guitar makers.
01:52Once I learned what I needed, I started building guitars myself and I've been doing it ever since.
02:00It's meditative. People ask oftentimes how this relates to surgical skills and surgical training.
02:07I think that it really is very much the same.
02:10In other words, my joy for working with my hands, I suppose, came first
02:15and it manifested in my job, which is surgery, but also my working with wood.
02:22And surgery is, I love doing it, but there's an intensity to it.
02:26And this is sort of the antithesis of that intensity.
02:29It's peaceful and is completely without tension.
02:33And that's lovely.
02:36And so once the shape is determined, then you determine the woods you're going to use.
02:40And sometimes that's a purely aesthetic choice.
02:42Sometimes certain players want a certain wood for a certain tone.
02:46So I kind of get all those things, literally put them on the bench and start designing when it's just raw, rough hunks of wood.
02:52This is where everything begins. I buy the wood in a rough form.
02:56For example, here's some East Indian rosewood that still has the saw cuts on it from the mill.
03:02These mashing sides are here, and these are also rough, but they'll be eventually thinned on the sander
03:08and then bent into their shapes.
03:13And so I used to have only two shapes of guitar.
03:17I now have collected eight or ten different sets of work boards.
03:24So here's how a neck begins, a big hunk of wood.
03:29But then at some point, you get down to just whittling it, basically.
03:42These are little surgical lights that I bought from a surgical supply house.
03:46I also learned that in the operating room, there are always two lights, one over each shoulder.
03:50So no matter where you're working, you're eliminating the shadow.
03:53And so when I'm working, I'll often use my two little lights, and I'll have one light coming over each shoulder.
03:58And so no matter where I'm working, there's never a shadow.
04:03And it makes for some great detail work.
04:05It's fun to see, as you start scraping back, bringing the wood's level and getting the glue off of there,
04:11it's fun to see the lines pop.
04:13This is rosewood, and this is poplar.
04:16And it's fun to see, as you're scraping, the result poke through.
04:20And then I assemble the back to the sides, and I have the first step.
04:25And then I start on the top. I choose those woods.
04:28All right, so this is the way I make my tops, using the composite materials.
04:33So traditionally, a top for a guitar, which is the vibrating element of it,
04:39comes out of a single book-matched set of wood.
04:44These days, people are using composite materials to try to get a guitar top that is as resonant and is as strong,
04:52but is actually lighter, so you get more sound and maybe even more controllable sound.
04:58From the audience perspective, no one would know there's any difference.
05:01For example, this is a double-topped guitar with all the composites and all the fancy things inside the guitar,
05:07but you'd never know it.
05:09All guitar tops are not just a piece of wood, but they're braced somehow on the inside with a series of braces.
05:16Traditionally, these are solid wood.
05:18I use a little thin sheet of carbon fiber, sandwich that between two thin pieces of wood,
05:26and you get a brace that is inflexible because of that, almost like an I-beam on the inside.
05:33It's very strong.
05:34If I get a request from a guitar player for something, I'll work it up in a prototype first
05:40so that I can change one element at a time to try to hone in on the sound that they're looking for
05:46without having to build a whole new guitar.
05:48So...
05:51There's a six-string.
05:52Here's a 12-string prototype.
05:55This is a Nara wood guitar.
06:02It's got a really big sound.
06:10I look forward to coming in here at the end of a long day.
06:13I guess I'm sort of a geek.
06:15In other words, I don't do much besides my work and spend time with my family
06:19and then make instruments and play in guitar concerts.
06:22It's really a good life.
06:24It's a simple life, but it's mine, and I like it.
06:35Prairie Mosaic is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund
06:40with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 4th, 2008,
06:45the North Dakota Council on the Arts,
06:48and by the members of Prairie Public.
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