Fender’s Donnie Wade on Guild Guitars

Reprinted from Australian Musician magazine, June 2007.

If artists the calibre of Dylan, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Brian May, and Buddy Guy have played your guitars, then there is no argument that they are instruments of the highest quality.

It’s the Guild guitar brand I’m referring to, the company which had humble beginnings in a New York City workshop over 50 years ago.

Polish immigrant Al Dronge had a vision back in 1953, and that was to make the finest standard American instruments they could, and to do so at an affordable cost to the customer. As a result, Dronge’s fledgling company created a wonderful range of flat-top acoustics, in particular the F-30 Aragon, F-40 Valencia and F-50 Navarre, which were widely acclaimed.

Into the sixties Guild found more success, assisted no end by the legendary solo performance of Richie Havens at Woodstock as his unique rhythmic style was highlighted on his D-50 model Guild.

Sadly in 1972, Guild founder Al Dronge died in plane crash, leaving the company struggling for direction. Consequently, Guild lost some ground to its competitors, and it wasn’t until Fender acquired the company in 1995 that things started to turn around again.

Fender’s Marketing Manager for Guild, Tacoma and Fender acoustic instruments Donnie Wade (pictured left) was recently in Australia for a dealer seminar, and also to tell anyone within earshot that the Guild name is back in a major way. Wade, a respected luthier and acoustic guitar aficionado took time out to speak with Australian Musician’s Greg Phillips about the Guild philosophy.

Guild has a long and distinguished history, which in itself gives you an edge over a lot of the newer guitar companies because you can’t buy that history and tradition. As a marketing manager, what kind of things do you implement to keep that tradition going?

Number one way you implement it, is to deliver a product that the consumer and dealer both feel is a value driven instrument. That’s the most important part right there. The marketing plan is just to deliver the product that the market expects from you.

Sadly many of the people that owned Guild between the time Al Dronge died and until the last five years, had lost sight of what it was supposed to be. The key thing to return to is ... to make what the consumer and the dealer expects of the product. So we do our very best to be true and real to what people expect Guild to be.

Timber is quite an issue these days, tell me about sourcing your timber and also the Music Wood campaign Guild is involved in with Greenpeace.

Number one, we want to build guitars. But first you have to step outside the music business. We have to be responsible as human beings to deliver a product that people want. But at the same time we have to become more intelligent in our approach as a manufacturer to find sources that are using properly managed timber.

One example I will give you is that we work with the folks up in Alaska. The Greenpeace program that we are involved in with Taylor and Martin and Gibson ... what we do is we make sure when we buy our Spruce, that we are buying from reputable sources that have harvested the wood properly. That’ s the first thing. You still have to buy wood from all over the world to make a musical instrument that the consumer expects.

The expectation of the consumer is going to change dramatically in the next five years. In the next 20 years Indian Rosewood is going to become a wood that just like Brazilian Rosewood is right now and the same thing will happen next year when it comes to Honduran Mahogany versus African Mahogany. As it is, if you do not have Honduran Mahogany within your company at the end of this year, it will be illegal to own anything that is raw Honduran Mahogany lumber.

OK, what are we doing about that? What we’re doing is sourcing out of Africa and trying to find reputable companies, people that we know do not go and steal old growth trees, because there is a lot of money in that. The big challenge for Guild and any other guitar company is to source wood that will not impact negatively on the planet and the people that live in those areas, yet at the same time deliver a guitar that the customer expects.

How long do you think it takes before a new Guild guitar really starts to reveal its own personality?

The bottom line is that when you build a guitar, it is made out of a living thing. It has a cell structure just like a human body does. The wood realises “I’m not a tree any more, I’ve been reincarnated as a guitar”... which happens in a time period generally of about a year.

The guitar will sound good when it is brand new, but in a year that wood will be settled in and start having more character because the wood has gone through the change of being a living thing to something that is not living any more.

As the moisture precipitates from the wood... and that only comes with age... you can only precipitate X amount of humidity through a kiln and air drying. Wood keeps changing. In a hundred years it’s going to sound different.

If it’s a laminated guitar it is not going to develop that character that it does if it was solid. At Guild, everything we do is solid except for the F50 and the F412 backs of those guitars. The backs on those guitars are laminated wood and the reason we keep them as laminated is because that’s the way Al Dronge designed those guitars and that became part of the character of the Guild instrument. If you change the back of the F50 or F412, 12 string, then the character changes of that instrument.

In all of the concerts you have been to and seen and heard someone play a Guild guitar, was there one gig where you thought the guitar sounded more extraordinary than usual?

A couple of years ago, John Sebastian, who used to be with the Lovin’ Spoonful was playing a gig and I was expecting him to be playing his Collings guitar. Low and behold John shows up with this Guild F40. John and I were talking and he said Donnie, “I have used this guitar on all the Lovin’ Spoonful recordings. I’ve got a Collings, but this is like part of me,” he said. “This reflects my heart, reflects my soul.”

When John did the gig that night, it was like OK, that’s the tool for the soul. Quite frankly what we do is we build these things, we call them guitars, but what we actually build, everybody in this business, not just Guild, we build tools for the soul. Whether you are 16 years old wanting to be Kurt Cobain or a fat old guy like me that wants to play like Merle Travis, that’s a tool for my soul and also a tool for that kid’s soul.

Tell me one thing about modern guitar building that disappoints you?

A lot of the way you create the soul of the guitar is by the work the human being does with it. So my biggest concern with modern manufacturing is that some manufacturers do not know how to draw the line between man and machine. You know if you go too far with the machine, you might as well have something that is nothing more than a plastic box. Thats my concern.

What’s on the drawing board and happening in the near future for Guild?

At the beginning of next year, we’ll see the re-introduction of the Guild electric guitar. You’re going to see some models that 99% of the world doesn’t even know Guild made in the 1950s. So there’s some real cool stuff that was made in the 1950s that no one has seen since 1959 and those are mainly small bodied instruments, more finger styled.

What are you most proud of at Guild?

The thing I am most proud of is the team of people and the family I get to work with. This is my 37th year in this business and you know, it’s great to make a guitar and to see someone really happy, bring a little joy to them or spark that comes from it, but the biggest thing for me is the family and team aspect.