Andy Powers: Master Luthier at Taylor Guitars

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.

0:48I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Andy Powers. Andy is a renowned luthier and guitar designer. He was born and raised in Oceanside, California. He developed a passion for guitar making at a young age. He even attempted to build his first guitar when he was only seven years old. Andy pursued his interest in music and earned an Associate of Arts degree in music from MiraCosta College, and then he transferred to UC San Diego. After meeting Bob Taylor, the co-founder of Taylor Guitars, at a concert at Maricosta, Andy eventually joined Taylor Guitars as their master luthier.

1:34He has been instrumental in designing and developing some of the company's most acclaimed guitars. His work has earned him a loyal following among musicians including Taylor Swift, Elvis Costello, and Jimmy Page. Andy recently launched his own electric guitar brand, Powers Electric. This further cemented his reputation as one of the most talented and innovative guitar builders in the world. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here is the remarkable Andy Powers. What I know about the guitars and guitar making could fit in a thimble. So I'm going to have to ask you questions like, I don't know what I know.

2:16I don't know anything because it's actually true. Can I stop you right there? If you ask me, I think that's a beautiful place to start. I think that's a really interesting place to come from because we all love music. We all love listening. I don't think that I've met but one or two people in life, when you ask them the question, what kind of music do you listen to? What kind of music do you like? That have responded and said, I don't really like music. like no no one says that that's just weird right we all have our preferences and so we know that listening and the way that we consume music is vital to the human experience but when it comes to actually building an instrument that's a little odd like when i was a kid it never occurred to me that instruments were made and they had to be made by a person i think it's a totally fine place to start and admit.

3:13Okay. Guitar making is a, it's a pretty weird profession. I want to go back in time a little bit. And I noticed that you love surfing. So first of all, can you tell me about the surfboards that you own? I'd love to hear what you own in terms of surfboards. Okay. Surfing. Now you should also understand that I am the product of two ocean loving parents. So my dad got into it when he was young. My mom got into it and is more of a distance swimmer these days. And so I grew up around the water. And so I have loved all sorts of different styles of surfing, different styles of waves. We all have our vices, right?

3:56That's one of mine. So for boards, it ranges from some early Hawaiian style boards, some alayas. I've got some redwood hot curl, like giant redwood plank boards that I've made to experience what the ancient style writing is like, all the way to modern high performance short boards. We have in our household a bunch of long boards. I've got some fishes. I've been really into riding kind of mid-length single fins or short little single fins lately that's been really fun because for us here in Southern California this is the time of year when you can get fun surf but not usually big surf everything's a little cruisier goes a little slower my kids really like riding longboards at one of the spots near our place we're riding longboards a lot of times these days I don't know man kind of anything goes and kind of anything And are these longboards like bings or skip fries or what kind of longboards?

4:56You know, I've ridden both bings. I've ridden skip fries because he's a San Diego guy. I've got a couple right now that my buddy Josh Martin has made. He's a great shaper up in the kind of Dana Point area. His dad, Terry Martin, shaped for Hobie for a lot of years. So he was pretty well-renowned shaper himself. And then Josh got into it when he was young, stepped away for a while, and is really taking up that torch, building some real inventive kind of board. For a longboard right now, on me, pretty traditional nose rider, big hatchet fin kind of thing. That's a good longboard flavor. And who makes your favorite longboard?

5:38Right now, the last one that Josh Martin built for me, that's a current favorite. That's a really enjoyable surfboard to ride. up till maybe head high. By the time it's head high, I want to switch to a short board. There's a spot actually not terribly far from our workshop here at Taylor Guitars called Blacks. It's a beach break kind of wave. It's more of a winter break, but I really like riding there. And in the winter, it'll get pretty big. So I'll have big wave guns for riding that spot during the winter. Do you have any pierce and arrows? I do, as a matter of fact. Maybe this is a poor reflection on me, but I still have one that I've never broken.

6:18That one's about an 8-0 gun for riding blacks in the winter. And that one's been a great board for me. Well, if Bob Pearson, before this interview, he's making a board for me right now. Oh, no kidding. How fun. What's he making? He's making me a pig style longboard and I'm old and heavy. So believe it or not, My boards are 11 feet, so I'm going to get an 11-foot pig. That sounds fun. Now we'll cruise. You know, it takes all types. Surfing and music, to me, are very closely related because there are so many different ways that a person could engage with the act. And there are so many different varieties and approaches, aesthetics.

7:05It's very exciting for me to watch. Like for our own kids, our oldest son, he's 13, almost 14. I was trying to get him interested in some of my short boards and trying that. He wasn't really having it. He was having fun on a surf mat and riding pipos and that kind of thing. And then he watched that old Bruce Brown movie, The Endless Summer. And went, now that's for me. I want to do that. I want to ride like that. I go, okay, let's go play longboards. smells fine let's go right back and he's really into that kind of writing style good flow that's just his thing i think that's great about a month ago i was out and wingnut was in the water so oh no kidding oh yeah and madison is a very good surfer too much better than i am oh fantastic

8:07Now, I guess we should talk about guitars a little bit. But first of all, do you name your guitars? You probably name your boards. We name our boards. So do you name your guitars? I never really got into that. But in some cases, yes, I've built instruments that ended up with names. That's a tradition sometimes in the guitar world, but it's very, very prevalent in the world of violins. like a lot of the real historically important instruments, you know, Stradivary built instruments, Amadi built instruments. They develop a name over the process of decades and centuries. So this was known as the so-and-so Strad, either sometimes known by the or named by the person who once owned it, somebody who made it known or prominent, or sometimes it was a description.

8:57There's all kinds of different stories where things end up with nicknames. So yes, I think in our quiver, we have a handful. Some of them are named and some of them aren't. Some of them are just a color, like the green one. The board that our oldest son is riding most right now is one of my wife's boards. He snagged that from her and he knows it as affectionately as the cucumber because of its color and shape. That's what that board's called. So yeah, sometimes guitars will end up with names like that. About six months ago, we had a Korean violinist and she had a Strad and she and her boyfriend were at a coffee shop outside a train station and her Strad was stolen from her.

9:44And this whole episode was about coming to grips with having her Stradivarius stolen. So that was a very interesting episode. Man. That's quite long. As a guitar maker, is your hero like Stradivari or Gibson or Fender? Do you have heroes like that? I do, because I like that saying that we stand on the shoulders of giants. I think that's very true. Now, by that, I mean that you're going to take into account the great work that's been done. The world of musical instruments is a fairly traditional world. and at the same time guitar specifically as a young instrument. It's only reached its, what we think of as modern form, within the last century.

10:31And so it's still in the process of developing and being innovated, being adapted to whatever musicians are doing. If you look at the world of violins, the modern form of a violin was arrived at about 300 years ago. Pianos, clarinets, a lot of instruments have achieved a state of development where they're basically just refining nuances from one to the next to achieve the ultimate fit for a particular musician. The world of guitars is so fascinating because it's still undergoing this evolution. And so 200 years from now, are you hoping that there's a Powers Electric guitar that's like a Strad?

11:13What I'd like to do is add what I am able to use my utmost. the things that I'm capable of working on, and try to make some sort of great contribution into the world of a musical community. If I can do that and offer an instrument that's a little more than what a musician could ask for, then I'm happy. And I don't really have grandiose visions of a future legacy or a household name or notoriety in that way. That's not what really interests me. That's not what drives me. What I love is that people play music and I want to do everything I can to build a wonderful instrument to allow them to seek their creative art.

11:58I think that's what makes me happy. Okay. This is the last surfing related question. Okay. I doubt that. In surfing, if you were to go to Bob Pearson and say, Bob, I know nothing about surfing. How should I begin? He would tell you, start with something that's 10 or 11 feet long, lots of volume, maybe a foam board. And then as you get better, then you go from 11 to 10 to 9, 6, and then go to a mid length and go to a short board. and is there the same kind of progression in guitars that you start with this is a beginner guitar it's good for everybody and then you go to this and this and this is there a progression theoretically for someone beginning guitar not in the same way it is with surfboards because ironically the easiest instrument to learn to play will always be the very best one that's partly what makes them best.

12:58Something that has great sound, that's comfortable, that's physically easy to play, that makes very accurate notes, that's easy to tune, that responds well to the needs of a musician. When the instrument is responsive like that, it makes the learning process, even for a rank beginner, like your first go out, you want to make that experience as good as it can possibly be. If you try to do that with an instrument that is very difficult to play, strings high from the neck of the guitar, it's physically difficult, doesn't play in tune, doesn't sound good even when you get it right, that's a very frustrating experience.

13:40And so playing an instrument, it's one of those experiences is where the first five minutes of your life as a musician are the worst. From there, it gets better. But the first five minutes are awful because you don't sound good. It's not fun. It's hard to hold. It's awkward and it hurts your fingers. None of those are good things. Do you want to jump into an instrument, even if it's not the most lavish or most expensive instrument? I wouldn't recommend necessarily that because you've got to learn how to take care of the thing and make sure you don't damage it but you want an instrument that's easy to play that's easy to hold that sounds good and isn't too precious at the same okay i lied here comes another surfing question you know like when madison and i are out and we look at these people and they're learning to surf and they're struggling so much and they're all on costco wave storms and that has got to be the hardest board in the world to learn on right it seems like it it really seems like it you look at that rocker profile and how much water they're pushing when you go to paddle oh that's really tough i think when they learn to surf, what I would wish that people would do is learn to paddle first.

15:06Just learn to paddle because once you can get that board balanced well and you can get good momentum so it's planing at a paddling level, your ability to catch a wave is a huge impact. And once you can catch a wave, then it's pretty easy to learn how to stand up and steer and all that. It's been fun with our daughter who's just turned 10, she's learning to surf. And with her, I tried a little bit different version where I started to teach her by just riding tandem on a big longboard. It never had occurred to me to go just ride tandem because the hardest part is getting lined up, actually catching a wave.

15:47And then once you stand up, you go, I can help you up. I can hold your hand. I can show you where to balance so you're not always falling off. They give a little bit of a head start. And so once she graduated to writing her own board, it was hilarious to watch how quickly she took to it because she already knew where to line up. She knew how to paddle. She knew how to keep a good straight upper torso with bent knees, clean form. She had a lot of the basics right there. Okay. So can you be very specific if there's someone listening to this and saying, God, I want to take up the guitar. Either with a Taylor model or some well-recognized model, what model should a beginner buy?

16:30I would start with a Taylor Academy series guitar. That was a series of guitars that I designed specifically for someone who was going to be new to playing an instrument. Very minimalistic. Everything that doesn't need to be there was taken away. So it's not at all a precious guitar. It's not a particularly expensive guitar. but it's put together very well. They sound great. They play very well. They're incredibly comfortable to hold. Everything about it was a very wholesome instrument to start with. And how much does one of those cost? They are, depends on where in the world you are. By the time you do currency conversions, all that, it's in the neighborhood of six to$700, I think, 600 bucks.

17:15It's less than a surfboard. Yeah. They're very enjoyable instruments to build because I think as a musician and a guitar maker, how in the world could somebody have something this good for this price? It's great material. It's solid. It's a wonderful instrument. But the way that you do it in that case is we mechanize it, industrialize that instrument so that we can make them efficiently. And we take away all of the frills, the filigree, the fanciness. It is like mid-century modern minimalist. There's just what you need there. It's like a cup of black coffee or something. And is this happening in the United States that these are being made?

18:01Those guitars we're building in our Tecate factory. So Taylor Guitars is interesting in the way that we're set up. We were founded here in San Diego, and we have one factory here in San Diego still. And we established decades ago a second factory in Tecate. Now, if you look on the map, you can see that there's an international border between those two cities, except that they are about 45 minutes apart. And so we go back and forth every single day, all day long between our two factories. The two factories work pretty seamlessly together. So parts for all the guitars are built, are started here in El Cajon, parts for all the guitars, different parts for the guitars are started in Tecate.

18:47Some of them cross the border one direction, some other parts cross heading northward. And so we end up dividing it into style of material. And so some guitars, you build the entire box, what we call the body of the guitar, out of solid wood, which would be like a takeout block of wood and saw a thin sheet off it. And that's maybe the back of the guitar or side of the guitar. Other materials, you could take that same block of wood and shave an even thinner sheet off and then glue two or three of them together, usually three. And so that makes a more durable style of construction and has a lot less waste because you're not losing the sawdust between those layers.

19:32And so we have different equipment for building different style bodies on both sides of the border right now. And don't you have a sawmill or something for in Africa or something? Yeah. Yes. So the world of guitar making, it's pretty wild, the places it takes you. Because if you look at an instrument, there isn't a single species of wood that you build the whole guitar with. It's a very special version of woodworking in that you're asking the material, you're working right at the margin of what the materials will allow you to do. And so for each component of a guitar, maybe the neck of the guitar has one set of characteristics that that piece of wood needs to have.

20:19The fretboard of the guitar, the place where you actually touch, you'd be like the fingerboard on a violin. That has a different purpose. It's a different role to play. It needs a different kind of wood, one that's denser, harder, long wearing. maybe for the soundboard, the top of the guitar, the face of the guitar, that you need a different piece of wood. And all of these different materials have to come from different forests, different areas. They're harvested in different ways and they're all brought together. And we have a, call it a philosophy. Here we want to invest in the inevitable. It just makes sense.

20:55If I know this future is coming, I better prepare for it. Years ago, we started looking at the future of guitar making woods and saying we want to build instruments with wood and that means that in a world that's rapidly changing we should think differently about how we source materials how we harvest it and what we can do to propagate future generations of instrument building wood so it's it's a little like like for centuries instrument builders have operated like hunter gatherers you go out into the forest you find what you need you take it and you're good you're good for the day you can eat we've crossed over in our modern era to behaving like farmers we go we better have some foresight for the future because we can see that this forest isn't going to supply everything that we would want or need.

21:57And yet we want to leave this in better condition than the state we found it in. So we're going to go start planting. We're going to harvest in different ways. We're going to approach the resource in a totally different method. And so in different parts of the world, we harvest in different methods, whatever works best for that part of the world. So operating in Central America, we've partnered with different villages that have rights to harvest trees. So we help them with forest management plans so that they're never just clear-cutting chunks of forest or burning it to turn into cattle land or something like that.

22:35There's value here. There's commerce that can be done, but not too much. Be very careful with the resource. So in some cases, we'll work that way. In other cases, like you mentioned, our mill in Africa, that's where ebony comes from. And that's the part of the world where very dense blackwood ebony that was traditionally used on violin fretboard or fingerboards, guitar fretboards and different components. That's where that comes from. And about a decade ago, we had the opportunity to purchase this mill. And once you go there, you learn about it. You can't unlearn. You can't unknow what you've discovered.

23:14So we realized we need to go in here and start doing this work ourselves. because it was a case of a good operator displacing a bad operator. We can make a change here. We can make a change for the people who are working with this mill, the conditions that they're working in, the way that they're harvesting materials. We can work with others who have local knowledge that we can start replanting these trees in addition to planting fruit trees or other shorter-term kind of economic crops that can help the entire region. And so in different parts of the world, you do different things. But the goal is to leave things in better condition than the way you found them.

23:58And how do you get your Koa? Koa. Koa is another interesting project because for years we would find Koa when we could, when it would come onto the market. Hey, there's a neat piece. Let's make some guitars from it. A number of years ago, we were looking for koa, and one of our wood sourcing specialists said, I can't find any koa, but how about you buy a piece of land that has a bunch of koa trees on it, and sent us a real estate listing for someone who was trying to sell a koa forest. And he said it half in jest. He was joking about it, and we talked to another partner of ours, whose specialty is cutting spruce soundboards up in the Pacific Northwest region.

24:45And he said, that's not a bad idea, actually. Let me look into it. So he did some research, came back, he goes, we could do this, just not that particular chunk of forest. That one's not good. And so that started this partnership that we now call Paniolo Tonewoods, Siglo, first century, where we are working with a variety of different organizations there on the islands. We also own our own piece of land where we are propagating Koa trees for future generations of use, as well as harvesting the dead and dying to improve the condition of what forests are there. So you can go into a Koa forest or what was left of a planted one and look at the trees that are good and healthy, those stay.

25:35And then the others that are diseased, that are dying, that are damaging things, you can remove those. And so what we've worked out with Kamehameha schools and some different groups that own land is that we can improve the quality of the forest that they hold as forest land in exchange for stumpage in doing that forestry work. And so we're planting koa trees, we're harvesting some old koa trees or some damaged koa trees usually. One of the big problems in Hawaii with koa specifically is cattle. Cattle ranching is the biggest detriment to the koa tree that there could be. Because there is apparently nothing more succulent to a cow than a young koa tree.

26:21The seeds are all over the place. I can't make this stuff up, right? And so when these koa trees sprout, cows will go through and eat them off right to the ground. And then what you end up with is a stunted little bush that should have been a big, tall koa tree. And so a lot of what we see coming out of a koa forest now are these bizarrely deformed, twisted, damaged trees that were planted a generation or two ago that had been damaged by cattle branching. So the biggest hurdle to cross in a lot of those cases or in those forests are fencing. Got to keep the cows out. Keep the cows out. The coa trees grow.

27:07The seed's viable for a very long time. What island is this? On the big island. Switching gears a little bit. Can you just explain to me philosophically or emotionally or psychologically, what's the difference between someone who plays an electric guitar and someone who plays an acoustic guitar are these two different kinds of people no typically not they can be but oftentimes what you have is a musician who's looking for a different response a different setting different context it's similar to if the surf is triple overhead i'm not going to take a longboard out into that. I'm going to take one of my bigger wave boards.

27:52I might take a piercing arrow out and go, all right, big, thick leash. Let's be ready. That's a different scenario. If it's waist high, glassy and clean, surface small and just a nice point wave, I'm not going to be taking a big wave gun out into that. I'm going to take a long board with a big single fin. I'm going to go nose riding. They're different scenarios. And so for musicians, you want to pick an instrument that fits the context of what you're looking for, right? Maybe one's more in a band environment, one's more of a songwriting environment. Sometimes you are playing an acoustic guitar with a band, but it might be amplified.

28:31Maybe you're playing a rhythm part. Maybe you're playing a fingerstyle part. It has less to do with the personality of the musician because most guitar players end up playing styles and multiple instruments. It just depends on the context. is it heresy to plug an acoustic guitar into an amp no of course not that's not a problem at all we in fact build some amplifiers that are specifically geared toward acoustic guitars for vocal use as well because sometimes you just need the thing to be louder you look at everything that way and go it's a practical response like how do you want to manage this thing that's coming out the sound.

29:15Okay. Music is meant to be shared. And that means that you want to be sharing it with an audience. If it's a small audience, that might be okay to play acoustically. What if it's an audience of a hundred people or 200 people or a thousand people? You want that sound to go a long ways. You want to be able to let everybody hear it and enjoy it. Got to figure out a way to make it louder. I'm glad to hear that. Going back to surfboards, I put pads on my surfboard because I hate wax and I put a handle in my surfboard because they're so wide and people look at me like this heresy. And the only person who doesn't think that's heresy is Bob Pearson himself.

29:57So I think when you have Harris, the heretics tend to be people who are very insecure and it tends to come from a place of they're just not confident in what it is they're seeing and doing if you look at a lot of things very practically you go if the board's wide and it's hard to carry who cares if it doesn't affect the way it's riding but it makes your experience a lot better to carry the thing why not go for it a lot of instruments i approach the same way there was an era before my time where people wouldn't like what we call a cutaway on a guitar now if you were to look at say the form of a guitar and it's a figure eight sort of a shape the highest notes on the fret or on the neck of the guitar they weren't very accessible because you run into the body of the instrument your hand can't get to those highest notes the way it can on a violin or a cello or something like that where your hand reaches over the body some makers started to make an asymmetrical shape it looks like a shark bit a bite out of the one corner of it they go now you can get your hand around it and you can play the high notes there was a time when that was viewed with disdain and then eventually you realize this actually works really well why not you would see the same resistance to change when the electric guitar was being first developed.

31:31The idea that you could make a guitar and have it not follow? Weird. Really, a solid chunk of wood that you put magnetic pickups on and that's what you play? That just seems strange. Is that even an instrument? Yeah, it's a new form of guitar. You're still playing a guitar, but you could look at a Les Paul or a Telecaster or a Stratocaster. though we recognize them as guitars now but at the time those pretty outlandish ideas i don't think that there's anything wrong with making changes when the change is beneficial to the user up next on remarkable people okay we're gonna take a different approach here we're gonna start a different brand so that we can maintain these different ideas as what they should