A Trip Across the Bay
Taking a new guitar in for a setup
10/03/2025
Sounds good, doesn't it?
My wife joined me going across the Chesapeake Bay to visit the bench of my luthier, Kenny Marshall and drop off a new guitar. Kenny is the kind of luthier you want to know, honest, casual, absolutely capable, and with forty years of experience behind him. So, we girded ourselves for the rush hour and set off over and through the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge Tunnel in a downpour and in rush hour. We passed the shipyards of Newport News Ship Building, the Virginia War Museum (an excellent little museum), the Mariners' Museum (the bones of the USS Monitor and artifacts from CSS Virginia (Merrimac) are there). We passed into a quiet residential area near a college and eventually arrived at 5pm.
A few years ago, Kenny moved his bench into the house that was his father's home and piano teaching studio. His father had beautifully converted the two-car garage into his studio. He split the studio into two areas: a reception area with his dad's grand piano, plenty of seats, a stereo, the line-up of upcoming work (about thirty guitars at the moment), and his electrical workbench. Behind that is a room with his technical bench where the tools, clamps, drill press, fret arbor, stacks of pickups in boxes, pots, jacks, spare necks, hoops of fret wire, and such line the walls.
Whenever I visit, we talk. We catch up on lives and families and giggle over some of our experiences with big artists. My wife chats with him as well. He showed us his electrical bench with its three tuners, from a mechanical Conn Strobotuner to a rare electronic tuner from the '80s that is now out of production but is the backbone of his work.
After the initial chat we looked at the guitar, a Taylor Gold Label Series 717e. Kenny was impressed with the sound, a blend of the open Martin OM-28 midrange and the upper end and the bass of a D-28. I showed him the guitar's new Action Control Neck Joint and the tools I bought to adjust it. He took the guitar to his technical bench to evaluate the action. He placed a florescent tube behind the fingerboard and laid his straightedge down the fretboard. His first eyeball estimate was that it's got a little fret hump around the upper end causing the strings to fret out when the action is lower, which confirmed my suspicion. Then, there's a dip starting at the second fret and then things seem to flatten out up to the twelfth fret, that is, the neck seems to dip down around the third and then goes pretty flat from there up. Once he deals with those issues he said he'll adjust the neck angle and see whether it needs a taller saddle. He will do all this to bring it into his specs, which are quite precise. I have several guitars that he has set up and they all play much better than they did from the factory. I say, "Do what it takes."
Talk
Then his wife joined us. We talked about our careers up to this point and where they came from. About experiences. About health. We talked about my son's passing last year. Kenny is putting a new line of Telecaster clones together. He showed me his design for a Tele bridge plate to enclose a Fender wide-range humbucker pickup. We discussed his trips to a place with a CNC machine to execute his body and neck basic cuts. My wife and his got into gardening and Kenny and I dived into guitars. They both had seen me on the TV a few weeks ago when a mutual friend had brought an artist into the studio to shoot a recording session. The story made it to air on a network. I giggled that the only showed the back of my head while I was at the console. He told me that he'd be out of town on and off for a couple of weeks but would get the guitar to me as quickly as he could.
I was amazed to look up at the clock and see that it was eight at night! We took our leave, grabbed a bite, and headed home.
A Slight Return
The waiting is the hardest part, isn't? Eventually Kenny texted me that the guitar was ready and we set up a date for me to pick it up. This time, the trip over the Chesapeake Bay was over the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel. The route is dictated by whichever bridge appears to be more congested on our phone apps. Virginia has ripped up Interstate 64 extensively while it is doubling the capacity of the HRBT and the result is a bouncy, windy, potholed mess. When we arrived, the talk began again and he brought out the guitar. The guitar immediately felt better... much better. The buzzing was gone and the action was lower at the nut. He'd found that the first two frets by the nut were high as well as the fifth through seventh, preventing the neck from having proper relief at a decent string height. Up around the teens there were three low frets, so he actually raised them and wicked in superglue to set them. He dressed the frets and was able to set the relief. The saddle was high on the bass side and the nut needed to be filed to match the new height of the bottom two frets. Using the new neck joint, he set the neck angle and smoothed the fret ends a little. I'm thinking, "Wow that's a lot of work for a new guitar." I think Kenny sees it in my eyes. He says, "We're talking tiny amounts here. It's normal," and smiles.
So, what does it all mean? The guitar now feels incredibly comfortable, secure, and natural. It requires less fretting pressure than before and there aren't high frets to make the strings feel like they are gouging me on those first frets. It will join my other guitars that he has tuned up so well and will blend right in. Some people talk online about wanting to "fight their guitars" - for the guitars to be a little hard for them to play. Not me. I want the guitar to melt into me and become a partner, an extension of myself, without any fighting or arguing. Kenny makes it happen.
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