Q/A: Strange GuitarWorks

New Orleans’ premier guitar techs discuss their shop, their city, and the Dewey Cox Story

First, I gotta know…The décor in your shop is minimal aside from one piece of artwork featured prominently on the wall: a poster for the movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. What’s the deal with Dewey?

BS: It is quite simply one of the greatest musical comedies ever made. Way up there with Spinal Tap. Eminently quotable, and also weirdly…accurate. If you watch all the scenes, you’ll see all the guitars and gear are period accurate. And those four guys are actually playing the instruments. All those guys were learning how to play throughout the filming and said they were actually starting to gel as a band by the end of it.

I didn’t know that!

BS: It’s infuriating watching what is supposedly a “music” movie where people hold musical instruments incorrectly. The music is happening and all the fingerings on the trumpet are wrong. He’s holding the guitar wrong. C’mon guys! Do a little research! Clearly “Walk Hard” did the research…

Few have done more research than yourself. How did you get into guitarwork?

BS: It was mostly based on desperation and sheer luck. I left New Orleans in October, 2008 and moved to San Francisco. I was a professional musician here in New Orleans and thought I would move to San Francisco and do the same thing, A few months later, the economy collapsed - you know, the housing crisis - and it was impossible to find work. Gigs weren’t paying anything.

So you had to make a change…

BS: I started getting bored, but I realized there are people way worse off than I am and I figured the best way out of my own misery was to help somebody else, right? so I started looking for guitars to fix up - and I had done some work in the past on my own stuff and other peoples instruments, but nothing full-scale - and I thought, “I’m gonna expand on those skills and also maybe help the world be a little bit better.” So, I started looking for instruments on Craigslist and getting people to offer broken instruments for me to fix, and I would sell them on eBay with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders. I wasn’t making any money on it. It was just a way for me to give back a little bit and alleviate the boredom of being full-time-unemployed. A guitar shop caught wind of this and sent me a little message: “Hey man, we know you’re doing this, we think it’s a really good idea, keep it up, etc.” I had never heard of these guys before. A few weeks later I was wandering around, pounding the pavement, resumés in hand, and I happened to see this shop and thought “Oh, that’s that place!” So, I walked in and started chatting with them and they offered me a job. It was San Francisco Guitarworks (SFG).

And that’s where you met Aaron?

BS: Before I accepted the gig at SFG, I took a job at Guitar Center. I needed anything. It was an awful experience, but I met Aaron there. I quit a couple months later. Unemployment is better than working at Guitar Center. When I got the job at SFG and they said we needed to hire another tech, I said, “I got the guy.” So only a month after I started, we hired Aaron. For the next 3 years Aaron and I worked ten feet apart from each other.

Aaron Younce - a Bay Area native - built his first guitar at thirteen years old. Inspired by his father, who built guitars throughout the 70s, Aaron spent his youth developing the skills to carve and assemble the entire instrument from scratch. Following high school, he completed a three-year audio engineering program before committing fully to a career in guitar-craft. He got his first job at Carvin Guitars, where he worked a phone sales position, which provided an employee discount on wood for his own projects. As the custom build requests increased, his friend, James Creston suggested they create their own guitar company. At 25, Younce moved to San Francisco and cofounded Maret Guitars. It was during these early days in San Francisco that Aaron picked up a job at Guitar Center, met Ben, and found his way to San Francisco Guitarworks.

What was it like working there?

BS: I thought that I was kinda hot shit and knew what I was talking about when I walked in there. Within a couple of days, I realized I don’t know jack squat about fixing guitars. These guys were super pro and easily one of the best guitar repair shops in the country if not the world. And I just so happened to luck into a job with these guys. I worked there for three years and basically got paid to learn.

Continuing to refine their craft, the two recognized the potential in introducing a similar concept to a new market.

AARON YOUNCE: [Ben] lived in New Orleans pre-Katrina, and he was like, “Man, I’m gonna take this model and do it in New Orleans. Nobody’s doing it there. There are people working out of the back corners of music shops, but nobody’s really doing this thing.” I had just accepted a job at Fodera guitars, and I decided that I needed to take that opportunity because I’d basically be getting paid to get my masters in guitar making. So, I took that job and moved to Brooklyn and Ben moved back to New Orleans and opened the shop in his house.

BS: Within a few months I had upwards of 25-50 guitars sitting in my living room and it took off from there. He and I kept in constant contact throughout the whole time. He kind of became a little bit of a partner by proxy. Constant updates back and forth were sort of a way of keeping a hook in him because I knew that things were gonna get bigger and I wanted to him to come down here eventually. AY: He was like, “Man, this is blowing up. Come down.” Eventually I agreed. “Let’s do it.” I packed up my stuff and moved to New Orleans. Two months before I got here, he moved into the shop we’re in now. So, he got things rolling and I came down. At first, we were only working 24 hours a week - Monday through Thursday - just seeing if we could keep food on the table for two people. And it worked. So, we expanded our hours and opened 5 days a week.

Almost immediately, Strange Guitarworks garnered a reputation as an elite, yet accessible guitar tech/repair service in a city desperately lacking options. Nowadays it’s difficult to find a working guitarist who hasn’t been by the shop.

BS: When good work is done, word gets out pretty quickly.

You’ve become an institution in the New Orleans guitar community. What

BS: New Orleans guitar culture is revealed to me in the type of work we are requested to do. In San Francisco, we had lots of very expensive, very new guitars coming in. And often times people wanted either a high-end modification that they read about in a forum somewhere, or it had the tiniest little scratch in the finish that they wanted fixed up and made invisible. In New Orleans, people will bring in the most dogged-out, beat up, disgusting guitar, and go “yea man, I play this thing six nights a week and I just need my strings changed.” People here are using their instruments in a very visceral, very real sort of way that isn’t the superficial, “Oh, I’ve got this new $600 pickup and I put on sweatpants before I ever play this guitar because I don’t want to scratch it.” These are tools; living embodiments of what these people are trying to convey. It is a part of them. So, in a sense, New Orleans is treating their guitars as they were intended - to make music with - not just an object of desire. Not that a guitar being an art object is necessarily a bad thing. It can be both. But it’s definitely used more as a tool for expression [in New Orleans], rather than being the expression itself.

AY: In New Orleans, you have a ton of actual players who are just beating the hell out of their guitar every night on Frenchmen [Street] or on the road or whatever. It feels really good to be able to keep those things rolling for them. Keep them working. Musicians in New Orleans are gonna make music in spite of any limitations, but it’s really nice to show them how much easier it can be.

On the corner of Oak and Dublin, paces from the Carrolton Streetcar Line and blocks from New Orleans funk oasis, The Maple Leaf Bar, stands another of the city’s hidden musical gems. Unassuming on the block, you’d hardly notice it’s there, if not for the custom Triumph Bonneville parked directly out front. Ring the doorbell, wait a few seconds, and meet two of New Orleans’ most revered axemen.

Do they play guitar? Sure. But to everyone in town, they’re known as the guys who fix them.

Since 2013, Benjamin Strange and Aaron Younce have owned and operated Strange Guitarworks at this Uptown address. In seven years, they have established themselves as the go-to tech/repair service for New Orleans’ guitar-playing community and countless major acts, including original members of The Meters, Arcade Fire, Anders Osborne, The Revivalists, and Samantha Fish.

“Everyone goes there,” says New Orleans guitarist/writer, George Wilde. “From high schoolers to rock legends. They’ve had their hands on every guitar in New Orleans. They level the playing field.” There’s a reason New Orleans trusts its guitars to this duo: Strange Guitarworks introduces a completely new model of guitar repair and customization; one that combines scientific precision with an unwavering dedication to old-world craftsmanship.

I got the chance to talk shop with the two men who keep New Orleans wailing:

I’m sure you’ve handled some really abused, neglected instruments over the years. You’re known for the work you’ve done restoring guitars damaged by Hurricane Katrina. There is a common sentiment among guitarists that once an instrument sustains real structural damage, it can never fully recover. What do you say to those people?

BS: Anything can be fixed. It’s just a matter of time and money. One of the things that we like about what we do is that it’s a stance against throwaway culture. “I need this new iPhone and my old iPhone is worthless now.” That never happens with a guitar. A guitar will always have use. It will always have value. And if it’s not playing well, that can be changed. That can be fixed. There’s nothing out there that can’t be fixed. There is no rabbit hole we won’t go down to fix somebody’s guitar…But sometimes, discretion can be the better part of valor.

What do you mean by that?

BS: Say somebody has a $200 guitar that needs $800 of work…like a cheap acoustic with crazy-high action and an epoxy neck where you can’t melt the glue off. Instead of turning that impossible-to-play guitar into trash, we’ll say, “this is a great instrument to learn to play slide.”

In the age of automation, fewer and fewer people professionally pursue the lifelong mastery of a craft. You spend a significant portion of your time dealing with individual guitars on a very physical level. What kind of relationship do you develop with the instruments you work on?

AY: I’ll get way into the process. Like hand carving a neck? I can spend 8 hours…I’ll forget to eat. I’ll burn the midnight oil getting in the zone, slowly carving something by hand to get it as perfect as possible. That process is very enjoyable to me. Even though it is hard work. I’ll really get into it…carving a neck with rasps and sanding blocks and files and carving knives. All by hand. Not using any sort of technology. I really enjoy the woodcarving aspect.

Sounds like you’re in pursuit of perfection.

AY: I’m absolutely in a pursuit of perfection all the time. I’ll spend an extra hour working on something that nobody besides me is ever gonna see. And I’ll kill myself over it. Just because I want to be the best I can be. And I want the guitar to be the best it can be. And I want it to be able to tell its own story. I don’t want to have to explain anything about my work. I want somebody who’s never met before to see it and say, “Whoever did this, did it right.” I want it to stand on its own. I do that with guitars. With our shop space. With our tooling. With our processes. I’m always trying to build a better mousetrap. Always trying to refine processes. Always trying to make things more efficient…more consistent.

BS: Aaron is constantly developing new tools, new jigs, new ideas to implement to make something even better. Like our headstock splining jig. We get calls all over the world asking “Hey, do you sell these things? Do you make these things?” It’s basically an idea that I had, that Aaron implemented, and now we do these crazy splines across broken headstocks and make them stronger than ever. And we can look at that and say, “There’s no one else in the world that has this tool because we invented it.” The process of doing that…That is what makes the guitar better. That is fun. The end result is cool, but, man, how we got there…The journey is more important than the destination.

Complementing a marked propensity for doing things the old-fashioned way, Strange Guitarworks navigates the cutting edge of guitar technology. On March 28, 2019 (a date Ben recalls specifically) the shop acquired a PLEK machine: the German-made,computerized neck leveling tool that executes precision adjustments, impossible to detect with the naked eye. As of today, there are fewer than 25 PLEK machines in repair shops throughout the United States. It has become such a phenomenon amongst New Orleans guitarists that the noun has become a verb: “I got PLEKed at Strange Guitarworks.”

BS: The pursuit of the physics of the instrument and how it all interacts with itself is part of what led us to the PLEK machine. I actually flew out to Berlin and had a meeting with those guys out there, and they showed me the tools they use for research on the physics of string oscillation, which filled me with a greater understanding of the instrument as a vibrating musical device.

AY: Sometimes a guitar player will come in and say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with this thing. It’s just feeling weird.” And we’ll take a look and say, “How are you even playing this right now? There’s such a raw quality about musicians in New Orleans. They’re gonna play whatever they can get their hands on and they’re gonna make it work, but it’s really nice to be able to say “this thing could be way easier to play.” We just dial it in, and they’re like, “Oh my god! I can do things - techniques - that I didn’t even know were possible because I didn’t realize how much of this guitar I’ve been fighting.”

It is this unique combination of hands-on TLC and computer-aided precision that supports Strange Guitarworks’ overarching philosophy: ANY guitar can be a great guitar.

AY: There is no correlation between value and quality. We’ve had to refret brand-new $3,500 custom shop Les Pauls straight out of the factory because the necks were twisted and we’ve worked on $90 Ibanez Gios that sound amazing. One of my favorite basses I’ve ever owned was a 2004 Mexican Jazz Bass that I bought for $200 on Craigslist. It sounded better than any American Jazz Bass I’ve ever played. A friend of mine tried to trade me straight across for his $2,000 American Deluxe…We always tell people at the shop, you’re better off getting a $200 Mexican Fender or an Epiphone Les Paul and doing some fretwork, because that $3,000 guitar is going to need the same level of fretwork. We’ve seen it way too many times to be convinced otherwise. We often times will advocate for buying the less expensive instrument that doesn’t have the fancy headstock logo and putting a little love into it. It’s going to be better than anything you can buy on the street.

BS: I don’t want to be bored. Every time that I’ve done something, I’ve done it with a sense of “I want something new all the time.” There’s not a single day that goes by in the shop that is the same. Say somebody brings in a ’65 P-Bass and they want me to turn it active. Route a battery box through it. The traditionalist, vintage purist is going to be appalled at that. They’ve got so much emotional investment in this object, and because it’s old, they’ll refuse to do the work. My job is not to do that. The emotional attachment should come from the customer. THEY love this instrument. This guitar is an extension of them. and if they want to take this ’59 Les Paul and route it out and put a Kahler whammy bar in it? OK. I’ll do it. I’ll drill a hole in anything.

The shop itself is an epicenter of the New Orleans axe-wielding community. If you need proof, look no further than the black, signature-clad wall at the main entrance. There - written in gold and silver sharpie - you’ll find names including legendary Meters bassist, George Porter Jr., Anders Osborne and Samantha Fish (to name a few), but you’ll also find the names of loyal customers without acclaim. Everyone walking in and out the door is a guitarist and an equally valued member of the Strange Guitarworks community. Of course, communities strengthen in trying times. With the New Orleans’ entire live music industry shut down in response to the Coronavirus, the shop serves a refuge for musicians coming to terms with the current state of their lives and careers.

BS: We want to make it a space for people to talk, and it’s kind of amazing how much emotional labor we do for the New Orleans music community at large…that I wasn’t even fully aware of until coronavirus hit. I’m always talking to people about their issues. I’ve had grown men crying in the shop about their music career and where it’s going or where it’s not going. I’ve had people celebrating the birth of their kids or mourning loss of a loved one. All sorts of stuff. People just come in and unload because we’ve cultivated this atmosphere of “We’re here to help.” It might be your guitar, or it might be you need someone to talk to.

Life is like a guitar…

AY:…you never know what note comes next. Every note is fleeting. You can’t change what you’ve done in the past and you can only do so much to predict what’s going to happen in the future. You just gotta play it as it comes.