We’ll start with a Facebook post from Monday. If you’re not hooked to the Scott Beckwith page ( https://www.facebook.com/scott.beckwith.35 - friend & follow), you’re missing most of what I post!
Happy Monday morning, friends! It's springtime. Yeah I know it's summer, heck it was 107 here yesterday. And I know in life seasons we eventually face autumn. And I know not everyone out there lives and works around perpetual creation, there for the choice to see it as that, where it's easy to find rebirth because you're surrounded by it. but I'm here to tell you within everything changing is that potential, a sunrise for something new to begin. It's Monday morning, we're coming up on the first of the month... these are great times to make those changes you know in your heart it's time to make. I'm just a guy who carves out guitars and basses... you don't have to take my word for it. But the butterfly, and this piece of wild pecan, let them be your teachers.
In fact, let these ALL be your teachers. A year ago, many crucial parts of what I build and a few long-term arrangements I had counted on for years had become unavailable due to big changes in the parts supply, their ripples, and changes suppliers and other small business owners were making to be most efficient with what THEY had to work with. I get it, I understand. But it still sucked rhino balls. Today? SIX of what might just be one of the best models to ever come out of the shop, the SPORT BASS, are in assembly. We just introduced this model at the beginning of July; I designed it in June, after looking at the Bean guitar (hanging here up front, leading them in) and some bodies for ITS next version I still had. It hit me. “This is the perfect pocket bass platform!” And, things as they are, I don’t have to run anything by committee. I go by the instincts that got me here. So, under 60 days later to have six actually built and getting parts put on? All of which I have? Unheard of. Yet here we are. Trust in the buoyancy that brought you this far, and keep creating, and keep showing up to do what’s next. It might be fall shortly, but it’s springtime, baby.
So let’s run some numbers, shall we? I get asked about them any time I’m anywhere and somebody’s heard or finds out what I do. Every time. “How many do you make a month?” Well, it’s not an assembly line and those aren’t the numbers all a-swim in my head, bub. Sufficient is how I think of those kind once we’re north of any worries and things are flowing. I think past business being taken care of, while the magic is happening it’s crude to be counting. I don’t count my blessings in numbers. Like what Rolls-Royce used to do when magazine testers would ask how many horsepower their engine makes. “Sufficient,” they’d say. No, the numbers that roll around in my noggin move like this…
That bejeweled pecan beauty is the 350th instrument to be routed by the Bosch Colt router I changed over to years back. 350 is a significant number, being the cubic-inch displacement of the engine in my beloved housetruck Moondancer. Moondancer is a 1982, and that was the year I started playing guitar, my first electric pictured here – a black Cort with gold racing stripes. Adding the numbers corresponding to the letters C O R and T gives us 55. In 1955 Rock and Roll's first #1 hit happened - Bill Haley and the Comets, with "Rock Around The Clock". There is not a clock in my world, friends. No watch either. To find the time, I have to find my phone. The main computer stays fairly accurate but I’ve covered its time display; the laptop drifts, so I know it means nothing. That’s three sources, though – a trinity of sources. And, though batch-crafted in pairs, that line of 6 Sports in assembly (2 of which are available in inventory) did end up going from finish into assembly in two batches of THREE. and at the front of that line in the picture? The Bean from the ‘90s? That was my 3rd guitar made. That ties it up in a nice little circle, doesn’t it? And this is why I don’t go hang out with people very often. Because they want to know who famous I’ve met and I’m trying to stitch together the friggin’ universe.
Thank you SO MUCH for being along, I hope you’re enjoying the cool mornings that have begun. Embrace the changes in the fall. Hold your line against the driftings that aren’t in a positive direction… but the ones that are, surrender to the wind. Life is more than fighting against its natural flow.
Listening to: Joe Henderson, So Near So Far: Musings for Miles; Lindsey Buckingham, Out of the Cradle; Los Lobos, Colossal Head.