JUST THINKIN'

NEW models & announcements
BIG sale on inventory and special orders
MORE basses in inventory – in process AND READY
SPECIAL Anniversary basses – READY
AND videos

COMING Saturday July 1st at 12:01 AM RIGHT HERE on the news page! It's Birdsong's 13th Anniversary!

I can’t believe it’s been 13 years since Birdsong “officially” launched on July 4th 2004. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely feel like we’ve built somewhere over 800 instruments, moved the shop 3 times, and grown into something. It just seems like all of that was packed into three or four years. 13? Amazing. You know what they say about time flying. And get this – it’s been 17 since the first Birdsong brand guitar was made by yours truly in the back corner of a friend’s workshop. It’s been 20 since I cut my first body out – sawdust and sore arms being the threshold where we graduate into something more than an assembler, and when this journey of design and craft began to walk ME. That was 1997.

I started tinkering with my guitars in about 1987 – that’s 30 years. I started playing in 1982. Music has been my life, through many chapters of both they entwined like the fibers of a rope; never did I doubt it would lead me somewhere and take care of me if I offered it all I was and all my faith, and tried my best to use all I was at any given time. Just about everyone in my life now came to me – or me to them – through this path of music. The Birdsong experience has been, though manifesting as wood and wire, curves and balance, tools of tonal vibration, more than anything a journey of people. It has been a great honor to work for you all, even those just interested who watch – you’re family too. And it has been a high blessing to have worked with those who helped out along the way. The absolute most sacred relationship, however, has been to be able to honor my teachers and continue good work in their stead, sometimes with their tools. In the case of the little building I write these words in now, even in their very workshop torn down and rebuilt here, where the instruments we craft get their final assembly.

There are a lot lesser men to add up to than whatever I can contain and work forward of the greatness of my mentors. I don’t know how it happened but I am a tireless soldier crafting tools of creation in their honor as ripples outward from them through me. Wood becomes instruments. Their woodcraft is now in my luthierie. Paths intertwine. Lives intersect. It all changes as we go and we change as it goes. It happens through us, and we through it. I just know I grew through the growing of this garden. Somehow I was given the gifts, shown the path, surrounded by angels, and with borrowed tools and some new ideas, magic happened… and still does every day. I feel the miles but I feel THAT so much more. I had no idea where that kid with the B.C Rich guitar would end up and I’m very grateful we wound up here. It was a long, strange trip that could fill a book and maybe even inspire more people than the basses. But here we are, and I look forward to carving these things out until I pitch off the workshop stool. To be the guy that takes part in the making of musical instruments for you is more than I ever imagined I could do, or offer, or be. Thank you for this journey.

THIS is what makes a Birdsong, and this is what Birdsong makes. 

Tune in SATURDAY July 1st, RIGHT HERE

Listening to: Temples Sun Structures; Bruce Springsteen autobiography audiobook read by the author; lots of live Grateful Dead.