Written By: Dan O'Donnell
With Mardi Gras rapidly approaching many from the Crescent City will remember Jimmy Foster fondly this holiday. While he wont be appearing at the clubs he played last year, his music and his guitars will live on for musicians New Orleans and around the world.Foster, who gigged regularly around his home in Covington, LA, was not just the man who made seven string guitars popular among jazz freestylers; he also produced exquisite guitars for clientele such as Paul Simon until his death in April of 2011. Now, there is only one of his signature “Royale” archtop guitars left at his workshop in Covington, though that single guitar could easily fetch over $50,000 at auction. That is because the Royale, which typically took Foster six months to make, is listed at “starting at $20,000,” on the Foster Guitars website. The final guitar made by jazzman and master luthier Foster could easily command double or triple that at auction.
His guitars have become the stuff of legend, butter-smooth strings and frets, a sound that is inimitable. They also have developed a devoted following among guitarists.
Foster chose to play seven string jazz guitar, where a low B string is added below the E, because he said it allowed a player to voice chords more completely. Eighty percent of the guitars he made each year, by his own estimate, were seven string guitars but, he noted, both six and seven string models were the same prices.
Foster, who introduced musicians around the world to his smooth seven-string jazz stylings, learned the rudiments of repairing guitars as a middle school kid when he took apart and reassembled his first guitar because of a blemish on it.
“There was a spot on it, y’know, a blemish, so I refinished it,” Foster said in one interview. “My dad always told me that if someone could make something, there was no reason I shouldn’t be able to take it apart and make it too.” Foster, according to New Orleans folklore, then went on to become a guitar repairman while at the same time working at his father’s craft in a body shop, pounding out dents.
“Foster’s Custom Finishes and Repairs,” began with guitar work before Foster could drive, doing work for many of the town’s music stores.
“My dad would drive down to the music stores and pick up the repair jobs for me,” Foster said. “I would do the repairs and would spray the guitars in a booth I made in my backyard.” When he opened his first real shop, doing both auto body work and guitar repairs, he was faced with another dilemma.
“I would answer the phone, and some guy would ask if his fender repair was done yet and I wouldn’t know whether it was a Fender (guitar) or a car fender,” Foster said. Ever innovative, he thought up a unique strategy—two identical business cards, one with a guitar on it, one with a car on it.
He began by doing local repairs for New Orleans music stores, then became noticed by big name makers like Gibson and D’Angelico because he was the sole repairman in the area who could handle their instruments. That exposure taught him the finer points of making a great guitar.
With the number of musicians in New Orleans, he was often faced with hand-made or very high quality instruments, from which he learned by doing.
“When I would work on an instrument that was especially good sounding, I would find out what it was that made that particular guitar so great,” Foster said. “There was no one here to teach me how to build archtops, so I used the knowledge that I got from doing repairs.”
He said that the key to avoiding dead spots on a fingerboard comes from the tuning process, and figured out a way to avoid that in his guitars. His discovery process sounds more like a music physicist walking you through a puzzle.
“Many years ago I built an archtop for myself; this guitar had some dead spots on the fingerboard. I noticed that on other guitars, whether factory or handmade, some sounded great and some did not. I wanted all of my guitars to sound great,” Foster said. “I realized that the guitar I built that had the wolf tones was tuned to the note C. This made the body of the guitar absorb the string frequency of the note C. But, it also made the dominant and subdominant notes weak. So, on this particular guitar the C note was dead and the G and F notes were both weaker than the rest of the notes on the fingerboard.”
He detuned the guitar half a step and found the dead spots disappeared, then tuned it up half a step with the same result. Recognizing that guitarists have to tune to the key of C, Foster saw that the only way he could keep the whole neck alive was to change the body of the guitar.
“The solution was to carve the re-curve so that when I tapped the guitar the resonant frequency would fall between two pitches,” Foster said. “Every guitar has a different tap pitch depending on the density of the wood or the size of the body. But if I carve the top and back re-curve, then the pitch of the guitar will drop. As long as that pitch is a semitone between two notes in 440, the guitar will not have dead spots.”
Foster said that was a main reason for his guitars’ consistency, and the prevention of feedback when used electronically.
Foster said that being a guitar player affected his guitar making mainly because of the community of musicians he knew.
“It helps me to be in tune with other players’ needs. I have learned to make a guitar that has less feedback and no dead spots. I know how to make a guitar feel great to a player,” Foster said. “Most importantly, I have learned how to make a guitar that will last a lifetime and will hopefully give a player a lifetime of enjoyment.”
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