The Show's ANALOGS series is about people who make things by hand — and what those things tell us about those people.
Last year, I took a trip to Flagstaff, where I met a guy named Ryan Elewaut. Ryan and I are both amateur guitarists, and our conversation started off on familiar terrain.
"Like, I remember, one of my first memories playing guitar was learning a G chord and a C chord from my friends brother, who we all looked up to, and he taught us some guitar," Elewaut said. "But I remember hearing those first two chords and struggling through them, and just being able to hear them side by side, and switch between them, was like - it just was this kind of overwhelming sensation of sound and creating."
"I think I’ve had a similar feeling as a guitar player. And for me the feeling was very much, like: 'Oh — that’s all the songs I love!' Like this whole world, that, you know, like, music was already very transportive to me, but also seemed completely mysterious," I said. "And then someone taught me G, C, and D —and I thought, I can play 80% of those songs!"
"Yeah, and just the way those chords work together — you have this relationship with them already, because of listening to music. And it’s coming from your hands now, you know?" Elewaut said.
Now we’ve all heard the version of this story where that moment — learning those first chords on the guitar is the inciting incident in a musician’s origin story. There are people who spend the rest of their lives chasing the feeling they get in that moment — from the basement of a friend’s house all the way to a stadium full of screaming fans.
Ryan Elewaut is not that person.
"Something about guitar making clicked with me more than guitar playing," Elewaut said.
Around the time he started playing the guitar, someone gave Ryan this book about making guitars. It wasn’t the best book. The writing was sort of vague and subjective — more of a narrative about this one guy’s experience of building guitars than a step-by-step guide. But something about it left an impression on Ryan.
"The thing that really blew me away was just seeing that something could be made like that by hand. This kind of like, need of — you have to build something to build something. You have to make a jig, and maybe you have to make a tool or set something up to make that jig. And then you’re going to use that jig to make a part on the guitar," Elewaut said.
"Interesting. So if I’m hearing you right, this is gonna be a terrible analogy, but it’s not like making a soup, where you’re like, 'OK, I put water and carrots and onions together and now I have soup.' It’s like if you had to make the carrot first," I asked.
"Yeah! Yeah, grow the carrot first," Elewaut said.
And so, at age 15, Ryan started growing his own carrots. He spent countless hours in the garage, with the only sort-of-helpful book, building his first guitar. He says it took him three years.
"It’s that one, actually," Elewaut said.
"Oh, it’s that one on the wall over there?" I asked.
"Yeah, I have it in the office. It doesn’t sound great, but it was a real build. I mean, it’s a real guitar," Elewaut said.
Ryan and I were talking that day in the office of Solstice Guitars — the company he now runs. Solstice builds custom, hand-made guitars and electric basses. His customers pay top dollar. The base price for his acoustic guitar, which he calls the Ecliptic, is $6,200. He also makes an electric guitar, he calls that one the Tellurion and a bass, the Nova. He has display models of all these instruments mounted on the wall of the office. And hanging next to them is that very first guitar he built in his parents’ garage.
"Sounds pretty good to me," I said.
"Sounds all right — I made the top too thick, I wouldn’t use this kind of wood on a nylon string guitar," Elewaut said.
It’s now been about 30 years since Ryan built that guitar. These days, he works a little faster. But not much.
"I quote customers around nine to 12 months right now," Elewaut said.
Ryan opened Solstice about five years ago. His signature product is that acoustic guitar, called the Ecliptic. He estimates he’s only made about seven or eight of them, and when he says he does a lot of it by hand — he’s not kidding. The process starts with slabs of raw wood, some of which comes from right there in Flagstaff.
"This is a piece of sitka spruce, and if you hold one of these plates in the right spot you can tap it and get some different tones. And if we do that with a different species you’ll get a totally different sound," Elewaut said. "This is cedar. And we could do — here’s some ponderosa. And then this is Adirondack spruce, also red spruce. Like the old, classic Martins are Adirondack spruce."
"Wow," I said.
This, of course, is just the beginning. The wood he taps on gets used for the body of the guitar — but there’s also the neck to consider. Then, there’s the inlay of the fretboard, where he likes to tuck in these subtle crescent shapes that evoke the celestial environment, which, as you may have noticed from his use of names like Solstice, Ecliptic, and Nova, is where Ryan draws a lot of inspiration.
"The meaning that I have with that really has to do with our existence on planet earth and our entire perception of time is based on this rhythm that our planet experiences as it rotates around the sun," Elewaut said. "You know, I have a pretty deep thing with music and what it means to be on earth, and as a human, and the way we experience time, and it’s so easy to, I mean, how can you pay attention to this thing you’re locked into?"
As Ryan said all this, I thought back to that early memory he and I share — that feeling of strumming G and C chords for the first time. And how maybe the reason that feeling is so transcendent is that, in that moment of realizing that the sounds your hands are making are the same sounds that other hands once made. And that those sounds became the songs you listen to, to remember transport yourself back to the best moments of your life, to escape the worst ones. What’s really happening in those moments is that you’re stepping out of time. Not literally, not escaping it, but just noticing it. The fact that you’re stuck in it, no matter how much you wish you weren’t.
That’s why Ryan calls his electric guitar the Tellurion — because a Tellurion is a device that measures the movement of the earth, moon and sun. It’s literally a time machine.
"Humanity, connection, through music. Wood is a very incredible thing — the substance itself is, to me, one of the most magical things I get to work with," Elewaut said.
Before I left, I asked Ryan to play me a few chords on the Ecliptic.
"It’s got that real, like, ring to it," I said.
"It’s got some resonance to it that’s a little bit unexpected, I hope," Elewaut said.
That last thing he said is a little hard to hear, but I wrote it down when he said it. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He said: “It’s got a resonance that’s a little unexpected.”
