Ian Stehlik

Over the years of playing guitar, I love taking every opportunity to play a variety of instruments to try to learn, from my own ears and hands, what makes a steel string acoustic guitar sound great and play well. In the 1970s I was mostly listening to and playing electric guitar. I did have an acoustic at home, but it was a 1950s Maton ‘Stradivarius’ f-hole guitar that I’d bought for about $40 from an Adelaide second-hand store. This guitar was fun to play, but at that stage even I could tell that the laminated body f-hole design was trebly and lacked sustain. In the late 1970s, K Yairi acoustic guitars started appearing in Australia from Japan and I bought a cutaway dreadnought model. This guitar was well made with a solid cedar top and laminated back and sides,. I liked the understated aesthetic and it had a noticeably sweeter, more sustaining voice than the Maton archtop. I enjoyed playing this guitar for a year or two and it was definitely a step up in tone.

Around this time in the early 1980s a guitar maker from Victoria called Bryan DeGruchy moved to Adelaide and was doing some luthier work at a guitar shop I used to go to in the eastern suburbs. I remember meeting Bryan there as he worked on some Tele partscasters, but the conversation quickly moved to his true passion: steel string acoustics, made with traditional woods, designs and techniques. So a little while later I arranged to visit Bryan at his home in the Adelaide hills to explore having a guitar made. I remember chatting in his tiny garden shed workshop, admiring the stack of tonewoods in storage, and looking at templates for different traditional body shapes. By the end of the visit I was starting to think about guitar options and Bryan was strongly dissuading me from anything non-traditional, like a cutaway top!

Before I left he invited me into the house for a cuppa. While chatting with Bryan and his wife, I noticed a small guitar in the corner of the dining area. “Oh, that’s one I’ve made for myself” said Bryan, “.. the back and sides are some 100 year old Brazilian I got from a retired violin maker in Portland; the boards were only big enough for a small guitar.” I asked if I could play it and was immediately struck by the volume and tone that leapt out of this small beauty. When I asked if this model size had a name , Bryan said , “Oh not really, I just call it the Midget”. A short while later I managed to convince Bryan to sell me ‘Midge’ and now, close to 40 years later, she remains a very favourite guitar. It was only years later, after I started thinking about and studying Martin guitars, that I measured all the dimensions of Midge to realise that what Bryan had created was an exact homage to a pre-war Martin 0-28. [The photo below is a later Martin … more about that in Part 2.]