Alexander Acoustics caters to customers who want to ‘hear’ the guitar

CEDAR RAPIDS — “We’re in this time when a lot of these older tone woods are getting harder and harder to get,” Alexander Steele said.

“Even the larger manufacturers are going to some myrtle, some walnut. Everyone’s looking for something else.”

“Tone wood” refers to those varieties favored for construction of stringed instruments for their resonance, ease of use and appearance. Traditional tone woods such as rosewood and mahogany are have become more expensive as supplies dwindle.

“The actual true mahogany is Honduran mahogany,” Steele explained. “That’s super hard to get because it was over-harvested.

“Now they have all these other mahoganies, this African mahogany that’s not actually a mahogany. It’s a lot more porous. It doesn’t have the same workability.”

Fortunately Steele, who’s built guitars in his northeast Cedar Rapids basement workshop for about a decade, has found suitable replacements in his own backyard. Literally.

“This is a tree that fell on our house in the derecho,” he said, pulling a plank from a rack where it’s been drying. “We had it milled, some of my buddies helped me get it out. That’s locust.

“I’ve got some walnut I found around town. That’s still drying out, but this winter I might actually start on some of it.”

Steele, 37, grew up in Minnesota before moving to Cedar Rapids in 2007 so his wife could attend Kirkwood Community College’s dental hygiene program. He’d begun building guitars about two years earlier.

“I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid and have always been pretty mechanically inclined,” he said. “I’ve always been tinkering with guitars, just trying to fix the things I broke on them.”

Steele taught himself how to build guitars.

“There’s so much information available,” he said. “I’ve got all these books on guitar building, and there’s so many resources online. I learned it that way, and as you start doing and learning people started liking the stuff I was making.”

Whatever the wood used, Alexander Acoustics specializes in steel-stringed guitars with little ornamentation.

“There’s no binding, there’s no inlay, there’s no rosette around the sound hole,” Steele said, indicating a model on his work bench.

“Some of those things take away the resonance a little. You an do an inlay on the fret board pretty simply, but you’re trying to build a guitar that would sound a certain way, instead of trying to look a certain way.”

That can take a bit of convincing, until a prospective customer picks up an Alexander guitar.

“Some people don’t want a guitar that looks simple,” Steele said. “A lot of the guitar market is driven by what a guitar looks like, rather than what it sounds like.

“Someone that wants to listen to the guitar and hear what the guitar sounds like, that’s who I cater to.”

Steele’s guitars have found enough of a following that he usually builds about 10 a year. His simple, basic designs are complimented by his attention to detail. He sets the bridge pins, which anchor the strings below the sound hole, to a specific depth for each string, for example.

“They’re all ordered, so that’s going to hold the smaller string tighter and this one needs to be deeper for the bigger string, and it’s going to hold that one tight,” he said.

“Usually on a manufactured instrument they’re all the same, so the little string doesn’t get held as tight. It’s a simple thing but it does add to resonance of the instrument.”

When he’s not building guitars, or driving a tow truck for a local service, Steele repairs them.

“There’s a big market for repairs,” he said. “I love to take on a repair and get someone’s instrument working the way it’s supposed to.”

He also builds mandolins and ukuleles — any stringed instruments with frets.

“Anything from the violin family, I’m not building,” he said.

Steele has even built a ukulele out of oak salvaged from scrapped freight pallets.

“It actually sounds pretty good,” he said. “A lot of woods, once you work them down correctly become musical at some level.

“The hard thing is trying to sell an instrument that people haven’t heard about. A lot more people want to spend money on rosewood than the pallet oak. That’s where the industry gets stuck — the consumer wants a specific wood, and you have to make what you can sell. That makes it challenging, but if someone’s open minded you can make some really cool stuff out of wood you can find right here,” Steele said.

“I’m really excited to make a guitar out of the locust that fell on my house.”

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