Alumni Spotlight

Johanna Mutti '04

Striking a Chord

Johanna Mutti '04 at work
in Huntingdon, Pa.

When Johanna Mutti ’04 was 12 years old, her parents took her on a tour of the Martin Guitar factory in Nazareth, Pa. She was enthralled to see the different phases of the building process, and when she returned home, the home-schooled Mutti, who had recently begun playing the guitar, wrote a paper about the visit. She included a long list of questions she hoped to have answered on a future visit. Little did she know that as an adult, she would make her living by building stringed instruments.

“It’s always fun to look back and see how things you’re doing now are connected to events in your past,” says Mutti. “I certainly didn’t know when I was kid that I would do this for a living, but I’ve always been very curious about how things work, and I’ve loved guitars since I started playing at age 12.”

Mutti is now co-owner and operator of Oriskany Stringed Instruments, a two-person shop that produces custom, handmade, high-end acoustic guitars in Huntingdon, Pa. She and her partner, Curtis Rockwell, build three instruments at a time in a painstaking process that takes about three months from start to finish, working in a building that was once a chicken coop. Their instruments, which are notable for their rich sound and easy playability, are built with the tastes and quirks of the particular musician in mind. The company creates instruments for professional musicians and amateur players who want excellent instruments made to particular specifications. Customers often visit the Oriskany workshop to select wood, play existing models and share ideas before the building process begins.

At Earlham, when Mutti took John Howell’s “Physics of Music” class, she thought she might be able to answer one of the questions she had come up with in the visit to the Martin Guitar factory – how the different brace patterns used in guitars change the sound of the instrument. She couldn’t find much academic literature on the subject and ended up writing about properties of tonewoods (woods used in the construction of musical instruments). Rockwell, a long time friend of the family, became aware of Mutti’s interest in guitars and invited her to apprentice in his newly set up workshop. Over the summer between her sophomore and junior years at Earlham, she built herself a guitar in Rockwell’s workshop, then returned the next summer for more hands on learning. After graduation, she joined the business full-time.

“I have always enjoyed working with my hands, but I hadn’t really worked with wood before,” notes Mutti on becoming a luthier, the name given to those who build stringed instruments. “In some ways, I think it was an advantage that I learned about the specifics of guitars and the use of tools at the same time. Building a guitar is very delicate work, so it’s not quite like other types of carpentry.”

A guitar is consists of over 120 different parts and pieces of wood, and Mutti says that building a great instrument requires an understanding of how all the parts interact. “It’s not that different from understanding ecology,” says Mutti, who majored in biology at Earlham. She notes that it is that interplay between the various parts that determines the sound of an individual instrument. Selecting appropriate tonewoods, scalloping the braces, carving the neck and doing good fret work are labor intensive and detail-oriented processes that need to take in to account such things as desired tone, the size of a customer’s hands and whether a player uses a pick or fingers to strum the strings.

Oriskany Stringed Instruments has made a point of catering to the needs of women since many mass produced guitars are uncomfortably large for people with smaller hands, shorter arms and narrower shoulders. Mutti notes that about one-third of their customers are women, a much higher percentage than is usual in the industry.

“Our guitars are smaller than your standard dreadnought, and we have the flexibility to build an instrument that fits the player,” says Mutti.

Mutti regularly played rhythm guitar at contra dances as a teenager, but doesn’t play as much anymore. “After spending 10 hours a day building guitars, marketing guitars, talking about guitars and working on a website about guitars, somehow it’s not that appealing to spend the evening playing the guitar,” she says, though she still considers her background as a musician indispensable. “There are luthiers out there who don’t play, and their instruments are often really beautiful, but they don’t sound very good and they are often difficult to play. As a piece of art, they may be exquisite, but we like to think of our guitars as a tool for a musician, not just a piece of art. They have missed the point.”

The point for Mutti is to make instruments that are beautiful to look at and listen to and also constructed so that they bring out a particular musician’s best. In coming years, she and Rockwell hope to increase their business by building such other string instruments as mandolins and banjos. They have also made bouzoukis and baritone guitars and hope to sell more in the future.

“Our approach is to cast a big net and wait for somebody to trip on it,” she says. “At the same time, it’s hard to predict what products are going to prove most marketable. We always have to be careful to keep focused on what we do best.”