Guitarley’s Scholarship & Giveaway

I humbly present Guitarley’s first annual calendar, for a cause and a prize! This is an exciting sale for me and my shop, and here is why!
So first I made a custom guitar, and then I took said guitar on 8,000 mile musical journey to Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado! On this journey I hiked this guitar to beautiful areas of the southwest and took photos. Then I got this crazy idea to have my first guitar calendar made and have some fun with it!
As many of you know, playing guitar is my favorite thing, and a guy named Dave Brumbaugh helped me get much better at doing so, some years (decades) ago. Since then he has grown this amazing music school in our town called the Uptown Music Collective. It’s a true highlight of Williamsport and our flourishing arts and music culture. The sale of this calendar will help a student and sure-to-be future rock star afford to attend this terrific music program by funding a full year’s tuition cost! I hope over time this annual campaign can grow to support more and more students, but lets start here!
The next fun and enticing part of this calendar sale is a big one too! I’ll keep track of each person who shows their support by buying a calendar (or 3) and assign them a number for each calendar purchased, entering them into a give-away drawing! Can you guess what I’ll be giving away?! Yep, the very same custom guitar that is featured in every picture in the calendar! The circle is complete!
Now, there are 250 calendars that were printed locally, with pictures I took, of a guitar I made, that I’ll give away, and donate a large portion of the proceeds to the place where I learned to play guitar! How about that!?
There are no quantity limits on how many of these calendars you can purchase, and for every one you buy you’ll increase your odds of winning my latest hand-made guitar! These can make great gifts for the guitar lover or musician in your life, and the holidays are just around the corner. 250 calendars kind of seems like a lot when I was carrying them 3 blocks to my shop, but I think we can do this! I’m hoping to sell them all by mid-November so please help and spread the word! Once ALL the calendars are sold, I’ll have Mr. Brumbaugh (hopefully he’ll do it) draw a number and announce the corresponding name and winner of a custom guitar (valued at $3,500) in an SKB hard case, and set up arrangements for getting it to it’s new home!
Please help me out on this one! Share my posts and videos about this campaign! Buy a calendar! Help a kid become the best guitar player they can be! Maybe add one of my guitars to your collection! 1of 250 are pretty good odds!

As always, thanks for supporting my little guitar shop and our community!

Sean Farley

So much has happened in 5 years. It’s easiest to see what I’m up to by following me on Instagram, @guitarleys. But while you are here, please check out this video made by my good and very talented friend, Tyler Spooner (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk3yhEQG-n53IPIqRTzMPZw). Share just enough to make it viral! 😉

5 Year Anniversary

Can you believe that it’s been 5 years since Guitarley’s opened it’s doors!? I can! It’s been a wonderful adventure and the shop has grown immensely. Starting as just a small repair shop with a small work bench, a few guitar hangers, and an amp or two, I now have a custom wood shop and repair/show room, that is packed full of guitars, projects, and woods! I have worked on thousands of guitars and built several customs, with many more in the works. It’s hard to believe sometimes.

Guitarley’s has recently been chosen to design and build 12 custom guitars for Geisinser Health Systems! 12 guitars! Get ready to see some serious building this spring.

I’ll also be hosting an open house to celebrate the 5 years of business! Please plan to attend on Saturday, April 2, from 4-7pm! Come see the guitars that have been built, custom amps, woods, tools, and me!

More new products on the way!

Most retail music stores carry the run of the mill chrome and glass slides, but here at Guitarley’s I wish to offer you slides of the highest quality! I have recently been signed up to be an authorized dealer of the world’s greatest guitar slide, “The Rock Slide!”

RockSlides have unparalleled sustain.Why so much sustain? Because the heart of The Rock Slide is the solid brass rod that is CNC carved to fit your finger. This particular brass formula has a lot of nickel content which is the best for tone, sustain and plating. The walls are thick and get thicker towards the end of the slide. We intentionally added a tone ring at the fingertip end which adds mass and helps secure your finger. Like a Hawaiian tone bar cuts through the mix with more weight and mass, so does The Rock Slide. NOT JUST A PIECE OF PIPE.

The first batch of these should be arriving at Guitarley’s in a week or two, so stay tuned for when you can test drive one of these beauties! Check out all of their great products…

http://www.therockslide.com

Welcome Emerson Custom Guitar and Electronics!

Guitarley’s has yet another great brand of tone to offer our customers! We welcome some awesome hand-made boutique products to help you improve the quality of parts and tone in your favorite guitar! Check out their website and ask me about pricing and ordering!

http://emersoncustomguitars.bigcartel.com

L.A. Amp for sale!

This is an amazing sounding “Super Reverb” style amp, custom built by Gary Crouse of Lewis Alexander Amplification! This amp boasts 45 watts of all-tube tone! You have to hear it to believe it. This amp is currently for demo and for sale at Guitarley’s so stop by and check it out!
-45 Watts
-45 lbs
-All USA made parts
-Completely hand-wired
-Mercury Mag input/output/choke transformers
-Hotrod Channel 1 with special gain structure and “Phat” circuit
-Ruby 6L6’s
-Vintage tone soul USA 5U46B rectifier
-extra filtering tube reverb w/military Phillips 12AT7
-JJ’s in all other preamp positions
-4×10 w/ 2 Kendrick Black Frame and 2 Eminence
-Vintage 1965 reverb tank
-RCA vintage style foot switch
-Custom cover and leather handle

The Wood Shop

I am excited to make a new, long overdue, post here on my site! I have been a busy luthier and musician so I’ll fill you in on what’s new at Guitarley’s!

Let’s start with the wood shop. For the past two and half years I’ve been acquiring tools and lumber to build guitars, patiently might I add. I recently made some further purchases and got the tools I need to finally get started with the next step in my career as a luthier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luthier)! It feels great to have a functioning studio to make things. I now have the freedom and opportunity to obsess! I have started to learn the tools and dial them in for my purposes. I have also started to size and dimension my collection of lumber and organize stock!

I spent yesterday afternoon running my tools, revealing the hidden beauty of some very special lumber that I purchased two years ago. I got the wood from the estate of famous American wood worker and artist, Wharton Esherick (http://www.whartonesherickmuseum.org/studio.html). This was a special chance opportunity to select some of the finest of lumber, especially at this early stage in my career. I was in the right place at the right time.

The density, color and other characteristics of these boards have a different feel than other quality woods available today. It’s hard to describe, but if you held each board you would feel the difference from others. There’s something spiritual about these boards as compared to others. Perhaps I’m feeling, in hindsight, the foresight of Esherick’s sense of quality in lumber. After all, he picked this wood out for his own personal endeavors as a wood worker, but passed before he could get to it. Does that mean he just had a lot of wood, or was he saving some of these boards because they were so special? I’ll never know, but it’s amazing to consider the story and spirit of these boards that are in my wood shop! I picked the cream of the crop, from a master craftsman’s cream of the crop!

I really look forward to the projects and creations to come and hope you will follow my adventures. I promise to keep it interesting! I’ll be posting pictures as usual to my social media accounts so get ready to follow, share and like some content! Follow me on Instagram (http://instagram.com/guitarleys), Twitter (https://twitter.com/guitarleys) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/guitarleys). Thanks supporting me as I chase my dreams as a craftsman, artist and musician.

The next BIG step…

Over the past several weeks I have been preparing for a big opportunity in my career as a luthier and business owner. In a previous blog you’ll see that I had my first CNC experience as a woodworker. With the help of my good friend at Hermance Machine Company (www.hermance.com) I participated in a CNC demo with C.R. Onsrud (www.cronsrud.com) making a few of my resonator guitar bodies. The demo was well received enough that the company is taking me to Las Vegas with them for the 2013 Association of Woodworking and Furnishing Suppliers Fair (http://awfsfair.org)! There will be hundreds of thousands of people in attendance, lots of contacts, exposure, and opportunity. It’s kind of a big deal.

In preparation I purchased a variety of aged tone woods from Lewis Lumber Products (www.lewislp.com) and other various providers in my area. There will be 24 blanks consisting of curly maple, ash, alder, African and Honduran Mahogany, black walnut, and padauk. I have done a fully detailed CAD drawing of my guitar that will instruct the CNC routing machine on what to cut, and it will do it efficiently and accurately!

While the machine demonstrates its cutting abilities, making a large batch of guitar bodies for me, I’ll be there to answer questions and demonstrate the lutherie process. I will also have one of my completed resonator guitars on display for me to play and for others to test drive. I’ll have various hard ware pieces as well as my new line of custom winds form Porter Pickups (www.porterpickups.com). With these pieces I’ll be able to do a “dry-fit” assembly and preview the further building process.

In the mean time I’ll be planning display materials, printing handouts about my business and music, and working away in the shop for the upcoming week. Then its time to fly to the deserts of the southwest. 

Is there anything that you fellow bloggers would like to see at a demo like this? I’m open for suggestions and experiences. Thanks for your support and I can’t wait to show you the guitars as they progress!

Don’t forget to follow my progress on Twitter and Instagram (@Guitarleys) and visit my http://www.facebook.com/guitarleys page and support me with a ‘like’ and a share!

 

Custom guitar body with CNC machine!

It has been way too long since my last post! However, my negligence has been due to a very happily busy repair shop and constant developments in my lutherie and musical business! Life has been good to this “lucky luthier” and “guitar man”! My latest adventure this week was big league for sure…

I recently participated in the 2013 machine Expo at Hermance Machine Company (www.hermance.com). What a cool look into the world of production level woodworking this was! Every year major companies set up product and demonstration booths throughout the facility and show off their tools and what they can do. I was selected to join forces with C.R. Onsrud (www.cronsrud.com) who specialize in high quality CNC (computer numerical control) machinery designed for the aerospace, woodworking, plastics, and composites industries.

With a CAD (computer-aided design) program, we created a three-dimensional geometry of my resonator guitar to guide a very large CNC machine being shown at the expo. This machine cut out one of my guitar bodies, beautifully, in a matter of minutes! As a small luthier with smaller machines and hand tools, this was impressive and inspired possibilities of larger production in the future. It would have taken me a few hours instead of a few minutes.

For the immediate future, this particular machine has provided two mostly cut resonator bodies to be the first of guitars that will be built in my shop in Williamsport, PA. This is very exciting and motivational as I become one step closer to completing my wood shop and beginning the next step in my adventures in lutherie and music. Check out my photo album on Facebook by clicking this link, and be sure to ‘like’ and follow my page- http://on.fb.me/13OPbTL

Memphis Memories

It was an honor to represent the Billtown Blues Association (www.billtownblues.org) in Memphis, TN, at the 2013 International Blues Challenge! Thank you to my supporters for providing me with another great opportunity like this. This was my third time competing and I realized how different each Beale Street experience has been. My first time in Memphis (2008) I competed with Black n’ Blues (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/blacknb), the second time (2009) with the Ann Kerstetter Band (http://www.annkerstetter.com) after having reconstructive surgery on a freshly reattached thumb. This last time (2013) I competed as a solo artist and Luthier! The one constant, when reflecting on my Memphis trips, is how great a time I’ve had and how much I’ve learned. The amount of talent in both the band and solo/duo divisions never ceases to amaze and humble me.

For many reasons this recent visit has been my favorite thus far! The IBCs inspired my first solo tour, which encompassed 7,000 miles of travel, performing in 15 different cities across the USA! I played just shy of 30 shows all in fantastic new venues while promoting my fresh solo album, “Karma” (http://bit.ly/KarmaCD). See tweets from my solo tour by searching for the hashtag #SWKarmaTour on Twitter (https://twitter.com/guitarleys). I was always nervous about playing solo shows, so to conquer my fears I took them head on in a big way! Not only did I promote and share my music on this tour, but I shared my profession in the art of lutherie! I was proud to perform my original songs on the guitars that I obsessively built myself. I also got to share this great experience with my love and best friend.

Memphis has really grown since the last time I visited! While the usual Beale Street barbecue and blues joints are amazing, it was nice to see many new and successful shops and restaurants on Main Street. I remember taking long runs in the afternoons on my last visit when it was all under renovation! Now Memphis’ downtown, just outside of the Beale St. section, has more of a local’s feel — it’s less touristy, very safe, and full of great places to shop and eat! The beautiful buildings, cobblestone walkways and the Trolley system are comforting and give the town a quaint feel. I really felt it was a city and area that I could move to! I could open a Luthier’s repair and wood shop, build and fix all the stringed instruments and amplifiers by day, then, after sunset, head down to Rum Boogie Cafe or King’s Palace and show them off! Sounds like the good life to me!

All in all my recent trip to the Memphis IBCs was stellar! It was my favorite visit yet! I plan to compete again in the Billtown Blues Auditions next year and will hopefully return to Beale in 2015. By then I should have at least another album or two and some cool new custom built guitars to show off. I think I’ll just keep competing in the IBCs as long as I am able and hopefully I’ll win it someday! It’s always worth a trip for all the great music, and it’s always an enriching learning experience. I feel I have many years left of paying my dues in the world of the blues, but will hopefully one day deserve recognition as a guitar player, singer, songwriter and a Luthier.