Kids at play: Lake Stevens middle-schoolers craft electric guitars

LAKE STEVENS — Hey kid! Where did you get that awesome electric guitar?

If you’re one of Alex Moll’s students, there’s a good chance you built it yourself.

Moll, who teaches career and technical classes at Lake Stevens Middle School, has been helping students in grades 7 -12 craft their own solid-body electric guitars since 2012.

Many start from scratch.

“I’ve had students who’d never seen a screwdriver,” he said.

What’s the key to success?

“You just need grit,” he said.

More than two dozen of the student-built guitars got air play this summer at the Schack Art Center in Everett.

The exhibit included a pizza-slice shaped guitar, pink frosted donut guitar, tulip guitar and a classic Van Halen version with a multi-layered paint job.

Students design, wire, assemble and decorate the guitars.

There’s really only one rule — keep it comfortable and balanced. “You don’t want to make it so heavy on one side, it slips down when you’re playing,” Moll said.

After that — almost anything goes.

Each year 15 students join Moll’s after-school guitar-building club, which meets from November to April. (There’s a waiting list.) They’ll then spend 40 to 100 hours building a single guitar.

“It’s physical work,” Moll said. “People get hot and sweaty and tired.”

The club is supported by the National Science Foundation’s STEM guitar project, which focuses on the engineering, math and technology that goes into guitar-making.

Chemistry, physics, reading a schematic, learning to wire the electronics — they’re all at play when you build an electric guitar, said Moll, who also teaches military veterans and teachers guitar-building skills.

Because of the club’s STEM status, the cost of the materials, about $200, is paid for by the state’s Career and Technical Education program. Students pay nothing.

Students can design their own guitar shape or opt for a traditional style such as the Flying V or the iconic Stratocaster, known for its deep cutaways and pointy horns. The shape of an electric guitar doesn’t usually effect how it sounds, since it relies more on electronics than form, he said.

The neck is pre-made. “We don’t have time to hand-carve those,” he explained. The electronic components come as a kit, but students must attach and install the electromagnetic pickups themselves.

Plug into an amplifier and you’re ready to rock! And, yes, they sound great.

Since 2012, Moll has constructed a dozen guitars himself, including one made of corrugated cardboard, and helped build more than 100, he said.

Growing up on a farm near Oso, he started using tools and repairing equipment when he was a kid. His love affair with the guitar began in middle school when he learned to play.

A master’s degree in forest resources from the University of Washington and his service with the Navy Reserves sharpened his construction skills.

Yes, I can

Skyley Vivens, 12, a seventh-grader who likes creating digital art, enrolled in Moll’s design and modeling class to sharpen her hands-on skills. “I want to learn to work with different materials,” Skyley said.

The course blends traditional woodworking skills with 3D modeling and printing, and laser engraving and cutting.

On a recent day, students in the class were making canjos, a one-string, one octave instrument whose resonating chamber is a tin can. Moll’s handiwork includes a bean with bacon soup canjo and a Spamjo – with, you guessed it, an empty tin of the chopped ham attached to the base.

Moll began class by telling students: “You need to burnish the neck until it feels smooth like marble, like glass.”

The swish of handsaws and sandpaper and gentle hammer taps filled the room.

But this reporter sensed a more serious undertone at play. Students faced a big decision: Which can to attach to their canjo?

Twelve-year-old Kevin Johnson, who was deepening the laser-engraved frets on his canjo with a small handsaw, said he’d narrowed the field. “I’m thinking a can of chicken noodle soup.”

Luke Faillace, 12, took a break from sanding to gauge his progress. “I really like creating things,” he said, running his hand over the neck. “I’m thinking about signing up for guitar-building.” But no decision yet on which can for the canjo.

Dunkin’

Three years ago, when Conner Welch was a seventh grader, he signed up for Mr. Moll’s after-school workshop. He’d made a canjo, now he wanted to design an electric guitar.

And not just any guitar, but one that would resemble a frosted pink donut with a scattering of sprinkles.

“I thought it would be really cool,” said Conner, now a sophomore at Lake Stevens Hugh School.

“The hardest part was definitely the frosting,” he said. Paint didn’t give the right texture or depth. His dad suggested applying clear epoxy. On a whim, they mixed it with crushed pink sidewalk chalk.

It worked!

Conner fashioned the “sprinkles” from Sculpey clay. “We rolled out big long worms of rainbow colored clay… heated them up, let them harden and snipped them off with scissors,” he said.

To complete the look, he carved three donuts on the headstock and added a donut-themed harness and rainbow strings.

Conner dubbed the guitar Dunkin’.

“It was perfect, exactly how I had wanted,” he said. Conner hasn’t learned how to play it — for him it was “all about building it.”

And that’s fine, Moll said. “My favorite example is Leo Fender. He was just a genius industrial designer who never played a note,” he said of the famous guitar-maker.

At some point, Moll would like to teach a ukulele-building class geared toward students who’ve already built an electric guitar. He offered one a few years ago without the prerequisite, but it was a bit of a mistake.

”There were a lot of tiny little braces to install that caused frustration,” he said. “There were a lot of tears.”

What? Build my own guitar???

Celeste Johnson wasn’t a hands-on type or a tinkerer when she took a shop class from Moll in 2011. Then a sixth-grader, Johnson discovered she had a talent for creating handmade items — from jewelry boxes to birdhouses.

When Moll announced he was launching an after-school electric guitar-making club, she was astonished, “I was like – What do you mean I can build my own guitar?” Johnson, now 25, recalled.

She signed up immediately, but the work was slow-going.

“We would focus on one piece each week,” she said. “At a certain point, it started to look like an actual guitar. That was an exciting moment.”

The guitar-making sessions were accompanied by mini-music lessons.

“Mr. Moll was really involved with music and music history and would play different bands for us,” said Johnson, now a behavior analyst who works with children. “He really has an impressive way of connecting with students.”

She opted for a teal wood stain so you could see the grain on the guitar she made.

Since then, “His knowledge and techniques have improved dramatically,” Johnson said. “When he got his 3-D engraving machine, that added another dimension to decorating and personalizing the guitars.”

The teal-colored electric guitar she crafted as a seventh-grader still hangs in her room.

Didn’t catch the Schack Art Center’s student guitar exhibit? View it on YouTube at: tinyurl.com/kfmr8hv8

Janice Podsada is a freelance writer and former employee of the Daily Herald. She can be reached at jpod2024@gmail.com