Handmade Instruments Resonate
Images by Brette Little
You’ve likely seen Grant Wickland and his stunning handmade banjos, ukuleles and resonators strung up at his Wickland Instruments booth at the Saturday Market. When Grant retired in 1995, he decided he wanted to learn how to build a banjo, and consulted the help of his friend Bill Rickard of Rickard Banjos, who only got so far as teaching him how to make a neck: “That's what really got me started, but he only he only lives here about two weeks a year. I haven't hit the right two weeks.” Left with only a neck and no banjo, Grant set about doing his own research into how to complete construction.
Grant first settled on building block rims, “which are basically just a brick pattern,” and noted that much of the wood he uses is salvaged or gifted, each with its own little origin story. The banjo hardware he sources from Rickard Banjos, except for the tuners, many of which are from Gotoh. Grant recalled that he had to get permission from all the other Canadian wholesalers before the Japanese company would agree to sell their tuners to him.
Soon enough Grant became interested in building a resonator, basically a steel lap guitar with a sitar built onto a separate level. It looks incredibly complex, a beautiful shiny thing, and they don’t call it a resonator for nothing - the reverberation gets right into your bones in a way you won’t soon forget, with a sound so pleasantly striking.
With his extensive experience in carpentry and building, Grant has learned how to build a fantastic range of instruments, from the elaborate resonators to cigar box ukuleles. For the resonators, he crafts the body out of German steel sheet metal and purchases the metal coverplate from National (because “my wife wouldn’t let me buy a $40,000 metal cutter press.”) He explained how when you attach the neck to the guitar body, there is both a change in wood and a glue void that disrupts the reverberation through the instrument. So he figured out how to make the neck run the full length of the guitar body for sustained sound, just another example of the innovative tinkering of a builder who found his calling in retirement.
If you’re wondering if Grant does custom orders, he doesn’t - mostly so he can keep focusing on the work that interests him. Whether it’s solving the riddle of how to create a sprung tipping bridge so the sitar strings would sound just right on the resonator, or installing signature celestial inlays on the neck, or creating a resonator electric bass, fretless with rubber strings (for those musicians with tendonitis!), Grant seems happiest to let his creative mind wander. He also learned early on that shipping his instruments was hardly worth the trouble, and has seen customers fly out from around the world to come pick up their pieces in person from Salt Spring. Well worth the journey, to meet your music maker.
You can find Grant’s instruments online, and possibly at the Saturday Market this summer (pending pandemic orders).
