This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Nestled between the tall trees of the Mendenhall Valley, George Gress makes guitars in his woodshop. He’s been making them for the past decade, but in the last few years he’s brought on two ambitious students.
On Saturdays, Joseph Galgano and Bryan Bolaños bond with Gress over wood flames and handmade instruments.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
George Gress: This. This is right where you want it. This is, but the profile is not yet. So you don’t, you don’t want to go any, you don’t want to grind any more of this off. So, let me make a little pencil mark…
George Gress. And I’ve been here a lifetime, about 35 years, and started making guitars 10 years ago. And have gradually been able to mentor and help some other guitar makers get started.
Feel right here? That’s flat. You don’t want that flat. So what you’re going to be working on is, just like this. You’re just going to go back and forth a lot.
Bryan Bolaños: I’m Bryan Bolaños. I grew up here in Juneau, originally from the Philippines. I’m a self-taught musician and artist, and I do like a million things, and this is one of them.
This is my first guitar build. And I think about like two years into learning the guitar, I was looking at luthier colleges. Luthier is like, what this profession is, making six string instruments, or stringed instruments. And I was like, looking into it, and it was like 20 grand for tuition.
Joseph Galgano: And then you gotta stay there for like five months.
Bolaños: Yeah, but then I just messaged George, and he just got me in right away, and just like, now I’m doing it. So I didn’t need to go pay a crazy tuition, and then I just get to hang out with some cool people and make instruments.
Gress: He hasn’t seen my bill yet.
Galgano: Bryan, like thought he had to earn his place here first. And he’s like, ‘I can clean up, and I can do this, and I can do that.’ And George and I were like, ‘What are you talking about? Just pick some wood and get going!’
Yeah, I’m Joseph Galgano. I moved to Juneau in 2018, and I make guitars and bass guitars under the name Intrepid Guitars. When I was in college, I always wanted, like, a custom guitar, but it just felt really unattainable. And like custom guitars are like, if you go to Fender Custom, it’s like $3,000 to $4,000. And I was just like, ‘why don’t I just try to make my own guitar?’ And then, that’s how it started. And I was, I was doing it, but being under George’s mentorship really, really expedited the process, and now I have a shop in my garage, and I’m almost, almost self-sufficient. Almost.
Bolaños: Being a musician, you know, ourselves, like we know how we want it to sound and how it, how we want it to feel.
Galgano: That’s probably been my favorite part, seeing the guitar put together and hearing how it sounds, because each one sounds different. You know, you put the work into it, so kind of have a connection to it.
Bryan, we cut his, it was just a block of wood, and we cut it into his guitar shape. And I saw Bryan, like, getting excited. He’s like, ‘Oh my God, it’s an actual guitar.’ And I was like, so this is how George feels. I was like, I was like, I could see why he likes it so much.
Gress: Yeah. Yeah.