Welcome to Hoytbasses.com

The Epic Tale:

Note to insomniacs: please continue to read on: you’ll be cured!

In 1952 I was born : very shortly thereafter I discovered music. Though I played trumpet in the high school band, I always gravitated to the bass and guitar……. I can’t imagine my life without these 3 instruments in them.

In 1978, I built my first guitar: It had a spruce top and sapele mahogany body: I thicknessed the back, sides and top with hand planes, scrapers, and sandpaper. The guitar weighed 156 pounds but it played pretty well!

In 1979, I was received my first commission: a walnut and maple neck through bass . I showed it to Mike Pedulla (I used to hang around his shop under the pretenses of buying fingerboards or whatever and pick his brains!) and he gave me a b+ for my first effort at bass building. The ONLY problem was that I installed the truss rod backwards, so adjusting the neck made it worse….. live and learn. I gave the owner his 50 bucks deposit back……..I put those dimarzio J pickups into my second bass and played that for a LONG time……

Fast –forward to 2008 :

I’ve been married to the love of my life for 32 years, have three kids and 2.33 grandkids (#3 will be here in May of 08).

Since 1984 I’ve been playing with the cape cod institution, Night Train. It was here that I would get the chance to try out my bass building ideas in real-time-gig-situations. (I’m the strikingly handsome flugelhorn player). Also in the pic is the Web King himself, Bob Gollihur, who had come to visit me that week and sat in with the boys. He’s playing my passive Bart MMK equipped workhorse bass that I built around 1993 or so

I was a psychotherapist for 23 years. I worked with the toughest kids and families in residential, outpatient, and public school settings. It was a lot of stress. To (sort of) deal with the stress I built stringed instruments: Acoustic guitars and basses, Electric basses and guitars, electric upright basses. I gave away a lot of stuff, sold some stuff to cover the cost of my next project, and finally, in the late 90’s I sold a few instruments for actual profit. I even had a web page that was more cheesy than this one, yet somehow, people dared trust me to build their dream instrument!

Then, in 2000, I was blessed to be able to land a job teaching woodworking and GUITAR BUILDING to high school kids here on the Cape. Talk about a dream gig! Each year we build about 30 acoustic guitars, 30 electric guitars and basses and a few weird things like an electric cello, electric violins, and electric upright bass for the Jazz band.

Teaching, however, takes a LOT of energy, so a few years ago I stopped building instruments on commission. A few friends have managed to twist my arm to build something for them but my luthiery is strictly a hobby at this juncture. That makes building even more fun, since I’m under no pressure to produce anything at all, the stuff I choose to build can be as weird or as elaborate as I want it to be. I’m finishing a Brazilian rosewood acoustic guitar** that is completely asymmetrical in shape. It will be my “couch guitar’. No forms, No jigs: I just started bending the sides till they ‘looked right’. My latest challenge has been to build some Archtop Jazz guitars. They’re a lot of persnickety carving and measuring, but I find it very relaxing. I continue to play some music here and there and, of course, to teach.

With any luck, I’ll be retiring from teaching in a few years. At that point, I hope to jump back in to the world of luthiery. It was said that Stradivarius’ “golden years” of violin building were his 60’s and that’s my goal as well. ( That and to stay on THIS side of the ground long enough to catch a few more keeper striped bass, see all my grandchildren graduate from high school and see the Patriots win their 10^th super bowl!)

THANK YOU SO KINDLY FOR VISITING: If you’d like to e-mail me you can do so : karl (at) Hoytbasses (dot) com.

Karl Hoyt; Cape Cod, Ma.

** A board of Brazilian rosewood was brought in by one of my students a couple of years ago. It had been in the back of her dad’s garage for 25 years, so we built a couple instruments out of it. I would NEVER knowingly contribute to the raping of the rain forest to build a guitar from newly harvested rain forest wood. In fact, in our guitar building class, we’ve switched to domestic hardwoods for our guitars. Personally, I love the sound of a cherry or walnut guitar, and I can get the wood in my own back yard of New England.