Michael Millard
Michael began hanging around boatyards and wooden boats in New England as a young boy, actually getting work there when he was 12. Lessons in woodworking and craftsmanship came lovingly and patiently from a group of men who were a dying breed, most of them very old. For about ten years he was immersed in that environment and soaked up all he could from those people.
A co-worker brought a turntable into a boatyard shop in May, 1961. Michael was about to turn 14. Instead of the usual rock’n’roll that day, he was treated to Reverend Gary Davis, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell, and Blind Blake. It was the blues, and the Big Light Bulb went on!
A few years later Michael started visiting Reverend Davis for guitar lessons and the music and the woodworking began to merge. The uniqueness of the men he worked with, their methodology, & the blues they were surrounded by, all encompassed in the decade of “the sixties”, created the context of guitarmaking for Michael.
In spring of 1970, Michael Millard found himself at a crossroads. He was living in Buffalo, NY, when the graduate program he’d been enrolled in was discontinued. As he considered his options for the immediate future, a friend suggested that he pursue his oft-stated interest in building a guitar. A visit to Michael Gurian’s workshop led to a job offer with Gurian Guitars, along with a promised move to New Hampshire. In October of 1970, Michael began his work for the Gurian company and in that same year he built the first Froggy Bottom in the kitchen of his apartment on New York’s lower east side.
Froggy number one was commissioned by a professional player and was a modification of a Gurian JM, built of Mahogany and German Spruce. In 1973, he made the move to New Hampshire along with Gurian Guitars, and in March of 1974 he left Gurian and began building Froggys full time.
Over the next fifteen years, Michael built guitars one at a time, for customers who were almost exclusively working musicians. Orders came through word of mouth as well as through personal contact with players, as Michael was spending half of his time as a working musician as well. He quickly came to value the personal interaction with these varied players around their needs and desires in guitars. It was particularly useful when he found players who would take each guitar for what it did best, and play to its strengths. This process helped Michael to identify specific characteristics in guitar voicing and to associate them with design features.
He adapted methodology from Gurian Guitars, which grew from traditional classical guitar construction, to develop a system of construction that was almost completely free from constraining jigs and fixtures. This allowed him to be completely responsive, from a design perspective, to what his friends and customers were asking for in their guitars. Through careful listening, and trial and error, Millard found that he could identify ways to vary his designs in ways that were useful to building the guitars that lurked in his customers’ imaginations.
You can learn more about Michael and Froggy Bottom Guitars by visiting his website.