Good Day GUITAR EUREKA Detectives!
You are given 10 clues to the identity of this mystery PERSON. See how many clues you require to solve the case...have fun!
1. I was born on January 9, 1886 in Cropsey, Illinois.
2. I entered the Oberlin Conservatory (Ohio) in 1904 to study harmony, orchestration, canon, counterpoint, fugue, music theory, and piano.
3. In 1906, I met a female singer named (Sally) Fisher Shipp (1878-1954), the leader of the well known Fisher Shipp Concert Company and I was invited to join her ensemble. We performed on numerous concert tours, occasionally billing themselves as the "Gibsonians" We later married on May 21, 1916 but divorced 8 years later.
4. 1911 marks the time that I had an official relationship with the Gibson company as a performing artist, a participant in many Gibson travelling "Gibsonians" bands, an advisor, and a music composer. By 1913, Gibson was making some of my musical scores available as printed sheet music. By 1914, I was engaged as concert master for Gibson's various ensembles, writing and arranging much of the music they performed.
5. In 1918 I got a job at Gibson as acoustical engineer and also became responsible for various business management functions. During my employment at Gibson, I wore many hats; aside from acoustical engineer, I was credit manager, factory production manager, purchasing agent, and repair manager.
6. I consciously invoked the violin connection when I named the Style 5’s amber-to-brown sunburst finish “Cremona brown,” a reference to the Italian city where Antonio Stradivari had made the world’s finest violins.
7. In 1924 I left Gibson to pursue other interests, in 1925 I became Professor of Acoustics in the Music School at Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois where I met my second wife Bertha Snyder.
8. On November 1, 1933, I and close friend Lewis Williams, and five other local businessmen founded the ViviTone Company in Kalamazoo for the purpose of "manufacture and sale of wholesale and retail musical instruments, acoustic and electric products, including research, consulting services and financing such business." Our ViviTone electric guitars were unusual and innovative. Some had f-holes in the top and back, some had no f-holes, and some had no back (they might be viewed as the first solid-body electrics, although “bodyless” would be a more accurate descriptor).
9. My contributions to Gibson include the design and development of the "Master Model" instruments: the H-5 "Master Model" mandola, F-5 "Master Model" mandolin, K-5 "Master Model" mando-cello, L-5 "Master Model" guitar, and style 5 "Master Tone" (later to become "Mastertone") banjos
10. One of my insturments was made famous by the founder of bluegrass, Bill Monroe. Monroe used a Gibson F5 model serial number 73987[4] signed by me on July 9th, 1923 for most of his career. This mandolin can be viewed in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee, where it now resides in their collections.
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Other Trivia/Hints
In 1921, I worked with the factory to construct a unique instrument that united the qualities of the mandolin and viola: a "mando-viola" boasting 5 courses (two strings each) tuned Eb, C, F, Bb, and Eb (treble to bass).
In 1924, I developed an electric pickup for the viola and the string bass. In my pickup design, the strings passed vibrations through the bridge to the magnet and coil, which registered those vibrations and passed the electric signal on to an amplifier.
My contributions to Gibson include building the instrument top with F-shaped holes, like a violin; introducing a longer neck, thus moving the bridge closer to the center of the body; and floating the fingerboard over the top, a change from prior Gibson instruments that had fingerboards fused to the top. He also pioneered the use of the Virzi Tone Producer, a spruce disc suspended from the instrument top that acts as a supplemental soundboard.
I installed the Virzi Tone Producer, a sort of inner baffle that had a mellowing effect on tone, in many Gibson mandolins.
My combination of f-holes, tone bars, and a 14-fret neck effected a fundamental change in the characteristic sound of a Gibson guitar, from bright and “woody” to dark and “woofy.” I further shaped the tone by adjusting the size of the soundholes and the thickness of the top and tone bars—in essence, I hand-tuned each
L-5. And then I signed and dated the label.
I also made electric pianos using tunable metal reeds and a direct pickup design (reed-driven rather than string-driven), in the mid 1930's.
As of January 2010, mandolins signed by me in fine condition are valued in the $175,000 to $200,000 range, and are highly sought after by musicians and collectors. The average value reached a 2008 peak of around $225,000, then backed off somewhat from 2008 to 2010.
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