Pictou County man builds acoustic guitars

LIMEROCK, N.S. — He can make them, he just doesn’t play them very much.
“I thought it’d be really neat to learn to play guitar,” Rick Whitaker says of his first real interaction with the stringed instrument.
“It turned out that I don’t have a huge amount of musical talent.”
They knew someone in Nova Scotia who made guitars, however.
“Cherry (Whitaker, his wife) got one built for me and I thought, “you know what, I can do that’. This is back in 1971. So, I built one (and) it wasn’t great, but it was playable.”
He shipped one of his guitars to a buyer in Calgary on Sept. 2, “and I’ve got another one that’s going in the next couple of days to Langley, British Columbia.”
On this early September day, there are nine of his acoustic guitars hanging in small room at their house in Limerock, among them three nylon-stringed classical guitars, a 12-string acoustic and some instruments with cutaways, which allow a player much easier access to the higher frets on the fingerboard.
Some of his guitars are made of exotic wood shipped from other parts of the world – South America, Mexico, east Indian rosewood – and Whitaker estimates that it takes between 100 and 120 man-hours to build a guitar (the one currently under construction is “number 79,” he says.)
“I do a lot of it with hand tools. Obviously, I have a bunch of power tools, too, but a lot of it’s done with hand tools.
“It’s not difficult to build a guitar (but) it is difficult to build a good guitar consistently,” he adds. “That’s more difficult. And part of the learning process is to figure out how to overcome any errors that you may have made along the way.”
He’s had renowned Canadian folk musician Valdy in his living room on a couple of occasions.
“He’s been here more than once,” Whitaker says.
“A friend of mine, Dave Gunn, knows him and brought (Valdy) and somebody else in one day and they sat down and played, probably for two hours. Played, talked, sang, played some more. I don’t like to drop names, but (east coast multi-instrumentalist) J.P. Cormier has also been here.”
So, did Whitaker make a sale?
“Did Valdy buy one? No. Did J.P. buy one? No,” he says with a smile.
“Do I wish they would? Yeah, kind of.”
Whitaker spent about a decade making and repairing acoustic guitars at his shop, while his wife worked as a school teacher (they are both known for their many years of working with the New Glasgow Karate Club).
After they started adopting children (they have three), he went to work out in the real world, but still kept up with his hobby.
“There’s no pressure now. I do it for fun and if I happen to sell one or two along the way, that’s great.”