Instruments are personal.
Some musicians spend years trying to find a reliable guitar best suited for their needs, playing style and personal tastes. There's a myriad of factors to consider: intonation, body shape, neck size, cost, string action, visual aesthetics, the instrument's material, and much, much more. Some find the right one early. Some may never stop searching — every avenue coming to a dead end.
But guitarists in Spokane who cannot find what they're looking for know to reach out to Pat Foster.
In the mid-1970s, Foster was playing in a band with some of his friends in the hills of Napa Valley. Eventually, all instruments need repair.
"It was an isolated area," Foster, now 75, says. "We were in the boonies, there was nobody to do repair work on instruments. We had to drive, at minimum, an hour to get anything done. Especially on the old, clunky instruments that we were playing."
Foster decided that learning how to repair them himself would be the cheapest option for a group of young kids just scraping by. He started repairing his own stringed instruments, others' instruments and built a few banjos, tucking away the extra money to pay for college.
After college, Foster got a job working in Silicon Valley in the 1980s but left in the early '90s after discovering the lifestyle wasn't for him. That's when Foster met his wife and the couple moved to Spokane.
In 2005, Foster made his first guitar using the knowledge he'd gained from splitting open guitars and repairing them all those years ago.
"It was quite the success," he says. "I'm real pleased with how it turned out, even now. A couple people played it, thought it was great and asked me to build guitars for them. It was like a snowball, going downhill. Everything just cascaded from there."
The first guitar and the subsequent guitars made for friends were all steel-string acoustic guitars, but about 10 years later the tinkerer inside Foster started to make itself known. He started to become interested in classical style guitars.
Unlike your typical acoustic guitar, classical guitars have strings made of nylon rather than steel and have wider fretboards due to the traditional playing techniques of classical guitarists.
"I made one classical guitar just because I wanted to know how they worked. I had no intention of making anymore, and I wasn't even attempting to sell them," he says. "But the demand was there. That first classical guitar I built opened a whole new world of music for me."
Local guitar instructor Michael Millham was among the bunch wanting to get his hands on a Foster guitar.
"I got to know some guys from the Fall Folk Festival who had Foster guitars," Millham says. "One of them was John Paul Shields, the first guy to get a Foster guitar. And then Abe Kenney did and they were both just fantastic guitars."
Eventually, Millham ended up with a classical guitar fit to his ideal specifications. Millham, who has played guitar for over 40 years and has taught at various universities for nearly 25 years, says the Foster guitar is his live performance go-to. "I've probably made about 20 classical guitars," Foster says. "And Michael has probably played nearly every single one of them. He's always chomping at the bit to see how my next project works out."
In a 2022 blog post on his website, Foster said, "When it's done, the guitar goes out into the world on its own journey to make music."
On March 16, local music connoisseurs can be part of those journeys as a host of Foster's handmade classical guitars will be on full display at Hamilton Studio as part of a concert celebrating the luthier's stringed creations.
The three aforementioned classical guitarists — Millham, Shields and Kenney — are set to perform solo and trio works that showcase the sonic diversity and mastery of Foster's guitars with Foster sitting in the audience.
Foster, who was born with a degenerative bone disease and now uses a wheelchair, has had to stop making guitars. Millham says the show has been talked about since about 2021, but the three guitarists never felt the timing was right until now.
During the 20 years Foster made guitars, he focused on the Torres style of classical guitars rather than the Hauser style. Torres-style guitars typically have a thinner soundboard (the body of the guitar) than the Hauser style, making them lighter and giving them a unique sound and resonance. Every guitar is unique and handmade, only the luthier himself or a guitarist with a highly trained ear could pinpoint the exact qualities that separate them, but Millham says they're distinct.
"All three of us have a Torres-style Foster," says Millham of the guitarists in the showcase. "It's remarkable how consistent they are. They're small, interesting, fun and easy to play. All the things you want."
The trio of guitarists have all played some high-end guitars in their time, but Millham says each time they would perform in a group setting when Foster was still an active luthier, Foster would get another order from someone who was in attendance. Millham mentions the resonance and tone of Foster's guitars is sought after, often perking up the ears of listeners.
Millham says the selections the trio plans on playing will showcase just how well the guitars can work together, but also shine on their own.
"The musicians in the show are all well known around here so people have already heard these guitars," Millham says. "But this is a special opportunity to hear these instruments in a wonderful space and hear the musicians talk about them all while the man who made them sits in the audience." ♦
Foster's Guitars: A Night of Classical Guitar • Sun, March 16 at 6 pm • $30 • All ages • Hamilton Studio • 1427 W. Dean Ave. • hamilton.live
