Official Luthiers Forum!

I'm making the label for a new build I just finished.
My wife is an oil painter, and she tells me "Never put a date on your art".
Do you guys put a date on your inside label, and if so, why?
Lucky me, that's the only criticism she has of it

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Measure Twice,

Karl Borum

I do (year only), but it goes on before closing the box so it may not be accurate by the time everything else is finished.

I'd also like to hear how people do serial numbers. I have a universal counter that increments for every instrument regardless of type, so for example #7 is my first harp guitar.

I use 2 digit year followed by 2 digit guitar number so I can tell about when it was built. I don’t think it really matters.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I write the date I brace the top on the inside of the guitar. Usually they completed shortly after…

As for serials, I just go in order, but just for fun whenever I want to try something different, I’ll reach ahead to the end of the order list and use the next number, so 404 got built for example several years before 403…

This has nothing to do with the date, but several years ago I took my first guitar I built to a respected Guitar retailer and asked if he would put it on consignment. He looked it over and played it, for a good while, then looked inside at the label, rather deliberately, and announced "Serial number 1". " Its a nice guitar- I'll put it on the wall, but nobody's gonna buy serial number 1 from someone they've never hear of. But yeah, and you can come and get it in three years...." He told me that while I was building guitars, I also needed to build a brand if I was ever going to sell one. I learned a great deal that day.

My wife says that people are reluctant to buy oil paintings that are not recently completed, that's what prompted the question. Her circle of artists never put a date on their work.

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Measure Twice,

Karl Borum

I did I dated them all and the date was the completion date. Some of my completion dates were estimates since I installed my label before I glued the back on the rim. I would cover my label with clear plastic blue taped over the label to protect it and then pull the clear plastic when I finished the finishing process of the instrument. Some instruments can get set aside and may take a while to finish so I always used the completion date.

Why? Because I want to track my progress. I would not want to be building guitars for 20 years and have a prospective client judge me on number 2..... The expectation is that over time we get better and better and better....

So I appreciate the artist's point of view and the respect for capturing the moment and the emotions of the moment. That's cool. But to me unlike some here who stress more over a rosette than a proper neck angle.... to me a guitar has been and always will be in addition to art a tool for a musician and that my friend is something that benefits from the more experience we gain and the more our chops improve over time.

I put a year on mine. Put the label in through the sound hole right before it gets strings.

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Say what you do, Do what you say.

I sign and date the top before closing the box - the label has a number which can be looked up on a spreadsheet. Here you can find all of the instrument details such as where the top came from, its species, plus final thickness and deflection numbers.

M

Yup, can be an unexpected issue. Since I fuss over everything guitar, my last build session was a set of triplets and I closed up the boxes a few years earlier (like almost 5), of course thinking I'd finish them up much earlier.

I decided from now on to glue in labels with easy access to the back and leave the date area blank and use a rubber date stamp I can apply thru the sound hole when I finish the build.

Kind of hard to sell a new guitar with a 5 year old date in it.

Fortunately, my customers typically wait so long anyway, they don't care about the date very much as long as they get something to play while I'm still building.

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Brian R, Wood Mechanic
N8ZED

Frank Ford advised against putting in dates. He said that folks tended to thing of them as 'freshness dates', and were reluctant to buy something more than a year old. If it's been on the wall that long there has to be something wrong with it...

I still sign the inside of the top with a serial number and box closing date, and sign and number the label with the year. It might reduce the value now, but in fifty years, who knows?