With his death comes the loss of one of the most innovative and sought-after classical guitar designers in recent decades. To many, Humphrey’s renowed creation, the Millennium guitar, represented the most significant technical and philosophical advancement in classical guitars since the work of Antonio Torres in the mid-19th century. The Millennium’s sloping soundboard, elevated fingerboard, and Humphrey’s experiments with interlocking transverse top bracing, resulted in a large, rich, resonant sound that was unlike any classical guitar before it. Devotees of the Millennium came to include such notable performers as Sharon Isbin, Eliot Fisk, Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Richard Cobo, David Tannebaum, and Sergio and Odair Assad.
Humphrey was born in St. Joseph Township, Minn., and began his musical life as a cellist, but was quickly drawn to guitars and guitar making when he moved to New York City in 1970 at the age of 22. The city was the home of many famous guitar makers at the time, and Humphrey got his start in the shop of luthier Michael Gurian, where he apprenticed for a year. Humphrey loved the guitar, but at the same time was consumed with the classical guitar’s persistent shortcomings: its quiet voice and lack of sustain.
“Great guitars,” he said, “are conceived and constructed exclusively for the purpose of playing music. Yet to date, no existing classical guitar has fulfilled all the musical requirements: dynamic range, sustain, voice balance and clarity, articulation, voice separation, volume and projection, color, and quality of sound. These elements are all part of the music being written for classical guitar.”
To Humphrey, the guitar hadn’t gone through the kind of developmental evolution common to other instruments: “For performing up to its potential, on a scale of one to ten, I’d put the guitar at minus four when you compare it to other orchestral instruments. Those instruments are far closer to producing the full potential of their volume or power capabilities… The guitar must become more powerful for it to truly enter the mainstream of instrumental performance.”
Humphrey set up shop in the cramped confines of a small bedroom in his NYC apartment, doggedly building guitars as well as pondering them, his thinking a blend of science, philosophy, and art. Of this time, a long-time friend of his wrote, “He worked day and night, tirelessly unlocking the secrets to producing instruments with a sound he heard clearly in his head, but not yet in classical guitar.”
Funny, personable, and deeply talented, Humphrey’s West 72nd Street apartment came to be known as Grand Central Station, hosting a constant stream of friends and musicians where “there were more fabulous spur-of-the-moment classical guitar performances… than in the concert halls of New York City.” “Several times,” remembered another long-time Humphrey acquaintance, New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn, “I conducted interviews with guitarists at Tom’s apartment on West 72nd Street, because that was where they were staying. (And Tom’s parties were epic.)”
Humphrey flirted with some highly unusual and imaginative ideas for improving the classical guitar’s power and sustain. In the mid-eighties, he considered a plan for building a guitar with multiple spring-action finger levers for sustaining or dampening the instrument’s sound, much like the pedals on a piano. He talked about the possibilities of building a small amplifier into the guitar body. But he eventually abandoned these notions. Achieving the results he desired, he knew, should and could be realized through altering fundamental design elements of the guitar. “I’ve come to believe in two premises,” he said. “First, that the body of the guitar contains perhaps two-thirds more sound than we are getting. Second, that to effect even the slightest change sonically we must make major alterations in the guitar’s architecture… I believe the sound is in there and we’re going to get it out: it’s just a matter of unlocking the mysteries that will bring the sound out of the box.”
Like the famous tale of the chemist Kekulé apprehending the structure of the benzene molecule in a reverie, Humphrey’s design for the Millennium guitar came to him in a dream: the elevated fingerboard, the sloping soundboard, changes to the internal bracing. He built his first Millennium in 1985. The modified fingerboard gave players easier access to the higher reaches of the instrument. The Millennium’s unique bracing, and a soundboard modeled on the soundboard of a harp, increased the instrument’s power, fullness, and projection.
Said Humphrey: “A general misconception is that the sound comes out of the soundhole. Some of it does, of course, but it comes mostly through the soundboard. The immense sound of a violin, for example, isn’t coming out of those little f-holes. Or, in the case of the harp, the soundholes are in the back! The soundhole might better be called an ‘air vent’: it lets air into the body. The guitar’s sound reflects off the denser, hardwood back and sides and travels out through the soundboard… By sloping the soundboard and using a high neck angle on the Millennium, an entirely different load is created on the soundboard, producing greater power.”
As a luthier, Humphrey was already widely known and well respected, but the Millennium guitar made him an international household name – at least in the households of guitarists. Young performers were the Millennium’s earliest adopters: David Starobin, as well as the Assads, Fisk, and Isbin, among others.
Word spread, interest built rapidly, and orders multiplied. Humphrey stopped making any more guitars in the original style. At a pace of about 20 guitars a year, the waiting list for a Millennium grew to three or more years, which only seemed to make the instrument even more desirable. In 1989, Humphrey’s wife, Martha Costa, joined him full time in his studio to help deal with the demand.
When C.F. Martin approached Humphrey about licensing the Millennium design, friends tried to talk him out of it, fearing he would lose clientele. But Humphrey saw the licensing deal as a personal challenge: motivation for him to invent something new and better – the next generation of advances in an instrument that’s development he considered far behind its orchestral counterparts. “We will figure out how to make [the guitar] project the sound to its fullest potential. I mean, flutes can play concertos just fine, and so can most other instruments – except the guitar. Here you have this instrument that almost everyone plays to some extent – there’s two or three now in many households – yet we are lagging so far behind. If I didn’t believe that it could produce the sound, then I would probably just build conventional guitars.”
“C.F. Martin and Antonio Torres originated instruments that have been imitated by hordes of guitar makers,” he said, “but there have not been many like them in guitar-making history, even though there is a huge demand for creative innovation. I’m only in the early stages of developing my guitar as I picture it. I still have a lot of work to do and too many ideas.”
Sadly, that work and those ideas have come to a premature end, and the guitar world is deprived of who knows how many extraordinary instruments and incomparable sounds. One hopes that the luthiers of today and tomorrow will find inspiration in Thomas Humphrey, and continue pursuing the sounds of his dreams.
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Thom Palmer is a writer, designer, and very amateur musician. His most recent novel, Desire, was published last year.
