B.C. guitar maker uses local wood to build custom guitars

Trevor Woodland had a practical reason for taking up the bass guitar as a middle school student on Vancouver Island.

"Basically, they needed someone to play bass guitar, and I was the only one big enough to reach the first few frets, because it's a large instrument," he said.

Inevitably, something on the bass would break.

Growing up inthe small hamlet of Black Creek, B.C., he didn't want to have his momdrive him to the nearbytowns of Courtenay and Campbell River to get it fixed, so he tookmatters into his own hands.

"You generally make it worse the first attempt," he said of his early efforts at repair. "But you fix that problem and you try it again. You fix the subsequent problems that kind of come up and you basically get really intimate with your instrument and you start figuring it out."

Years of tinkering haveled Woodland to openVictoria'sVigilant Guitars, which specializes in building custom-made guitars usingethically-sourced materials. Where possible, he tries to uselocal materials.

"We've got a lot of those woods that aren't traditionally used in guitars but can be heavily featured, so just even using some of the surrounding environment in that sense can just set you apart," he said.

Woodland is also aco-organizerof the Victoria Guitar Show, a free event taking place Saturday at the Victoria Conference Centrefrom 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT.

He says he looks forwardto meeting up with fellow luthiers to talk shop, a welcome respite from what can be a solitary vocation.

"I'm sitting in this room some days and you don't really look outside too much because you got your head down on the bench," he said.

Woodland says he considers himselfa craftsman focused on the science and engineering of guitar-making, but he can't help but occasionally wax poetic about the instrument's enduring appeal.

"Sometimes it's an artifact of all the stories that have been played through it, every song, every bar that it's been played in,every stagethat it's been strummed on," he said."It has those stories imbued with it and that sometimes just makes for a much cooler instrument."

Woodland says his guitars are built to last and he hopes they'll behanded down from one generation to the next.

"It's pretty neat to think that some of the guitars I'm making right now,or maybe in the next couple of years, they'll have a good lifebut they might become an integral part ofsomeone's life that I'll never meet because they're 100 years in the future."