Dave Matthews and his custom made Taylor jumbo 12 string rocking a packed house in an amphitheater most likely owned by Verizon.

Jun (short for Junior) Reputana playing in his guitar shop located at the end of an unnamed dirt road on the edge of a tiny fishing village in southeast Asia. I asked Jun if he could build me a guitar like the one Dave Matthews plays. Jun had never heard of Dave Matthews, but he replied that if I brought him a pattern of half of the guitar body with the accompanying dimensions, he could build anything using only his hand tools and a lifetime of guitar making experience. The guitar would be made entirely from locally available materials; the only wood suitable for building guitars is that of the jackfruit tree. I agreed to give it a shot, so we began the process that would build the first guitar to be downloaded from the internet that I have ever heard of.

A jackfruit in the Dumaguete fruit market: Imagine playing one of these. Photo by Kristin Gilliss.

To make the pattern Jun would need, I found a nice photo of the guitar on the internet and used Adobe Illustrator to trace a pattern over the shape. Once the pattern was created I enlarged it to life size in Photoshop and printed it out on three sheets of ordinary 8.5 x 11 inch paper. It was then I realized how large this guitar really was going to be if this worked.

Jun took the paper cutout I had made from the downloaded guitar picture and used it to make a wooden pattern that would soon become the body of the developing guitar.

A prime jackfruit plank waiting to be made into a guitar in Jun's capable hands. The natural color of the wood is quite yellow, so a walnut colored stain was used to approximate the claro walnut wood that Dave Matthews' guitar is made from.

The handsaw that Jun uses to cut the planks that will form the resonating back and front of the guitar so crucial to the finished sound of the instrument.

More instrument wood waiting to for its chance to be on the world stage.

Roughly formed guitar necks await the tedious hand carving that will prepare them to be played for years to come.

It may take some imagination, but this is the back of my guitar at its earliest phase. The precisely cut planks of jackfruit wood are glued together and then the pattern is used to trace out the final curves of the guitar. Yes, at this point, I really knew this was going to be a large instrument.

Once the front and back of the guitar were cut out from the jackfruit planks, the braces that control the resonance and tone of the finished guitar are set in a precise "X" pattern. The small splints of wood keep steady pressure on the frame as it cures. Note the outline of the sound hole before it has been cut out of the wood. Jun uses an ordinary compass to trace the sound hole pattern.

The next time I stopped by to see the guitar, it was basically done. And by done I mean Jun had done it; I was amazed that he was able to take that simple paper pattern and turn it into something approximating the sound of a pipe organ with the beauty of a well made piece of furniture.

Jun had even painstakingly inlaid the entire edge of the guitar and the sound hole with black pearl.

Each little piece of black pearl that lines the edge of the 12 string was hand cut from indigenous shells and inlaid into the wood. Jun combed the tidal flat across the dirt road from his guitar workshop to find the shells.

After admiring the aesthetics, it was time to actually play the guitar.

...And that turned into a regular jam session in Jun's workshop.

Jun used to be in a band back in the day, so we asked him to perform for our Peace Corps group swearing in ceremony. He said he would only do it if his son and a few of us from our Peace Corps group would play with him. We agreed.

Jun played his latest 12 string masterpiece for the Peace Corps Group 263 swearing in ceremony performance. We played two songs; one of them a traditional song in tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, the other a Styx cover song called "Boat On The River" that most people thought Jun had written. I had never heard the song until I learned it from Jun, but it rocked the house. Photo by Daniel Bowman Simon.

The first time I got to play the 12 string on stage I was wearing a grass skirt from a traditional Visayan dance performance and we played one of the silliest songs I've ever written: The Dugong Song. I taught the band how to play it before the show, and they really made it work. The song had became an anthem during our training, so lots of people got up on stage for the first full band performance. The lyrics are simply "Dugong, Dugong, Dugong, Dugong" with lots of rhythm changes, but otherwise that's all there is to it. The acting ambassador from the U.S. Embassy in Manila was in attendance and was probably wondering what was happening onstage. Photo by Daniel Bowman Simon.

Since one performance of the Dugong Song is never enough, we encored with the band at the end of the night. In this photo we're playing the "Dirty Dugong Song" which is more of a standard blues progression (and has more varied lyrics). The house was really rocking at this point, but they didn't have a mike stand so this fellow in the Allen Iverson jersey kindly volunteered to hold the mike for me. I think he would have preferred if we had done some hip hop covers by Eminem or 50 Cent though, but he was a good sport. Photo by Daniel Bowman Simon.

Apparently word got out about the Dugong song performance at our swearing in ceremony because two nights later I found myself teaching another band how to play it and getting up on stage to play again at a club in Tagbilaran called Kilum Kilum. I missed my guitar, but it is always fun to be on stage playing in front of a crowd. Photo by Daniel Bowman Simon, by the way Daniel used to do concert photos for bands like David Bowie, Jane's Addiction, and oddly Britney Spears, so he made us all look like we knew what we were doing on stage.

Like I said, the song became an unofficial anthem that we all would sing. It really didn't work very well when it's just me singing "Dugong, Dugong, Dugong, Dugong", so luckily there were a few more mikes on stage. Photo by Daniel Bowman Simon.

Since the crowd seemed to enjoy the silly Dugong Song, we encored once again with the blues inspired Dirty Dugong Song, which the band had a lot of fun with I think. Photo by Daniel Bowman Simon.

Well, we didn't get booed off the stage, so I took a quick bow and went back to being a spectator in the crowd. Photo by Daniel Bowman Simon.

Oh, in case you were wondering what the difference between a 12 string guitar and a 6 string guitar is (aside from the obvious fact that it has more strings), the 12 string is tuned the same as the six string E-A-D-G-B-E (from left to right) but there are two strings for each note. On the four heaviest strings (E-A-D-G) the second string is of a lesser diameter so that the smaller string harmonizes at a different pitch to the larger string. The effect is that the guitar has a very full tone, almost a chorus effect.