It is not too often that you get a serious unexpected jolt to your world view that by turns astounds, humbles and exhilarates you. In May 2013 I was walking through my first Makerfaire in San Mateo, California, an hour south of San Francisco, getting a sore neck from constantly looking around this way and that at ever more amazing expressions of human ingenuity that swirled past me. I had started out that morning feeling pretty cocky, that I was a Maker and would fit right in here, having created something like the Ridgewing guitar that astounded and amazed. But as I walked along the realization grew on me that what I had accomplished was pretty tame compared to the wonders around me. 

And then at one point I looked to the right, and stopped dead in my tracks. There, leaning up against a simple black-draped table was a phantasmagoria of musical creations the likes of which I had never seen before, and I felt a can opener starting to work its way around my head. The gentleman with the Cheshire cat smile behind the table was their Maker, Ken Butler of Brooklyn, New York. The instruments, which is really too humble a name to call them, ranged from one string to twelve strings, and they could all be played.

I knew that the guitar had been somehow deeply embedded in the collective human subconscious, but here for the first time I saw it disemboweled and laid bare.  The guitar genie had slipped into the back of some interstellar, extra-dimensional thrift store, tried everything on, gone up and down all the used-hardware aisles, and emerged here to show off its favorite new outfits. This man, Ken Butler, had found the rabbit hole, and to my eyes he now held the door open.

If you decide to jump in and go to Ken’s website, you find that exotic musical instruments are a just a point of departure into… I don’t know words that fit.

As I explored Ken’s website, I found another trap door that led down to a network of other sonic dream-chasers. On the “about” page is a list of links to others similarly seized by alternative musical visions and sculpture. There it hit me – Family!