By Unknown, circa 1979

Tucked away in the back alley, at the rear of 8405B – 118 Avenue is a rather special and unique shop. It is home for “D.A. CAMERON – Stringed Instrument Repair” owned and operated by Dale Cameron. There are, of course, a handful of instrument repair shops in the city [of Edmonton] but what makes this business unique is that Dale is a certified master craftsman of the prestigious C. F. Martin Guitar Company.

No other community in Canada can take pride in having such a craftsman, for he is the only Martin master craftsman in the country. In fact, there are only about 25 in the world.

Looking back on Dale’s 27 years it seems quite natural that he be in such a profession. An Edmontonian, he grew up in the Alberta Avenue-Eastwood area and went to Eastwood Public School. From a very early age Dale has always been involved in music. His parents encouraged him to learn piano and by the time he had completed education at Eastwood he had his grade 9 piano. He also had a love for carpentry and would help his father and grandfather, who as he says are pretty good “wood butchers.” It wasn’t until he had begun to attend Eastglen Composite High School that guitar entered his life. He became a very accomplished guitarist and played in coffee houses and back-up with other local musicians.

However, he could see the writing on the wall as he says, and decided that his first love was repair work. With his talent as a woodworker and being an excellent musician he soon found himself working at the House of Banjo. There, building himself a reputation as a fine craftsman, it wasn’t long before the C. F. Martin Company, widely considered as the world’s best guitar manufacturers, heard of his talents. Dale was hired by the Martin Company to establish a warrantee repair shop in Toronto in 1975. He worked at building up this centre to the point where it became necessary to employ two assistants.

By the summer of 1978, Dale and his wife decided that Toronto was not for them and moved back to their parents and friends here in Edmonton.

Although his tidy shop may be small, he has already gained quite a reputation with the musical instrument retail establishment. Quite a few of the department stores and music shops refer repair work to him. The repair work is not just limited to guitars, as any stringed instrument can be repaired. The cost for repairs can range anywhere from 25 to 600 dollars, depending upon the type and quality of the instrument.

He has done repairs for such people as Redd Volkert, Martin Simpson, Roy Acuff and for the rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer; and many others too numerous to mention.

Although not with the C. F. Martin Co. any longer, he is authorized to warrantee repair C. F. Martin guitars, west of Winnipeg.

His talents are not limited to the wood chisel, as he is past contributing editor to “Tempo” a music trade magazine and in the fall he will be writing a series of articles for “Canadian Musician”.

This young man has become one of Canada’s finest craftsmen in the art of guitar making. We wish him every success and are glad to have him as part of our community.

By BOB REMINGTON

Caption: Dale Cameron shapes the braces on a new Martin guitar

His grimy shop in a back alley of Edmonton’s Cromdale area hardly seems a fitting place for a certified master craftsman of the prestigious C.F. Martin guitar company.

But among the soiled white walls of his sawdust-covered shop, Dale Cameron is slowly building a reputation as one of Edmonton’s and possibly Canada’s finest stringed instrument repairmen.

C.F. Martin Co., widely considered to be the world’s finest guitar makers, heard of his ability while Dale was working locally for the House of Banjo about five years ago.

He was hired to set up Martin’s warranty repair outlet in Canada out of Toronto in 1975.

Six months ago, the native Edmontonian returned home to set up his own shop, hidden at the rear of 8405 B 118th Avenue.

The shop has become known to professional musicians and to retail shops that trust his work as a quality repairman.

The 27-year-old craftsman possesses the rare skills of the company founded in 1833 by German-born violin maker Christian Fredrick Martin.

Dale was carefully schooled by some of Martin’s most qualified craftsmen and realizes his training was the best he could receive.

“It was a phenomenal break. I couldn’t believe it,” said the soft-spoken repairman and part-time guitar maker.

Proudly displayed in his shop is the letter from Martin Co. president Frank Martin qualifying him as one of the firm’s few employees to achieve master craftsman status.

Although he left the company’s Toronto shop, he still handles Martin’s warranty work.

Dale’s first love is repair work, but he also builds guitars “for friends” lucky enough to know they will get an instrument built completely by one man.

“There is no such thing as an individual guitar maker for the major companies. When “C.F.” first started building he had a number of people under him to whom he delegated certain jobs and that’s how it continues today.

“If one person is especially good at fretting, that’s what he will do. There’s no sense in sending out a beautiful instrument with crooked frets. So it’s mainly assembly line work.”

Alberta’s dry climate causes many of the repair problems that come through his shop, and Dale advises stringed instrument owners to take precautions against dryness that can crack and damage the fine mahogany, rosewood and spruce used in most guitars today.

Dale is an accomplished guitar and dobro player, but can play any stringed instrument to the point of knowing how to correct a problem.

There are no other Martin master craftsmen in Canada that he knows of and he guesses there are about 25 in the world.

He has done repairs for Redd Volkert, Martin Simpson, Roy Acuff, and for the rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer and numerous other artists.

Dale plays a Martin D-41 and is interested in selling a. rare Martin D-76E – a special model made for the U.S. Bicentennial with the “E” designation referring to models made for Martin Co. employees.

By BARNABY PAGE

Journal Staff Writer

Edmonton Journal, circa June 1985

Caption: Instrument repairman Dale Cameron … works with acoustic and electric guitars

Nobody ever said music was a safe business; but the bullet holes in the country girl’s guitar were more than instrument repairman Dale Cameron had bargained for.

“She was missed, but the guitar was hit,” Cameron recalls of the music-hating husband’s deed. “I never knew the details.”

Indeed, farms and farmyards seem to spell nothing but trouble for musical instruments.

Aime Dery, an instrument craftsman who specializes in pianos and player pianos, observes that “people purchase player pianos in a granary, take the dead mice out of them, and refurbish them.”

Dery, and Cameron, whose experience includes the repair of medieval and Middle Eastern stringed instruments, are two of a hidden crowd of city instrument technicians dealing in the weird and the wonderful.

The more arcane aspects of their business take a back seat to standard repair work on the two tried-and-true favorites, piano and guitar. But the backroom business in obscure instruments is surprisingly extensive. <…>

A particular problem in Edmonton is the cracking of wood in the dry climate. <…> Cameron, who works with acoustic and electric guitars as well as more esoteric stringed instruments, says there are two types of instrument-owners.

“There are those that ignore them altogether, and those that are really particular about them.”

Those that ignore them tend also to be lax about insurance, he says, because insurance of an instrument usually needs a rider on the policy.

“People don’t think they need a rider. But if they’re using the thing professionally and it’s out of the house a lot they should. It’s probably a good idea if it’s an instrument over $800.”

The worst salvageable instrument Cameron has ever seen was a mandolin in Nazareth, Penn., where he studied at the workshops of Martin Guitar. It has been dropped overboard a lake boat, and “just gone to the bottom and been rescued.”

By DALE CAMERON

Special to the Journal

Edmonton Journal, Aug. 31, 1996

The one and only time I met Leo Fender was at a trade show in California in the mid ‘80s. He struck me as a teddy bear of a man in a grey, rather Stalinesque looking suit. It seemed Phyllis, his wife with the fresh blue rinse, had recognized that this occasion wouldn’t require the ever-present pocket protector resplendent with pens that appeared in most pictures I had seen of this mythical man. Nor would this event demand the flip up magnifying glass so often used to aid his vision; impaired by the loss of sight in one eye as a youth.

Who says a visionary has to see with 20/20? And like North America’s greatest architect of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright, who has little formal education in his chosen field, Leo Fender had no training in electronics or engineering. It probably pleased the man to know that some of the best players associated with his instruments likewise weren’t schooled players.

1996 marks the 50th anniversary of Fender Musical Instruments. From its inception, this manufacturer of guitars and amplifiers was on the vanguard of not only changing the context of how we perceive musical instruments but forever altering the underpinnings of popular music as well.

It was post-war America and time to catch up with life. The economy boomed with more than “a chicken in every pot” as Roosevelt had extolled. Orange groves around Fullerton, Calif., the first home of Fender Musical Instruments, were disappearing at an unprecedented rate to make way for more and more industrial parks. Disposable income was flowing as freely as a Cadillac’s tailfin. And perhaps it was no coincidence that Leo Fender’s favorite car was the venerable Caddie. The swooping lines and vaguely erotic curves that set the standards for auto styling in the 1950s could well have served as inspiration for Leo Fender’s most familiar design; the Stratocaster.

As fate would hold, something else was introduced at virtually the same moment and that was Rock ‘n’ Roll.

For Leo Fender, what had begun as a radio repair shop, fuelled by an interest in electronics and Hawaiian music, soon blossomed into a lifelong compulsion to improve the lot of musicians and the music they made. Extending his radio experience, he designed and built his amplifiers and guitars with the premise that if something was easy to repair, it would be easy to build. Not many could have foreseen in 1946 what a revolutionary concept this would prove to be to the guitar and to modern music.

Building an amplifier with the chassis at the top for easy access to the controls was radical; it meant the tubes hung downwards. This was at the time akin to swearing in church. Now it is an industry-wide standard.

A quick primer for those born after 1965: Electronic items like televisions, radios and musical instrument amplifiers prior to this time were built using something called vacuum tubes. They are devices that current is run through in order to perform a number of different tasks, like increasing volume and therefore amplifying a sound.

After the mid-’60s, many of these tasks were relegated to the new fangled transistor. Much voodoo is attached to the use of tubes in musical instrument amps because the tube adds a definite warmth of tonality. This is also the reason that music-related amplification is one of the few things to still largely rely on the vacuum tube. Here lies some of the basis of Leo Fender The Legend, as he laid the foundations for modern guitar amplifier design.

Fashioning a guitar body from a solid block of wood, attaching pickups made of magnets wound with wire and then fastening the neck with screws makes up the balance of the legend. These were concepts that had been explored before but Leo Fender, not unlike Henry Ford, was the first one to pull everything together in an elegantly simple unit that was easy to mass produce.

The Broadcaster electric guitar, soon to be renamed the Telecaster for trademark infringement reasons, was born. And how these odd new items sold!

As the youth of the western world passionately embraced their new invention called rock ‘n’ roll, they needed hip new tools to set this music apart from their parents’ stodgy looking big bands of the ‘30s and ‘40s. It was certainly no longer cool to have a clarinet stuck in your mouth when you could have a shiny, sonic, blue colored, atomic- inspired sculpture hanging suggestively on a single thin strap. The real beauty in all this was that not only was the fashion statement met, but these new instruments could be turned up loud. The louder the better!

With Leo Fender’s introduction of the first electric bass guitar called the Precision bass in late 1951, the die was cast for the basic combination of rock musicians to this day. That is, bass to provide the driving to the bottom end and assist rhythmically with the drums and guitar; and voice if required, to complete the whole package.

Many believe that the Precision bass is, in fact, Leo Fender’s greatest contribution. It solved many of the problems of the previous standup double bass. Nearly as small as a guitar for portability, it can be very loud when required and it is much easier to play. With the addition of frets the player didn’t have to worry about playing in tune, as on the fretless bass violin fingerboard. The Precision bass found the intervals for him.

Years passed by and innovations continued more or less unabated. The Jazzmaster and Jaguar guitars, the Jazz Bass, and a multitude of amp models. Then, suddenly citing ill health, Leo Fender and his partners sold the Fender Musical Instrument Co. to megacorp CBS in early 1965 for the sum of $13 million US. Ominous this point in Fender guitar history is referred to as Pre-CBS — not only marking the end of an era but the start of a slippery glissando into trouble for Fender Musical Instruments. Whether or not Leo Fender was very ill at the time is open to speculation. He was a man who ran from any kind of confrontation and perhaps couldn’t face his loyal staff with the fact that he was grabbing the brass ring and leaving them to an uncertain fate.

It is a continuing tribute to Leo Fender’s inventions and reputation for quality products that it took until about 1982 for this change over to eventually cause the company to hit rock bottom.

CBS, realizing the severity of the situation, finally hired a new manager that wrestled the company back into producing quality Fender products. Several years later CBS sold this instrument division to a consortium including that same manager who has now led the business to unparalleled success.

There has been some innovation since, but the groundwork still rests with Leo Fender and his proteges, George Fullerton, Forrest White, and Freddie Tavares who I believe was an essential cog in design work. Tavares was a native Hawaiian studio musician who became Leo Fender’s musical translator of sorts because as close as Leo Fender was to his musical instruments, he could neither tune nor play them.

Over many years of working as a guitar mechanic and as a guitar store owner, I have had much contact with Fender guitars and the people who use them. I heard Nokie Edwards, the great original guitar player from The Ventures, relate the story of his group using Fender gear on many of their hits even though they had a contract to endorse another brand and use it in public. This resulted in more than a few people buying the Moserite brand because of the perception that they sounded so good on recordings.

I also recall listening to the legendary James Burton reminiscing about the reliability of his Fender gear throughout a long career with Rick Nelson, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and many others. Mostly, though, I remember the look of a young man nervously opening up a Fender guitar case to reveal that the repair that I had done for him had returned the guitar to its original state. That look was a combination of overwhelming relief, happiness, and great pride of ownership because that vintage 1957 Stratocaster that he had been momentarily careless with had been left to him by his deceased father; a player of some renown.

These days, as the world pauses ever so briefly to mark even the most important of milestones, Fender’s 50th year may seem to be of little consequence. But think about it. How much poorer would we be without the countless musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Buddy Holly who made their own magic on these fine instruments and passed down that knowledge?

Thank you Leo Fender from everyone who has listened to music played through your wonderful inventions.

Edmonton’s Dale Cameron is an internationally known guitar repairman. He is currently writing a mystery novel using guitar culture as a theme.

◼ 1946: Leo Fender establishes the Fender Electric Instrument Company in Fullerton, Calif.

◼ 1949: Fender and George Fullerton assemble a prototype for the Fender Esquire and Fender Broadcaster electric guitars.

◼ 1951: The name Broadcaster is dropped for copyright reasons and the name Fender Telecaster is adopted.

◼ 1954: The Fender Stratocaster is introduced. It featured sleeker, curving lines, a sculpted back to conform to the player’s body, and three pickups as opposed to two on the Telecaster.

◼ 1965: Fender sells his company to CBS for $13 million US.

The Fender Stratocaster and the Fender Telecaster have been workhorses of rock and country guitarists for years.

Here’s a list of famous guitarists and the model they are associated with:

Stratocaster

• Eric Clapton
• Buddy Holly
• Jimi Hendrix
• Ry Cooder
• Stevie Ray Vaughan
• Richie Sambora
• Robert Cray

Telecaster

• Albert Lee
• Muddy Waters
• Buck Owens
• Albert Collins
• James Burton

Q: I own a twelve year old acoustic guitar that has a crack in the face from the rear of the bridge to the end block. I’d like to know if it can be repaired without altering the tone, and if so, how this should be done.

The crack in your instrument can be repaired, but I wouldn’t recommend that you attempt the repair work yourself. The trick with it is that every crack is different—only someone with a good deal of experience will be able to decide which method of repair is best in your case.

The method of repair will vary with the age of the crack itself. New hairline cracks are easier to repair than distinct separations, which are caused when the wood surrounding the crack is allowed to shrink over a period of time. The lower the humidity of course, the faster the wood will shrink.

These open, separated cracks must be repaired with a matching splint, glued into place. The hairline crack need only have glue run into it. First the crack is forced open, either with special jacks or by hand, if you can get your arm inside the guitar. Water is run into the crack so that the glue will be easier to work in, and then the glue is worked with the fingers. The excess glue is wiped off, and the crack is closed with special clamps.

If done properly, both of these procedures should leave the tonal quality of the instrument unharmed. I should also mention that until you have the guitar repaired, you should try and avoid running your fingers over the damaged area, since dirt and oil rubbed into the crack will have a bearing not only on the repair job itself, but also on how good the touch-up will appear.

— Dale Cameron, April 1977

By Alan Kellogg

Edmonton Journal, Sept. 1, 1994

As cynical as you can get about the music business, there remains a small, quiet, insistent voice way back there. Some of us still hear it.

If you’re genuinely talented, work hard and keep your nose clean, you’ll get your shot.

No one is suggesting the process will be easy or the rewards will be commensurate with the work and gift involved, but someone will listen, some day.

Take the case of Redd Volkaert.

Working out of Edmonton for years, plying his trade in the relative Canadian music industry hinterland, Redd (it doesn’t seem natural to call the man by his last name) finds himself a bona-fide Nashville session guitarist.

Redd’s a modest cuss, and he’ll be the first to tell you every new floor exposes another ceiling. He certainly hasn’t yet cracked the creamy upper reaches of the Music City Rolodex, the handful of players who get the top album work, day in and day out.

But after only a few years in Nashville, arriving as a total unknown, he’s managed to get off the grind of road work and enter the arcane circle of those who get it right the first time in the recording studio: the ones who get the phone calls. It’s a deal that allows Redd to enjoy his marriage and home in leafy Smyrna, Tenn., and concentrate on honing his craft. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” he says. He means it.

“Luck?” Dale Cameron of Cameron Guitars, a crusty, unsentimental observer of contemporary axemanship, says you don’t find many like Redd.

“He’s certainly the best country player to have ever come out of this town. He’s a real musician, it’s not contrived, it flows out of him.”

Born and raised in Vancouver, Redd got his first hand-me-down Harmony guitar at age 10 and took exactly two formal lessons. Son of a weekend R&B player, Redd landed his first gig at the age of 13 at the scenic KitKat club on East Hastings. By the time he left for Edmonton six years later, he’d already played every country dive and Legion hall in the Lower Mainland. Weddings, parties, ritual circumcisions, you name it.

Never one to complain, Redd can still let out a deep chuckle or two remembering his days studying at country music grade school…