September on the East End: Long days, cool nights, uncrowded beaches and, most of all, the light. Clear, glistening, water-refracted light that tumbles ocean into sky. It’s inspired painters and romanced writers. And now, the days are emptied of their humidity, which allows a guitar maker the precious moments of warm, dry air needed to mill the rare woods he’s been carefully curing for decades before moisture can seep into the cut.
Owlish, affable and by turns philosophical, 53-year-old construction carpenter Carlos Barrios lives with his wife and children in a home with a wide, welcoming porch off Three Mile Harbor Road. In his basement hides his audaciously self-made guitar workshop.
In 1985, when Carlos was 19, his father announced that he was packing up the family to flee the dangers of a Guatemala caught up in a civil war that had directly threatened them. “It was culture shock, seeing all those big roads,” Mr. Barrios recalled, on driving through freeway-laced Southern California for the first time.
He had left his engineering studies behind. In America, he discovered rock — Led Zeppelin and the “bluesy psychedelic music” of early Pink Floyd. From there, it was jazz, Charles Mingus and Percy Heath, whose strings now grace Mr. Barrios’s own bass guitar.
In the early 1990s, his family joined an aunt on the East End. His cousin, a pianist, played gigs in the city, and Mr. Barrios started accompanying him into Queens, where the band jammed out Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Chick Corea and Weather Report: “If that type of music doesn’t inspire you, you’re not a human.”
Watching his cousin’s band play, Mr. Barrios found himself drawn to the bass. He liked the idea of being in the background while carrying the responsibility of being the band’s pulse.
It was Jaco Pastorius, the innovative and ultimately tragic jazz bassist of Weather Report fame, who set Carlos Barrios on his life’s passion trajectory. “When I heard that fretless bass, I was captivated. I was, like, ‘Where can I get a bass like that?’ I didn’t find it, so I said, ‘I’m going to make it.’”
Chutzpah.
At the time, Carlos had a piece of Honduran mahogany given to him from a job site. He had been eying it to shape into furniture. After listening to Pastorius, he decided, “No, this wood is for instruments.”
Undaunted by the fact he’d never turned out a guitar before, Mr. Barrios decided to craft the warm-toned mahogany into his longed-for fretless bass. “I just started going for it, learning as I go, and that’s how everything evolved.”
Mr. Barrios worked on the guitar day after day during breaks from his job as a maintenance man at the Fish Farm on Cranberry Hole Road — a job with a work and learning environment he enjoyed but eventually had to leave due to a back injury. He outfitted his guitar with scavenged Fender parts. He hollowed out the wood to lighten the instrument, creating a chamber that gave him the “spectrum of sound” — from low to mid to high — he had sought.
Today, Mr. Barrios continues his search for “a certain tone” in the woods he collects and cures, one he can call his signature as he painstakingly turns out custom-made guitars. His basement workshop is a kind of magical lair from which he pursues that quest, and it’s an homage to his jazz-like improvisational ingenuity.
A consummate, obsessive and fiendishly innovative craftsman, Mr. Barrios makes his own molds from scratch — really scratch. Layer by layer, he laminates the wood from which the mold is formed. He’s constructed his own spreader and his own steam box from which “the wood tells me when it’s ready to bend.” He’s cut his own Plexiglas for his master patterns.
Nestled amid the benches, tools and forms is the wood that Mr. Barrios has been collecting for 30 years: purple heart, tiger maple, Guatemalan rosewood, East African zebrawood, and 1,500-year-old salvaged redwood.
To build his guitars, Barrios uses a method of internal bracing devised in the 1970s by the physical chemist Michael Kasha. It’s a slow and exacting process. Each brace is individually carved and placed.
The result is a profound, ethereal and lasting sustain, one that, Mr. Barrios says with deep satisfaction, impressed the renowned guitarist and former “Saturday Night Live” band leader G.E. Smith. Accompanied by the artist Eric Fischl, Mr. Smith visited Mr. Barrio’s workshop and sat playing one of the handcrafted guitars for three hours: “He was very, very impressed with the stuff I’m getting from my basement.”
Inspired by such master luthiers as James D’Aquisto and John D’Angelico, Mr. Barrios has a vision of building pure wood guitars with nothing to interrupt the sound of the wood’s vibration. Now, his skills honed, his molds made, he stands at the precipice of his dream.
Meanwhile, he continues to work as a construction carpenter — a “really good job” — taking on select and challenging guitar repairs, while focusing on building individual guitars and playing with the band Out East.
When asked if he has qualms about the challenge of executing his vision, Carlos Barrios chuckles. “I’m like an adrenaline junkie. Some people want to jump out of a plane. I look at the wood and I’m, like, oh man, what am I going to make? What am I going to create?”
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