Podcasts Culture Crested Butte Is Home Ep. 53 Kent Viles | Making Music and Creating the Dobrato

Ep. 53 Kent Viles | Making Music and Creating the Dobrato

Published: Feb. 26, 2020, 11 a.m.

Kent Viles hails from Muncie, Indiana (amazingly, my second guest from there).  He grew up with an ability I've never had- the ability to play musical instruments.  Like many of my guests, Kent had a love of skiing and the outdoors despite being far from mountains in the midwest.  So when it came time to choose a college, he found Western Colorado University and has been in Gunnison ever since.

Kent has been involved with many aspects of the music industry, as former owner of Wildwood Music, a composer for television and film, as well as wiring houses for music in the early days of whole-house audio.  But what he's most well known for at this point is a guitar which he developed called the Dobrato.  It combines elements of different types of guitars to create it's own highly unique sound.  It's been used in a Grammy-winning song, and played by musical titans including Jimmy Buffet and more.  In this episode, Kent not only describes the development of the instrument, but also plays a short demonstration!  Enjoy!

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Castle Creek Guitars

Quotes:

In Muncie, there's Ball State University and the fraternities and sororities they'd have [weekend] dance parties, and our band would get booked to play these parties. So I guess I started playing out when I was about 13. We'd stuff all my gear into my mom's car and go by Freddie's house and get his drums and we'd stuff it all into a car. Then we'd tell her come back at nine o'clock and pick us up and she was our roadie.

 
And so it's a real scramble to put this together when the [film] director finally gets you your piece of film that you're going to score to their [movie] -you know, two months late on their deadlines, the budget is completely spent, and they need it yesterday.
 
So in 2008/2009, you know the whole industry with the recession, the construction industry, was of course lacking. And I found I couldn't really sustain a full on company doing audio visual and control systems, because we really needed new holes in the ground. So over many bottles of wine and discussions, Castle Creek Guitars, at least the conception of it, was born.
 
I was playing a resophonic style guitar, and people think of them as dobros. And it's kind of a blue-grassy toned instrument. Well, I had an idea that I'd really like to add a vibrato to it just to add another voice or another color to the palette of what this instrument was producing.  A lot of people think of it as a whammy bar.
 
[The Dobrato] So with one motion, I can do vibrato, and a secondary motion, I can pull my B to C sharp, which is the pedal steel move. So now our instrument, not only does it have a very unique voice because of how I wanted to tone out the resophonic guitar, but it also has a vibrato B-bender. That's really never existed before.