“It’s thankless work sometimes when you have to sand six
guitars. But when they’re done, you can sit back and look at
them and play them ... it’s just the most rewarding thing.”
When he was 19, he applied for a job at Hohner and got it. His
next guitar gig was a six-month stint at Dean, which proved to be
a stepping stone en route to a 15-year, on-again-off-again tenure
at Hamer that began in the mid-’80s. “Once I [temporarily] left
Hamer to pursue my own guitar building,” he says. “I was always
building Sherman guitars at night on my own.” He ended up
back there a few years later, only to leave again later for Washburn
Guitars. There, he worked alongside legendary luthier Grover
Jackson to help launch the company’s custom shop in Chicago.
“Ironically,” he laughs, “I wound up going back to Hamer. They
came calling—bribing me with zeros—and I accepted.”
That time he stayed with Hamer for a while, running produc-
tion and helping out in the adjoining Ovation factory until going
back to Washburn for a final stint in 2000. But the commute to
Washburn’s Chicago facility from Sherman’s New England home
was exhausting, especially when he was needed on weekends to
help out at home or play local gigs as a sideman. “I was flying out
to Chicago, living in a fully furnished motel during the week,” he
says. “The hard part about that was that I’d shut the factory down
at 2: 30 [on Friday] and have to grab all my gear—I’d have a guitar
and my clothes with me—head back, and then my wife would pick
me up at the airport and I’d have to go straight to a gig. It was try-
ing. Eventually it was like, ‘Okay, I can’t do this anymore, I need to
be back home.’” He went full-time with Michael Sherman Guitars
in 2003.
6-String Luxury Machines
While at Hamer and Washburn, Sherman worked with such big-name artists as Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, Sammy Hagar, No Doubt’s Tom
