(ABOVE) At home on Molokai, luthier Eric DeVine hunts deer, makes beer and wine and handcrafts some of the world's most coveted ukulele.
During his lunch break, Eric DeVine cracks open the door to his shipping container-turned-studio and surveys his surroundings: red dirt, kiawe (mesquite) trees, cactuses and the cobalt Pacific pulsing in the distance. If a few axis deer wander through-as they often do-DeVine might take a shot with his rifle or bow. If it hits, he'll dress the animal and hang it in his walk-in fridge. Then it's back to work building some of the world's finest ukulele.
DeVine began handcrafting string instruments two decades ago; the self-taught luthier is now considered one of the world's best ukulele builders. His forty-foot shipping container on the remote west end of Molokai is like Geppetto's workshop, a tidy, one-man factory where the magic happens. Alongside the traditional tools of the trade-saws, drills, clamps and figure eight-shaped jigs, are a few sophisticated extras: laser cutter, mica powders and small piles of gemstones.
DeVine builds just twenty instruments per year. Each is a dazzling work of art fashioned out of rare woods and inlaid with opals or emeralds. There's a two-year waiting list for one of his custom instruments, which cost thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars. An ukulele that expensive might sound like a contradiction; after all, the beauty of Hawaii's humble four-stringer is its accessibility-affordable, easy to carry and to play. But DeVine saw the ukulele as a blank canvas for creativity. The precision-minded perfectionist couldn't help asking, What would make this even better? As he says, "It's fun constantly raising the bar."
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(ABOVE LEFT) DeVine embellishes each instrument with custom inlays-everything from a musician's initials to Mighty Mouse or an outrigger canoe surfing a wave of blue opals. (ABOVE RIGHT) Musical manicure: DeVine finishes each instrument with twelve coats of lacquer, which he lets cure for three weeks, then sands, buffs and polishes to a glossy shine.
"When you hear or even feel a DeVine, it's in its own class. It has this deep, rich, big sound," says Andrew Molina, professional musician and three-time Na Hoku Hanohano Award nominee for ukulele Album of the Year. "With respect to other builders, in my opinion DeVine is in a league of his own."
DeVine is a relative newcomer to the ukulele universe. He grew up in Woodinville, a small town east of Seattle. His father built houses for a living and put his four sons to work early, helping him lay concrete and operate heavy equipment. "Digging ditches at age five," laughs DeVine. He was "the kid who was always taking toasters apart to figure out how they worked." When he began playing guitar at age 13, he wondered how the various components combined to produce sound.
By 1996 DeVine had grown weary of the wet Pacific Northwest winters. He moved to Hawaii, first to Kona, then to Maui, where the laid-back, lyrical music of the Islands was a welcome departure from Seattle's gritty grunge rock. He traded his electric guitar for a uke and found work in the food and wine industry-another passion of his. On September 11, 2001, he happened to be visiting family in Seattle. Travel back to Hawaii was suspended and his job at Roy's Restaurant in Kahana put on pause, so he decided to stay put and make the most of his time there learning to build his own instruments.
Rather than using conventional inlay materials such as abalone or turquoise, DeVine opts for precious gems. The leaves of this maile lei are laser-cut Zambian emeralds.
Finding a mentor wasn't easy. "There are a lot of lutherie schools available nowadays," DeVine says. "Back then there really weren't." He found a class at Everett Community College, but the instructor, a retired woodworker, had built maybe four or five guitars. And he wasn't much of a musician. And he taught directly from the textbook while giving students access to the tools.
But that was all the enterprising DeVine needed. He dived into the reading materials and experimented with various tonewoods-woods valued for their acoustic properties. Before long he had pieced together a decent-sounding guitar. "Finishing the first one seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, like climbing Mount Everest," he says. "I immediately knew this is what I wanted to do. It brought together the two things I love the most: building things and music."
DeVine returned to Lahaina, where he worked for Mr. Wine, a boutique wine shop. In his spare time he puzzled over fretboards, tuning pegs and sound-hole placement. Coincidentally, his boss's family was involved in the local music scene and owned a record company. DeVine also had the opportunity to display his growing collection of instruments at Hula Grill's annual keiki ukulele contest. One of their artists, Kimo Hussey, was a contest judge. DeVine was thrilled. "Kimo was an idol of mine," he says. "When I got to meet him, it was just butterflies in my stomach."
When DeVine began building instruments, he was one of the only luthiers producing custom ukulele. He elevated the craft to a high art, designing a process for incorporating twenty-four-karat gold in the rosette (the ring around the sound hole) and the purfling (the instrument's edge where the top and side woods meet).
Truth be told, Hussey had a bit of an ukulele addiction. After retiring from the military, his collection of high-end ukes grew from a handful to a wall-ful. To keep his habit manageable, he developed a system that DeVine calls "catch and release." Hussey orders a custom uke with specs he wants to try. He plays the instrument on tour and then sells it to one of his appreciative fans. It's a win for everyone. "That has permitted me to show off Eric's ukes to people around the world," Hussey says.
When DeVine launched his career as a luthier, he was one of very few builders offering custom, made-to-order ukes. As his reputation grew, the owner of a high-end ukulele store in China flew DeVine and his family to Shanghai for a week to attend Music China, the biggest music trade show on the planet. DeVine was awestruck. "It's the size of a city! Each building is as big as a stadium and dedicated to a different instrument."
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DeVine shapes an instrument's body with jigs and routers but hand-carves its neck with a rasp. "The contour between the neck and headstock is a critical part of the shaping," he says. He uses a Japanese "dragon file" with random, hand-cut notches (ABOVE RIGHT) to achieve an especially smooth surface. "This gives the neck a very pleasing feel for the player."
Celebrity clients helped boost DeVine's business. Jack Johnson, who bought a jumbo guitar that DeVine crafted out of maple, curly koa and Engelmann spruce, said, "Usually a guitar that looks this pretty doesn't sound right. But out of all of my guitars, it has the best intonation."
One day DeVine was surprised to see a Seattle rock star standing at the door of his Lahaina workshop: Mike McCready, Pearl Jam's lead guitarist. "He was getting married and wanted a matching set of guitars for him and Stone [Gossard], the other guitar player. That was his best-man gift," says DeVine. While ordering the guitars, McCready picked out an ukulele for Pearl Jam's lead singer, Eddie Vedder. A stunner with a cedar top, quilted maple back and curly koa binding, the uke ended up being featured on Vedder's solo album Ukulele Songs. "That was pretty neat," says DeVine.
Because DeVine makes so few instruments per year, he can afford to be choosy with his materials. Part of the thrill of buying a DeVine instrument is picking out the tonewoods and decorative elements. In some cases, clients can select not only the type of wood but the individual tree. Some of the trees from which DeVine sources his wood are so special they have names and international reputations.
The most famous is simply called "the Tree." In 1965 loggers discovered a mahogany tree over a hundred feet tall and ten feet in diameter deep in the Honduran rainforest. They suspected the five-hundred-year-old behemoth would have superior wood, and they were right. But as they sawed away at the trunk, it toppled backward into a deep ravine. The woodworking world collectively gasped. After ten years of failed retrieval attempts, a determined miller hiked into the gulch with a team of tractors, cut the massive trunk into quarters and hauled it out piece by piece.
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Each step of a uke's creation is an exercise in precision. (ABOVE LEFT) Long wood dowels allow DeVine to nudge braces perfectly into place before gluing them down. (ABOVE RIGHT) Three headstocks emerge from a slab of tonewood, ready for tuning knobs and strings-as close as DeVine comes to assembly-line production.
Clamps and jigs hold the uke steady so the luthier can attach the head to the body.
"That material is some of the highest-priced in the world," says DeVine. "A guitar set, just the back and sides, will cost you about ten grand." But for serious musicians the superior acoustics are worth the price. The Tree's tonewood reportedly sounds magical, with astonishing clarity and bass response. DeVine created a tenor ukulele with a set from the Tree. Its luminous, reddish body looks three-dimensional, like rippling water.
DeVine describes another famous tree, one native to Hawaii. In the early '80s a massive koa on Tantalus on Oahu had reached the end of its life and was a threat to the property owner's house. The homeowner called Bart Potter, one of Hawaii's most knowledgeable millers, to harvest the wood. When Potter cut open the trunk, he was astonished by its dark chocolate wood and intense washboard curls. He nicknamed it "the Mother of Curl." A luthier himself, Potter knew exactly how to mill the tree to create book-matched sets for instruments.
"Every famous musician in the world has an instrument built out of this tree," says DeVine. "It is that special." He has several billets from the Mother of Curl stashed away for special projects. DeVine regularly purchases wood from Potter, who appreciates his commitment to quality. "Eric is exacting and uncompromising in the quality he looks for," says Potter. "You probably could identify one of his instruments with a blindfold on."
"I know quite a few arborists," says DeVine. "And they know that I like the good stuff. Because I do so few instruments a year, I shoot for the ultra-high end. The materials that I use are only the best of the best." For his business' twentieth anniversary, DeVine built a "tenitone" uke—a hybrid instrument he invented—with rippled koa, platinum fret markers and Zambian emeralds.
DeVine obsesses over every detail, from the super-capacitor in his pickups to the complex bracing of his uke tops. As a result, his handcrafted guitars and ukes are consistently lightweight, well built and loud. Just about everyone who plays a DeVine praises its voluminous sound-how big and bold it sounds for its size. Blues musician Doug MacLeod says his parlor guitar "throws like a megaphone."
DeVine's most significant contribution to the musical world is the invention of a new instrument: the tenitone ukulele. Halfway between a tenor and a baritone, the tenitone features a tenor uke's classic G-C-E-A tuning with a baritone's larger body, longer scale and bigger sound. His customers can't get enough of the new chordophone. "Since I started making tenitones, they've almost taken over my complete sales," he says. "Tenors used to be my highest-selling instrument. Now I do at least a dozen to one tenitones over tenors."
DeVine's creativity really takes flight during the final step of the building process: embellishing the instrument with inlays. While other builders use abalone shell or mother of pearl, he goes the royal route with opals, emeralds and precious metals. Two years ago he celebrated his company's twentieth anniversary with a commemorative ukulele. "I thought, I gotta make this thing spectacular," he says. He designed a maile lei, its leafy vine of Zambian emeralds cascading down the fretboard. After heavy bidding online, the uke sold for $25,000.
A few years ago DeVine collaborated with Hussey on a full sensory experience. They hosted a gourmet wine and ukulele pairing dinner at a Launiupoko estate on Maui. The chef described each course, DeVine chose a wine to complement the food and Hussey played an ukulele to match them both. The lucky guests took home their very own DeVine ukulele. Hussey hopes to repeat this someday. "Everything about Eric is wonderful," he says. "And backed up by performance."
It's true that DeVine applies his perfectionist DIY ethic to just about every area of his life. He brews his own beer and makes his own wine. He hunts for the family's food. "We haven't bought meat for years and years," he says. "Venison is our staple, and we dry-age everything and make steaks, burgers, jerky, bone broth, all that kind of stuff."
In 2022 he moved to Molokai with his wife, Monica, and their son, Porter James. "It just suited us a little better-the quiet, and the people, too," he says. "It's such a musical community. It seems like every single person plays over here."
Monica is a fine jeweler who takes the offcuts from Eric's tonewoods and uses them as inlay for her gold and silversmithing. "She's a jack of many trades as well," says DeVine. "We both work from home. We go to the beach, but we don't go out too much," he confesses. "Sometimes I go a couple of weeks without leaving the property."
DeVine's off-grid, off-the-beaten-path address is an added bonus for some of his clients. Molina, who put in his order a year ago, is already planning his trip to Molokai. He chose Swiss moon spruce for the top of his personalized uke, Cuban mahogany for its back and sides and an opal inlay. "I love red, so he's doing red opals along the binding," Molina says, giddy as a kid on Christmas. "I saw a little sneak peek. I cannot wait to pick it up in person."
