The TinkerTar, a kids’ guitar trainer widely available for about a month now, is in many ways the synthesis of Charlottesville instrument and board-game maker Brian Calhoun’s eclectic career.
Calhoun’s craftsmanship has been well known around town, and beyond, for many years. Through Rockbridge Guitar, he makes high-end instruments and has worked with renowned musicians like Dave Matthews, Brandi Carlile, Keith Urban, Harry Styles, and Zac Brown.
After years of making guitars, Calhoun had a crazy idea in 2016—crazy at least for a respected luthier whose business was music. He had played a boring board game one night and decided he could make a better one. The outcome was Chickapig, a hilariously fanciful farmyard strategy game. Legend has it Calhoun even had help from Matthews in making and popularizing the game, which went on to win Best Board Game at the 2019 National Parenting Product Awards, and is on shelves at Target, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and independent game stores.
Chickapig opened Calhoun’s eyes to kids’ products, he says, and the idea of a beginner’s guitar lodged itself in the back of his mind.
“I have always wondered why kids don’t start guitar early,” Calhoun says. “On the piano, they start the Suzuki method as early as 3 years old.”
Calhoun started asking parents of small children about their strategies for pushing musicianship. Having kids learn on four-string ukuleles seemed popular, and one of Calhoun’s friends pointed out that he was quite capable at drawing animals. He made a dinosaur-shaped uke and put it in the hands of some 5-year-olds. Still, the instrument was too hard. The concept of chords was too far removed from what kids think of when they think of songs.
That’s when it clicked. If you could get children to play melodies, he figured, they would take to the instrument more quickly. The best way to move to melodies? Force the issue with only one string. “If you get rid of the other strings, you have no option other than to play a melody,” Calhoun says.
The accomplished six-string luthier made a one-string prototype, and it worked. Kids could pick up the single-string instrument and play melodies after only a few minutes, immediately sparking their interest.
One-string instruments are not on their own a new idea, but Calhoun figures his TinkerTar is unique in at least a few ways. First, one-string instruments aren’t typically targeted toward beginning players. Second, the TinkerTar is fretless but includes color-coded finger positioning marks and drawn-on frets. That makes it simple to both find the right place to make a note and depress the string to make clear tones. Third, the instrument is simple to tune. Calhoun recommends starting by tuning the one string to C in the open position, but even as the TinkerTar loses fidelity, it always “stays in tune with itself.”
The TinkerTar is available nationwide at Walmart, and Calhoun says the next step is finding shelf space in more stores. He says the considerable job won’t take away from his work with Rockbridge, though. Now that he has manufacturing in place, he’s able to step away and let the business jam on its own.
“We can make as many of these as the market allows, and they have so much potential,” Calhoun says. “They can have a big impact on music education.”