Episode Notes Welcome to The Art Parlor for April, brought to you by Friends in Art! It's been a spell and we are very glad to be back! Join us for an inspiring conversation with the creators of NVision Guitars, a mother-and-son team building custom adaptive guitars for musicians with disabilities. From tactile designs for blind players to ergonomic solutions for mobility challenges, their work is opening doors to music for everyone. Hear their story, their passion, and how they’re redefining accessibility in the arts. AI-Generated Transcript Jason Opinions expressed on ACB Media are those of the respective program contributors and cannot be assumed to serve as endorsements of products or views by Friends in Art, the American Council of the Blind, their elected officials, or staff. Friends in Art welcomes you to the Art Parlor, where visually impaired artists of all types will discuss their work. Pull up a chair, bring along your beverage of choice, and listen to thoughtful, stimulating conversations with visually impaired artists in all media and from all parts of the world. And now, here's your host, Anne Chiappetta. Ann Welcome everyone to the Friends and Art, Art Parlor podcast. I'm Ann Chiappetta, your president, and I'm joined tonight by some special guests. But before I get to them, I also want to let you know that Meghan Downing, one of our board members, is here to help us welcome our guests from Envision Guitars. So we have Renee and Tristan. And I just want to welcome you guys. I know we had you featured on our blog at www.friendsinart.org/news. If anybody wants to go there and check you guys out for your interview. So welcome, welcome, welcome. Renee Thank you. Thank you for allowing us to be here. Ann Sure. So you're from Iowa, right? Tristan Yep, we're from Ankeny, Iowa. So just a suburb outside of Des Moines. Ann So my new guide dog's name is Iowa, by the way. So really? Tristan Really? How did you know? Ann He was born in the I litter. And that's the name that they picked. So. Oh, okay. Yeah. I just thought that was a little, a cute little thing to let you guys know. Before we get into like the questions, could you give us a little bit of your history, how you started your business and maybe some of the reasons why? Sure, yeah, absolutely. Renee Well, Tristan started playing guitar when he was about 10 years old. And he's always had a love for guitar and played it and kind of messed around with building guitars all through high school. And anyway, about a year and a half, two years ago, I was having some health issues and Tristan was taking me back and forth to Mayo. And we just really got into some deep talks about life and the purpose of life. And I had recently retired from the military. So I had been running a Christmas decorating business that I had to actually quit due to the health issues. And so we were just talking over just what the future holds for both of us actually. And I said, you know, what would make you the happiest? What do you think would you would find most purpose in? And he said, I would find most purpose in building guitars. And that was just kind of out of the blue because I never knew that he actually just wanted to build guitars for a living. And I said, Well, you know, what's stopping you from doing that? And he said, I don't know. And I said, Well, what would that look like? And so we brainstormed on up to Mayo and we talked about how my dad, who was a quadriplegic, had went to Easter Seals and gotten training on leather making and he had gotten some tools from them and he had found his purpose through that. And then Tristan had shared with me that when he was younger, he used to play the guitar with his eyes closed because he was afraid that someday he may not be able to see and he was afraid that he may not be able to play the guitar. And so he'd been doing that for some time. And just on that same vein, we brainstormed the idea of what if we made guitars for people who can't just pull a guitar off of the shelf of a box store and play it. So what if we made guitars for people who have challenges, maybe some low vision or maybe they're blind or maybe they're in a wheelchair and they have spatial considerations or Parkinson's. You know, there's a variety of different challenges face where they can't just take a guitar, like I said, off of the shelf. And you know, as we dug into it, we realized there's actually nothing like that. There's nothing like that out there. There's guitars that look like tech toys, and there's guitars that maybe they have, you know, some tactile markers on them with glue or some homemade type of fashioned material to allow people to kind of use it, but nothing's actually made for people with these challenges. And we thought, well, why won't we, you know, we could do that. And so we have developed various adaptations for our guitars and we built a business around it. And that's what we do. So Tristan is the luthier and I do the management, the sales, the marketing. He of course helps me with a lot of that as well. But he's our guitar maker and our technical expert. And I try to help anywhere that I can to free up his time so that he can do what he does best. Ann Wow. So Tristan, how did you learn your craft? Tristan It wasn't necessarily like a linear learning system, I would say. A lot of times with a kind of niche craft like that, you have to really stretch out your arms to whoever you can get information from that will really benefit your ability. So whether that's from reaching out to local Luthiers and local shops, to ask them how can we get better at our craft, what are we missing, what are the things that we're nailing, countless hours of watching YouTube videos and different tutorials, and then a lot and a lot of practice in the garage and trials and errors and learning from those errors. So it's a very compound kind of learning for it. you have to pull from just multiple different sources. Ann Do you feel that some of this is like natural for you in eight? And then some of it is, you know, you've got to learn how to hone your craft. Do you feel like you were, you were kind of like, you had it in you, you just had to get it, get it to the point where you, you know, get it out there. Tristan And definitely, yeah, I think that I think that it's one of those things that when you have a passion for something, you're going to find a way to make it so you know how to do it. But so I don't think that it necessarily takes like someone that has these innate abilities compared to another. It's who's willing to put in the hard work and who's actually passionate about what they're doing. So it's, you can apply it to anything that anyone's passionate about. It's just the ability to keep moving forward with it and keep persisting even while you're waiting. Ann Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I have a curious little weird question. Are you the one that drinks the monsters while you're working? because there's a picture in the background. The monster drinks are there. Tristan I've been trying to cut down on that a little bit. But yeah. Renee To be fair, even though they're completely not what I would recommend, Tristan was working a full-time job up until not too long ago. So he was working the full-time job while doing a vision. Jason Oh, wow. Renee He was sleeping literally about four hours a night. Yeah, I was sleeping like four to five hours a night for a good year. Yeah, but we finally were blessed with the opportunity to go full time. And so he's been getting more sleep. So OK. Ann That's pretty good. I was. Well, yeah. Sometimes I didn't expect that to be described on the photo when I put him put it through my describer and I was like, oh, it was really cute. Anyway, Megan, do you have any questions? Meghan Yeah. Hi, guys. I'm Megan. It's nice to be on this call with you. I love so far what I'm hearing and learning about what you guys are doing. I guess I want to give a little bit of background on kind of where I fit into this a little bit, but I'm blind. I started losing my vision when I was nine to a progressive eye condition. I'm 24 now, so it's been a little bit over half my life now since I've lost my vision. I started playing fiddle when I was like four, and then music was always something like I could do Well, my vision was decreasing as I got older. And so I just love your mission of like figuring out ways for people with any ability to be able to play music, because I think music is one of those things where it's accessible to like everyone, whether it's listening or playing. And this process of losing my vision and music helping me through that led me to I went to Berkeley College of Music, And I actually play guitar. I went to Berkeley for guitar. Renee That's awesome. Meghan Yes, big fans of Berkeley. Yeah, I was really blessed to be able to-- I was like my dream school. And I started playing guitar when I was younger as well. It was probably my second or third instrument I started playing and fell in love with guitar. And so I kind of put the fiddle aside. And guitar is my main passion. So when Annie told me you guys were coming on and I learned about what you guys were doing, I was like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. because I actually, I studied, I'm a music therapist. Jason And so I work with folks all that like literally Meghan every single day that could use products like what you guys are doing. I worked in like neuro rehabilitation with stroke patients and I still work with people who are brain injured. And it's funny that you said something about, you know, I just got a grant from the Christopher Reeves Foundation to do a project with people with paralysis. And I know that you mentioned your dad was a quadriplegic and I'm working a lot with those folks right now or I'm about to start. So I'm like really interested in what you guys are doing and I would love to know like if you found a way to adapt for p
