William Eaton has made many unconventional instruments since the mid-1970s, and he has helped students learn how to build much more straightforward guitars at Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery
Steve Nall recently took over selecting tonewoods and voicing the tops and backs of all Collings acoustic guitars after working for decades with mentors Bill Collings and Bruce VanWart.
Five promising young luthiers—Brian Itzkin, Oliver Marchant, Eve Meister, Max Spohn, and Olivia Elia—chat about their personal visions and approaches to the craft of building guitars.
Since his retirement in 2018, former C.F. Martin & Co. mainstay Dick Boak has continued hand-building instruments like this dreadnought-ukulele-small-bodied-guitar trio.
Rick Turner created many unique Compass Rose acoustics, but this one—regarded as among his finest—was the luthier’s personal guitar and a showcase of both his bold concepts and skilled execution.
Bob Taylor (Taylor Guitars), Richard Hoover (Santa Cruz Guitars), and Dana Bourgeois (Schoenberg, Bourgeois Guitars) reflect on 50 years of guitar making.
Classical guitar builder Joshia de Jonge talks about experimenting in her own shop after years of working alongside her father & other facets of a life of lutherie.
Alembic, Turner, The Dead's Wall of Sound—The late luthier Rick Turner, who died last April at 78, had such an illustrious career that to fully describe it, one would need to write a medium-size book.
When Paul Reed Smith first heard an 1800s acoustic guitar built by Antonio Torres, he knew his own steel-string guitar designs would borrow structural elements from Torres.
A friend commissioned Jack Cowardin to build an understated 000 acoustic guitar to complement his 1938 Martin 000-18. The result was much more than just wood and metal.
The Hauser guitar making dynasty started in the late 19th century with Josef Hauser (1854–1939) and continues today with Hermann Hauser III and his daughter Kathrin Hauser.
What does it take to go from loving acoustic guitars to actually building them? To answer this, we asked a handful of luthiers to tell us their origin stories.
Drawing on three decades of experience building guitars for stars and students, Del Langejans’ small outfit near Lake Michigan has developed a signature sound by using thick, rigid sides and rosewood necks.
Dan Erlewine's pioneering reference works and instructional content have made him a mentor to three generations of guitar maintenance and repair geeks.
Photos by Claire Bégin The sound of a customer fingerpicking a 1950 Gibson CF-100 in the front showroom of Folkway Music, in Waterloo, Ontario, an hour west of Toronto, drifts into owner Mark Stutman’s office. On the floor lie guitar cases with instruments ready for repair. On one wall is…
