The Guild of American Luthiers is a nonprofit educational membership organization whose purpose is to facilitate learning about lutherie: the art, craft, and science of stringed musical instrument building and repair. Since 1972, we’ve been the foremost source of information for makers, repairers, and restorers of all kinds of string instruments.

Guild membership and publications are open to all. Whether you’ve been making instruments for years, or have just acquired the lutherie bug; whether you live in Brooklyn or Bangladesh; whether lutherie is your livelihood or your passion or both; we invite you to join the Guild and learn more about the many ways you can benefit from and contribute to our information sharing system!

Membership Benefits

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Member Discounts

Members get discounted prices on our books, back issues, plans, and more.

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American Lutherie

Our respected journal American Lutherie is the main benefit of GAL membership.

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Articles Online

Members can read a growing selection of our articles online.

CURRENT ISSUE OF
AMERICAN LUTHERIE

Harp Guitars: An American Lutherie Anthology - Fall 2023

You might think you know something about harp guitars, but you’ll know a lot more after reading the newest 100-page book in our American Lutherie Anthology series: Harp Guitars! Sure they’re the giant, archaic monsters we’ve seen with mandolin orchestras, but they’re also modern instruments fulfilling the musical dreams of current musicians. And someone might want you to fix or build one someday! Our new book includes a bunch of the major articles we’ve done on harp guitars, including an historic overview of European and American versions, as well as the design process behind new models of steel string, classical, and electric versions that are taking the instrument into the future. Also included are reduced versions of three of our popular harp guitar plans, drawings of a wide variety of new designs, a panel discussion from our 2006 Convention, meet-the-maker interviews with three builders of harp guitars and other instruments as well as collector/harp-guitar enthusiast (aka Pope) Gregg Miner. See more.

Shipped to all 2023 members Mid October

New Instrument Plan

1982 Douglas Ching Slack-Key Guitar
GAL Plan #81  Drawn by Tim Olsen

Looking for Something?

You can search abstracts of all our articles. Pick a topic, pick an author, or search for a word. It’s fun!

Resources

Are you just getting started in guitar making, or thinking about becoming a luthier? Or are you an experience builder looking for an event or hard-to-find supplies? See our Resources page with links to lutherie schools, suppliers, organizations, events and more!