Posted on July 15, 2026July 15, 2026 by Dale Phillips The $75 Guitar Challenge The $75 Guitar Challenge by Doug Hunt and Mark French Originally published in American Lutherie #142, 2021 Mark: A couple years ago, I was walking around a big home store and started to wonder whether it would be possible to build a guitar only from things I could buy there. Obviously, they didn’t sell tuners, fretwire, or truss rods. However, I thought it might be possible if one had those three things. I decided that, given those parts, it might be possible to make a guitar with $75 to spend at the home store. Thinking it might be an interesting challenge, I suggested the idea to Doug Hunt. Doug and I have been guitar-making friends for years, having met as part of a project aiming to teach technical subjects to high school students through guitar making. (Check it out at guitarbuilding.org.) He was interested, though not looking for one more thing to do at the time. A while later, he suggested that a better idea would be to start with a budget of $75 that could be spent anywhere (he’s a big fan of eBay, as it happens). As long as the money could be spent anywhere, he thought that it might be possible to do the whole instrument for $75. Over some months of occasionally revisiting the idea, we did a little negotiating and settled on the following rules: Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on April 6, 2026April 7, 2026 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: Michael Bashkin Meet the Maker: Michael Bashkin by Brian Yarosh Originally published in American Lutherie #132, 2017 A Bashkin guitar really stands out. The design and artistry speak volumes. And once you have had the pleasure of hearing or playing one, you won’t forget it. The tone has an identity all its own. I have known Michael for many years. Every time we talk about lutherie, I learn something new. He is a great guy and has a wealth of knowledge that he is always willing to share. I sat down with Michael at the 2017 GAL Convention for a chat. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? When was your first introduction to guitars or woodworking? My grandparents emigrated from Poland and Russia to the USA about 1905. They were part of that big immigrant wave. They did typical immigrant things; they were in the garment industry and had to bootstrap their way up. My parents were born in Brooklyn in 1940s, and each was the first in their family to go to college. My dad taught high school at Brooklyn Tech for over twenty-eight years. My mom was an elementary school teacher, but when they had a family, she started staying home. I was born in New York City and lived in Brooklyn for a couple of years. Then we moved out to the suburbs in Teaneck, New Jersey, about six miles from the George Washington Bridge. Dad commuted in to the city every day. It still very much felt like we were in the New York area. So I had a pretty normal middle-class childhood, and I felt fortunate that I grew up in a racially mixed town. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on October 9, 2025October 9, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Dealer: Armin Kelly Meet the Dealer: Armin Kelly by Cyndy Burton Originally published in American Lutherie #80, 2004 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 I see your ads for Guitars International everywhere. Can you tell me how you got started dealing in classical guitars? I made a very serious mistake! (laughs) From the time I was fifteen until I was thirty, I studied classical guitar very intensively with several very musical teachers. But at some point I realized I had to decide whether this was what I wanted to continue doing the rest of my life or not. I felt that I’d hit my peak as a player, and I wanted to explore other things. So I stopped playing — not an easy thing to do — and eventually sold my guitars. Playing classical guitar had been an all-consuming endeavor for me, and I couldn’t do it part time and remain happy. Instead, I returned to school and studied English literature and literary criticism at Columbia University and teacher methodology at Harvard University. Later I taught English for several years, both at university and high-school levels. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on April 23, 2025June 20, 2025 by Dale Phillips A Luthier’s Choices A Luthier’s Choices by Kenny Hill from his 2004 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in American Lutherie #87, 2006 Guitar building, for me, began as a way of understanding the instrument more completely. Maybe it’s like raising your own food in order to understand where food comes from. I attended the 1977 GAL Convention and brought my fifth guitar to display. In those days I thought that I could probably invent the guitar and just discover it, all new, all fresh, all mine. It took many years for me to start over — to just start over from the beginning and to learn what our predecessors have done, and to learn the variety of different ways there are to produce a good instrument. The pursuit of anything is a series of decisions that come at forks in the road. It’s not just about how you do something, it’s about where it takes you. And it’s about what it does to your life and how it channels you into participating in your own life and the lives of the people around you. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on January 13, 2025May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips Is “Guitar Design” an Oxymoron? Is “Guitar Design” an Oxymoron? by Steve Klein from his 2001 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in American Lutherie #76, 2003 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 Webster’s defines “oxymoron” as “a figure of speech in which opposites or contradictory ideas or terms are combined, e.g., sweet sorrow” and my personal favorite, “thunderous silence.” The second definition of “design” is “being able to make original plans.” When Todd Brotherton called to ask if I would speak here today, he mentioned that I’ve been doing my design thing for near on thirty years. And almost in the same breath, he called my ideas new and innovative. What’s wrong with this picture? Palm pilots are new. Downloading MP3s is new. Viagra is new. My ideas are no longer new. So why are the things that I’m trying to do still thought of as new? Or we might ask, why is the musical world so slow to change, when everything else in our culture seems to be on the fast track? Why might it take so long for acoustic guitars to evolve? This begs some questions, such as: Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
