Posted on October 10, 2025October 10, 2025 by Dale Phillips Hearing Voices: A Recipe for Voicing the Steel String Guitar Hearing Voices: A Recipe for Voicing the Steel String Guitar by John Greven from his 2011 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #114, 2013 Let’s discuss a vocabulary for tone. These are the words I use when I talk to my customers. Power. We’re talking about headroom, the ability to get louder when you play harder. Responsiveness. I want a top that will respond easily to a light touch, but it will also sustain under a heavy one. The finished guitar will have a full voice played lightly or heavily or anywhere in between. A lot of guitars require a heavy touch; as playing pressure diminishes, the voice gets thin and loses its full substance. Projection. How far away can you hear it? I want the guitar to throw its voice as far as possible. When I was at Gruhn’s, a 1937 D-28 came in, all original. The top was the thinnest we’d seen on a herringbone, about .090", but it was really stiff. The sound of that guitar was painful, but you could hear it for miles. For a bluegrasser trying to play lead over six banjos, that’s the guitar. 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 10, 2025October 10, 2025 by Dale Phillips A Summary of John Greven’s Voicing Method A Summary of John Greven’s Voicing Method by Mike Doolin Originally published in American Lutherie #114, 2013 John Greven has been building guitars for fifty years, and has single-handedly built over 2200 guitars in that time. Doing the math, that means he averages close to a guitar a week. Given that kind of efficiency, it’s not surprising that his methods for controlling the sound of his guitars are simple and direct. He’s distilled the huge number of variables down to the handful that he believes are most important, and has evolved testing methods that take only seconds and require no measurement tools. While John is a trained scientist, and does speak of the scientific aspects of guitars and wood, he’s quick to point out that his methods are not scientific, but intuitive and experiential. This is a major problem in documenting his methods: in a sense, you have to be John Greven to fully understand them. They rely on John’s vast experience in building thousands of guitars, and playing those guitars and thousands of guitars by other builders, and on his “photographic” memory for sound, and the database of sounds that his experience and memory have created in his head. Moreover, sound is not accurately describable in words, and tactile sense is not accurately quantifiable. 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 10, 2025October 10, 2025 by Dale Phillips Workshop Evolution Workshop Evolution by Kent Everett from his 2011 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in American Lutherie #108, 2011 Evolution doesn’t necessarily mean that you get better and better. It can mean that you evolve to fit the situation you find yourself in, such as changes in the market or your living conditions. One basic way to set up a workshop is to have a master work bench in the middle of the room and the power tools around the edges. It’s basically a circular idea. This is very common in Spain and I think most of our small garage workshops are set up this way. In a bigger workshop, you might want to set it up so the wood goes in one end, it goes through the various operations, and it comes out the other end as a guitar. This is a more linear plan. For five years prior to getting into the first shop I’m going to show you, I went everywhere trying to find a job as a guitar builder. I built my first guitar in Victoria, BC in a little workshop right down the street from Larrivée. I walked into his place one day and I was blown away. He had eleven employees and I could not believe it. I wanted to be part of that. I stayed in Victoria for a year trying to get on with Jean, but that was around 1980 and the acoustic guitar market was dying and he was shrinking his shop. I built four guitars in a cabinet shop while I was in Victoria. I would bring them to Jean and he would encourage me and I’d go back and do it over again. 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 Maker: George Wunderlich Meet the Maker: George Wunderlich by Nathan Stinnette Originally published in American Lutherie #73, 2003 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 How did you start building minstrel banjos? I was a Civil War reenactor, and I was introduced to the work of a gentleman by the name of Joe Ayers, who’s done a lot of recordings of minstrel banjo music. I’d never heard it before, and I decided right then and there that I could play that kind of banjo music. I’d grown up in Missouri where most everything is bluegrass, and I knew I did not have the coordination for three-finger playing. But this was something I could do. It was a little more melodic, a little more interesting to me. I bought an 1880s-period banjo from a company called The Music Folk in St. Louis. It was the oldest banjo they had on the wall, so I thought, that must be Civil War. When I couldn’t get the right sound out of it, I called Joe on the phone and said, “What am I doing wrong?” He explained to me in very basic terms that my banjo was wrong. It needed to be fretless, it needed to be gut strung, it needed to have a deeper pot. With his direction, I built a banjo. This was in 1992. 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.
