Posted on October 19, 2026October 30, 2026 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: C.F. Martin IV Meet the Maker: C.F. Martin IV from his 2005 talk at the National Music Museum Originally published in American Lutherie #91, 2007 As a young man, my great-great-great grandfather Christian Frederick Martin apprenticed with his father in my family’s furniture business. That’s what the Martins did back in the very early 1800s. Their little town of Markneukirchen was populated with instrument builders, many of whom came from Bohemia, what is today the Czech Republic. In one of those weird political-religious things, a town of instrument builders in Bohemia was invited to pick up and move over the mountain to resettle in Markneukirchen, which is in Saxony in eastern Germany. So there was a history in Markneukirchen of building musical instruments. The guitar was becoming more popular in northern Europe. For some reason, the young man that we now call C.F. Senior was inspired to take an interest in guitar building. This is all undocumented oral history, so we don’t really know what inspired him. I really would love to have been a fly on the wall: the family is sitting around the dinner table when he says to pop, “Oh, by the way, I don’t think I want to join the family furniture business. I want to build guitars.” 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 July 31, 2026July 31, 2026 by Dale Phillips Effects of Grain Orientation on Brace Deflection Effects of Grain Orientation on Brace Deflection by Greg Nelson with Benjamin Nelson Originally published in American Lutherie #127, 2016 I have always taken it on faith that perfectly quartersawn wood had to be superior to diagonal- or plain-cut wood when it comes to bracing. I never felt the need to question this common wisdom until when reading The Responsive Guitar, I discovered that Ervin Somogyi had done a test that created doubt about how accurate this assumption might be. He invited further testing, and that is what inspired me to spend some time and material to check things out. I come to lutherie work without any formal scientific training. This sort of testing demands a scientific method, so I invited my son, Dr. Benjamin Nelson, to participate. His field of expertise is astronomy (mostly extrasolar planets), but having grown up in our house, he is not unfamiliar with wooden instrument construction. 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 July 22, 2026July 22, 2026 by Dale Phillips An Inexpensive Resophonic Guitar An Inexpensive Resophonic Guitar by Lee Herron Originally published in American Lutherie #132, 2017 I’ve become fascinated with slide guitars. My son-in-law is a great pedal-steel player, and we were talking several years ago about the Weissenborns. So I made a baritone version for him and one for myself. I’ve since made a resophonic guitar, slightly modifying plans from Beard Guitars and purchasing his cone, spider bridge, cover, tailpiece, and so on. All of these slide instruments turned out well with great traditional tone. When my granddaughter visited recently, she asked what my favorite song was, and we went to YouTube and pulled up the Paul Simon song The Boxer featuring Jerry Douglas on Dobro. Clearly I’m hooked on the sound. My two Weissenborns and the resophonic each had perhaps $300 worth of material over and above the cost of typical flattops I’ve made, and just about all of it in commercial/official resonator parts. As you’ll see, a few YouTube videos pointed me towards some creative scrounging and innovative thinking that let me reduce the $300 ticket to less than $20 for resonator parts and plywood. 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 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 July 7, 2026July 7, 2026 by Dale Phillips First Build: A Lumberyard Ukulele First Build: A Lumberyard Ukulele by Steve Dickerson Originally published in American Lutherie #143, 2021 When you’re building your first instrument, there aren’t many options. You can buy a kit, join a class (if you can find one), or build from scratch. Kit building can be enjoyable, as well as educational, but (to me, at least) it doesn’t produce the same satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that comes from starting with nothing but the raw materials. My first instrument, many years ago, was scratch-built, but with a twist: I bought a tenor ukulele kit from StewMac, complete with plans and a how-to DVD. I watched the DVD, studied the plans and manual, but set the kit aside. I then bought materials from Home Depot and made a uke, using the kit’s plans and instructions. I still have my “Lumberyard Ukulele” (Photo 1), and it’s a good reminder of some of the things I did wrong. 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.
