Posted on October 31, 2019May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Accidental Exotics Accidental Exotics by Mike Brittain previously published in American Lutherie #95, 2008 My interest in guitars started when I was four years old and spotted a baritone uke at my granddad’s house. I started playing guitar at eight and played in garage bands until I went into business as a cabinet maker in 1971 at age eighteen. In 1975 I decided to build a guitar. It looked similar to a guitar, but was not an object to be proud of. However, I persisted and eventually built twenty-three guitars in the next eight years. I was a GAL member during some of that time and got a lot of inspiration from many GAL authors and members. In 1983 I decided to quit building guitars to concentrate on my growing cabinet business. In 1997 my granddad passed away. He knew how much that ukulele meant to me, so he left it to me. That inspired me to start building again. For the first time in fifteen years, I opened the case of my guitar #23. To my surprise, I was pretty impressed. It looked good and sounded good, and there were no cracks. My first new project was based on the baritone uke, and I gave it to my dad in honor of my granddad. At that point I was hooked on building again. In 1999 I sold my business and started attending classes with Charles Fox, Cameron Carr, Greg Byers, Jeff Elliott, and Cyndy Burton. I have spent the last four years working with Augie and Donna LoPrinzi. I have been fortunate to spend time learning from my lutherie heroes. 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.
Posted on August 30, 2019May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Forester: Andrea Florinett Meet the Forester: Andrea Florinett by Greg Hanson previously published in American Lutherie #93, 2008 In the summer of 2005, I took a step that many an amateur luthier eventually must — I ordered European spruce tops from a European source over the Internet. The Internet has become a vital vehicle for commerce, but when it comes to selecting tops for acoustic guitars, nothing can replace hands-on inspection, even for those of us with less than full-time professional experience. The tops that showed up on my doorstep two weeks after I clicked the “Submit Order” button exceeded my expectations, but I liked some better than others. How, then, to solve this problem other than trekking off to Europe to test, tap, and touch the so-called Holy Grail of the Mother Continent, Picea abies? As a professor of German and a fluent speaker of the language, I threw caution to the wind and wrote to Andrea Florinett of Tonewood Switzerland in Graubünden, Switzerland. I took advantage of the three main reasons many teachers become teachers — June, July, and August — to ask Andrea if I could work for him for a couple of weeks on a volunteer basis. I can only imagine what reservations the Florinett family might have had, but a week later I received a very welcoming e-mail from Annette Florinett, Andrea’s wife, accepting my offer. Tonewood Switzerland is largely a family-run operation with one full-time employee, and they were glad to gain a helping, albeit inexperienced, hand. 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.
Posted on July 1, 2019May 27, 2025 by Dale Phillips Woodchopper’s Ball Woodchopper’s Ball by Bruce Harvie from his 2004 GAL Convention Lecture previously published in American Lutherie #90, 2007 How many people are here because they are thinking about processing their own wood? I highly encourage it. It’s very satisfying to build instruments from wood that you’ve cut. You can get a spruce on a firewood permit. It’s a great feeling to be out in the forest. When the Guild was first starting out over thirty years ago, the word “tonewood” was not in common usage. Back then there were maybe only three or four suppliers. Now you can Google “tonewoods” and get a hundred suppliers. There’s still a lot to be explored in the world of tonewoods. Englemann spruce didn’t really come on the market until 1978, and Red spruce not until ’89 or so. I can think of four or five species that are virtually untapped in the world of tonewoods: Noble fir, California red fir, and true white fir are all great woods. In Europe, you have places like the Ukraine opening up right now. They have beautiful spruce. I’ve seen quite a bit of it. We have wood here at this convention from the Balkans. That’s nice to see. It’s amazing how much wood is here. It’s just great to see all the guitar tops and woods for sale. And don’t miss the auction. If you look at the woods that were used in guitars in the first part of the 20th century, you see some scuzzy looking wood. On some of the best-sounding prewar Martins, the tops are mismatched and the grain is running every which way. You see tons of runout because that wood was supplied in the form of lumber, not split billets. I see some wonderful-sounding old guitars that were built with wood that people would throw away nowadays. But a typical guitar store today has walls full of Breedloves or Martins with tops that were milled correctly, probably by Pacific Rim Tonewoods up in Concrete, Washington. They do an incredible job of milling guitar wood. 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.
Posted on June 27, 2019May 26, 2025 by Dale Phillips Top 40 Wood List Top 40 Wood List by Nicholas Von Robison previously published in Lutherie Woods and Steel String Guitars, 1994 See also, “Taxonomy and Nomenclature” by Nicholas Von Robison “Glossary of Basic Wood Terms” by Nicholas Von Robison The contemporary luthier can be said to be either in a bind or in a unique evolutionary position, depending on one’s point of view. In the following list of lutherie woods, many will be noted as banned, extinct, prohibited, embargoed, unavailable, and/or expensive. In many cases I have listed viable alternative woods to replace the traditional species based on my own knowledge, education, experience, and on the advice, suggestions, and experience of respected, reputable wood specialists, dealers, and luthiers. While many species can be freely exchanged or adopted in place of the traditional woods of beauty and adornment, those that fall into the category of replacements for traditional resonant woods must be tried without any assurance or guarantee that musicians will accept these alternative woods. The acceptability of a wood species for the production of stringed musical instruments is largely dictated by the traditional practices and materials handed down through centuries. Many of the favored wood species are those that were available in commerce not only to the luthier but to the European furniture craftsmen as well. It can be very difficult for the luthier to obtain acceptance of new materials by the end user, the musician. The musician expects to hear a certain sound from an instrument, and any variation from that sound, as well as any variation in physical appearance, is suspect. In view of this, the chances of obtaining musical acceptance for instruments built with nontraditional woods has been slim in the past. 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.
Posted on June 24, 2019May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Grading and Resawing Lutherie Wood Resawing Lutherie Wood by Bruce Creps previously published in American Lutherie #91, 2007 See also, “Sharpening the Stellite Teeth on the 3" Hitachi Blade” by Bruce Creps “Grading and Curing Lumber” by Bruce Creps Harvesting, milling, and processing tonewood can be a wasteful business. Much of the wood used by luthiers comes from large, older trees, elders worthy of respect. As someone fortunate enough to work with these rare, high-grade woods, one of my top goals is to minimize waste by processing this valuable resource efficiently. This article concerns the Hitachi CB75F resaw, though much of what follows is general enough to be applicable to other resaws. Luthiers who buy resawn sets might glean information about how their wood is processed and what to request or avoid when ordering. A note on nomenclature: A resaw is an upright or horizontal bandsaw set up to make uniform rip cuts. The front of the saw is where you start feeding a cut. The face of a board is its wide, longitudinal surface; the edge is its narrow longitudinal surface; the end is its crosscut surface. The resaw blade is made up of its band and its teeth (terms not necessarily interchangeable). I refer to vertical-grain wood in place of quartersawn wood to avoid confusion, since a sawyer can get vertical-grain cuts without quartering a log. 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.
