What The Hygrometer Can’t Tell You

Most humidity advice stops at 50%. What’s actually moving a guitar is the water in the wood’s cell walls, and learning to know the wood is where the craft...

I Lost Three Guitar Backs In One Night

Three braced guitar backs cracked overnight while my hygrometer said 50%. The humidity where your wood sits can be very different from the number on the wall.

The Two Battles Every Guitar Builder Fights

Every builder fights two battles. The first I can trace to a ceramic rooster in a 1993 drawing class. The second took me years to even see.

Why Do Guitar Headstocks Break? (One Little Scratch Explains Everything)

A strip of maple veneer, one little scratch, and it breaks right there. That’s why headstocks break, and most of it isn’t bad luck.

The Guitar Is An Energy System (Not A Wooden Box)

The biggest shift in thirty years of building happened pushing a lawn mower: I stopped seeing a wooden box and started seeing an energy system.

Why I Put The Same Strings On Every Guitar

I put the same strings on every guitar I build, the way a studio uses the same monitors. I need to hear the guitar, not the strings.

Should You Level Frets Straight, or With Relief?

A shop in Italy put my guitar on their PLEK machine and it came back needing nothing. What decides that isn’t the leveling. It’s the shape of the...

Is Wood Dust Dangerous in a Small Shop?

For twenty years I told myself a one-man shop didn’t make enough dust to worry about. One line of research took that story apart.

The Room Inside the Guitar

Yesterday I was carving the top of an archtop guitar I've been working on, and somewhere in the middle of the work, I caught myself listening. Not the kind of listening...

The Invisible Rules Holding You Back (And How to Erase Them)

I've been thinking about constraints lately. Not the real ones — the ones we don't even realize we've created for ourselves. It started when I came across an old...

Our New Spotify Podcast!

Luthier Tool Guide

YouTube Channel

Take Your Guitar Building Skills To The Next Level!

Online Guitar Luthier School

Shorten your learning curve & avoid costly mistakes with the training and personal support you need to build your first guitar or take your current guitars to the next level.

Pin It on Pinterest