Blog

Your guitar was playing great with sweet low action, then suddenly the strings are buzzing against the frets and/or you notice your fingers catching on the fret ends as you move along the fretboard. What’s going on? Buzz and sprout are problems that crop up in the wintertime, especially for newer guitars. The culprit is low humidity. As you may know, warm air can hold more moisture than cold air, so in the winter outside air is much drier than it is in the summer. When you tu

The arm bevel makes the guitar more comfortable to play. Flatpick, fingerpicks or bare fingers—I love the volume and sustain that a big-bodied dreadnaught provides. It’s the perfect design for a bluegrass player or flatpicker who performs standing up and needs to be heard over the band. Martin Guitars invented the dreadnaught and, along with most other manufacturers, gives them necks that are a relatively narrow 1-11/16 inches wide at the nut—perfect for most flatpickers.  

There’s the fretboard, two pieces of binding, the heel cap and seven fret marker inlays. That’s eleven. You can easily see all of those....

I held my breath as Ryan opened the case and took out his newly completed guitar. I was pretty confident he would like it because we...

When I was 8 years old, I wanted to play the piano. That in itself was a little strange since no one related to me had any interest in...

The whisper of a sharp chisel paring a brace While carving the braces for Ryan’s guitar I got to thinking about why this is my favorite part of guitar building. It really does have a Zen quality.   Brace carving requires the kind of focus that lets me empty my mind of all life’s distractions. This begins with honing the chisels. I zero in on the edge until it is sharp enough to shave hair off my arm. Then the chisel slices effortlessly into the soft quartersawn spruce of the

Lately I have been making rosettes from the tree. No, not The Tree, that log of quilted mahogany that sells for thousands of dollars per...

I began building my first commission, an OM with a cedar top and cherry back and sides being made specifically for Ryan MacDougall.