Mark French

Twenty-year GAL member Mark French has been making guitars since about 1990. He is a professor at Purdue, where he runs the Guitar Lab. He was trained as an aerospace engineer and worked several different places before fetching up at Purdue in 2004. In addition to making his own instruments, he teaches a guitar design and manufacturing class and writes books. So far, he’s done three books on guitars and one on nonlinear optimization. Surprisingly, the movie rights for all four are still available.

▪ bio current as of 2024

By the same author:
  1. Changing Guitar-Body Resonant Frequencies
  2. Measuring the Breaking Strength of Steel Guitar Strings
  3. Let’s Catch Up With Richard Bruné and Marshall Bruné
  4. Reducing Frequency Error in Electric Guitars
  5. Using Soundhole Inserts to Vary the Lower Resonant Frequencies of an Acoustic Guitar
  6. An Easy Fretboard-Tapering Jig
  7. Helmholtz Resonance in Acoustic Guitars
  8. It Worked for Me: Sizing Plastic Thumb Picks
  9. It Worked for Me: Humidifier from Ball-Point Pen
  10. Measuring Mechanical Properties of Neck Blanks
  11. The Musical Instrument Museum — A Must-See for Luthiers
  12. The Charles Fox Guitar-Building Method, Part Six
  13. Guitar Making as a Teaching Tool
  14. Letter: Response to: Seeking plans for Scaled-Down Classical Guitars
  15. Letter: Charles Fox Neck Angle Sander
  16. Letter: Sealer for MDF Jigs
  17. The Charles Fox Guitar-Building Method, Part Five
  18. Measuring Resonant Frequencies of an Acoustic Guitar
  19. The Charles Fox Guitar-Building Method, Part Four
  20. The $75 Guitar Challenge
  21. The Charles Fox Guitar-Building Method, Part Three
  22. Guitar Making with an X-Carve CNC Router
  23. The Charles Fox Guitar-Building Method, Part Two
  24. The Charles Fox Guitar-Building Method, Part One
  25. Flamenco on the Front Range
  26. CNC Routers for Luthiers
  27. Mechanical Impedance
  28. A Guitar Is Born: Attending Charles Fox’s Hands-On Guitar Making Course
  29. Guitar Making: The Luthier’s Bench and the Factory
  30. A DRO Fret Slotter
  31. Making Long-Radius Curve Templates
  32. Meet the Maker: Mark French
  33. A Better Approximation to the Rule of 18
  34. A Simple Modification to Reduce Frequency Errors in Guitars
  35. Questions: Writing a Book on Guitar Building
  36. An Automated Fret Slotting Machine
  37. Making a Truly Flat Sanding Bar
  38. It Worked for Me: Knobs
  39. It Worked for Me: String Dampening
  40. Questions: Wood beam
  41. An Optical Sensor For Detecting String Motion
  42. Reducing Build Variation In Arched Plates
  43. Inharmonicity of Guitar Strings
  44. Letter to the Editor: Typo in AL#100 in his article
  45. Questions: North American Wood
  46. Taylor Today
  47. Build Variation in a Group of Acoustic Guitars
  48. A Different Way of Defining Body Shapes