Category Archives: author

Robert Anderson

Robert Anderson had to wait until he was retired before he could take on banjo work as a profession, an all too common story among luthiers. His skills at wood carving and inlay are known around the world. He lives in the glorious hills of North Carolina.

▪ bio current as of 2021

Jay Anderson

JWA Guitars

Twenty-two year GAL member Jay Anderson met his mentor Jim Olson in 2003 and subsequently built ten instruments that closely followed tradition in form, finish, and wood choice. He then made a conscious hard-left turn and began building instruments that are distinctly nontraditional, especially in their visual aspect. He hopes they will inspire the music of players and the imagination of collectors.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Andrea Andalo

Andrea Andalò is a guitarist, clarinetist, and surgeon who made a plywood balalaika at age eight with, as he says, “disgusting results.” After years of making furniture for family and friends, he “realized that a table did not sound well” and so returned to lutherie. He has made classic and steel string guitars and a true balalaika, and current projects include two lutes.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Ken Altman

Altman Bows

Twelve-year GAL member Ken Altman began his lutherie career in 1975, working in a violin shop in Berkeley, California. He began making bows in 1993, and has been a full time bow maker for eighteen years.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Randy Allen

Allen Guitars & Lutherie Supplies

Randy Allen is a supplier of cast mandolin tail pieces, inlay materials, and tonewoods, and provides a fret-slotting service to the luthier community. He is also the new owner of the ClimateCase company. Allen currently builds resophonic guitars, mandolins, and acoustic guitars in several models.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Dan Alexander

Dan Alexander Audio

Four-year GAL member Dan Alexander has spent the last three years learning to build guitars in his bathroom. In his spare time, he’s a dealer in professional recording gear and musical instruments, a published author, and has written songs for Eddie Money, Greg Kihn, and others.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Nicolo Alessi

Alessi Tuning Machines

Nicolò Alessi is a guitarist, lutenist, and retired industrial designer who lives along beautiful Lago Maggiore in Northern Italy. Nicolo’s innovative tuning machines, which he makes in both historical copies and modern designs, are known for their precise workmanship and hand engraving. He is very proud of his region, his work, and his family.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Larry Baeder

Larry Baeder has been a studio musician and recording artist for almost three decades. He has played guitar for artists as diverse as Carly Simon, Bo Diddley, The Temptations, Chuck Jackson, Ben E. King, Isaac Hayes, Jay McShann, Henry Butler, Jane Sibery, and The Staple Singers. Larry resides in New York City.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Juan Oscar Azaret

Azaret Guitars

Twenty-one-year GAL member Juan Oscar Azaret is a native of Cuba who immigrated to the USA in the early ’60s. He holds degrees in electrical engineering and worked for over three decades for Bell Labs (and subsequent spin-offs and acquisitions). He has built and played classical guitars and is now a professional luthier and part-time teacher of electrical engineering. He serves on the board of the Boston Classical Guitar Society.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Andy Avera

After almost thirty years of making music, Andy Avera has developed a deep appreciation for the fine art of lutherie. A technical systems engineer by day, most of Andy’s nights and weekends are filled raising kids and playing music with his wife Audrey, a florist by trade.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Pierre Audinet

Sixteen-year GAL member Pierre Audinet believes his love for wood is hereditary, passed down from centuries of woodworking ancestors. In his day job he travels to places as varied as Vietnam, Brazil, Yemen, and Djibouti to convince governments that investing in renewable energy is probably a good idea. He has been steadily building less than one classical guitar a year in Washington, DC, practicing lutherie skills acquired with masters in Sigüenza, Paris, Granada, and Firenze. He now pretends to be an enlightened amateur.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Andrew Atkinson

First-time American Lutherie author Andrew Atkinson is doing postgraduate work at London Guildhall University to recreate an authentic Elizabethan luthier’s workshop. This gives him a legitimate reason to poke around in old breweries.

▪ bio current as of 2002

Mike Ashley

Twelve-year GAL member Mike Ashley, exercising his Purdue pharmacy degree, “dealt drugs” to work his way through seminary, whereupon he awoke to find himself commissioned an Air Force chaplain for a twenty-six-year stint. Very early on, a Mississippi luthier evangelized him. Since the 1969 first instrument baptism, he’s balanced lutherie and other callings, recently retiring as Episcopal-Lutheran campus minister at Ball State University.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Kevin Aram

Aram Guitars

Twenty-two-year GAL member, GAL Convention lecturer, and AL contributor Kevin Aram lives and works with his wife Alison in lovely rural North Devon. His fine traditional classical guitars find homes all over the globe. For fun he enjoys building cigar-box guitars, putting Telecaster necks on old tins, and making music with his friends.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Bill Beadie

Four-year GAL member Bill Beadie spends most of his days figuring out how to make it safe to breathe the air in industrial settings. On the side, he studies guitar making with John Greven, “the best guitar maker ever.”

▪ bio current as of 2005

Thomas Bazzolo

Thomas B Bazzolo

Thomas Bazzolo began building classical guitars in 1983. Tom’s teacher the late Frank Haselbacher who is known for his “Augustine” guitars. After Haselbacher’s death, Tom inherited many of his clients. Tom built and repaired classical guitars in Connecticut for many years until relocating to Sullivan, Maine. He has retired from guitarmaking and now is a casual bladesmith.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Frederick Battershell

Fred Battershell makes a great variety of instruments including dulcimers, viols, psalteries, hurdy gurdies, and crwths. He has been a member for twenty-five of the last twenty-eight years, and has written a number of reviews for our pages.

▪ bio current as of 1987

John C. Bartlett

John Bartlett retired from the U.S. Navy in 1984, then retired from public accounting in 2010. He started playing guitar back in the Jurassic Period (1960 or thereabout) but didn’t become interested in guitar construction until around 1989. A luthier friend suggested he try building one. Since then, he’s built around forty guitars, an F-style mandolin, and four banjos. “I’ll keep doing it until I get it right,” he says.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Pete Barthell

Seven-year GAL member Pete Barthell trained as a mechanical engineer at Michigan State, Northwestern, and University of Michigan, then spent forty-one years in electrical manufacturing. He built his first guitar in 1976. It flew apart. He’s now working on classical #140 in the rural wilds of the Olympic Peninsula.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Sean Barry

When 19-year GAL member Sean Barry was 12 he was offered the choice of learning to play bluegrass banjo and guitar or becoming a herpetologist to study snakes and lizards. Since both involved scales, he saw little difference between them and he pursued them both with equal fervor. He spent ten of the next fifty-four years as a professional road musician and much of the rest as a professional herpetologist, not to mention as a bus driver and diesel mechanic for his traveling band. Along the way he developed an interest in the way wooden instruments were made and repaired and he has pursued lutherie tenaciously since the late 1960s. His lutherie focus is the F-5 mandolin but he also builds flat top guitars and even the occasional solid body electric. He hopes to write more for American Lutherie, especially during the winter when the snakes are hibernating.

▪ bio current as of 2016

Samuel Barnes

New Guild member Sam Barnes is a husband, father, and teacher who enjoys refactoring complex concepts into tangible analogies and actionable tasks. When not herding cats in the professional world or training budding project managers in academia, Sam enjoys football (soccer for the Yanks), cycling with his wife, and playing music with his kids. He has designed a bass guitar for his eldest son, and maintains lofty luthieristic aspirations, but has never actually constructed a guitar. He secretly hopes that his writings will inspire donations to his burgeoning workshop.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Don Barnes

Don Barnes

Sam is a husband, father, and teacher who enjoys refactoring complex concepts into tangible analogies and actionable tasks. When not herding cats in the professional world or training budding project managers in academia, Sam enjoys football (soccer for the Yanks), cycling with his wife, and playing music with his kids. He has played guitar for over 30 years and while he has designed a bass guitar for his eldest son, and maintains lofty luthieristic aspirations, he has never actually constructed a guitar (he secretly hopes that his writings will inspire donations to his burgeoning workshop).

▪ bio current as of 2022

Roman Barnas

North Bennet St. School

Roman Barnas is the Head Instructor of the Violin Department at the North Bennet Street School, Boston. He was born in Zakopane, Poland and entered the Secondary School of Fine Arts in Zakopane at the age of 14, when he first began making violins. He went on to the Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznan, Poland, where he studied music and violinmaking for five more years. Roman came to the U.S. in 1996 to work at Psariano’s Violins in Troy, Michigan. He studied violin making in with Boyd Poulsen and violin restoration with Hans Nebel. He plays violin, accordian and double bass.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Alain Bieber

Fourteen-year GAL member Alain Bieber was born in Paris and worked on large transportation projects in Europe as a civil engineer for forty years. He worked on a PhD in Berkeley, California for three years in spite of musical (and other) distractions. A lifelong committed and ungifted guitar player, he started lutherie in 1996 at his retirement, as a consolation. He says that it works.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Ted Beringer

Read Ted Beringer’s memoriam

Twenty-five-year member and retired electrician Ted Beringer saw a Fender being played in 1950, decided he could build that, and kept doing it. In 1982 Johnny Smith came to Billings, and his music inspired Ted to build archtops. He also builds flattops, nylon strings, and mandolins, all with an unconventional flair.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Tobias Berg

-20230718

Twelve-year Guild member Tobias Berg built his first guitar in the same year that he joined the GAL. A year later he left his native country of Sweden to study classical guitar making in Canada, England, and the USA, finally settling in Germany. When he is not building guitars, he enjoys a walk in the woods with his wife and tending his Bonsai trees outside the workshop.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Brent Benfield

Thirty-one-year GAL member Brent Benfield has been making wooden boxes to play music since 1972, if you count loudspeakers. Too much school and highly educated parents are part of the recipe. Millwright, cabinet builder, painter, solder tech, model builder, audiophile, orchardist, luthier. Built a rifle, a canoe, a bicycle, golf clubs, his shop, a car. You’d think he could find a real job.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Ed Beaver

Ed Beaver Instruments

Ed Beaver attended Guitar Research and Design in 1980, learning from George Morris and Charles Fox. He recently attended a refresher course with George Morris at Vermont Instruments in Post Mills, Vermont. He has since opened Ed Beaver Guitars where he is developing a line of instruments designed for the working musician. He has been a Guild member on and off since 1980.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Charles Beare

John & Arthur Beare

After training in Mittenwald and New York, Charles Beare returned to London to work for, and later run the family violin business, J&A Beare Ltd. Charles has become one of the world’s foremost violin experts. He recently attended the Violin Society of America’s 32nd Annual Convention in Portland, Oregon to lecture and to serve as a judge at their 16th International Competition. It was his fourth time serving as a VSA competition judge.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Reg Beardsley

Reg Beardsley took degrees in English and geology and then spent his career as a geophysicist in the oil industry. Devoid of any musical talent, it has taken him 45 years to reach the point of being able to improvise freely on guitar over a limited range of styles. He still has not built one, but has repaired a few and has several awaiting attention. In part the delays are caused by having far too many interests, a 5000 volume technical library, and a vast array of tools for working wood, metal, and electronics. His MS thesis was written on the nepheline syenite in Pulaski county Arkansas called pulaskite.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Allan Beardsell

Beardsell Guitars

Ten-year GAL member Allan Beardsell is a former student of Sergei DeJonge. He wasted his teens and twenties as a musician, and turned to guitar making as a way to get guitars cheap. Realizing his mistake, he started selling them to support the habit. He’s the provincial fencing champ in men’s épée, and plays in a kick-ass rock band, the DeadBeatles.

▪ bio current as of 2007

David Bolla

David Bolla graduated from Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in 2004, and in 2005 began repairing instruments for a small guitar store in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Working alongside the store’s owner, he helped grow the business to become a chain of six music-lesson studios throughout Metro-Detroit. In 2016, David and his wife moved to Payson, Arizona, where he now runs a small repair shop and services instruments for their local music store, Quiqtone Music and Supply.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Don P. Boivin

Don Boivin is a member of the GAL and of the New England Luthiers. A carpenter by trade, a musician by tenacity, and a stringed-instrument repairman by default, his lifelong love of wood has finally brought him to the onerous, yet thoroughly rewarding, pursuit of lutherie.

▪ bio current as of 2013

John Bogdanovich

Bogdanovich Guitars

Five-year GAL member John Bogdanovich is a luthier, author, guitarist, lutherie supplier, and teacher. He authored Classical Guitar Making: A Modern Approach to a Traditional Design and produced the 10-DVD set, Making a Concert Classical Guitar. He has a master’s degree in electrical engineering, worked at AT&T Bell Labs designing hardware, and completed the two-year fine woodworking program with James Krenov.

▪ bio current as of 2014

James Blilie

Barbarossa Guitars

Twenty-one-year GAL member James Blilie builds steel string and classical guitars, plus a few violins, resonator guitars, ukuleles, and Weissenborn-style lap steel guitars. He enjoys playing fingerstyle guitar and playing/singing folk and rock music. He has been a structural/mechanical engineer for over thirty-one years, working for Boeing, the FAA, Northwest Airlines, and Boston Scientific Corporation. He also enjoys muscle-powered fun in the outdoors with his family, and good food, wine, and beer.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Tom Blackshear

Tom Blackshear

Tom Blackshear started his lutherie career along with playing the flamenco guitar, and he has never lost his love for the romantic charms of Spain. He takes a leadership role in Internet chat groups, and shares his knowledge freely. Tom has been a GAL member for twenty-one of the last twenty-six years.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Andy Birko

Eight-year GAL member Andy Birko started making instruments as a hobby back in the mid-’90s, but when neither electrical engineering for the auto industry nor medical equipment sales really panned out, he turned his high-tech CNC hobby into a full-time business. Now Andy is the owner/operator of Birkonium LLC which manufactures many items for luthiers such as necks, inlay, and tools.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Dan’l Brazinski

Fourteen-year GAL member Dan’l Brazinski has been a picker since he was ten, and he got into lutherie work to afford nicer instruments. A local luthier warned him to quit before he was bitten by the bug but it was, of course, too late. That luthier later gave Dan’l his American Lutherie collection, beginning with AL#1. Dan’l’s eighteen-year-old son Luke Deuce grew up in the shop and began picking at an early age. Dan’l says, “I love it when people ask Luke about his ‘pre-war Martin,’ which he built in 2015.” He also has two Cheagals (Chihuahua/Dachshund/Beagles).

▪ bio current as of 2023

Gary Bray

Gary Bray retired from the real world in 2003 and has been making guitars ever since. He began playing bluegrass guitar for his dad’s band in 1965 at age ten.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Tobias Braun

Tobias Braun Guitars

Eighteen-year GAL member Tobias Braun handcrafts traditional classical guitars in Gaaden, Austria, and teaches a yearly guitar-making course in Ottenschlag, emphasizing the work of historic masters. When not cutting trees, making or restoring guitars, researching about guitars, or educating others about guitars, he enjoys spending his holidays in Sicily and his free time on the tennis court.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Chris Brandt

The 12th Fret

Twenty-year GAL member Chris Brandt made his first electric guitar in eighth grade. By eleventh grade he was working six days a week as a repair man at Sherman Clay Music in Portland. Many years later, he owned and worked at the long-standing Portland guitar shop, The 12th Fret. He retired in 2016, and he now lives in the country with his wife Carol and Smokey, his cat.

▪ bio current as of 2021

Don Bradley

Read Don Bradley’s memoriam

Don Bradley got involved with the GAL way back in 1977 as a logical consequence of his fascination with all types of musical instruments. He is a professional electrical engineer and is well known in the lutherie community for the signal generators that he has developed and sold for instrument analysis. Don also applies his engineering abilities to electric vehicle research, studies sustainable gardening, and takes care of his two llamas. As if that’s not enough, he can also be spotted at folk dance gatherings.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Richard Bozung

Richard Bozung has dedicated the past forty years of his life to simplifying music making for everyone. He holds degrees in engineering and business administration, worked in the Apollo program, helped found the Institute for Earth Education, was elected to the City Council of Ventura, California, has extensive music therapy experience, worked as an organic grower, and is a Montessori school music teacher. He is a leading advocate of cooperative sports and has recently focused on earth rewilding initiatives.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Jayson Bowerman

Bowerman Guitars

Jayson Bowerman discovered woodworking while studying manufacturing in college. He went on to be the head of R&D at Breedlove, as well as a musician and a professional athlete. These days he runs a one-man shop and stays active in the many outdoor opportunities of beautiful Central Oregon.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Paul Bordeaux

Bordeaux Inlay

Fourteen-year GAL member Paul Bordeaux started in lutherie in 1981 with only a Les Paul and his dad’s tools. He worked at Carruthers Guitars in the late ’80s. Paul specializes in custom inlays and designs for builders, but also for players around the world.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Ralph Bonte

Arrenbie Guitars

Seven-year GAL member Ralph Bonte was born and is still living in Bruges (Belgium) where he works in a psychiatric hospital. He builds and repairs guitars, and lately has a special fondness for Weissenborns and ukes. He’s the lead singer of the Belgian blues band Hideaway and founder of the gospel choir Soul Spirit. In June 2010 Ralph won the coveted lutherie prize “de Gouden bootschaaf” (“the Golden fingerplane”.)

▪ bio current as of 2010

Joe Browne

Three-year member Joe Browne came to the realization that he wanted to build a guitar in the mid-1960s, while he was in college. He didn’t actually do it until approaching retirement from his college mathematics teaching career. He enjoyed it so much that he made it a new hobby and is currently completing guitar number six.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Todd Brotherton

Todd Brotherton

The loves of thirty-six-year member Todd Brotherton’s life are his wife Peg, their dogs, fine woodwork (furniture making and lutherie), great Northern Italian espresso, vintage BMW motorcycles and woodworking machinery, rural life in the mountains… and the Guild, of course.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Mike Brittain

Mike Brittain began working wood in 1970. He was a GAL member from 1978 through 1984, building guitars at night while running a cabinet shop and raising a family. After selling the cabinet business in 2000, he happily returned to guitar making and the GAL with a more relaxed feeling of devotion.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Duane Brewer

Violin builder, Irish music and dance enthusiast, and backpacker Duane Brewer was among the first students in the violin-building program at Boston’s North Bennet Street School. After six years in Paul Schuback’s shop he is on his own, living and building near the beautiful Blue Mountains in northeast Oregon.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Larry Breslin

Deerhead Guitars

Longtime GAL member Larry Breslin caught the guitar bug in the early ’60s at a concert featuring Carlos Montoya and Sabicas. Soon realizing he could not sing or even tune a guitar, he decided to make one. Eventually help arrived in the form of the very first GAL publication. Nearly forty years later, he’s still making guitars.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Mark Brenner

Brenner Guitar Products

Mark Brenner has been working in the Milwaukee tool and die Industry since 1977. His firm Brenner Industries specializes in die-sinking and engraving for the trade. The Brenner Guitar Products Division was established in 2015 to develop and market the company’s guitar-related innovations.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Michael Breid

Michael Breid has been a GAL member on and off for the last forty-two years. He lives in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, where he likes to fly fish and feed the wild deer, foxes, and raccoons that visit him frequently. He repaired stringed instruments starting in 1968. Nowadays he likes to “keep his hands in the glue” by doing a few adjustments for friends or folks who pass through town.

▪ bio current as of 2022

James Buckland

Presbyterian College

Thirty year GAL member James Buckland began building as a kid to get the left handed guitars he couldn’t find. His doctoral research on the terz guitar, which included building his first terz guitar, earned him first prize in the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Graduate Endeavors from the University of South Carolina. Today, his research involving the early 19th century guitar is the central focus of his performance, lutherie, and teaching activities. Jim and his wife Karen are kept busy with their family of ten rescue cats.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Howard Bryan

Erstwhile GAL member G. Howard Bryan restores harps at H. Bryan & Co. Harpmakers (www.hbryan.com). He’s also a retired Marine officer and engineer who worked in the pharmaceutical and nuclear power industries.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Andre Brunet

Bruand Lutherie-Guitare

A luthier since 1970 and a teacher since 1973, André Brunet is founder and director of École-atelier Lutherie-Guitare Bruand, a private lutherie school affiliated with l’Institut des Métiers d’Art, of the college du Vieux-Montréal, based in Montréal.

▪ bio current as of 2012

R.E. Brune

R.E. Brune

R.E. Bruné was on the Guild’s very first membership list in 1972. He’s a GAL founding member, a former Guild president and board member, the organizer of our 1975 convention, and a frequent author and lecturer. He’s a classic guitar maker and dealer, flamenco artist, and father of a luthier. And a grandpa, perhaps of a luthier. We’ll see.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Marshall Brune

Marshall Bruné grew up at the bench of his father, R.E. Bruné, then graduated from the Violin Making School of America and completed an internship with Carl Becker. He makes and restores classical guitars as well as making orchestral string instruments.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Ron Bushman

As a teenager, Ron Bushman built a “guitar” from 1/8-inch plywood and a 4×4 from his dad’s garage. He built classical and flamenco guitars during the ’60s, then had a career as a mechanical engineer. He attended ASL in the ’90s, and is now retired.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Michael Burton

Nine-year GAL member Michael Burton has been a guitarist since age thirteen, and got into guitar repairs about eleven years ago. He soon realized that playing the guitar was only part of the quest; learning what goes into a guitar’s construction and what makes it play well is the other half of the equation. He studied classical music and taught guitar at a music college in Newfoundland, Canada for a few years, then studied electronics engineering. He is always ready to talk your ear off about anything related to guitars, whether it is playing, music theory, or repair work.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Chris Burt

Chris Burt

Chris Burt lives, works, and plays on the North Olympic Peninsula, where he’s serious about taking life less seriously. When he’s not enjoying the beauty of making and playing mandolins, he’s hanging out with his wife, cat, horses, or the neighbors’ dogs. He can often be found riding Mai, his Icelandic mare, somewhere along the Straits of Juan de Fuca.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Brian Burns

Lessons in Lutherie

Brian Burns came under the influence of engineers at a tender age. He does a lot of number crunching during the building process, but insists that it’s the player’s Thrill-O-Meter reading that determines the success of an instrument. He makes classical and flamenco guitars and teaches guitar making in scenic Fort Bragg, California.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Fred Carlson

Beyond the Trees

Forty-seven-year GAL member Fred Carlson grew up in rural Vermont, living for twenty years on a commune of woodworkers and musicians; making instruments seemed like the thing to do. Decades later on the other side of the continent, it still does. He’s currently building 39-string Harp Sympitars and grafting fruit trees in his copious free time.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Steve Card

Wildcard Guitars

Like The Duke in the movie The Shootist, Steve Card is willin’. He’s willin’ to try things others will not, so he’s willin’ to make musical instruments. He succeeds more often than not, through persistence and blissful ignorance. He loves and thanks his teachers, but is not attached to their methods. He has no Facebook page (he’s in the Witless Protection Program), so an e-mail address will have to do.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Jan Van Cappelle

The Dutch Luthier

Dutch luthier Jan van Cappelle began making instruments at fourteen, during a dull family vacation. After dropping out of high school he went to Belgium and graduated from the International Lutherie School Antwerp (ILSA), then worked for a Dutch guitar company. Burned out at age twenty-five, he decided to follow his true passion of making historical lutes and guitars, as well as contemporary guitars. His work combines theory and practice, arts and technology, historical research and modern design. He recently published Making Masonite Guitars, a twenty-five page book, entirely written and drawn by hand, that helps you to make Danelectro-style guitars.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Jose Cano

The child of immigrants from Jalisco, Mexico, Jose Cano holds a degree in mechanical engineering but has dedicated himself to music full time. Sustainable living, the Dharma, and swimming in the ocean are among his passions.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Mark Campellone

Campellone Guitars

Mark Campellone has been involved with repairing, designing and building guitars since 1978. He has been building traditional style acoustic archtop guitars exclusively since 1991 and has earned a reputation as one the prominent builders in his field.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Fred Campbell

Read Fred Campbell’s memoriam

Fred Campbell is a familiar face a GAL conventions, and has been a member for over fourteen years. With over 35 years experience in lutherie, Fred is considered a Master Finisher and Luthier. Doing business as Fred Campbell is a familiar face a GAL conventions, and has been a member for over fourteen years. With over 35 years experience in lutherie, Fred is considered a Master Finisher and Luthier. Doing business as F.W. Campbell & Sons in San Jose, California, Fred had clients from around the globe seeking his guitar finishing services and consultation. He is currently working with Tom Ribbecke at RGC in Healdsburg, California.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Todd Cambio

Fraulini Guitars

Four-year GAL member Todd Cambio builds guitars and mandolins that focus on traditional techniques and materials like ladder bracing, French polishing, and hide glue, as well as domestic woods like birch, white oak, walnut and poplar, which were once frequently used but which have fallen out of favor in modern times. Todd started the Fraulini Guitar Company in 2000 and has worked to provide instruments for traditional musicians. He has also done extensive research on Italian and Mexican immigrant luthiers who built instruments in the early 20th century. He works with his sons Felix, Oscar, and Leo.

▪ bio current as of 2024

John Calkin

J Calkin Guitars

Thirty-nine-year GAL member and frequent American Lutherie author John Calkin continues to search for life’s meaning in rural Virginia. “I thought I had it figured out, but the Tao backtracked on me and got away,” he reports.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Graham Caldersmith

Read Graham Caldersmith’s memoriam

Twenty-nine-year GAL member Graham Caldersmith started out studying reentry dynamics of spacecraft, but ended up studying the acoustic dynamics of guitars and violins. He lectured at the 1982 and 1998 GAL Conventions. Recently he has focused on developing a classical guitar family and refining the sound of violins made in Australian tonewoods.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Bruce Calder

Nine-year GAL member Bruce Calder unfortunately lets his day job get in the way of making guitars. He is hoping to increase his output from one every two years to two every one year.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Greg Byers

Guitars of Gregory Byers

I have been wrestling with lutherie since 1981 (I joined the Guild in 1983, if I recall correctly). My long-suffering wife and sons have tolerated and supported my affliction. I have built about 350 classical guitars along the way. I find it never really gets old because it is so hard to meet my expectations.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Bradley Clark

Cole Clark Guitars

Bradley Clark was once an art student with a strong interest in science and engineering. He found himself re-engineering Australia’s Maton Guitar’s production and indeed their business. He feels that many aspects of guitar making can be simplified, given advances in technology. His late father would have said “Give it a go, you mug.” At Cole Clark Guitars, he has.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Ermanno Chiavi

Chiavi Guitars

Swiss luthier Ermanno Chiavi, a guitar maker since 1985 and a GAL member since 1995, has developed unconventional guitars in various sizes, tunings, and string counts. With the Zurich University for Technology, he is researching the acoustics of classical guitars. Ermanno has been teaching classes for many years, including repair and construction courses.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Kerry Char

Char Guitars

Twenty-year GAL member Kerry Char repairs and restores fine acoustic instruments and still finds time to build classical, flamenco, and steel string guitars, not to mention Weissenborns and ukes. He has a special interest in and reputation for his work on harp guitars — restoring them, and building replicas of wonderful old Dyers and Knutsons.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Aaron Cash

Aaron Cash is a five-year Guild member building acoustic guitars when he isn’t teaching 6th graders the joy of reading. Still a kid at heart, he can be found playing a game of pinball in his workshop while the glue is drying. Aaron practices what he teaches his students: “Your best is good enough.”

2024

C.F. Casey

C.F. Casey Guitars

Forty-six-year Guild member C.F. Casey built his first dulcimer back in 1978, and studied with Božo Podunovac in 1980. Fred has lately been building a lot of ukuleles and has become an enthusiastic practitioner of Hawaiian steel guitar.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Bonnie Carol

Bonnie Carol

Bonnie Carol has built, written about, and performed upon mountain and hammered dulcimers for three and a half decades. She has recently teamed up with luthier Max Krimmel (www.MaxKrimmel.com) to expand her dulcimer building work. One of her choice gigs is as organizer of Moons and Tunes wilderness rafting trips where all participants bring instruments and jam down the river. She and Max also play African marimba and Max built their set of eight marimbas from the small sopranino to the huge fan bass (www.maxkrimmel.com/Marimba/MarimbaMain.htm)

▪ bio current as of 2008

Luis Colmenares

An engineer by trade, Luis Colmenares is a husband and a father from Venezuela who works as a project manager in the health sector. He spends most of his spare time tinkering about all things instrument-making related, from acoustic guitars, to electric basses, to effect pedals, and Eurorack modules. As a maker he sees his rather experimental instruments as means to learn something new, and also as opportunities to combine his passions for music, design, wood, and electronics.

▪ bio current as of 2021

Bill Collings

Collings Guitars

The elusive Bill Collings is a shy and gentle creature of the Texas desert. He was spotted at GAL conventions in 1977 and 1978, although the astute luthiologist will note that at that time he was wearing the longer plumage of the starving artist/craftsman.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Erick Coleman

The D-Rays

Erick Coleman has been repairing guitars for over 25 years, working by appointment only out of his home shop in Athens, Ohio. As senior technical advisor at Stewart-MacDonald, Erick participates in the research and development of new tools, writes product instructions, and educates the staff. He has conducted numerous guitar repair workshops at the Guild of American Luthiers and Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans conventions as well as at the Northwoods Seminar and Purdue University. A guitarist for nearly 4 decades, Erick performs regularly with his band the D-Rays.

▪ bio current as of 2017

David Cohen

Cohen Musical Instruments

Twenty-year GAL member Dave Cohen built his first mandolin in 1973 while a graduate student at Florida State U. He taught college chemistry and did research in Richmond, Virginia, from 1974 to 2003. He returned to lutherie in 1997, and in 1999 began a collaboration with Dr. Tom Rossing, researching the physics of mandolin-family instruments.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Ben Cohen

Lutenist, amateur luthier, and ten-year GAL member Ben Cohen started building wind and percussion instruments from plumbing supplies while in college, inspired by Bart Hopkin’s brilliant quarterly journal Experimental Musical Instruments (www.windworld.com). Ben runs a klezmer band, plays in a Jewgrass band and a Baroque trio, and keeps his day job.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Bishop Cochran

Bishop Cochran

Bishop Cochran, a ten year Guild member, is now a guitarist and songwriter living in Spain. He has been a designer of guitars and amps, and he is the designer and manufacturer of the first plunge router base for the Dremel tools. He has designed many tools for both Allied Lutherie and LMI. His router bases are currently listed at Allied Lutherie and sold through the shop in Portland, Oregon and Bishop’s website.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Jim Clay

Six-year GAL member Jim Clay has been building on a hobby level since 1978 when his wife Susan gave him a plank of padouk and Irving Sloane’s book for a wedding present. A self-confessed “tool junkie,” Jim runs a custom cabinet shop at the University of Calgary, plays guitar, banjo, mandolin, and dulcimer. He has two wonderful kids, Julia, age seven, and Thomas age two.

▪ bio current as of 2000

Chelsea Clark

Guitars and Caffeine

At age eighteen, Chelsea Clark got a weekend job sweeping the shop of Dan Erlewine. Soon she was assisting Dan’s repair team and learning about lutherie. In the fifteen years since then, she has devoted years to formal schooling in cultural studies and industrial design, and held a series of employments in guitar repair shops including Gibson’s restoration shop and one of LA’s legacy music stores. In 2016, she “decided it was time to grow up,” so she opened her own repair shop, Guitars And Caffeine.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Birck Cox

One-year GAL member Birck Cox went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon in the 1970s. There he was friends with Ellen Black, who married lute maker Robert Lundberg. Birck acquired a graduate degree in medical illustration, and spent the next forty years drawing guts, not to put too fine point on it. But his attachment to lutherie is not simply journalistic. While a college student he learned to play the bagpipe, but later suffered some facial lacerations that made playing difficult. When he first heard the droning sound of a hurdy-gurdy, however, he was able to remember the pipe tunes as if played on a stringed instrument, and is slowly building up the knowledge and woodworking skills to build a hurdy-gurdy.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Ray Cowell

The Ukes of Northumberland

Ray Cowell, sixty-two, started his working life in the coal mines and retired after twenty-five years of running his own paint-industry business. He made his first electric guitar in the early ’70s, and in retirement he discovered the ukulele. He asked for uke-building help via the Internet. Luthier Tom Johnson lives close by, and answered. Now they are firm friends.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Stephan Connor

Connor Guitars

Thirteen-year member and established classical guitar maker Stephan Connor recalls that when he first got the fever to build a guitar, Richard Bruné recommended he join the GAL. He soon received a back issue reviewing lutherie schools which led him to study with David Freeman of Timeless instruments. Seems the Guild was “instrumental” to his career.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Marc Connelly

Nine-year Guild member Marc Connelly is an amateur luthier who has built about five guitars a year since 1998 with the help of GAL reference materials and the network of kindred spirits that is the GAL membership. Marc is a thirty-year veteran advertising agency art director, sits on the Board of Directors for the Hydroplane & Raceboat Museum, and is a principal member of the deck crew/restoration crew of the 1982 Atlas Van Lines and the Slo Mo V.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Robin Connaughton

Three-year GAL member Robin Connaughton was a folk musician in the 1970s. His first work on a musical instrument came when he got a basket-case Gibson J-50A and learned how to fix and improve it. After earning degrees in metallurgy and materials science, he worked as a research scientist for Australian steelworks, and then as a teacher and materials consultant at Sydney Technical College. In retirement, he has been researching the effect of various materials as saddle inserts for guitar bridges, and the suitability of bamboo for guitar manufacture.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Michael Cone

Michael Cone Classical Guitars

Michael Cone built his first classical guitar forty-two years ago and became a member of the Guild at its inception. He is currently engaged in the development of analysis systems that optimize structures that vibrate, including musical instruments, though vuvuzelas may prove too challenging.

▪ bio current as of 2010

James Condino

James Condino

Mandolin Magazine columnist, Fine Woodworking author, regular AL contributor, and GAL presenter, James Condino has been building instruments for over forty years. He’s also a serious outdoorsman who guides whitewater expeditions and takes fine guitars and mandolins to volcanic summits. He survived Hurrican Helene, but a quarter of the town of Asheville did not.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Arianna Colombo

Arianna Colombo was born in Italy and became familiar with GAL while attending the Civica Scuola di Liuteria in Milan, where she learned how to build guitars, lutes, and Italian mandolins for four years. After graduating cum laude, she is gaining experience in some workshops and laboratories, and is also working for the Italian authorized “support and repair departments” of Martin, Taylor and Bourgeois. Fond of custom steel string guitars, she specializes in highly detailed decorations and inlays.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Olivier Fanton d’Andon

Olivier Fanton d’Andon comes from a family of musicians. He learned the flute at an early age and later the classical guitar. He pursued medical studies, but decided to make musical instruments instead. He has received many awards for his lutherie work, culminating in his designation as “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,” the highest national distinction in France.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Mark Dalton

Huss & Dalton Guitar Company

Mark Dalton grew up in a Virginia family in love with bluegrass music, and is an excellent guitarist and banjo picker. He joined the crew at Stelling Banjos for several years before having Jeff Huss (also a Stelling alumnus) build him a guitar. They got along famously and soon formed Huss & Dalton Musical Instruments, a company that is now over 20 years old.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Curtis Daily

Curtis Daily is a double bassist specializing in historical performance. He performs regularly with Portland Baroque Orchestra and Seattle Baroque Orchestra, as well as with other early music groups and festivals across North America. His interest in historical bass strings led him to Aquila Corde, whose gut strings he has used and vended for a number of years. He enjoys playing the classical guitar for diversion and has several stacks of fine tonewood in his basement that will someday become classical guitars if he ever comes up with enough free time.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Tom Cussen

Cussen Banjos

Tom Cussen came to the banjo in the late 1960s and was a founder of the popular band Shaskeen in 1970. While working as an electronics technician at University College Galway he began building banjos and soon expanded into repair, restoration, and manufacturing. Today Clareen Banjos is the premier banjo maker in Ireland.

▪ bio current as of 2013

John Curtis

John Curtis is a partner in Luthier’s Mercantile, a founding member of WARP, and a world traveler on behalf of the world’s dwindling supplies of tropical hardwoods.

▪ bio current as of 1993

Joseph Curtin

Joseph Curtin

Joseph Curtin completed his first violin in 1978, and has worked as a maker in Toronto, Paris, and Cremona. In 1985 he and Gregg Alf established the firm of Curtin & Alf in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Curtin opened his own studios in 1997. Along with researcher Fan Tao, Curtin is founder and co-director of the VSA Oberlin Acoustics Workshop. He has lectured on violin making at universities and professional associations throughout America and Europe.

▪ bio current as of 2009

William Cumpiano

Wm R. Cumpiano

William R. Cumpiano, a professional luthier for forty years, coauthored the bestselling textbook Guitarmaking: Tradition & Technology. He is a founder of the Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans and the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project, and a contributor to Acoustic Guitar and Guitar Player magazines as well as the defunct Journal of Guitar Acoustics. His current studio, Becker & Cumpiano Stringed Instruments is located in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he makes guitars individually, teaches, and researches Latin American stringed instruments.

▪ bio current as of 2006

John Cross

Eleven-year GAL member John Cross started building in 2003 when he decided foolishly he could save money building a guitar over buying one. Other hobbies include boomerangs and reorganizing his shop at least once every guitar (sometimes more).By day he is a manager for a team of oilfield chemists and engineers in Alberta, where he lives with his wife Katy and two sons. He builds guitars and the occasional ukulele at a pace that makes snails feel good about themselves.

▪ bio current as of 2016

Kjell Croce

Croce Guitars

Twenty-three-year GAL member Kjell Croce is a graduate of the Red Wing School in Minnesota. He worked for Ron Pinkham at Woodsound Studios in Maine for five years before moving to Michigan, where he has worked in the repair department at Elderly Instruments for thirteen years. He also builds guitars under his own name.

▪ bio current as of 2017

William T. Crocca

While still a teenager, Seven-year GAL member William T. Crocca was introduced to lute construction by Meeme Malgi, a violin maker in the New York City area. Bill could no longer spend the required time with Mr. Malgi once college began, so he acquired a few books and began building his first guitar. Of course, that also involved building tools and fixtures. A few guitars were sold, one to a violinist in the Trenton, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Career and family displaced a good portion of his available lutherie time, and now in retirement he is once again building instruments and learning new techniques.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Bruce Creps

Notable Woods

Twelve-year GAL member Bruce Creps started his tonewood business in 1999, incidental to what he thought would be a new career in lutherie. He still hopes to dabble when he and his wife finish building their small passive-solar house. Bruce transports shipments under 100 lbs. via bicycle trailer, and deducts bicycle costs as a business expense.

▪ bio current as of 2007

John Decker

guitarmasterworks

John Decker trained as an aeronautical engineer at MIT and holds a Ph.D. in plasma physics from Cambridge University. He spent most of his career in the semiconductor and aerospace industries and briefly managed the Air Force’s optical observatory on Haleakala, Hawaii. While running a business making automated marine sextants, he started a back-burner project to make a stable and waterproof guitar of composite materials. This led to the development of the successful RainSong guitar. He retired from day-to-day operations at RainSong in 1998, and is now making classical guitars from exotic woods.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Randy DeBey

Bringing along a strong engineering and science background, Randy DeBey found his way to making and fixing violins by learning woodworking and making furniture for himself and others. He finished his first violin in 1991, spent a few years working in a violin shop in the late ’90s, and has had the good fortune of being his own boss ever since.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Robert Deacon

Six-year Guild member Bob Deacon has been working wood for thirty years. As a young classical guitarist he discovered Irving Sloane’s book and decided to have a go at building a classical guitar. The guitar turned out to be successful, and the process proved addictive.

▪ bio current as of 2004

Sergei de Jonge

Sergei de Jonge Lutherie

Sergei de Jonge apprenticed with Jean Larrivée in the early ’70s and has been a guitar maker and lutherie teacher ever since. He makes steel string guitars, classical guitars, and other guitar makers. Literally. A number of his kids have followed him into the family business.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Joshia de Jonge

Joshia de Jonge Guitars

Growing up in a family of guitar makers, Joshia de Jonge was thirteen when she built her first guitar in 1992. What began as an interesting pass-time has grown into a life’s passion of honing her craft. She learned her craft primarily from her father, Sergei de Jonge, and also spent time with Géza Burghardt, who taught her French polishing. She now resides in the Gatineau Hills of western Québec, Canada, where she enjoys balancing guitar work with raising her boys and spending time in the garden.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Ted Davis

Ted Davis was a GAL member for twenty-eight consecutive years. He was a frequent author and plan draftsman in our early days, spoke at GAL conventions, and was elected to the Guild’s Board of Directors in the ’80s. Ted passed away in late 2008. He will be missed by luthiers who knew him, and he should be thanked by those who did not; he helped to lay the foundations for the Golden Age of American Lutherie. Ted passed away in 2008

▪ bio current as of 2008

Rick Davis

Running Dog Guitars

After fifteen years of building, twelve-year GAL member Rick Davis has produced over 160 guitars. He was executive director of the Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans (ASIA) and editor of Guitarmaker magazine from 1999 to 2005. He moved to Seattle in 2006 to create a shared shop and lutherie center with wife Cat.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Keith Davis

After closing down the Michigan shop that he ran for nineteen years, twenty-year Guild member Keith Davis and his family moved on to Hammond, Louisiana where he reopened in mid-July. Then hurricane Katrina hit the area with devastating results. That changed everything.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Evan Davis

Evan Davis joined the Catgut Acoustical Society in 1976, earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from the U. of Washington with his work on the structural acoustics design of guitar soundboards in 1990. He has been a faculty member of the VSA’s Oberlin Violin acoustics workshop since 2006, and is currently employed as a Technical Fellow of the Boeing Company, directing research in structural acoustics, noise control, and sound quality engineering.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Michael DaSilva

DaSilva Ukulele Co.

Eight-year GAL member Michael DaSilva makes high-quality, handcrafted ukuleles. After falling in love with all things ukulele, he escaped the high-tech business world and began building instruments in 2004 and has built over 350 instruments to date. He continues to single-handedly build four or five instruments a month for ukulele enthusiasts around the globe.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Michael Darnton

Michael Darnton Violins

During his sixteen-year association with Bein & Fushi in Chicago, violin maker Michael Darnton had the opportunity to examine, photograph, and measure hundreds of Classical Period violins. He’s been a Guild member for a total of twenty-seven years, and is a past GAL columnist and convention speaker.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Manuel Diaz

As a teenager in Granada, Manuel Díaz apprenticed with Eduardo Ferrer and later in the 1960s learned from Manuel de la Chica. He is also an accomplished flamenco player.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Stuart Deutsch

New York based film sound recording engineer Stuart Deutsch is a ten-year GAL member who collects and plays archtops, classicals, and flattops. He met Fran‡ois Pistoius while working on a film in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2000 and has a small flattop, an archtop, a 12-string, and a classical made by him.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Ethan Deutsch

Four-year GAL member Ethan Deutsch has really been there, done that. He spent a year in Spain studying flamenco at age fifteen, and since then has worked as a musician, research chemist, custom cabinet maker, and production cabinet maker. And he has made a few guitars.

▪ bio current as of 2000

Michael DeLuca

Two-year GAL member Michael De Luca completed an electronics engineering diploma at age thirty-five, then worked on fiberoptic laser transmission systems for eighteen years. On his 50th birthday, his eldest daughter, Elena, gave him a book on how to make an electric guitar, and he built guitars for both daughters as a legacy. He now makes carved archtop and custom electric guitars and winds his own pickups. In 2010, his younger daughter, Deanna, registered him for GAL membership as a surprise gift, and in 2011, his wife Luisa convinced him to attend the 2011 GAL Convention. He owes his family for the passion he now has for making guitars and for their continuous inspiration and support. He names his guitars using their initials; the letters of the DELM logo represent Deanna, Elena, Luisa, and Michael.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Marco Del Pozzo

Marco Del Pozzo Custom Guitars

Marco Del Pozzo moved to Spain from his native Italy over twenty years ago to teach Italian in a private school. He spent five years as a finish carpenter in London and also imported handmade Spanish pottery. While there he found Dan Erlewine’s Guitar Player Repair Guide and he has been a full-time luthier for ten years, specializing in electric guitars and basses. Now back in Spain, he reports that bulls run past his shop on the main street of town each June, chasing people, during the local fiesta.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Paul Dzatko

Paul Dzatko is a ukulele and guitar builder who has been a Guild Member for fourteen years. Paul is a former scenic carpenter and stagehand who built sets for theater and motion pictures. He is now concentrating on crafting fine musical instruments.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Chris Dungey

Christopher Dungey

Nineteen-year GAL member Christopher Dungey is an award-winning maker of cellos with a degree in double bass performance. He attended The Newark School of Violin Making, then studied restoration with Hans Weisshaar and Thomas Metzler. He has been cutting and collecting cello wood since his student days in England.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Daniele Dubois

Danièle Dubois is an emeritus psycholinguist in the Lutherie-Acoustics-Music team at University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. Her work aims at identifying how cognitive categories for different sensory modalities (mainly vision, olfaction, and audition) are coupled to the diversity of the linguistic resources of languages and their uses in discourse by ordinary people as well as professionals and scientists, in a conceptual framework that can be qualified as situated cognitive semantics.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Mike Dotson

Located in Phoenix, Arizona, Mike Dotson has been a part-time builder now for about eight years. He started making metal-body resonators and now concentrates on wood-body resonators, electric guitars, and lap steels.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Mike Doolin

Mike Doolin

After sixteen years of full-time guitar making, thirty-two-year Guild member Mike Doolin retired from professional lutherie to play music full time. This doesn’t mean he has quit building guitars, it just means that now he gets to keep them all.

▪ bio current as of 2024

John Doan

John Doan

John Doan is a music historian, and Emmy-nominated composer/performer known for his pioneering efforts to revive the harp guitar. His latest CD The Lost Music Of Fernando Sor is the first recording of Sor’s music for the three-necked harpolyre. He is professor of music at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Dave Dillman

Long time GAL member Dave Dillman operated Experienced Instruments repairing, restoring, and reselling instruments in the Chicago area for several years. Most of his lutherie since 2005 has been keeping his personal fleet of Kay basses alive, while concentrating on his day job managing audio and video systems and production and playing in bluegrass jams around Santa Fe, New Mexico.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Steve Dickerson

Twelve-year GAL member Steve Dickerson took his grade-school class on a tour of the Pimentel guitar shop in Albuquerque, and there he caught the bug. Years later he began making instruments from firewood. He now builds and repairs guitars and ukes in a converted garage. He spent ten years in Thailand and is converting a 1929 Model “A” into a fuel-injected street rod.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Joseph Ennis

Joseph Ennis had a background in electronics and woodworking when he decided to restore a mandolin. He has now made several mandolins, beginning with a kit from Musicmakers. Joe also made a harp to prove a point about the notes of different musical scales: almost all of them are pitches that cannot occur on a piano.

▪ bio current as of 2002

Michael Elwell

Michael Elwell Guitars

Twenty-one-year member Michael Elwell built a dulcimer kit in 1974 and was hooked. Searching for info in libraries he discovered the GAL, and has been a member off and on since. After constructing dulcimers and citterns, he made a classical guitar at Leeds Guitar Making School in 1998. When his job as a foundry pattern maker and project manager went to China, he started making mostly classical and flamenco guitars in the woods of North Idaho where he lives with his wife of fifty years.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Sjaak Elmendorp

Twelve-year GAL member Sjaak Elmendorp has made classical and steel string guitars off-and-on for over thirty years. In addition, he has built acoustic bass guitars, archtops, ukuleles, mandolins, a kobza, and several balalaikas. Being trained as a physicist, he likes to apply modern mathematics to seek to improve upon the noble art of lutherie, only to find the old masters really had figured it all out!

▪ bio current as of 2023

Paul Eliasson

Paul Eliasson Guitars

Paul Eliasson studied political science and business management at Johns Hopkins University and is presently a management analyst at the National Institutes of Health. He began playing guitar at age ten. At age fourteen his father gave him a D-18 kit from The Guitarmaker’s Connection and the sawdust has not settled since.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Orn Eliasson

Fourteen-year GAL member Orn Eliasson is a physician in Baltimore specializing in pulmonary medicine, critical care, and occupational health. He began playing guitar at age seven using his sister’s songbook, and traveled from Europe to the USA at age nineteen to buy a Martin D-28 which still sounds and looks very nice, forty-seven years later. His interest in lutherie started when he gave his son, Paul, on his fourteenth birthday, a D-18 kit from The Guitarmaker’s Connection.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Franz Elferink

Elferink Guitars

Six-year GAL member Frans Elferink was born in the Netherlands in 1961, started playing guitar at age eleven, and built his first solidbody guitar at the age of eighteen. He has a degree in electronic engineering, and now builds archtop guitars as well as working part time in acoustical and electrical engineering.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Eddie Efendy

Eddy Efendy got his BS in mechanical engineering at Purdue in 2006, and his MS in mechanical engineering in 2010. Apparently happy with Purdue, he joined the faculty in the School of Engineering Technology, where he teaches classes in engineering mechanics.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Robert A. Edelstein

Eight-year GAL member Rob Edelstein is a urologist by profession. Raised in the Pacific Northwest and transplanted to New England, he has been building instruments in his spare time for the past ten years. He recently completed a long-scale mandola, although he was trying to build a short-scale octave mandolin. He is an avid reader of American Lutherie, and greatly appreciates all of the informative articles.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Ben Edelstein

Eight-year GAL member Rob Edelstein is a urologist by profession. Raised in the Pacific Northwest and transplanted to New England, he has been building instruments in his spare time for the past ten years. He recently completed a long-scale mandola, although he was trying to build a short-scale octave mandolin. He is an avid reader of American Lutherie, and greatly appreciates all of the informative articles.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Richard Echeverria

Twenty-eight-year Guild member Richard Echeverria attended the Roberto-Venn school in 1980 and has run his own repair shop since 1984. He also builds guitars, but he does that at home. He mentions that Echeverria is a Basque name, not Spanish.

▪ bio current as of 1992

Gila Eban

Gila Eban is a longtime GAL member, past Board of Directors member and convention lecturer. Apprenticed with Richard Schneider and studied with James D’Aquisto. Worked with Michael Kasha on guitar design. Was a member of the Catgut Acoustical Society. Is a member of the Acoustical Society of America. Participated and /or presented papers at conferences of these organizations and presented and authored/co-authored papers for their publications. Devised novel designs and methods for guitar soundhole decoration.

▪ bio current as of 2015

William Eaton

Roberto-Venn School of Lutherie

Early GAL member and Convention presenter William Eaton may be the Guild’s definitive Renaissance man. He has successfully melded together lutherie, musical composition, musical performance, teaching, and sports into one lifetime, achieving world-class results in all the categories. On top of all that, he’s the long-time Director of The Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Patrick Fanning

Patrick Fanning came to the GAL and lutherie in 2009 by way of building harpsichords and clavichords and restoring pianos. He prefers guitars now because the woods are more varied and interesting, and the instruments are much easier to store and move around. Patrick is also a watercolorist, writer, and publisher.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Kent Everett

Everett Guitars

Kent Everett has been building guitars since 1977, first on weekends while he did repair work on the weekdays. In the ’90s he was a one-man operation building fifty steel string guitars a year. In the ’00s he ramped down production and began offering a line of imported guitars. Now, after thirty-eight years in lutherie, his emphasis is shifting to teaching.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Taffy Evans

Taffy Evans — The Lone Luthier — Spent 30 years building and repairing guitars a thousand miles from anywhere, in Central Australia. Now works and lives in the small gold mining town of Charters Towers in North Queensland, for the past 10 years. Taffy builds guitars: Flat tops, Resonators, Hollow Neck Lap Steels, solid body electric guitars as well as Mandolins. Much of the time he is doing repairs for players up and down the North Queensland coast and hinterland. He plays in The Venus Blues Band. He’s been a Guild member for twenty-six of the last thirty years.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Monica Esparza

Esparza Guitars

Nineteen-year GAL member Mónica Esparza commutes easily between her two jobs: her family’s soft drink company and her guitar shop on the second floor of the same building. Besides being a passionate, intrepid traveler, she finds time for guitar lessons, long bike rides, and guitar shows and conventions.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Dan Erlewine

Dan Erlewine’s Guitar Shop

Thirty-four-year Guild member Dan Erlewine is known for finding and spreading efficient new tools and techniques for guitar makers and repairers, as well as for mentoring and promoting young talent in the lutherie field. He has been a constant presence in the American lutherie boom era, because he personifies the can-do ethos that underlies the whole dang movement: Figure something out and tell everybody about it. As a young man hoping to move from rocker to luthier, he found a generous mentor in Herb David of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dan has paid that forward many times.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Chuck Erikson

Duke of Pearl

Chuck Erikson, known as the Duke of Pearl, is a familiar and elaborate sight at GAL Conventions and other lutherie confabulations. He’s a former gold miner, and is currently helping luthiers and others understand the Lacey Act. He’s been a GAL member for a total of thirty-one years.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Daniel Fobert

Six-year GAL member Dan Fobert is a self-taught luthier who has been building traditional and nontraditional instruments since 1995. He enjoys traveling, camping, cooking, and winery hunting and has been spotted at BBQ cookoffs.

▪ bio current as of 2008

James Flynn

The Balalaika and Domra Association of America

Fifteen-year member Jim Flynn is a past author and an active member of the Balalaika and Domra Association of America. He is an Honorary Life member of the International Wood Collectors Society (IWCS). As an Associate Editor of that Society for many years he has edited and published several well accepted books in the “Useful Woods of the World” series. He is in the process of preparing a paper, long in the making, titled “Exploring the Science of the Sound of Wood.” Jim promises some provocative views on the role of wood in the quality of stringed instrument sound.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Gabriel Fleta

Grandson of Ignacio Fleta and son of Gabriel Fleta Sr., Gabriel Fleta Jr. has inherited the mantle of Fleta Guitars, along with a very long waiting list. He built his first guitar as a teenager, which continued the tradition of directly absorbing the indispensable knowledge from his forebears, whose workbenches are still part of his shop today. When not building guitars, he relaxes by collecting and repairing clocks.

▪ bio current as of 2016

Patrick Flanning

Patrick Fanning’s ArtWorks

Patrick Fanning came to GAL and lutherie in 2009, by way of his hobby of building harpsichords and clavichords and restoring pianos. He prefers guitars now because the woods are more varied and interesting, and the instruments are much easier to store and move around. Patrick is also a watercolorist, writer, and publisher.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Brian Flaherty

Brian Flaherty is a reference librarian at the New England School of Law library. He is not a lawyer — he doesn’t even play one on TV — and so nothing he says carries the weight of “legal advice.”

▪ bio current as of 2009

Gary Clayton Fisher

Solarez

Gary Clayton Fisher attended Pepperdine University in Malibu. He did his Masters work in Public Health at University of Hawaii Manoa and at University of California Berkeley. Gary also did some post graduate work in physical chemistry at UC Northridge, where he got the opportunity to see Andres Segovia, of whom he has always been a huge fan, when Segovia received his honorary Doctoral degree in 1982. He was a High school Biology and Chemistry teacher before starting Wahoo International, Inc in 1985. Primarily a water sports company, they have expanded greatly on the development and utilization of UV-Cure resins since 1987.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Paul Fischer

Paul Fischer

Paul Fischer began his instrument making career fifty years ago. After military service in the Royal Armoured Corps (11th Hussars) he joined David Rubio and was appointed manager of the fast-developing workshops. He remained in that position for six years before establishing his own workshop in 1975.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Michael Finnerty

Eighteen-year GAL member Michael Finnerty entered the army as an apprentice carpenter in 1963, and soon built his first guitar. Since leaving the army in 1972 he has gained a degree in legal studies; studied industrial relations, industrial law, and economics; taught commercial law; and run a business building and repairing guitars.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Dave Fifield

Cambrian Guitars

Amateur luthier Dave Fifield started to make guitars in, and has been a GAL member since, 2008. His impetus was finding a potentially higher-end substrate for his marquetry and inlay efforts, with which he has been engaged with since 1999. Quickly realizing the limited space available on great-sounding musical instruments for such art, he turned his efforts to finding a good mix between traditional and more modern building techniques and uses CNC and laser engraving machines judiciously to create one-of-a-kind instruments for friends and family. He makes his real money as an RF Engineer in the high-tech industry. He has been a meeting/web/email administrator for the Norcal Association of Luthiers (NCAL) for about 2 years.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Alyssa Fernandez

Alyssa Fernandez starting making guitars as a graduate student in the School of Engineering Technology at Purdue, where she helped teach the guitar manufacturing class and manage the Guitar Lab. She earned her MS in technology in August 2023, having previously earned undergraduate degrees in philosophy and English literature, and an MA in English literature. She started at Taylor Guitars as an intern in 2023 and just stayed. She is now a Jr. Manufacturing Automation Engineer at Taylor, where she shares a desk with a gecko named Mashed Potato. She lives fifteen minutes from the beach.

▪ bio current as of 2024

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

Joshua Alexander French

Joshua Alexander French, Luthier

Eleven-year Guild member Joshua Alexander French made his first guitar 1997 at the age of eighteen, and soon became enamored with the history and construction of classical guitars, especially bolstered by his experience at the Romanillos guitar-making course in Sigüenza in 2001. Though sometimes found at the workbench, he often pursues his other passions either at the local craft breweries, in the mosh pit, or traveling to both the near and far corners of the globe.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Debbie French

Debbie French is an Assistant Professor of Science Education and Director of Secondary Education at Wake Forest University. She started making guitars as a part of the STEM Guitar project when she was a high school physics, science, and engineering teacher at a school whose mascot was, somewhat paradoxically, the Fighting Quaker. She then did her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wyoming. When she isn’t professing, she likes to play tennis and curl (the ice-and-broom kind, not the barbell kind).

▪ bio current as of 2021

Mark Frazier

Mark Frazier is a software engineer specializing in open-source software platforms. By night, he vents his frustrations by building “real” things like Arts and Crafts furniture and acoustic guitars. He also built his solar-powered straw bale house. For the past four years he has been building guitars for the local high-school band’s fundraising efforts, yielding nearly $10,000 to date.

▪ bio current as of 2015

David Franzen

Guitar Lessons with David Franzen

Guitarist David Franzen has performed and taught guitar for more than twenty-five years. After receiving his Master’s degree in performance and teaching from North Carolina School of the Arts, he moved back home to Oregon. David performed at two GAL conventions, in 2002 and 2006. As fellow Portlanders, he and George Smith became good friends, and over the years George made several guitars for him.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Charles Fox

Ergo Fine Guitars

Thirty-three-year GAL member Charles Fox was present at the creation. His lutherie schools, beginning in Vermont in the early 1970s and continuing to California in the ’90s and Oregon today, have set scores of luthiers on the right track to creative and efficient guitar making.

▪ bio current as of 2021

Cat Fox

Cat Fox has long been a central figure in the Seattle guitar-making and repair scene, as well as a stalwart of the Seattle Luthiers Group.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Eric Foulke

Seven-year GAL member and registered architect Eric Foulke has lived at the four corners: born in California, raised in south Florida, and lived in Massachusetts before moving to Seattle with his wife Molly in 1999. He built his first mandolin in 1996 at Tom and Al’s Luthier’s Workshop and recently made the leap into the wild world of ukuleles. He hopes to build full-size instruments some day.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Mike Foulger

Ten-year GAL member Mike Foulger is an amateur instrument builder and musician. He was a full-time cabinet maker and wood carver for fifteen years prior to his current “real” job as a full-time software consultant. He loves to create new and useful tools for instrument making and has a steady repair business.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Eric Fouilhe

Eric Fouilhe

First-time Guild author Eric Fouilhé began in the ’70s as a self-taught maker of hurdy-gurdies, flutes, bag pipes, and Baroque guitars. He now specializes in violin family fittings, and over thirty Stradivarius violins are now fitted with his parts.

▪ bio current as of 1999

George Fortune Jr.

George Thomas Fortune, Jr., has been many things in his long life, but most people know him now as The Fiddle Man, a maker and fixer of violins. He is self-taught, and has completed thirty-five violins and a small clutch of other stringed instruments.

▪ bio current as of 1998

Alastair Fordyce

Twelve-year Guild member Alastair Fordyce is a retired Scottish orthopedic and hand surgeon, and a member of the NCAL luthier’s group. He took to lutherie on the advice of his wife Moira, who “received” the suggestion while musing in Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire, England. When she looked up she was standing in front of the tomb of 18th-century English cello builder Benjamin Banks. He has just beaten his age (73) for the first time, with a round of 72 (gross) at San Clemente Golf Course.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Jim Forderer

Read Jim Forderer’s memoriam

No stranger to the GAL, Jim Forderer and his wonderful collection of historical guitars have been a powerful presence at our last several conventions. Jim’s large family of children and his instrument collection keep him occupied, but he’s always on the lookout for the next great guitar or violin find.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Claudia Fritz

Claudia Fritz

Claudia Fritz is a CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) researcher in the Lutherie-Acoustics-Music team at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. Following her post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge (UK), she has been investigating the correlations between player and listener perceptions and measured acoustical properties. Her recent work with double-blind studies involving new and old violins has gained widespread international attention.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Ed Geesman

Geesman Fine Violins

Ed Geesman started violin making in 1972 in Portland, Oregon. In 1975 he got a repair job at Jecklin Violin Haus in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1978 he opened a violin shop in San Diego. Bow maker Robert Schallock came to work in that shop in 1980, and Ed picked up bow making. He moved to Zigzag, Oregon, in the foothills of Mt. Hood, in 1987 to concentrate on making instruments and bows. In 1998 he opened a full-service violin shop in downtown Portland, where he is today.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Topher Gayle

Topher Gayle

Topher Gayle claims to be the world’s slowest luthier, with three instruments built over the last twenty-five years. He just started an acoustic bass guitar from GAL Plan #13 and expects to finish it in the next millenium. But all is forgiven, because he is a twenty-year member!

▪ bio current as of 1998

Brian Garston

After obtaining his PhD in photochemistry from Manchester University in 1978, Brian Garston embarked on a thirty-five year career with Procter and Gamble and worked in the UK, Turkey, and Belgium. Following his retirement in 2012, he has focused on his passion for guitars and guitar making. He is currently a member of the Board of the Centre for Musical Instrument Building (Cmb) in Puurs, Belgium.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Bill Garofalo

Bill Garofalo makes steel rule dies for a living. A steel rule die is the thing with which greeting cards, paper boxes, and jigsaw puzzles are punched out of flat paper stock.

▪ bio current as of 1993

Bryan Galloup

Galloup Guitars

Bryan Galloup has racked up thirteen years of GAL membership across the last quarter century. He began his career with Dan Erlewine in the early ’80, and he has since become one of the country’s premier repair and restoration specialists as well as a builder of flattop guitars. He also operates the Galloup School of Guitar Building and Repair.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Maria Gonzalez-Leon

Maria Gonzalez-Leon has never been a GAL member, but she has had the honor of knowing George Smith, who was a member for a total of thirty-four years. It is he who encouraged her to pursue her education, which included many travels. He wanted to hear all about her adventures, especially those in Spain that included flamenco music.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Steve Gonwa

Eight-year GAL member Steve Gonwa is a retired Sheriff’s Department Captain, woodworking enthusiast, and a hobby guitar builder residing in southeastern Wisconsin. He admits to spending too much time reading American Lutherie and too little time actually doing American lutherie. Still working on that first handful of steel string guitars.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Antigoni Goni

Greek classical guitarist Antigoni Goni began to study guitar seriously at age twelve and won the Guitar Foundation of America’s competition in 1995. Today she concertizes worldwide, teaches at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, records, and directs the Volterra project in Italy each summer (www.volterraguitar.org). She was given her Romanillos guitar to play while studying with John Mills and Julian Bream at the Royal Academy of Music in London when she was eighteen, and it’s been her faithful companion ever since.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Jurgen Goering

Fifteen-year member Juergen Goering is a luthier and piano technician who serve a three-year apprenticeship in Germany under a master who scorned guitars. Imagine the torture!

▪ bio current as of 1992

David Goen

David Goen has been very fortunate to meet a lot of people who are much more talented than he could ever hope to be. This does not depress him; rather, it inspires. When he was ten he read a book by James Blish that offered the following epitaph for mankind: “We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.” He has been asking questions ever since.

▪ bio current as of 2016

Mike Gluyas

Mike Gluyas (B.Sc., Ph.D., and Fellow of the Institute of Physics), born in Cornwall in Southwest England, was a lecturer in electronics at the University of Salford in the UK and has a lifetime’s experience in sound recording. He remains very active as a sound recording engineer for a number of orchestras, choirs, musical ensembles and soloists. His Ph.D., for the enthusiasts, was in the measurement of the third order elastic constants of germanium and silicon, using a ‘sing-around’ ultrasonic technique. He lives with his wife Wendy in the village of Morchard Bishop in Devon, England.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Evan Gluck

New York Guitar Repair

Nineteen-year GAL member Evan Gluck says he is not the world’s best guitar repairman, but Google says he is. Like many luthiers, he made models as a kid, then got into a rock band. His shop is in his New York City apartment. Evan was a popular presenter at the last four GAL Conventions in 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2023.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Alex Glasser

Iron Horse Instruments

Seven-year Guild member and repeat convention presenter Alex Glasser repairs guitars. He worked for years with Jeff Traugott and then at Gryphon Stringed Instruments. Now he has his own shop, Iron Horse Instruments, a full-service repair shop specializing in vintage restoration. Once in a while he may even have time to build a uke or a guitar!

▪ bio current as of 2015

David Giulietti

Dave Giulietti is a professional engraver who does work for National Resophonic, Fender, Deering Banjo, Tim Scheerhorn, First Quality, Stewart MacDonald, Resophonic Outfitters, Ome Banjo and many others. He holds a BFA in sculpture from the Atlanta College of Art and has an extensive background in metal working. Dave has been known to chase building contractors with a shovel on occasion.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Mike Giltzow

Giltzow Guitars

Nine-year GAL member Michael Giltzow has been building flattop acoustic guitars for the last nine years. He graduated from Boise State University with a B.S. in Biology in 1971 and was CEO of Boise Vault for twenty-five years. He’s a pilot, PADI Dive Master, and collector and diver of old hard-hat diving gear. Michael builds guitars in his home shop every day — unless he is on the golf course.

▪ bio current as of 2011

David Grey

David Grey is the senior partner of a law firm in Beverly Hills. He has been involved with woodworking for twenty-five years, and with guitar making for two. He attended the American School of Lutherie, and says that the binding jig he discusses in this issue “is a direct result of the influence of Charles Fox, jig meister par excellence.”

▪ bio current as of 1997

Michael Greenfield

Greenfield Guitars

With a history as a working guitarist, a vintage and antique instrument restorer, and a former consultant to the international hospitality industry, Montréal native and fifteen-year GAL member Michael Greenfield has handcrafted fifteen or so acoustic guitars each year since the early ’90s. While his guitars employ modern elements and a lot of physics, he still handcrafts them in a traditional manner with a goal to not merely to satisfy, but to thrill his clients.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Aaron Green

Aaron Green Guitars

Aaron Green began his lutherie career as an apprentice to Alan Carruth beginning in 1991 when he was a teenager. While his primary focus is building classical and flamenco guitars, he also repairs and has partnered with luthier Karl Franks for high-end restoration. He deals in vintage classical and flamenco guitars, and has started a company called Westland Music Group with three partners involved in handmade solid and laminated archtop jazz guitars and concert promotion.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Ralf Grammel

Nine-year Guild member Ralf Grammel worked on electric guitars for friends in high school back in the stone age, but then life got too involved. He came back to lutherie in 2012, restoring Harmony and Supertone guitars of the 1930s and ’40s. He’s currently making an elevated-neck classical guitar. Seeing the work and innovations of other Guild members pushes him to improve and gives him a sense of pride in our great organization.

2024

Bob Gramann

Bob Gramann

A member since 1999, Bob Gramann built his first guitar from a kit in 1992. The resulting obsession now produces several guitars each year. He quit his computer job in 2000 and loves life, family, whitewater, and music.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Trevor Gore

Trevor Gore Guitars

From an early age, five-year GAL member Trevor Gore was fascinated by guitar music, woodworking, engineering, and innovation. Dissatisfied with “store bought” instruments, he used his disparate experiences as a researcher, boat builder, engineer, and guitarist to produce Contemporary Acoustic Guitar, Design and Build, in conjunction with veteran luthier Gerard Gilet. Trevor builds high-performance classical and steel string guitars.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Brad Goodman

Goodman Guitars

Along with building guitars for fifty years, Brad Goodman has made knives, furniture, cabinets, and millwork. He has also had careers in antique restoration, kitchen cabinet sales, and construction project management. He recently retired from a twenty-year stint as a municipal building inspector. He and his wife live in a bucolic town in New York where they raised their seven children. Brad’s motto: “A lesser man would have cracked by now.”

▪ bio current as of 2024

Robert Hamm

Eighteen-year Guild member Robert Hamm has a lifetime interest in the classical guitar, having attended a Segovia concert as a teenager in the 1960s. Lutherie mentors include Jeffrey Elliott, Dan Biasca, Cyndy Burton, and Greg Oxreider. His life of building traditional classical guitars began when he attended the (free) public exhibition at the 2006 GAL Convention, where he spoke with Jeff Elliott and others, and left with an armful of wood. That moment taught him the value of Guild membership. Besides, attending GAL Conventions lets him think he is not completely crazy.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Paul Hamer

Paul Hamer has been a professional musician, guitar instructor, music store owner, luthier, musical instrument manufacturer and distributor. Paul, along with his partner Jol Dantzig, formed Hamer Guitars in 1974.

▪ bio current as of 1987

James Ham

James Ham

Six-year Guild member James Ham has recently seen his focus shift from making bass viols and cellos with traditional methods and materials to exploring the use of carbon fiber and balsa wood.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Carl Hallman

Twenty-year GAL member Carl Hallman has been into guitars for as long as he can remember. His parents could only afford to give him a plastic uke, but he got a paper route and bought an electric guitar and amp from the Spiegel catalog. He formed a band called the Sonix with other kids, and was soon doing repairs at the local music store. He has retired from his day job as an electrical engineer and is now making acoustic guitars.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Roger Haggstrom

Roger Häggström originally used a guitar as a songwriting tool. Then he played a good guitar, and was hooked. He was a computer programmer for many years, but then bought 150 old, wrecked, parlor guitars and started restoring them and inventing ways to improve their sound. That’s his day job now, but the music is still with him. He and his pals have made a couple of CDs of his songs under the name of Roger & the Rockets. He is allergic to all furry animals, and was the editor for ten years of Ciklidbladet, a Swedish magazine about cichlids, the coolest of the aquarium fishes.

▪ bio current as of 2022

John Hagen

Seven-year Guild member John Hagen lives in a neighborhood surrounded by dozens of small lakes, near the western shores of one of the biggest lakes of all, Lake Michigan.

▪ bio current as of 2006

David Gusset

David Gusset

David Gusset is an early graduate of the School of Violin Making in Salt Lake City and a member of The American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. In 1985 he won the gold medal for violin making at the Stradivari Triennial Competition in Cremona, the only American to ever receive this honor.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Paul Gudelsky

The late Paul Gudelsky was guitar maker and collector, as well as a wood merchant. He was a GAL convention exhibitor and lecturer, and a Guild member for ten years. Paul passed away in 1996

▪ bio current as of 1996

Aaron Grumbacher

Aaron Grumbacher received his diploma from Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 1987 where he discovered David Russell Young’s book, The Steel String Guitar: Construction & Repair. He dropped out of UC Santa Cruz with aspirations of pursuing an apprenticeship in sustainable agriculture. Returning to his hometown of York, Pennsylvania, he served an eighteen month apprenticeship with local violin maker Mark K. Bluett. An intermittent Guild member since the late ’80s, Aaron has been building parlor guitars since 2007.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Stefano Grondona

Classical guitarist Stefano Grondona’s career includes concertizing worldwide, recording, co-authoring with luthier Luca Waldner La Chitarra Di Luiteria (Masterpieces of Guitar Making), and teaching guitar at the State Conservatory of Vicenza. He’s fortunate to own more guitars than he can possibly play daily, but is always finding ways to share with his audiences the bounty he discovers.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Ben Haskenhoff

David’s Guitar Loft

Six-year Guild member Ben Haskenhoff is in charge of instrument repair at David’s Guitar Loft in St. Louis, Missouri. Ben builds custom one-off electric guitars at a snail’s pace in his free time. When he finds time to pry himself away from the wild world of guitar repair, he can be found hiking and canoeing on Missouri’s startlingly scenic riverways.

▪ bio current as of 2021

Bruce Harvie

Orcas Island Tonewoods

Bruce Harvie grew up surfing and listening to Dick Dale in Southern California in the 1950s and ’60s, then escaped north to Berkeley, ostensibly to study law. He wound up studying the Jefferson Airplane. He started building mandolins in the ’70s, and after moving to Orcas Island, Washington, in 1979, realized that he lived in the middle of a forest of tonewoods. After hanging out with luthiers who really knew what they were doing, Bruce soon realized that he’d better stick to cutting wood, and has done so for the past twenty-eight years.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Jason Harshbarger

Harshbarger Strings

New author Jason Harshbarger is two decades into being a luthier, and has been a GAL member most of that time. To date, his emphasis has been on steel-string guitars, both flattop and achtop, as well as archtop mandolins. His designs, building processes, materials, and tools emanate from an organic and earthy place with a forward, modernistic, and open bent.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Hiram Harris

Hiram Harris completed his violin-making apprenticeship under Paul Schuback in 1979, and worked for David Kerr from 1980 to 1985. He has been a FedEx courier for twenty-five years. Lately he’s preoccupied with motorcycles, cooking, and metal working, but mostly he wonders where the last thirty years have gone. If you know where that time may be, he’d like to hear from you.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Tom Harper

Thomas Harper Guitars

Tom Harper is a thirteen-year Guild member, building primarily classic guitars. His past is riddled with quixotic pursuits that include bicycle-frame building, ski mountaineering guiding, and climbing instruction. He took a couple years off to build a house, but he’s back at the bench now.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Eron Harding

Backwoods Guitar LLC

Six-year Guild member Eron Harding owns and operates Backwoods Guitar Repair in the backwoods of Missouri, performing instrument repairs and vintage restorations. Having no formal lutherie training, his skills were acquired via various Internet sources, Stew-Mac trade secrets, real-world experience, and support from fellow GAL member Erick Coleman.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Beau Hannam

Five-year GAL member Beau Hannam began his lutherie career in 2002 under the guidance of Girard Gilet in Sydney, Australia, later becoming an teaching instructor and full-time luthier at Gilet Guitars. He continues the Gilet tradition of creative instrument building since moving to his own shop in Colorado in 2013.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Rod Hannah

Eight-year member Rod Hannah has been building and repairing guitars since 1981, full time since 1992. He formerly worked as a mechanical engineer.

▪ bio current as of 1997

Bruce Hammond

Two-year GAL member Bruce Hammond did fieldwork for an oil field service company for twenty-five years, with a stint in Kuwait during the well fire fighting effort, before entering the training field. He admits to a compulsion to research the peculiar, bombastic luthier Joseph Bohmann, which should cement his position as the village crackpot!

▪ bio current as of 2009

Lee Herron

Herron Guitars

As a kid, twenty-four-year GAL member Lee Herron made a guitar which soon came apart one hot day in the back seat of his dad’s car. In college he made an electric guitar, which he still has. Much later, in 1995, long-time GAL member Peter Yelda became his lutherie mentor. Lee has now made over fifty instruments including guitars, ukes, Weissenborns, and resophonics.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Chris Herrod

Chris Herrod was born in Healdsburg, California, and lives there still. He has been Sales Manager at Luthiers Mercantile Int’l for twenty-one years. Chris and LMI have been with the Good Ol’ Guild for a long, long time. He performs as a singer/songwriter in local venues.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Joe Herrick

Joseph Herrick got his love of woodworking at an early age from his father. Guitar making appeals to his engineering background. He was greatly pleased when his son recently completed building a beautiful first instrument, a ukulele, under his guidance.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Skip Helms

Twelve-year member Skip Helms builds mostly classical guitars and plays mostly steel string guitars. No longer a financial consultant, he now runs a cats-only kennel with his wife, Nancy.

▪ bio current as of 2002

Lizabeth Jane Hella

Lizabeth Jane Hella is a graduate of Lawrence University Conservatory of Music and completed postgraduate work at the American Conservatory of Music. She has appeared as a soloist in her home state of Minnesota, as well as Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. She was the music consultant for the documentary film, “Some Kind of Hope,” and the news documentary, “At The Crossroads.” She is an avid Montana outdoorswoman, an accomplished violinist, and actress and has a background in sound healing.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Melanie Heizer

Melanie Heizer grew up watching her father (GAL member Stephen Heizer) build acoustic instruments. One day she decided that she wanted to play the electric bass. Her parents wouldn’t buy her one, so to be contrary, she decided to build it. With the help of her father, she made a beautiful bass of purpleheart which she played at school. She is working on a second bass with help from Veronica Merryfield. Melanie just graduated from high school and hopes one day to involve her love for music and building in her future career.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Richard Heeres

Heeres Guitars

Richard Heeres started guitar making at David Freeman’s school in 1992. Like many luthiers, he can’t remember what some of the jigs in his shop are for. When he’s not building archtops or classical guitars he can be found sailing, playing with his band, or thinking of that one jig that will make all the others superfluous.

▪ bio current as of 2003

David Haxton

Haxton Stringed Instruments

Eight-year GAL member and California native David Haxton built his first guitar in 1971, but didn’t build his second until 1995. Since then, he has built twenty. When not engaged in luthier-related activities, he enjoys walking in the Seattle sunshine and listening to live music whenever possible.

▪ bio current as of 2002

Jim Hoover

Six-year Guild member Jim Hoover built his first guitar in 2003 and hopes to build many more. To keep food on the table he works full time for a pipe organ company.

▪ bio current as of 2004

Randy Holmes

Silvertone World

Randy Holmes, a Silvertone aficionado for over thirty years, runs silvertoneworld.net, a resource for Silvertone-branded guitars and amplifiers. His goal is to put every Silvertone instrument ever online by 2016, the 100th anniversary of the Silvertone brand. Randy built his first guitar in 1980, and has worked as a music writer, audio technician, rock ‘n’ roll road manager, radio DJ and production manager, and computer builder.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Jerry Hoffmann

Hoffmann Lutherie

Jerry Hoffman began building instruments in 2005 while he was still publishing Blacksmith’s Journal. By 2007 he was building instruments full-time. Before the Journal, he owned a blacksmith’s shop that produced hand forged architectural ironwork. His education is in graphic arts and he worked designing special fonts for photo typesetting machines until 1976 when he opted for self-employment first as a farrier, then blacksmith, then publisher, and finally as a luthier designing and building custom ukuleles.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Rob Hoffman

In his professional life, Rob Hoffman is an archeologist and an antiques features writer, working part time in vintage guitar sales and restoration. He also plays guitar with the Southernaire Blues Band, and is into competitive springboard diving.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Benjamin Hoff

Benjamin Hoff

Benjamin Hoff, author of The Tao of Pooh, is a former recording guitarist, singer, and songwriter who owns (among other instruments) two custom guitars — a “theorbo” ten-string and a six-string classical, both by Jeffrey R. Elliott.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Paul Hill

Eighteen-year GAL member Paul Hill is a luthier and cabinetmaker in Moscow, Idaho, where he moved to escape the bugs. He plays Doggone Sophisticated bluegrass with his band Steptoe, enjoys the small-town life with his wife and daughter, and goes trout fishing whenever he can.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Kenny Hill

Hill Guitar Company, Inc

Guitar maker Kenny Hill first joined the GAL in the ’70s. Now thirty-seven years into his lutherie career, he designs and builds classical guitars, manages Hill Guitar Co. in the USA and New World Guitar Co. in China, writes for several publications, and occasionally teaches guitar making. He keeps up his classical guitar chops and is a pretty fair pipe organist, too.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Keith Hill

Keith Hill offers this insight: “I am an aesthetic scientist. Aesthetic science is the ‘scienta’ in the motto Ars nihil sine scienta est. My work is a reflection of my aesthetic science, in other words, it reflects the attention I pay to how I hear, what I hear, how I see, what I see, how I sense, what I sense, and how and what intuitions arise from such attention. I use harpsichord, fortepiano, violin, and guitar making as well as my music, painting, and decoration to express the principles of aesthetics as I understand them from my experience paying attention. Even the fifty chickens, twenty geese, thirty-six ducks, and eight cats I keep are subjects for my aesthetic study.”

▪ bio current as of 2001

John Higgins

For the last 10 years, John Higgins has run a private shop, focusing primarily on vintage guitar restoration. In the past 35 years, he has also worked in retail and wholesale repair, and served as the service manager for a large Martin, Gibson, and Fender warranty repair facility.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Robert Hickey

Robert Hickey is an amateur instrument maker whose interest in kit violins (also known as dancing masters’ fiddles) was sparked the first time he saw one in Williamsburg, Virginia.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Doug Hunt

Three-year GAL member Doug Hunt has been a high school engineering and technology teacher for twenty-three years. He built his first guitar in 2007 following Melvyn Hiscock’s Make Your Own Electric Guitar and has incorporated electric and acoustic guitar design and construction in his manufacturing classes. He has received several teaching awards and credits his success to making guitars in the school setting. During the pandemic, Doug rebuilt a dilapidated 12´×18´ garage on his property to use as a guitar workshop and looks forward to happily creating lots of sawdust there.

▪ bio current as of 2021

Jason Hull

Twenty-nine-year Guild member Jason Hull has been building and repairing mandolins and guitars for more than thirty years. Mostly self-taught (with help from the GAL), Jason’s early training was at Guitar Services of Austin and Heart of Texas Music. He moved to Richmond in 2003, first working as an independent contractor and now exclusively at One Three Guitar.

2021

John Huffman

Music in Wood

Four-year Guild member John Huffman purchased his first classical guitar in 1968 while in the Navy, and learned to read and play music from books and fellow sailors. On shore leave in Valencia, Spain, he visited the Tatay guitar factory which sparked his desire to build guitars. Luckily, his college political science class was so boring, it enabled him to design the form he would use to build his first lute from local lumberyard woods. After college, John began building lutes and guitars, often with experimental features. In addition to building classical guitars, John continues to research and learn about historical lutes and build lutes to closely match instruments in museums.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Sergio Huerta Chavez

Sergio Huerta ChŒvez began formal study of guitar, cello, and vocal music at a young age. He then entered the Escuela de Lauderia and studied the construction of viola, cello, and viola da gamba there for five years, graduating in 1992 and opening his own shop in 1993.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Karl Hoyt

Nine-year GAL member Karl Hoyt built his first acoustic guitar in 1978. Lutherie was an excellent diversion and stress relief from his day job of working with troubled/court-involved teens. He has built scores of string instruments of all kinds, finishing off his career teaching woodworking and guitar making to high-school students on outer Cape Cod. Now in retirement, he is focusing on 0- and 00-sized guitars and ukuleles.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Elon Howe

Elon Howe is a building contractor, a violin and mandolin builder, a sawyer, a frequent Guild convention exhibitor, and a founding member of the Michigan Violinmakers Association.

▪ bio current as of 1994

Brian Howard

Brian Howard Guitars

Brian Howard is a lifelong player who has dabbled in repair for almost as long. After a thirty-year career as a cabinetmaker he decided to begin building guitars instead. Howard Guitars officially opened in 2011 and is in the process of introducing its first original-designed steel string acoustic.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Tip House

Tip House builds guitars, cases, and skis, plays bluegrass, and develops software. He did his first face-plant in 1967, wrote his first computer program in 1968, learned his first fiddle tune in 1969, built his first guitar in 1973, and still hasn’t learned any better.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Paul Hostetter

Paul Hostetter

Nineteen-year Guild member and card-carrying guitar nut Paul Hostetter has been both a musician and a luthier since 1963, playing, studying, restoring, building, and writing about fretted and bowed instruments. He lives and works in the hills near Santa Cruz, California.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Gary Hopkins

G. Hopkins Guitars

Gary Hopkins is an aerospace engineer by profession. He builds steel string guitars and does some repair work from a small shop at his house. He taught himself lutherie by reading books and articles, watching YouTube, talking to other luthiers, and listening to the opinions of semiprofessional guitar player friends.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Bart Hopkin

Experimental Musical Instruments

From 1985 to 1999 Bart Hopkin edited the quarterly journal Experimental Musical Instruments. He has written several books on instrument construction, produced several CDs featuring the work of innovative instrument makers worldwide, taught, and lectured widely. Bart makes no claim to fine craftsmanship; his primary interest has been in exploring diverse acoustic systems.

▪ bio current as of 2006

F.A. Jaen

Five-year GAL member Fernando A. Jaén quit his engineering job and now makes guitars full time in Spain. That wouldn’t be strange if he built Spanish guitars, but he makes jazz archtops.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Paul Jacobson

Classic guitar maker Paul Jacobson has been a Guild member for nineteen of the last twenty-one years. He used to be workin’ on the railroad. Now he’s strummin’ on the old banjo. Well, not exactly but you see what I mean. And who is Dinah, anyway?

▪ bio current as of 1998

Barry Irvin

When three-year member Barry Irvin’s first son was born with cerebral palsy, he became the primary caretaker, and running a business out of the home became the logical choice. With backgrounds in fine woodworking, science, and music, Barry decided to put it all together and join the ranks of happily destitute luthiers. In addition to designing and building, he rehairs and repairs bows. He also does some editorial work for a national motorcycle-club magazine, and writes on the side.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Phil Ingber

Five-year member Phil Ingber is a New York transplant to Kentucky where he attended lutherie classes in Louisville. After building one dreadnought guitar, he had the bug and decided to build more at home. He’s still very much a beginner, but having a ball learning the craft and making new luthier friends around the world.

▪ bio current as of 2022

H.E. Huttig

Read Hart Huttig II’s memoriam

H.E. Huttig was a faithful Guild member from the very start, a frequent author in our early days, one of our first advertisers, and a good friend to many in the craft. He passed away a few months after the interview in this issue was recorded. he is survived by his wife Rose. Hart passed away in 1992. Read his memoriam.

▪ bio current as of 1992

Carleen Hutchins

New Violin Family Association, Inc.

Although twenty-eight-year GAL member Carleen Hutchins did not take up a string instrument until age forty, she has now been in the forefront of research into the physics of violins for over fifty years. She is a founder of the Catgut Acoustical Society, the first editor of its journal, and a developer of the New Violin Family octet. Carleen passed away in 2009

▪ bio current as of 2006

Jeff Huss

Huss & Dalton Guitar Company

Jeff Huss moved to Virginia from North Dakota to be closer to bluegrass music. He abandoned a practice in law to work for Stelling banjos, then opened a one-man guitar shop. Mark Dalton was born in Virginia but loves bluegrass music anyway. He, too, worked awhile for Stelling. H&D currently have four employees and build about 100 steel string guitars a year.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Peter Hurney

Pohaku Ukulele

When he lived in Hawaii, Peter Hurney made ukuleles when the surf was down. Now he’s in Berkeley, California, where the surf is always down. He still makes ukuleles, and also DJs a prime-time music show on the UC Berkeley radio station KALX and builds really cool automata sculptures in his spare time. Peter is also looking for an interested apprentice to share the knowledge with. His ukuleles and stuff can be seen on his website pohakuukulele.com.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Lisa Hurlong

Lisa de Granada

Lisa Hurlong claims the credit of being the first American female classic guitarist to concertize worldwide. She lives in a little Spanish village on the Portuguese border called Monroy, which was the home town of many of the Conquistadors. She commutes to China where she works with a Chinese Olympic equestrian judge to establish a Spanish cultural center in Beijing.

▪ bio current as of 2008

David Hurd

Ukuleles by Kawika, Inc.

Twenty-three-year member David “Kawika” Hurd is a former oceanographer and a full-time ukulele and guitar maker. His website at www.ukuleles.com will be of interest to luthiers who wish to learn about applying of scientific and engineering design principles to lutherie.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Bill Hunter

In 1970, Bill Hunter cofounded Satellite City with his brother Bob. Satellite City makes both Hot Stuff and Hot Stuff UFO (User Friendly Odorless), cyanoacrylates well known in the world of musical instrument making.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Bob Jones

Bob Jones has been on the New York scene for many years. He does stringed instrument restoration and repair out of his home in Brooklyn. Don’t worry, it’s all legit.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Jack E. Johnston

Jack Johnston

Twenty-year GAL member Jack E. Johnston got into guitar making when he needed a lighter instrument than his 16 lb. banjo. A good guitar was too expensive, so he built one. He has studied with Charles Fox and Alan Carruth, has degrees in mechanical engineering and photography, worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for thirty years, and plays in The Bluegrass Gospel Boys Band.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Thomas Johnson

Thomas Johnson made his first guitar in 1967. He retired from a career in social work in 1997 and now makes lutes, guitars, and experimental instruments as a therapeutic aid to maintaining health. He met Tuvan musicians at a studio near his shop and travelled to Tuva in 2001. His current workshop is a cabin purpose-built in Poland and shipped in sections to his garden in the UK.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Sue Johnson

Sue Johnson made her first guitar out of Grandpa’s cigar box before finding lutherie enlightenment with Adrian Lucas and then Newark College in England about ten years ago. She juggles babies, guitar work, and part-time work in the wood shop of the local girls high school where she subverts the academic curriculum by introducing pupils to the delights of sharp planes. Her degree in geography helps her know that guitars generally come from somewhere other than England. The dahlias in her garden were particularly good this year.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Bryan Johanson

Bryan Johanson is an active concert guitarist, composer, and author who taught at Portland State University from 1978. A Professor of Music and past Director of the School of Music, Johanson retired in January of 2016 to pursue composing, performing and writing. His articles and reviews on the guitar have appeared in the top journals and magazines in the field, including Soundboard, Guitar Review, Acoustic Guitar and American Lutherie. His compositions have been published by Columbia Music Company, Edizioni Musicali Berben, Frederick Harris Music Publishers, Guitar Solo Publications, Thomas House Publications, Earthsongs Music Publishers, Mel Bay Publications, Doberman-Yppan and Les Productions d’OZ. The recipient of many commissions, his music has been performed and recorded by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chamber Music Northwest, the Oregon Symphony, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, David Starobin, The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, David Tanenbaum, the Portland Symphonic Choir, the Turin Philharmonic, the Bologna Orchestra and Third Angle New Music Ensemble. He has won numerous composition prizes, including awards from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Aspen Music Festival, the Esztergom International Guitar Festival (Hungary), The Festival of August (Venezuela), the Roger Wagner Center for Choral Studies, as well as multiple awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Johanson’s music is recorded extensively and appears on record labels such as Albany, Bridge, EMI, GSP, Gagliano Recording, Naxos and Cube Squared Records. In 1999, his critically acclaimed composition Open Up Your Ears for guitar was recorded on David Starobin’s Grammy Award nominated New Dance, and in 2004 his Pluck, Strum and Hammer and Let’s Be Frank were recorded by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet on their Grammy Award winning Guitar Heroes. Johanson is currently a member of the Oregon Guitar Quartet, which has released seven highly successful recordings. He has also recently been elected to the Board of Trustees for the Guitar Foundation of America.composing, and writing, he directs the Portland Guitar Festival. Current extracurricular activities include running marathons, distance cycling, and learning to play the pipa.

▪ bio current as of 2016

Jeff Jewitt

Homestead Finishing Products

In addition to running a full-time finishing supply company, Jeff Jewitt finds time to refinish, write, and teach. He has written extensively for Fine Woodworking magazine for over twelve years and is the author of four books, two videos, and numerous articles in other magazines. He has developed finishing products which are sold all over the world under the “Homestead” name.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Nupi Jenner

Nupi Jenner

Nupi Jenner began luthing in the early ’80s after being a folk musician and an unsuccessful student of medicine. He joined workshops by Lundberg, Romanillos, and others to fill the lack of professional education opportunities in Austria. Since 1990, he has taught lutherie in the only Austrian lutherie school, in Hallstatt. For the last sixteen years, Nupi has given summer workshops at the medieval Rapottenstein Castle, north of Vienna. He has made hundreds of instruments including guitars, violins, viols, lutes, mandolins, hurdy-gurdies, nickelharpas, and other more exotic examples. But the greatest highlights are four wonderful children, all dedicated to music.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Armin Kelly

Guitars International

His friends may call him an armchair luthier, but Armin Kelly spends his real time as founder of Guitars International on the telephone, match-making guitars to players, while encouraging guitar makers to produce their very best work for him. He considers his efforts successful when all parties concerned are happy. He moonlights as the artistic director of the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival which he founded fifteen years ago. He has been a GAL member for fourteen of the last twenty-two years.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Carl Kaufmann

Carl Kaufmann, luthier for more than ten years; backyard boat builder for lot longer a half-century. Makes both classical and steel-string guitars (but not many of either) and an occasional mandolin or Irish bouzouki , which is what he calls a mandolin on steroids. When he worked for pay, it was as a writer and editor. Dividing time now between Block Island off the RI coast, and Mystic CT, where winters are more tolerable.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Steve Kauffman

A Guild member for twenty-five out of the last twenty-eight years, Steve Kauffman lives with his wife and daughter in a home he rebuilt, and works in an adjacent shop that he designed and built.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Tony Karol

Karol Guitars

Tony Karol was a hobby builder through his teens and after university, where he studied electrical engineering. He became a full-time luthier in 2001 after the telecom meltdown. He started teaching lutherie in 2003 and continues to do so at his shop in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. He currently builds eight to ten instruments per year, including electrics, acoustics, and baritones.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Colin Kaminski

Colin Kaminski

Colin Kaminski dropped out of high school at fifteen to program for Bally Systems. He retired from computer programming at the age of twenty and now spends his retirement repairing violins for Jordan Music. When he is not looking for stars in the sky he is trying to become one on stage.

▪ bio current as of 1997

Dan Kabanuck

Dan Kabanuck was born and lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife of twenty-one years and his three boys ages seventeen, fourteen, and four. He took up the guitar at age twenty-nine, and in short order he was playing in a popular metal band. A real estate broker by trade, changing times landed him at LMI in 2007; he soon had several guitar projects in the works, and he’s helped build eleven ukuleles. Though he has no desire to be a full-time luthier, he wants to build instruments others would want to own.

▪ bio current as of 2010

O. Jovicic

We don’t have a mailing address for J. and O. Jovicic, but the Acustica magazine says Facultée deElectrotechnique de l’Université de Belgrade.

▪ bio current as of 1988

J. Jovicic

We don’t have a mailing address for J. and O. Jovicic, but the Acustica magazine says Facultée deElectrotechnique de l’Université de Belgrade.

▪ bio current as of 1988

Bill Kolb

Doctor Zither

An accomplished solo entertainer and recording artist who has performed on both sides of the Atlantic, Bill “Doctor Zither” Kolb is one of the founding members of the North America Zither Orchestra.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Neil Kok

Seven-year GAL member Neil Kok lives in eastern Finland. He has worked for years as a professional cellist and as a pastor. He started building violins and guitars in 1999, greatly aided by the advice of his luthier father-in-law, Johan Tromp, and the vital information so generously shared by the Guild members. He combines his workshop with a business accounting firm.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Masaru Kohno

Masaru Kohno became interested in building guitars in 1948 and traveled to Spain in 1960 to learn the craft. He apprenticed with Arcángel Fernández. Masaru passed away in 1998.

▪ bio current as of 1998

Thomas Knatt

Thomas Knatt has been a GAL member off and on since the ’70s. He builds guitars and violins as well as Violin Octet instruments as designed by Carleen Hutchins, and teaches guitar making in Massachusetts and France.

▪ bio current as of 2012

R.J. Klimpert

R.J. Klimpert collects, restores, and writes about vintage instruments while he plies his trade as a designer in the toy and game industry. A fairly clever guy with over a dozen patents to his name, he lives in Rhode Island with his three kids, thousand ukuleles, and one very patient wife.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Kalia Kliban

Cabinetmaker and occasional repairperson Kalia Kliban is a veteran of the Ervin Somogyi Finishing School for Aspiring Luthiers’ Assistants and a charter member of the Northern California Association of Luthiers (NCAL). She currently holds the American record for ongoing construction time for an Appalachian dulcimer.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Steve Klein

Twenty-five-year Guild member Steve Klein might have been running a ski shop today, if not for a meeting with Dr. Michael Kasha arranged by Steve’s famous scientist grandfather, Joel Hildebrand. Maybe you have heard this famous quote from Dr. Hildebrand: “Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five.”

▪ bio current as of 2003

John Kitakis

Ko’olau Guitar & Ukulele Company

John Kitakis bade adieu to mainland USA in the ’70s to settle in Hawaii (tough choice!), where he eventually met his wife, raised a family, then incorporated them into his stringed instrument business, Ko’olau Guitars and Ukuleles. He has been a Guild member nineteen of the last twenty-four years.

▪ bio current as of 2008

David Kerr

David Kerr Violin Shop

Violin maker/restorer David Kerr opened Kerr Violin Shop in 1976. He was a cofounder of the Portland Baroque Orchestra in 1984, playing with them as well as Philharmonia Baroque in San Francisco until 1999. Instead of following in Jess Wells’ footsteps to an obsession with building fly rods, he discovered glass. Currently he is making fused glass in his spare time.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Dick Kern

For fifteen years geologist/violin maker Dick Kern has worked as a resource conservationist. He has taken a sabbatical to study lutherie under Paul Schuback, but he still collects rocks and does flint knapping in his spare time.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Steve Kennel

Eleven-year GAL member Steve Kennel is a sculptor and printmaker who once worked in a newspaper pressroom and an autobody shop. He’s been a cabinetmaker, a dishwasher, a shelver of books in a library, a furniture maker, a caregiver, a foundry worker, and a welder.

▪ bio current as of 2024

David Kempf

David Kempf is a lifelong woodworker. He picked up a Silvertone at age thirteen, but made his first guitar at age forty-four. He has now been a guitar maker for two years and says his “only desire is to build a world-class guitar, not for profit or gain, but for the purity it provides.”

▪ bio current as of 2000

Andrew LaBonte

Andrew LaBonte studied music at the University of Vermont and SUNY Albany and became interested in early instruments. He moved to the Boston area in 1990 and worked at Hubbard Harpsichords for several years before starting his own workshop. He continued building while also doing restoration on and making reproductions of antique gilt and veneered picture frames with historical finishes. For the past ten years he has been building and repairing stringed instruments, and teaching private music lessons.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Kevin La Due

La Due Guitars

Kevin La Due’s day job is teaching high school kids to make guitars and other things. When not at Vestal High, he can be found creating his next guitar, building furniture, teaching guitar, and playing at church. He still finds time to design more guitars, jigs, and fixtures and recently has begun writing music. Oh yeah; he also plows the driveway in winter and mows the lawn in summer.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Nick Kukich

Franklin Guitars

Nick Kukich has been an intermittent GAL member over the last thirty-five years. He built his first guitar while on a summer break from college in 1971 under the tutelage of Bob Marsh, a recent graduate of what would soon be the Roberto-Venn School. Convinced that no one would pronounce Kukich correctly, he founded Franklin Guitar Company in 1974, naming it for his address: Franklin Road, in Franklin, Michigan. Nick feels fortunate to have spent the last forty-four years in the lutherie shop and says he will make guitars till the very end, meaning he expects to be found dead at the bench.

▪ bio current as of 2015

John Kruse

John Kruse is a forty-two year GAL member. Years before joining the Guild, he bought a $10 brown bag of violin parts and assembled a violin that he still has. His day job was in biomedical engineering and lasers before retiring. He has made three guitars and recently attended Trevor Gore’s class at Robbie O’Brien’s shop in Colorado. He’s looking forward to building more guitars using the new bracing system.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Max Krimmel

Max Krimmel

Luthier and all around craftsman Max Krimmel is a thirty-two-year Guild member, past Board member, and past author. He currently divides his time between artistic turning work in alabaster, building dulcimers for Bonnie Carol and playing/building marimbas.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Francis Kosheleff

Francis Kosheleff joined GAL in 1979 and has maintained his membership continuously ever since. He joined the human race (some doubt it) when he was born in France in 1929 to French and Russian parents. A compulsive inventor and part-time luthier, he builds mostly instruments that no other luthier would build: balalaikas, domras, packaxes, and others with folding, adjustable, or detachable necks.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Joe Konkoly

Konkoly Guitars

Joe Konkoly is head repair tech and manager of the repair department at Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan. In eighteen years at Elderly he has had the opportunity to repair and restore hundreds of the world’s finest new and vintage guitars, banjos, and mandolins. He also builds Konkoly Guitars — traditional steel string flattops — in his home shop, and does his best to keep the konkolyguitars.com website up to date. Joe lectured at last summer’s GAL Convention and has been a member for a total of twenty-eight years.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Saul Koll

Koll Guitar Co.

Eleven-year Guild member, GAL lecturer, American Lutherie contributor, and family man Saul Koll does beautiful work on his repairs, modifications, and custom guitars, but he sometimes needs a kick in the pants to get him out of the shop.

▪ bio current as of 2002

William Leirer

New GAL member William Leirer is a hobby builder who teaches five-to-eight-year-olds to read, write, and do math in his day job. He says building guitars is not good for his guitar playing technique. The more he builds the less he practices. And the more he reads and writes about guitars and participates in guitar forums the less time he has to spend on either.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Chuck Lee

Six-year Guild member Chuck Lee and his wife Tammy have seven children, four still at home. Once a self-employed master plumber, Chuck now builds about eighty-five banjos a year. He also enjoys gardening, reading, and dreaming up his next business.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Harvey Leach

Harvey Leach Custom Inlays and Guitars

Harvey Leach has been a luthier for more than thirty years. He is known for his intricate and detailed inlay work on his own guitars and those of many other high-end luthiers. Recently Harvey has seen his longtime efforts to develop a true full-size travel guitar reach fruition in the Voyage Air guitar project.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Lennis Laviolette

Lennis Laviolette

Thirty-year GAL member Lennis Laviolette is a retired land surveyor. He has designed and built liturgical furnishings for several Catholic church renovations, and makes classical, nylon-string jazz, and baritone guitars. He is working on guitar #92 and reports that everyone who has bought one of his instruments has become a friend.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Grit Laskin

William Laskin

A builder of steel string, classical, and flamenco guitars since 1971, William “Grit” Laskin is the first musical instrument maker to receive (in 1997) Canada’s prestigious Saidye Bronfman Award For Excellence In Craft. He apparently couldn’t decide whether to be a guitar maker or an artist. Thankfully, the two directions were not mutually exclusive.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Kent LaRue

Kent LaRue has a BA and MFA in music and an MA in public school administration. Before retiring, he was Director of Curriculum for Denville Township and president of the Morris Area Curriculum Network. He is now a “balladeer” performing authentic 18th-century music for visitors to Colonial Williamsburg.

▪ bio current as of 2009

Anne Ludwig

While studying for a music degree, Anne Ludwig took up the classical guitar and has been hooked ever since. She is a professional guitarist, an enthusiastic member of the Guild of South African Luthiers, and the founder of Guitar Talk magazine.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Adrian Lucas

A.J. Lucas

Adrian Lucas has been making guitars for about nine years. He first learned lutherie at an evening class run by Roy Courtnall and went on to illustrate Roy’s books Making Master Guitars and The Art of Violin Making. He currently builds classic guitars of his own nontraditional design and teaches electric guitar making at Newark and Sherwood College.

▪ bio current as of 2000

Wade Lowe

Wade Lowe was one of the early members of the Guild and has been involved on and off over the decades. He got serious about building musical instruments in 1963. In 1969 he was the primary repair person for the renowned Sutherland’s House of Guitars. Then in 1974 he opened Diapason Guitar Shop which was a wonderful shop that was influential to many Atlanta-area guitar builders. Today he continues to build beautiful instruments, is a purveyor, creator, and supporter of fine art, and resides in the center of the universe, which happens to be located in Decatur, Georgia.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Jason Lollar

Lollar Pickups

Long-time GAL member Jason Lollar literally wrote the book on making electric guitar pickups. His business outgrew his island homestead, so he moved it to the big city — Tacoma. He is slated to present at the upcoming GAL Convention.

▪ bio current as of 2017

Jeff Liverman

Jeff Liverman, Executive Director for the Danville Science Center, has worked in the science museum environment for over twenty years. Having a masters degree in Physics and a background in music, Jeff is interested in the intersection between music and science. Before moving to Danville VA, in 2003, he spent ten years repairing and building steel string instruments. Jeff also spent much of his semiprofessional life writing, playing, and recording music with the band Dirtball.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Sam Littlepage

In the middle of teaching Astronomy and Physics at a local university, four-year member Sam Littlepage builds classical and steel string guitars. (He has been caught building a few banjos, a dulcimer, and even a 12-string tenor). He is experimenting with new ways of doing guitar necks, bridges, soundboards, and so on.

▪ bio current as of 1998

Beverly Maher

Beverly Maher is the owner of The Guitar Salon, a unique one-woman operation located in an historic brownstone in Greenwich Village. She has been playing, buying, selling, and loving instruments all her life. Beverly has been called many names, from “Guitar Lady” to “Soul of the Guitar in NYC.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Michael Mahar

Thirteen-year GAL member Mike Mahar is a software engineer who took up lutherie as a hobby around the year 2000. He builds a guitar or mandolin every year or so in his spare time. A major interest is the scientific analysis of instruments to try to determine how physical properties affect the sound. He’s currently working on a computer program that incorporates instrument design tools as well as tone generators and spectrum analyzers.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Gary Magliari

Gary Magliari is a senior designer at Consolidated Edison with a work portfolio ranging from avionics to Manhattan’s underground gas and electric facilities. He first picked up a guitar in 1964 and has played in many bands. More recently he has applied his engineering skills to the age-old problem of intonation.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Massimo Maddaloni

Massimo Maddaloni is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. He likes to apply his background in microbiology to the production of homemade fermented foods (beer, wine, sourdough breads, salami and the like). He loves practicing martial arts (aikido, capoeira angola, kali) which lead him to a keen interest in energy practices and, in turn, to sacred geometry. He also loves outdoor activities: skiing, hunting, fly-fishing, gardening. In his youth he took classic guitar lessons to increase his chances to pick up gals.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Frederick C. Lyman Jr.

Read Fred Lyman’s memoriam

Retired bass maker Fred Lyman has had articles published by the Guild in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and now the ’00s. He’s a thirty-three-year GAL member and a Convention presenter. And he’s the champion of all Guild Benefit Auction donors, having donated hundreds of items beginning with our first auction in 1984. Fred passed away in 2012

▪ bio current as of 2009

Kathy Matsushita

Kathy Matsushita

Seven-year Guild member Kathy Matsushita has been busy in the free time away from her high school English classes making mostly guitars, but also a harp, a dulcimer, a mandolin, a fiddle, and what-have-you. Sharing her knowledge through her websites that chronicle her successes and challenges as an amateur luthier has brought a wealth of information and inspiration to others. And she’s well trained in can opening by Maggie and Emily.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Manuel Bernal Martinez

Manuel Bernal Martinez is a professor of music at the Javeriana University and Fine Arts Faculty in BogotŒ, Colombia, specializing in regional and popular Colombian music and instruments. He began working with GAL member Luis Alberto Paredes in 1990 to develop a superior model of the Colombian Andean bandola, and in 2003 they began to develop a bandola family of instruments. Manuel performed at the 2008 GAL Convention as a member of the bandola quartet Perendengue.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Lloyd Marsden

Four-year GAL member Lloyd Marsden got his initial education in practical woodworking growing up on a wheat and cattle ranch. A degree in mechanical engineering lead to work in mining equipment design. He built his first guitar using books by Young and Sloane. More recently he has studied with Harry Fleishman. “My wife patiently supports my hobby,” he reports.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Antonio Marin

Antonio Marín Montero was born in Granada in 1933. His family had no history with the guitar, and Antonio began his working life in marquetry workshops. He follows the technique and template of French luthier Robert Bouchet. Today his fame has reached five continents and he makes twenty guitars per year.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Ed Margerum

Edward Margerum is an unemployed chemist and scholar who is now vicariously living a lutherie career through his daughter Alice, a Guild member currently studying early fretted instrument construction at City of London Polytechnic, formerly London College of Furniture.

▪ bio current as of 1992

Linda Manzer

Manzer Guitars

Linda Manzer began her lutherie career as an apprentice to Jean Larrivée in the early ’70s, and has been a GAL member for a total of thirty years. She is a very highly regarded builder, which is particularly odd when you consider that she still hasn’t figured out how many necks a guitar has.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Ken McKay

Ken McKay’s formal education in working wood was to study classical woodcarving where he learned to recognize a sweet line. He now specializes in replicating electric guitars and is hoping to make his next double bass someday soon. He has other lofty goals, too.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Mike McGovern

Stewart MacDonald’s

Mike McGovern has been in retail music sales for sixteen years, ten of those at Stew-Mac. He likes working on instruments in his spare time, but easily gets distracted and ends up playing them instead. He lives in Athens, Ohio with his wife and three young children.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Paul McGill

McGill Guitars

Paul McGill was a way-rad downhill skier until he became entraped in lutherie work. Sure, he’s making beautiful instruments for big-name players, but now instead of the wind whistling through his hair he hears the wind whistling through the dust collector ducts. But it doesn’t whistle very loud, because he did such a good job building the system.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Graham McDonald

Graham McDonald Stringed Instruments

Graham McDonald is a mandolin, Irish bouzouki, and ukulele builder who has published three books on instrument making and one on mandolin history. He has been a member of the GAL for thirty-two years. Despite living on the other side of the globe, he has attended four (maybe five) GAL Conventions and been a presenter at two of them.

▪ bio current as of 2023

John McCarthy

Five-year GAL member John McCarthy is a certified aircraft mechanic as well as a classically-trained violinist and guitarist and a former professor of painting and fabric doping.

▪ bio current as of 2004

Michael McCarten

McCarten Ltd

Michael McCarten has been an artist/craftsman since childhood, being inspired by his artist grandmother and his carpenter grandfather. He has been working on stringed instruments since 1979, and at an increasingly higher level since happily joining the GAL in 1997. He is a proud person who is humbled and exhilarated by the diverse group of high caliber people willing to share their knowledge of lutherie.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Veronica Merryfield

From the UK and now on the Canada’s wet coast, Veronica Merryfield made her first headless fretless bass at age seventeen and just kept going. These days she builds to commission, preferring unusual designs that solve playability issues for players with physical limitations or making basses. Veronica has a day job in electronics and software to subsidize her lutherie habit.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Rich Mermer

Mermer Guitars

Fifteen-year GAL member Rich Mermer has been building custom instruments since 1983. He builds by the grace of God and his lovely wife Sue. Remember, behind every struggling luthier is a successful spouse or partner! Waiting to join in the fun are his sons Rylan Koa (age 6) and Nathan Sitka (age 4).

▪ bio current as of 1999

Josep Melo

Melo Custom Instruments

Twelve-year GAL member Josep Melo fell in love with guitars before his teen years. He trained formally as an artist and industrial designer, and opened his own design studio in 1975 at age of twenty-three. He was able to make friends with and order guitars from some of his guitar-making heroes, including James D’Aquisto, Steve Klein, and José Romanillos, and now builds his own guitars that honor their work while exhibiting his own distinctive, modern Catalan aesthetic.

▪ bio current as of 2022

David Melly

Seven-year GAL member David Melly found his way to the Bay Area after graduating from the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery. Although recently sited behind a table at the Healdsburg Guitar Festival with a Samvadhi, he normally makes steel-string acoustic guitars.

▪ bio current as of 1999

John Mello

John Mello

Since studying with Richard Schneider and Jeffrey Elliott in the ’70s, eighteen-year member John Mello has built, restored, repaired, and sold guitars in the San Francisco area for thirty-eight years, during fifteen of which he eschewed guitar construction in favor of a mortgage and raising two, now-grown children.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Eric Meier

A Psimple Psaltery

Eric Meier got his start in lutherie back in 2007. He continuously explored new and unusual woods to use for his psalteries, and this interest gradually grew into an online project that’s known today as The Wood Database. In addition to authoring a book on psaltery-making (A Psimple Psaltery), he has recently published the content of his wood website as a reference book entitled “WOOD! Identifying and Using Hundreds of Woods Worldwide.”

▪ bio current as of 2016

Ted Megas

Megas Guitars

Thirty-one-year GAL member Ted Megas combined his backgrounds as a guitar player and a furniture maker by becoming a guitar maker. He chose to specialize in archtop because it was the guitar that he enjoyed most and that offered the greatest challenge.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Paul McNulty

Paul McNulty Fortepianos

Paul McNulty dates his lutherie beginnings to purchasing a Renaissance lute in 1981 from the brilliant David Brown of Baltimore, and peering at it for several years in slack-jawed wonder, when not playing Dowland slowly upon it. Never comprehending lute technology, but being prompted by it nonetheless, he has made 150 fortepianos of different types since 1986. McNulty’s shop ethic, learned by slyly remembering Brown’s occasional remarks, eschews sandpaper, using scrapers instead as much as possible, but stops short at gathering reeds from primeval swamps for their gentle abrasive properties.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Ellis McMullin

Nine-year member Ellis McMullin decided to do something “constructive” when his wife gave him a classical guitar made by Del Langejans for his sixtieth birthday. He mentioned to Del that he thought he could make one. Del’s replied, “When you finish it, let me take a look.” Ellis did just that, and now makes guitars! Thank you, Del, for your suggestions and time.

▪ bio current as of 2006

Jim McLean

Dublin, Ireland native and five-year Guild member Jim McLean moved to Canada when he was sixteen, in 1971. Today he is married, teaches grade school, and builds acoustic guitars and Irish bouzoukis.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Max Mclaughlin

Max Mclaughlin is a freelance music journalist and drummer with a wide range of craft-based interests, including lutherie and vintage drum restoration. Although he is a first time GAL author, he has over 15 years of previous experience in the publishing world and is currently developing his own magazine devoted to the history and future of music and the people who make it.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Robert Miller

Robert Miller received his BA in music education from Kean University in 1982. He studied violin with Norma Auth of Maplewood, New Jersey, Newton Mansfield of Manhattan, and the late Odin Guenther of Heidelberg, Germany. He enjoys his free time reading, playing (electric) guitar, piano, or violin. He has worked for many years as an instructor of Special Education.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Gregory Miller

Gregory Miller

First-time AL author and twelve-year GAL member, Gregory Miller, pursued his love of woodworking instilled by a high school shop teacher all the way to a degree in Interior Architecture and Design at Kansas State University. In 1998, after ten years of professional practice with a Portland, Oregon, interior design firm, he made the leap to designing and building high-end custom furniture full-time. Then, while visiting the 2003 Northwest Handmade Musical Instrument Exhibit, he was bitten by the lutherie bug and has been obsessed ever since.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Bernard Millant

Bernard Millant’s family has been in the violin business in France since the 18th century. He learned his trade in workshops in Mirecourt, New York, and at his father’s side in Paris. Today his expertise, especially on bows, is sought after by musicians, makers, and dealers around the world.

▪ bio current as of 2006

John Miles

Seven-year member John Miles spent 35 years as an engineer developing infrared detectors. In 1961 he read Carleen Hutchins’ Scientific American araticle and decided to make fiolins after retiring. He has, and he does.

▪ bio current as of 1994

Luca Milani

Luca Milani started his career as guitar maker as soon as he got his degree in clinical psychology. He lives in Greece now and shares job and bills with his wife Marzia. During his thirty-three years he has collected more than thirty recipes to make espresso.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Tim Miklaucic

Guitar Salon International

Tim Miklaucic is the owner of Guitar Salon International in Santa Monica and founder and Chairman of GUITARadio.com, a multimedia publishing company dedicated to all forms of the guitar and guitar music. He also travels more than he’d like, but spends as much time as possible with his wife and their beautiful young daughter.

▪ bio current as of 2000

Anne Middleton

Environmental Investigation Agency

Anne Middleton is Outreach Coordinator for the Forest Campaign at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in Washington, DC, where she focuses EIA’s efforts to represent legal wood trade on Capitol Hill. She has published documents and articles on the U.S. Lacey Act, and has worked in the field in Eastern Europe, Tanzania, and the USA on a variety of wildlife conservation issues.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Leonardo Michelin-Salomon

Leonardo Michelin-Salomon – Luthier

Eighteen-year member Leonardo Michelin-Salomon studied lutherie at the School of Arts and Crafts in his native Uruguay, before moving to Norway in late 2002. He’s been building classical guitars for twenty years, and more recently also designing and building electric guitars and basses, and studying guitars from the early 1800s. Lutherie is his perfect excuse for keeping always busy learning new stuff.

▪ bio current as of

Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer (aka Rico) turns fine fittings mostly for violin family instruments. He apprenticed with Jeffrey Elliott way back in the ’70s and was founder/owner of the Twelfth Fret Guitar Shop in the late ’80s. Presently, he finds time to golf, fish, and hang out with Irish musicians.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Benoit Meulle-Stef

BMS Guitars

Electrical engineering didn’t make it for Benoit Meulle-Stef, so he turned to lutherie, and eventually set up shop in Belgium. There, at BMS Guitars, he does repair and retail, and builds electrics, resophonics, contra guitars, and unique multistring acoustics. It’s the only job he’s ever had. Ben has been a GAL member for two years.

▪ bio current as of 2006

John C. Moore

Six-year member John C. Moore, a chemical engineer by day, has made one guitar from a kit and is currently making no. 2 from scratch. He pursues guitar making for its unique combination of music, science, woodworking, tool collecting, and mistake correcting. While the glue is drying, he can most likely be found practicing crosspicking or on his Harley.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Chuck Moore

Moore Bettah Ukuleles

Seven-year Guild member Chuck Moore builds Moore Bettah Ukuleles in the Hawaiian jungle using only solar power, and has to drive into town to receive mail or make a phone call. He has also been a potter and a scrimshander. His ukes often feature eye-popping koa and exquisite inlay work with Hawaiian and South Seas motifs.

▪ bio current as of 2014

John Monteleone

John Monteleone

Like lutherie itself, John Monteleone has been greatly influenced by Italian men, working with Jimmy D’Aquisto in the ’70s and Mario Maccaferri in the ’80s. He was recently featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And he’s been a GAL member for a total of thirty-six years.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Mike Moger

Mike Moger has been retooling his shop and building guitars for six years following his class on classical guitar construction with Harry Fleishman and Fabio Ragghianti. He built mostly furniture before guitars, and continues to build as a hobby, using hand tools rather than machinery. He has sold real estate for twenty-three years.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Tatsuo Miyachi

Six-year GAL member Tatsuo Miyachi is an engineer who has been playing guitar for forty years. He has been pipe-dreaming several strange guitar-building ideas but he has not yet made any of them real.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Walter Mitchell Jr.

Walter Mitchell, Jr., is a retired publisher whose hobbies include boating and bicycling as well as making doll houses and model airplanes. He has been luthing for about two years, and his son David is also a beginning luthier and GAL member.

▪ bio current as of 1997

Gregg Miner

Harpguitars.net

Collector, historian, and multi-instrumentalist Gregg Miner has been unofficially crowned the Harp Guitar Pope. Creator of the Knutsen Archives, and subsequently, Harpguitars.net and Harp Guitar Music, his passion for the instrument borders on the pathological. And he is a fifteen-year GAL member.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Larry Mills

L. Mills

Twelve-year GAL member Larry Mills is also a member of the MLG, i.e., the Midwest Luthiers Guild. I guess that makes him a MLG/GAL. Isn’t that the slag term for a nonwizard? He’ll just have to use a chisle like the rest of us.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Todd Mylet

Portland Fret Works

Twenty two year GAL member Todd Mylet studied lutherie in Minnesota at Redwing Tech in 1995 and has been building and repairing various and sundry fretted instruments since. He plies his trade at Portland Fret Works with three other luthiers. When not luthing, he enjoys baking bread, surfing, and making his wife and two teenage daughters yawn by waxing on about the idiosyncrasies of the neck he is resetting.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Phillip Murray

Three-year Guild member Phillip Murray began in lutherie eighteen years ago and has been a full time builder and repairman for eleven years. He and his wife Gina have a son, Hugh, age 1. Phillip plays in a church folk group every Sunday to about two thousand people. He is also edits the newsletter of the Dublin Chapter of the Irish Woodturners Guild.

▪ bio current as of 1997

Andrew Mowry

Mowry Stringed Instruments

Fourteen-year GAL member Andrew Mowry gained his love of wood while roaming the forests of southern Vermont as a youth. Although his formal education is in geology and geography, he has been a full-time luthier since 2004, building mostly mandolin-family instruments.

▪ bio current as of 2017

George Morris

Luthier and lutherie instructor George Morris has taught and inspired hundreds of students. He prefers to stay with individual construction techniques using minimal resources as opposed to making multiple instruments of the same design. George holds small classes at his live-in school in Vermont.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Mark Moreland

Mark Moreland has been a violin maker and restorer since 1975. He began his apprenticeship after a violin performance career, and eventually ran shops in Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. In 2010, he opened a full-service shop with his wife Sharon specializing in workshop-model instruments which are carried in shops around the country. Mark’s personal instruments have earned the endorsements of top artists. Mark was also shop foreman and quality control for Eastman Strings Co. at which time the Mark Moreland Atelier line of student instruments was created. Mark is a full member of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. In addition to running his shop and building instruments, Mark enjoys gardening and sailing.

▪ bio current as of 2021

Todd Novak

Gryphon Stringed Instruments

Professional guitarist turned luthier Todd Novak is currently working for Marc Silber Guitars and does freelance repairs in the Berkeley, CA area. He is also a ukulele enthusiast, and has begun building soprano ukes along with restored and vintage stringed instruments.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Jean Francois Noel

Ten-year Guild member Jean Francois Noel is a professional motorcycle mechanic who for the last ten years has made a custom guitar or two each year, as well as doing a lot of lutherie experimentation for his own satisfaction.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Shaun Newman

Shaun Newman Guitars

Shaun Newman began playing the classical guitar in 1968 whilst living and teaching in Germany. He made his first classical guitar almost 25 years ago and has also made harps, dulcimers (hammered and fretted), mandolins, mediaeval fiddles, psalteries, and ukuleles. He has recently completed a baroque guitar with parchment rose. He retired almost a dozen years ago from his busy role as a company director working with an agency supporting unemployed young people.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Steve Newberry

Read Steve Newberry’s memoriam

Fifteen-year member Steve Newberry was a founding member of the postwar New York Society of Classic Guitar. As a guitarist he performed on radio, TV, and Broadway. He studied both music and math at numerous institutions of higher learning. Since retiring as a software consultant and technical writer in 1988 he has done considerable experimental lutherie and is a founding member of NCAL.

▪ bio current as of 2001

Paul Neri

Paul Neri has been repairing and restoring instruments for more than half of his sixty-two years. He is the author of The Acoustic Guitar Repair Detective, a repair diagnoses book published by Hal Leonard. He was formerly with the bluegrass trio Spacegrass, the duo The Acoustic Suburbanites, the Spanish guitar duo Las Guitarras, and later the bluegrass quintet Ragweed. He now occasionally performs solo Spanish guitar and is a member of The Kerry Boys, an Irish music group where he plays banjo.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Greg Nelson

Nelson Stringed Instruments

Eleven-year GAL member Greg Nelson took up building stringed instruments in the late ’90s after years of cabinet and furniture making, architectural millwork, and antique restoration. His passion is steel string guitars, but he is currently building a fiddle and working up the nerve to try a cello.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Tom Nelligan

Olympus

Tom Nelligan is a Senior Applications Engineer with Olympus NDT in Waltham, MA. He has worked in the field of industrial ultrasonic testing since 1978, and specializes in ultrasonic thickness gauging and flaw detection. He is also an amateur guitarist.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Geoff Needham

Fourteen-year GAL member, amateur classical guitarist, and retired family physician Geoff Needham lives near Hadrian’s Wall in Northeast England. He decided to make a guitar in 2004, believing he could not afford to buy a fine classical instrument. He now realizes that he could have bought several fine guitars with the money he has spent on lutherie. He has completed scores of classical guitars and has a special interest in building with nontropical woods.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Koen Padding

After graduating from the Newark School of Violin Making in 1979, Koen Padding worked at Machold Rare Violins on the restoration team gathered around Roger Hargrave. He returned to the Netherlands in 1988 as technical director of the family’s ink factory, and founded Magister Varnish Products in 1997. Koen passed away in 2012

▪ bio current as of 2009

Don Overstreet

David Kerr Violin Shop

Twenty-two-year GAL member Don Overstreet is a past convention presenter and an occasional contributor to American Lutherie. His regular gig is setting up, repairing, and restoring instruments of the violin family at David Kerr’s Violin Shop. He intends to get back to those unfinished violins in the workshop at home any day now.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Tomas Orellana

Tomas Orellana

Tomas Orellana built his first instrument in his college dorm room. He played the Venezuelan cuatro as a child and later studied the different types of Venezuelan bandolas. Outside his shop, he is a CAD designer, aerospace engineer, and pilot with an MS in mechanical engineering.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Tim Olsen

Harvey Thomas Custom Guitars

Editor-in-Chief Tim Olsen is the founding editor of GAL publications. Beginning with the Guild of American Luthiers Newsletter and the GAL Quarterly and Data Sheets in the early 1970s, which evolved into our quarterly journal American Lutherie in 1985, Tim has edited, rewritten, clarified, compiled, corrected, and/or combed over every article in every journal or book published by the Guild. His commitment to the Guild’s founding principles of openness and sharing is evident in his stewardship of the Guild over the last forty years. Tim’s interest in lutherie started as a twelve year old when he started his first guitar. He was operating his own shop at seventeen, and completed his professional lutherie career in his mid-twenties, when he began dedicating his full time work to the Guild and its publications. [01-21-2022]

Stan Olah

Stan Olah is a chief of police, a farmer and nurseryman, and a budding violin maker. He’s enthusiastic about all his jobs, but he’ll talk your ears off about fiddles (and since he’s a cop, you’ll like it). He turns to George Fortune for fiddle advice and good stories, and he’s a good storyteller himself.

▪ bio current as of 1998

Tim O’Dea

Tim O’Dea is a carpenter by trade and has been making guitars for about five years. He is a surfer living near the Pacific coast of New South Wales.

▪ bio current as of 1998

Peter Oberg

22 year GAL member Peter Oberg likes to think of himself as a polymath, however delusional it may seem. He has scaled back his luthiery endeavors to pursue his dormant yet nascent potential as a musician and composer for the guitar, all the while remembering those close to him, past and present. When all else fails he goes in the ocean, seeking to merge with the vastness of the infinite mystery.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Sebastian Nunez

Sebastian Nunez

Sebastián Núñez was a tinkering teenager in a Buenos Aires garage band until he followed his girlfriend to the Netherlands. There he fell in with a historic-house-restoring, Harley-riding, early-music luthier. He read every early-music magazine in the Utrecht University library while commuting to work. Now he’s an old master, making and restoring lutes, Romantic guitars, and harpsichords.

▪ bio current as of 2017

James E. Patterson

Nineteen-year Guild member James E Patterson is a well-known lutherie author and a retired printer with an interesting hobby: he likes to go on “photo and video binges, mostly of travels in Southeast Asian countries.”

▪ bio current as of 1997

Ralph Patt

Ralph Patt’s Jazz Web Page

Veteran musician Ralph Patt played with famous big bands, did studio and broadcast work, and generally jazzed it up in the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s. Since then he has been working on nuclear-waste issues for the U.S. Department of Energy, but he hasn’t let it get in the way of his music.

▪ bio current as of 2002

Ben Patron

Ben Patron, at the culmination of a varied career that included work as a lift truck driver, cannery worker, inventor, motorcycle customizer and restorer, artist, and vintage instrument dealer, continues to explore the extreme boundaries of lutherie in his shop in the foothills of the Sierra. In his spare time, he performs on guitar and provides motivational talks at local Rotary Clubs and other venues. Supporting him in his sometimes whacky adventures is his wife Cherie, a super woman who can sing and ride and dance on roller skates, and is disobedient too — another plus.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Ken Parker

Twenty-three year GAL member Ken Parker is world famous for his electric solidbody Fly guitar. But since that project ended, he has returned to his first love, the archtop guitar.

▪ bio current as of 2023

John Park

Twelve-year GAL member John Park has played the Spanish guitar since the early ’60s but resisted building them until the late ’70s. He builds blancas and a few classics in the time-honored way and plays to them while the glue dries. Hobbies include classical humming and mountain biking, which he does simultaneously.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Giacomo Parimbelli

Giacomo Parimbelli began playing the guitar as a child and graduated at the prestigious Conservatorio di Verona “Felice Evaristo dell’ Abaco”. He perfected his skills under the tutelage of famous musicians such as Stefano Grondona. He penned several books, including the first biography of Benvenuto Terzi, and countless assays. He has been a soloist in Italy, Europe, India and Russia. He plays a wide repertoire of classic music on baroque guitars. He is a guitar collector and an unflagging promoter of traditional guitar culture in Italy.

▪ bio current as of 2019

Luis Alberto Paredes Rodriguez

Twenty-seven-year GAL member Alberto Paredes Rodríguez was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Along with studies in engineering, he took up instrument construction as a hobby in 1959, and in 1977 he became a GAL member. He has built more than a thousand instruments including guitars, bandolas, tiples, mandolinas, cuatros, violins, and gambas. He is the author of La Guitarra Clásica Moderna: Historia, diseño y construcción, a Spanish-language lutherie book.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Anamaria Paredes Garcia

Anamaria Paredes Garcia holds a doctorate in veterinary medicine from the National University of Colombia. She is the daughter of luthier Luis Alberto Paredes Rodriguez, and is the principal coordinator of the administrative activities of this family business.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Chris Pantazelos

Spartan Instruments

Chris Pantazelos builds and repairs guitars and all kinds of stringed instruments from the Middle East, including replicas of ancient Greek instruments. He has had great success with all wood lattice bracing for classical guitars, and he continues to develop this construction.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Craig Pierpont

Eight-year member and first-time author Craig Pierpont’s interest in lutherie began in the ’60s while in high school. At that time he realized that the only way to acquire all the instruments in which he was interested would be to build them himself. He quit his day job in the ’80s eventually becoming a full-time harp builder. Declining to use power tools, he builds his instruments completely by hand. That may be the reason that many of the other instruments on his original list remain built only in his mind.

▪ bio current as of 2000

Norman Pickering

He’s an inventor and researcher who has worked in the aviation industry and the manufacturing of brass instruments, but Norman Pickering is probably best known to luthiers as the inventor of the Pickering phono cartridge and as a prolific investigator into the physics of violins and bows.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Bruce Petros

Petros Guitar Shop

Bruce Petros has been building guitars since 1972 and has over a quarter-century of GAL membership under his belt. His son Matthew has been building alongside him full time since the year 2000, and together they build about thirty guitars per year.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Neil Peterson

Peterson Acoustics

Four-year GAL member Neil Peterson was a custom cabinetmaker for twenty-five years. He got the lutherie bug really bad while studying with George Morris, and has been dreaming of full-time instrument building for about the last ten years. Neil is currently working on guitars #30å33, and enjoys building in mesquite and reclaimed longleaf pine, both native to his home state of Texas.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Devon Pessler

Devon Pessler is a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering Technology at Purdue, where she is working on characterizing wood for acoustic guitar tops. Most of her work outside of classes has been on a program to provide engineering support to companies in Indiana.

▪ bio current as of 2024

A.I. Peresada

After becoming Laureate of the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students, Anatolii Ivanovich Peresada attended and taught at the Institutes of Culture in Moscow and Leningrad. He currently teaches at the Krasnodar Institute of Culture. In 1985 he published a book, Orchestras of Russian Folk Instruments.

▪ bio current as of 1989

Don Pilarz

Twenty-two year GAL member Don Pilarz built his first classical guitar in 1982. Born in Montréal, Canada, he earned degrees in music and math there before moving to Genoa, Italy. He builds mainly new classical guitars but enjoys the challenge and satisfaction of studying and restoring fine older classical guitars. After decades of playing classical guitar and lute, he has also taken up playing piano.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Guy Rabut

Guy Rabut

Guy Rabut’s first instrument, made when he was fifteen, was a fretless “guitar” whose body was a hollow section of an apple tree, with a 1/4? scrap-lumber soundboard. He’s come a long way, and is now a highly regarded violin maker with a shop in Manhattan. He’s a repeat GAL Convention lecturer and author. And he has been a Guild member for an incredible forty-two consecutive years.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Ralph Rabin

Fiddle maker Ralph Rabin’s story is told. One point not mentioned there is the fact that he was a member of the Mad City Maulers, the winning team in the 1988 guitar smashing contest.

▪ bio current as of 1989

Charlie Price

Two-year GAL member Charlie Price has over thirty years experience in the aerospace field. While variously employed by Boeing, Pratt&Whitney, and Lockheed, he worked on such projects as the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle, the X-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Apollo Lunar Lander, and the Reagan-era “Star Wars” program.

▪ bio current as of 2023

Bart Potter

Bart Potter was born in Honolulu in 1951 and continues to live there with his family. He apprenticed at the Guitar and Lute workshop in Honolulu from 1974 to 1975 and on its untimely closing, continued making guitars and `ukulele in his home workshop until 1980. At that time he transitioned from lutherie to his current profession of sawmill-owner and producer of tonewood and veneers from Hawaii-grown trees. He was among the founders of the Hawaii Forest Industry Association in 1989, served on its board for 19 years, contributed extensively to the “green” aspects of the prospectus of the HFIA-produced annual statewide woodworking show “Hawaii’s Woodshow” and continues to support HFIA as a member. In 1992 he served on committees defining the focus of Senator Daniel Akaka’s Tropical Forest Recovery Act, which ultimately provided the genesis for the 2007 creation by the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources and the Unites States Forest Service of the Hawaii Tropical Experimental Forest (HETF). The establishment of the HETF guarantees a land base for ongoing research on the Hawaiian forest.

▪ bio current as of 2008

Derek Porter

Four-year GAL member Derek Porter went from his home in the American West to a story-book Great House in the English countryside to take a rigorous instrument-making course.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Paul Poliski

Six-year GAL member Paul Poliski began the hobby of building guitars and repairing stringed instruments for his musician daughter and son-in-law about fifteen years ago. A recently retired architect, he is now regularly repairing instruments for local shops. His future retirement in Jerome, AZ, will focus on building the “perfect” dreadnought.

▪ bio current as of 2011

Bob Pittman

Pittman Guitar Repair

Bob Pittman has been repairing things as far back as he can remember. When his teenage son took his new electric guitar apart, he followed the calling into the world of lutherie and fixed it. Now he spends his spare time repairing acoustic and electric instruments. When time allows, he makes krar kits for aspiring musicians to assemble and play in his home workshop in the Boston area.

▪ bio current as of 2010

Jose “Pepito” Reyes

After a successful career in the banking industry, José “Pepito” Reyes began building guitars and cuatros in 1986. Three years later he was infected with a passion for the Puerto Rican tiple, and since that time he has dedicated himself (with huge success) to the rescue and promotion of this lovely little instrument. He builds tiples in the mountains of central Puerto Rico.

2006

Rivke Lela Reid

Three-year GAL member RIvke Lela Reid plays Eastern European Jewish music — which brought her to the tsimbl. She built and plays a solidbody sunrise starburst electric tsimbl, and introduced it at Klez Kamp 2005 with fuzz and wah-wah.

▪ bio current as of 2007

Steve Regimbal

Amateur playwright and man of leisure Steve Regimbal lifts weights twice a week with Ted Beringer’s son, Barry. He owns five Beringer instruments, and helped Ted present some of his instruments at the McIntosh Art Gallery in Billings, Montana.

▪ bio current as of 2003

Philippe Refig

Guitars Refig

Philippe Refig began his career in the ballet in Paris in 1951 and eventually spent eighteen years with the English National Ballet. He learned classical and flamenco guitar playing in the ’50s and studied instrument making at the London College of Furniture (now London Guildhall) in the ’90s. He now makes guitars full time, both classical and flamenco.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Dave Rauscher

In the late ’70s, David Rauscher played classical and country guitar outside New York City. He wrote articles for Pickin’ magazine and was later their marketing director. Sloane’s book led him to H.L. Wild. He bought some wood and built a couple of guitars. Planning to continue, he bought a bunch of rosewood and spruce at Michael Gurian’s. But getting and spending laid waste his powers. Now he is seventy and retired. He still plays, and still has all that wood and all those clamps. So here he goes again, with a goal to make one good enough that he can sell his Ramírez (but never the Joseph F. Wallo).

▪ bio current as of 2014

Dale Randall

Twenty-year GAL member Dale Randall is a retired Michigan Conservation Officer (fish fuzz, possum police, duck dick…) who has been married to Marge for forty-eight years. He tries not to let luthing interfere with a few bluegrass festivals and three months in Florida each winter.

▪ bio current as of 2005

Edmond Rampen

Five-year GAL member Edmond Rampen started making instruments in the early 1970s with Foxfire 3 as a guide and the wood pile as a source. After art school he planned to be a luthier, but a wood allergy mandated a hypoallergenic alternative. He became a product designer and a professor, teaching industrial design, CAD, plastics fabrication for artists, and musical instrument design since 1985, as well as running a business focusing on medical and musical hardware. Years later he discovered that the allergy was just to pine. He resumed instrument building and is now over one hundred and counting.

▪ bio current as of 2018

Dave Raley

Five-year GAL member Dave Raley is an engineer in his day job specializing in aircraft landing systems. Check his web page (www.daveraley.com) for his thoughts on the global implications of the GPS system and a nice cornbread recipe.

▪ bio current as of 2004

Jim Roden

Professional forester Jim Roden uses his spare time to build dulcimers, garden, tend his orchard, and pick out tunes on his instruments in the quiet of his front room.

▪ bio current as of 1994

Nicholas Von Robison

Read Nicholas Von Robison’s memoriam

Twenty-two year member Nicholas Von Robison is a convention workshop presenter, former staffer, frequent contributor, and special projects guy for the GAL. We generally send anything pertaining to wood that crosses our desks to him for comment and review. After a 10 year hiatus, he’s building again, slow but sure after being out of the hands-on, new world of lutherie for so long. Nick passed away in 2000, read his memoriam.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Larry Robinson

The last we heard, amateur luthier and musician Larry Roberts was driving big trucks around the Pacific Northwest to pay the bills. He assures us that his woods and tools are still there, beckoning, and he’ll be back to lutherie soon.

▪ bio current as of 1994

Mark Roberts

Mark Roberts Guitars & Ukuleles

Seven-year Guild member Mark Roberts brings to lutherie a background in all disciplines of fine art, industrial product design, and furniture design to uniquely crafted his approach to design and craft of fine instruments. While building a multitude of different instruments, he maintains a keen focus on evolving the instruments. Mark’s background in industrial product design has afforded him the opportunity to develop a number of innovative tools and jigs for the luthier’s shop. Mark also organizes the monthly Portland Luthier Lunches and exhibits at the annual NW Handmade Musical Instrument Show.

▪ bio current as of 2013

Art Robb

Arthur Robb

Art Robb is a luthier in Wiltshire, England. Born in New York in 1945, all his musical instrument work has been in the UK. He specializes in Renaissance Lutes but also makes guitars, does repairs for local musicians and restores 18th and 19th century guitars. Art taught musical instrument making in evening classes and college from 1980 to 2000 and developed a portfolio of plans which are now available from his website.

▪ bio current as of 2019

David Rivinus

David Lloyd Rivinus

David Rivinus made his first violins in the early 1970s under the tutelage of Indianapolis maker Thomas Smith. Shortly thereafter he was accepted to a full apprenticeship at the Hollywood shop of restoration icon Hans Weisshaar. In 1979 he opened a shop with violin maker Thomas Metzler in Glendale CA, and moved several years later to Vermont where he devoted himself to new instrument making and acoustic research. His work on acoustics and ergonomics continues, but he has moved west once more, to the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.

▪ bio current as of 2000

David Riggs

Despite being a bona fide weirdo and lifelong member of the arts community, Davy Riggs has never once seen a UFO. He was recently reminded that he was formerly employed by the Government as an identifier of flying objects. Life is unfair.

▪ bio current as of 2004

Kevin B. Rielly

Twenty-two-year Guild member Kevin Rielly built a banjo in 1964, a kit dulcimer in 1969, and a guitar in 1973. He plays guitar, banjo, octave mandolin, anglo concertina, and tin whistle. He has an MS in accounting from SUNY Albany and was the CFO at SUNY Adirondack where he has worked for thirty-two years.

▪ bio current as of 2014

Tom Ribbecke

Ribbecke Guitars

Veteran builder and GAL Convention presenter Tom Ribbecke was born in Brooklyn, but has been making guitars in the San Francisco Bay area since 1974. He’s an innovator, a teacher, a mentor, a lecturer, and a captain of industry.

▪ bio current as of 2024

Gene Rhinehart

Thirteen-year member W.E. Rhinehart builds and plays resophonic guitars, as well as fabricating resophonic guitar cones. Mr. Rhinehart passed away in 1997 but his shop is still running.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Dennis Russell

Nine-year member Dennis Russell is a retired Navy aviation mechanic. He built his first instrument in 1994 and has now built several mandolins and three guitars. He plays flat-pick guitar, mandolin, and old-time fiddle, as well as growing tomatoes and roses.

▪ bio current as of 2004

Paul Ruppa

Paul Ruppa is a musician and mandolin historian with degrees in Scandinavian Studies and Music History. Since he bought a Vega cylinder-back mandocello in 1973 (for $175), his interest in America’s mandolin history has grown and “kind of became an obsession.” He has been a member of the century-old Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra since 1981, and has directed the MMO on Garrison Keillor”s “A Prairie Home Companion. “Currently, when not looking for more information about the origin of America’s appreciation of the mandolin, he is realizing a dream by leading an ambitious recording project. His goal is to produce a musical tribute to what he calls “the American Mandolin Orchestra Era.” For the project, Ruppa has formed an ensemble of first-rate, local musicians to play vintage mandolin arrangements on antique Vega instruments. The repertoire selected for the project is all linked to Wisconsin’s unique mandolin orchestra heritage. Ruppa says “It sounds crazy, but it might just work.”

▪ bio current as of 2017

Charles Rufino

Charles Rufino Violinmaker

Charles Rufino has been immersed in the art of the violin maker since 1974, studying at the Newark School of Violin Making in England and working under “Nigo” Nigogosian of New York and Carl Becker of Chicago before opening his own shop in 1984. He is a full member of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers and the International Society of Violin and Bow Makers. Like Bach, he enjoys playing the viola in several community orchestras so that he can be “in the middle of the harmony.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Rick Rubin

Thirty-three-year GAL member Rick Rubin has been involved in instrument repair since 1976. In retirement, Rick plans to inflict more guitars, Irish bouzoukis, and octave mandolins on the world, while using up the stash of wood he’s sat on all these years. He’s also a member of an Irish trad band called Floating Crowbar, where he plays guitar, banjo, mandolin, and a little whistle and flute.

▪ bio current as of 2022

Merv Rowley

Mountain Dulcimer 1-3-5

Merv Rowley is a retired engineer whose career was spent in industry, research, and education. For the past twenty years he has been sole proprietor of Roselle Dulcimers, building mountain dulcimers, hammered dulcimers, and the occasional banjo or German Alpine zither. He has authored several articles on innovations in dulcimer design and construction and remains active as a custom builder, teacher and volunteer performer.

▪ bio current as of 1999

Peter Rosenbladt

Rosenbladt Guitars

Peter Rosenbladt grew up in Germany and came to the U.S. in 1968 to study computer engineering at UC Berkeley. He stayed, and worked his entire professional career in Silicon Valley. Building musical instruments sounded like a wonderful challenge because of the combination of physics, engineering, craftsmanship and art. He has been at it since 2003 and has been amazed by the world-class level of American lutherie.

▪ bio current as of 2015

Todd Rose

Todd Rose Guitars

17-year GAL member Todd Rose has been married for the same number of years and is the lucky father of two amazing daughters. In his central NY county (and the U.S. as a whole), one in five children don’t have enough to eat. Finding this heartbreaking and intolerable, Todd and his wife, Suzy, have recently turned their homestead into a not-for-profit initiative called Morningsong Community Service Farm, to produce fresh food for donation to local food pantries and meal programs, while also serving as a resource for people seeking to learn about homestead farming and related subjects. Since he turned his attention to this project, Todd’s adventures in lutherie have become a part-time pursuit. He still plays and repairs guitars and ukes and such, and still has unbuilt instruments on the drawing board, but how many of these he will get around to building remains unknown. He’s okay with that.

▪ bio current as of 2016

Jose Romanillos

Read Jose Romanillos’s memoriam

Thirty-year GAL member José Luis Romanillos celebrated his 85th birthday in June 2017. He, and his wife and partner of fifty-nine years, Marian Harris Winspear, claim to have retired in 1995 when they moved back to Spain after bringing up their three sons, mostly in England. Apparently, retirement means building instruments, teaching lutherie, and researching, updating, and writing books. José and Marian continue to inspire us while setting the bar impossibly high.

▪ bio current as of 2018

John Roeder

First-time author John Roeder has been playing zither in cafes and restaurants for ten years, and building zithers for seven years. He considers himself a good musician, but strictly an amateur luthier.

▪ bio current as of 1997

Rob Rodgers

Rodgers Tuning Machines

Rob Rodgers makes Rodgers tuners, the precision tuning machines known to luthiers and musicians around the world. After completing his own engineering qualifications, Rob teamed up with his dad, David Rodgers. Rob with his wife Sue, now living near Halifax, Nova Scotia continue to streamline the business using 21st-century equipment, but still find time to appreciate the beautiful Canadian landscape. During the summer months they enjoy cycling and kayaking and continue a lifelong interest in the martial arts throughout the year.

▪ bio current as of 2012