2023
AL#150 p.24
Lee Herron
▪ A Dobro is good clean fun. And then maybe youll want to expand your lap-steel playing to include an acoustic Hawaiian guitar. Wouldnt it be great to have them both on your lap at the same time? Do it. Go on; you are a luthier, you can mash them up. A Dobro… a Weissenborn… a WeissenBro!
2022
AL#147 p.18
Beau Hannam
▪ In a former lutherie life, Hannam cut saddle slots with a big honkin milling machine. A change of situation led him to design this practical and straightforward router jig to do the job. He gives clear and detailed instructions for building and using it.
2021
AL#144 p.6
Roger Haggstrom
▪ A hundred and some years ago, Swedish folks sat around the house all of a dark winter and sang hymns together, accompanied by the strummings of cheap mass-produced guitars. Those days are gone, but a lot of the guitars are still hanging on the walls of old houses. Roger Häggström has made a business of restoring them to useful condition and modifying them to sound and play better than they ever could have. He restores and modifies. Restomods. Mentions the Levin guitar company.
2020
AL#141 p.26
Leonardo Michelin-Salomon
▪ A Uruguayan luthier enrolls in a craft school in Norway to study Romantic-era guitars built by Italian, German, and French makers two hundred years ago. He writes an article about his techniques and discoveries that is published in an American journal with readers in over forty countries. Yes, it’s a big beautiful lutherie world. We are all just leaves on one wide-spreading, figured-maple branch.
2018
AL#133 p.40
John Armstrong
▪ Many different designs have addressed the problem of making a travel guitar with a full scale length. Here’s one that solves the problem by completely redesigning the tuning mechanism so that it can fit into the body behind the bridge.
2018
AL#133 p.60
Jay Anderson
▪ Here’s a simple device that lets you string, play, and set up a flattop guitar before you glue the bridge on.
2017
AL#131 p.71
R.M. Mottola
▪ How do I find the best compensation angle compromise for a steel string guitar saddle slot?
2017
AL#132 p.3
R.M. Mottola
▪ Mottola collected some data about string length compensation at the 2017 GAL Convention. He promises to publish soon.
2017
AL#132 p.18
Kevin Aram
▪ Kevin Aram has long been one of the very top classical guitar makers in the United Kingdom. Here he takes us through his process of setting the action on a classical guitar and making sure the frets are shipshape and Bristol fashion.
2017
AL#132 p.44
Juan-Oscar Azaret Graham Caldersmith
▪ Graham Caldersmith’s articles in GAL publications go back a full thirty-five years, earlier than American Lutherie magazine itself. He’s located in a tiny town in the hinterlands of New South Wales, Australia. He uses his scientific training to develop innovative classical guitars, and has long been a leader in the effort to develop a family of guitars of different sizes and musical ranges. Our globetrotting reporter asks about his latest thoughts and methods, which include carbon-reinforced lattice bracing.
2017
AL#130 p.52
R.M. Mottola
▪ Did ancient folk know what they were doing? Or did they just have the bad luck to be born too soon? This article can’t settle that question definitively, but it does give some new and helpful information for luthiers. Graphs compare the pitch accuracy of fret scales calculated by the 12th-root-of-2 method vs the Rule-of-18 method. Appropriate string length compensation is considered.
2017
AL#129 p.12
John Calkin
▪ Calkin says real lutherie can be fun, spontanious, quick, and cheap. He makes a uke from a lumber-yard 2×4 to drive home the point.
2017
AL#129 p.24
James Condino
▪ Condino has developed a clever process by which he can string and play a new mandolin very early in the building process. This makes voicing much more accurate,a nd it reduces the risk of experimental materials and bracing patterns considerably. Must see to believe. Mentions the work of Lloyd Loar at the Gibson company in the 1920s.
2009
AL#99 p.65
Luis Mesquita
▪ In one bundle we are offered a new design in archtop guitar bridge construction, an adjustable neck (no details), and a cool way to hide pickup controls in a side sound port. Way cool!
2007
AL#92 p.26 read this article
Mike Doolin
▪ The author begins with a lengthy introduction to explain why guitars can’t play exactly in tune in every key, all the way to the point where music theory clashes with physics. It’s pretty deep but it’s fun. The cure for wayward guitars is to find what music a guitarist plays the most, and then adjust the action and intonation at both the nut and the saddle to find the most satisfactory compromise for that player. This is the thinking luthier’s approach to intonation correction. With 4 charts and a drawing.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2006
AL#85 p.46
John Calkin
▪ Some instruments aren’t valuable enough to warrant extensive repair work but are too interesting to throw away. Enter the resurrectionist. In this case the subject is a ’30s tenor guitar by Regal. Cracks are fixed, braces are replaced, a new bridge is made, and the neck is refitted. With 21 photos.
2005
AL#82 p.58 BRB7 p.336
Brian Yarosh
▪ Yarosh came up with a top-loaded (pinless) bridge with individual sliding bone saddles. You can build one yourself with his good description and 26 photos.
2005
AL#81 p.54 BRB7 p.300
Thomas-C. DeVeau
▪ A basic archtop-style, floating bridge, that is. With 9 photos.
2003
AL#74 p.64 BRB7 p.505
Harry Fleishman
▪ Mr. Harry examines fossil ivory as a material for bridge pins, nuts, and end pins, and finds it exquisite. He also checks out the Stew-Mac Bridgesaver tool and finds it useful on a variety of fronts.
1999
AL#59 p.46 BRB5 p.396
Jeff Huss Mark Dalton
▪ Hand carved and compensated bone saddles are a mark of finesse. Fine work is all about the details, and Huss and Dalton discuss a detail that is often overlooked but easy to make. With 8 photos.
1996
AL#47 p.34 BRB4 p.368
Greg Byers
▪ Finding perfect intonation through deep math and jiggling the string length at both ends. For some luthiers the quest for perfection knows no bounds. The rest of us are just jealous.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
1995
AL#44 p.26 BRB4 p.238
Chris Foss
▪ This is one of the most invigorating articles on the hammered dulcimer ever. Foss has made over 1000 instruments, has developed some hard opinions, and has tried a truckload of interesting experiments. Ever carpet the inside of a dulcimer? Foss has. Find out why.
1995
AL#41 p.18 BRB4 p.154
John Calkin
▪ The goal is to make the lightest possible instrument that will stay in tune. Calkin examines bracing, bridge design, scale lengths, wood, and hammer design. With 9 photos and several drawings.
1995
AL#41 p.26 BRB4 p.134
Nicholas-Von Robison Debbie Suran
▪ Suran is a performer/builder of hammered dulcimers.
1995
AL#41 p.56 BRB4 p.442
Michael Darnton
▪ Why is there a step in the neck behind the nut of my fiddle? What angle are the junctions of the ribs cut to at the corners? What’s the difference between French and Belgian cello bridges? Zits in the varnish? Why does my French polish crackle?
1993
AL#34 p.58 BRB3 p.494
Harry Fleishman
▪ Mixing dust with glue for a heavy paste to epoxy frets.
1990
AL#22 p.28 BRB2 p.384
Rion Dudley
▪ Dudley adds a 1/10″ layer of spruce between the instrument top and the bridge plate of a 12-string guitar, and under the bridge of a flattop mandolin. He likes the results, but is uncertain what the operation actually does to the performance of the top.
1989
AL#19 p.59 BRB2 p.479
Francis Kosheleff
▪ Got a movable bridge instrument with ladder-style bracing? Want to try a bridge design that might offer an improvement in tone? Kosheleff has an idea you should look at.
1988
AL#16 p.35
Cliff Dennis
▪ Jeez, someone finally took the mountain dulcimer seriously enough to try and compensate it’s intonation. Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. and Mrs. Dulcimer.
1987
AL#12 p.54 BRB1 p.464
Harry Fleishman
▪ These three articles augment Tim Olsen’s initial bass offering in American Lutherie #9, and as a collection they still offer the largest fund of information on the creation of the acoustic bass guitar to reach print.
1987
AL#12 p.56 BRB1 p.468
William McCaw
▪ These three articles augment Tim Olsen’s initial bass offering in American Lutherie #9, and as a collection they still offer the largest fund of information on the creation of the acoustic bass guitar to reach print.
1987
AL#12 p.58 BRB1 p.470
David Freeman
▪ These three articles augment Tim Olsen’s initial bass offering in American Lutherie #9, and as a collection they still offer the largest fund of information on the creation of the acoustic bass guitar to reach print.
1984
DS#267 BRB2 p.356
Peter Psarianos
▪ There are two main styles of commercially available bass bridge adjusters. Here’s how to fit them to a bridge. With 6 drawings and a handy spec chart of the two adjusters.
1982
DS#205 BRB2 p.315
Jeff Feltman
▪ Feltman offers a dulcimer bridge design that hardly changes the traditional look of the instrument but is said to dramatically improve the volume of the instrument. It’s a sad commentary on our noisy society that the only way to improve volume is by making it louder. Oh, well. With drawings enough to make things clear.
1980
DS#159 BRB2 p.290
Hardy-B. Menagh
▪ Menagh’s dulcimer utilizes a shortened fretboard, a banjo-ish bridge, and a tailpiece to help make the instrument louder. He also employs an X brace under the top.With 2 photos and a drawing of his dulcimer innards.
1977
DS#45 BRB1 p.288
Ian Noyce
▪ ‘Bet you thought you knew how to tune a guitar. Some are fussier than others, right? Noyce explains that fussiness, and by examining the fussiness it can in part be designed out of the guitar. On the other hand, part of the problem is psycho-fussiness, meaning that you have to tune to suit the peculiarities of human hearing. They say that horses have perfect pitch, so tuning up must be much less of a chore for them.