Category Archives: Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Rodgers

Rodgers Tuning Machines

David Rodgers make Rodgers tuners, the precision tuning machines known to luthiers and musicians around the world. David left his position as chief design engineer for a large company in the mid-1970s in response to a growing demand for the improved machine head design he’d developed in his home workshop. Recently David has found time to restore his functional steam-driven locomotives and 200´ track that circles his back yard.

▪ bio current as of 2012

Jason Rodgers

Jayemar Guitars

17 year Guild member Jason Rodgers, a middle school band and choir teacher by day, builds electric guitars and pickups in the evenings and weekends out of his small garage shop. He enjoys using locally sourced woods, preferably reclaimed or recycled, and simple finishes. Jason readily admits that he is part of the era of internet-educated guitar makers, and owes much gratitude to his friends at the Musical Instrument Makers Forum www.mimf.com

▪ bio current as of 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derek Porter

Four-year GAL member Derek Porter began his exploration into lutherie with the construction of a gourd banjo, and shortly thereafter spent two years studying at West Dean College in southern Britain. There he gained a deep appreciation for the art and the many facets of design which contribute to it. He continues to build a variety of instruments including guitars and viola da gambas while spending a good deal of time in the repair and restoration field of orchestral instruments. Currently, Derek is establishing a methodology for instrument design based on human measurements which he hopes to publish soon.

▪ bio current as of 2024

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

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

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

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. She plans to graduate in May 2024. She came to Purdue as a freshman and did so well, she decided to stay. Most of her work outside of classes has been on a program to provide engineering support to companies in Indiana. She is challenging the record for the largest number of support projects ever done by a student.

▪ bio current as of 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Megas

Megas Guitars

Seventeen-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 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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