Michael
Hornick
Marty Lanham
John and Bill Gilbert
Steve
Grimes
James Olson
Sidebar: How to Shop for a Custom Guitar
When guitar makers get together these days, the talk often turns to
the Golden Age of Lutherie. That age happens to be taking place right
now, and we who are in the field of fretted instrument building, repair,
and restoration are in the incredible position of knowing that we are
living in the good old days. There are more good builders with access
to excellent parts and woods and useful information on the craft than
ever before. Dozens and dozens of luthiers are making a wide variety
of beautiful guitars in everything from one-person shops where just
a few instruments are made each year to factories where scores of guitars
are built every day. However you look at it, there have never been more
high-quality choices for the acoustic guitarist.
The phenomenon of the individual luthier—especially for steel-string
guitars—is a relatively recent one. In the first half of the 20th century,
American flattop guitar making was dominated by big factories. By 1960,
Gibson, Guild, and Martin reigned so supreme that it was thought that
an individual just couldn’t make a guitar as good as the factories could.
Even in the field of archtop guitars, hand-builders such as Stromberg
and D’Angelico were few and far between.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, luthiers such as Eugene Clark, Michael
Gurian, J.W. Gallagher, Stuart Mossman, and Roy Noble started to build
guitars individually in small shops—basically making up the craft as
they went along. With only two very hard-to-find books on guitar making
available, many of these pioneer modern luthiers had to take instruments
apart to find out how they were built.
Today there are so many books and videos on guitar making and repair
that I can’t keep up. There are two separate guitar makers’ organizations
and quite a number of schools and courses specializing in lutherie.
Guitar making in small shops is now a viable profession for the dedicated
craftsperson. For some—such as Santa Cruz, Breedlove, Collings, National
Reso-Phonic, and Bourgeois—the goal is to build up small "boutique
factories." The employees at each of these companies turn out 40
to 60 instruments per month.
The subjects of this article, however, all work in very small shops
with little or no help. Outputs range from fewer than 12 guitars per
year (Michael Hornick) to a nearly superhuman 60 instruments per year
(James Olson). All of these makers work in well-organized spaces, and
each luthier has also mastered the art of building the specialized jigs
and fixtures that aid precision work. Several of them have past or current
side careers as working musicians, a factor that certainly affects their
approaches to designing and building instruments. Keep in mind as you
read these profiles that this handful of makers was chosen as a representative
sampling of the hundreds of individual luthiers working today; check
out scores of custom makers in our online Custom
Guitars Gallery and Luthiers Directory. You'll find additional makers
in our online Manufacturer
Directory. Next time you’re shopping for a guitar, consider that
there’s probably a world-class guitar maker within a couple hours’ drive
of your home.
—Rick Turner
MICHAEL HORNICK
AVERY, CALIFORNIA
"It’s the neatest woodwork on the planet." Michael Hornick’s
eyes twinkle like those of a guitar-making Santa Claus as he shows off
the shop where he builds nine or ten guitars a year under the Shanti
name. "There’s nothing that compares to the finished product of
an instrument. It’s alive, and it’s so much more than just a piece of
woodwork."
Hornick considers himself a true custom builder. "It’s not just
offering custom options," he says. "For me the ultimate thing
in building is to have players come to my shop, to sit down and listen
to them play, and then absolutely zero in on their taste in every aspect
of the instrument, whether it’s some far-out new kind of inlay or just
the purfling that goes around the top. So it’s two people’s creativity
going into the instrument, not one." Hornick pulls out a few examples
of his exquisitely detailed work. "Every rosette is different.
You wouldn’t believe the stuff we come up with sometimes. Until it’s
right, I can’t stop."
Hornick’s obsession with detail is evident. "I do an awful lot
of stuff inside the instrument: interlocking braces, laminated bridge
plates. . . . It takes time to do that little bitty stuff, but that’s
the thing that drives me: can I make it better? I’d like to think that
my instruments will end up having a real life span. Not 50 or 100 years,
but hopefully hundreds."
This high level of craftsmanship is one reason you will find Shanti
guitars in the hands of players like Pat Flynn, Peter McLaughlin, and
Lorin Rowan. Another reason is the sound. "I’m such a tone freak,"
Hornick explains. "It’s easy to get a big bottom on a guitar. It’s
a whole different ball game to get the midrange just as sweet and thick.
On the really good-sounding guitars, when you hit a treble note it pulls
out all the bass overtones that are sympathetic to it. What makes that
aliveness and effervescence in the tone is when it’s pulling out its
opposites. You get it from both sides; it doesn’t just come from one
place."
Hornick says that "a master luthier can make a really good-sounding
guitar out of most any piece of wood, [but] they’ll make a great-sounding
guitar out of a great piece of wood." Which is why he gets so excited
about tonewoods. "I just go nuts over the woods. This [he gestures
to his wood storage closet] is my playroom, my favorite room."
He points to some stacks of wood. "That’s silver spruce from the
Black Forest. Right now I’ve got 35 German tops that are to die for.
I can remember way back in the ’60s when you got your little baggie
and it was like, ‘I got my stash.’ That’s the way I feel in here all
the time. I’ll call [a luthier friend] and say, ‘I got a real good score
for you’ and start laughing. We actually relate it that way sometimes."
He pulls out another piece. "This is some gorgeous yellow spruce.
Put your nose on the end and smell it."
One way Hornick shares his knowledge of lutherie is through a mandolin-building
course he teaches each year at the RockyGrass Festival in Lyons, Colorado,
and again in his own workshop. "In four or five days, you get the
experience of building an instrument," he says. "The students
do their own fretwork, they carve their own necks, they put everything
together. They don’t bend [the sides]. I cut the ledges for the purfles
and the bindings, but they glue them in and scrape them down. One of
the things I want to make sure people get in the class is the freedom
to be artistic. It’s real fun because all the enthusiasm and everything
that’s going on, as well as the process, is shared. They walk away in
a whole different place."
RockyGrass is but one of the many festivals Hornick attends. Each year
the winner of the Troubadour singer-songwriter competition at Telluride
walks away with a Shanti. "Telluride has been really good because everybody
knows me; I’ve been a part of the festival forever," he says. "The big
deal for me is staying in touch with the people and the players. Most
of my orders come that way rather than through the mail."
He recently completed guitar number 77, but Hornick still remembers
the thrill of his first instrument. "Guitar making was the avenue
for my artistic [impulse] to come out. With the guitar, I just never
got tired of doing it. [The first one] took a year and then it was alive.
And when I strung it up, I knew that this was it, this is what I was
trying to find. Ultimately the whole thing was finding the passion and
having the opportunity to go for it. I consider myself unbelievably
fortunate."
—Phil Campbell
MARTY LANHAM
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
The two-room barn next to Marty Lanham’s house in Nashville is filled
with stacks of wood he’s collected over the past 20 years. In his workroom
hang the bodies of three freshly finished guitars, one of which will
be first prize at the Cross Country Trail Ride in Eminence, Missouri.
Holly Tashian’s Martin waits in its case for a fine-tuning before accompanying
her on a European road trip. On the walls, photographs of bluegrass
icons such as Bill Monroe and Dave "Stringbean" Akeman share
space with the Beatles, Albert King, and Paul Simon. Lanham points out
one of his favorite photos, which shows a young Johnny Cash smiling
and chatting with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.
Lanham’s Nashville Guitar Company services some of acoustic music’s
most respected talents. He’s made instruments for Pat Enright and Stuart
Duncan of the Nashville Bluegrass Band, mainstream country artist and
former bluegrasser Marty Stuart, and songwriter Dave Gibson, formerly
of the Gibson-Miller Band—as well as doctors, lawyers, overseas collectors,
and other part-time players, including actor/banjoist Steve Martin.
Lanham has been a professional musician for the better part of the past
three decades, and his guitars combine modern adaptability with a traditionalist’s
appreciation for acoustic instruments.
He got interested in instrument repair in 1964, when he brought a couple
of his old Gibsons to a shop. "I took them to a place in San Francisco
that was pretty reputable," he recalls. "When I got them back,
I could see the guy’s handprint in glue on the back of the mandolin.
I knew that I could do better work than that." As a teenager, Lanham
had done plenty of gun-stock work, so he was no stranger to wood, and
in the late ’60s he began working on instruments for friends and colleagues
he met playing bluegrass banjo in the San Francisco area.
In 1972, the members of Lanham’s band, the Styx River Ferry, decided
to move to Nashville. Lanham got a job in the repair shop of Gruhn Guitars,
where he worked for eight years. "That’s where the bulk of my knowledge
of instruments and materials comes from—the constant parade of the finest
instruments in the world," he says. He also had the opportunity
to work on Hank Williams’ old Martin D-45, now owned by Marty Stuart,
Lester Flatt’s D-28, and two of Jimmie Rodgers’ guitars—a Weymann and
a Gibson HG-24. Still, Lanham’s primary focus was on his musicianship,
and he spent four years as banjoist on the Grand Ole Opry, playing with
bluegrass legend Wilma Lee Cooper.
Lanham gradually began making his own instruments, and in 1985 he decided
to devote himself full-time to the business of lutherie. "The musicians
of this community have shaped what I do," Lanham says. "I
like to work on instruments for people who play professionally, who
push the envelope and push the instruments to the maximum demands of
the road. I think the thing that’s unique about my instruments is not
any one detail or feature, but the experience I bring to the workbench—experience
with musicians, and experience gained from being a musician myself."
Lanham’s instruments are built with traditional tonewoods like rosewood
and spruce as well as more unusual species like Tasmanian blackwood
and Malagasy kingwood. "A big issue among instrument makers,"
he says, "is the supply of wood. We’re all looking for alternative
woods and a sustainable-yield wood supply. I’ve located some people
who specialize in wood harvesting. There’s a guy named Larry Trumble
who seeks out individual trees in Alaska. There are a lot of trees,
for instance, that were cut off about 15 feet above ground, so there
all these 15-foot stumps."
How many hours does Lanham spend on an individual instrument? "I
honestly don’t know," he says. "I work in a more organic way,
I guess. I spend a lot of time not just out here in the shop but doing
R&D, you might say. The [musical] genre really determines the demands
of each instrument. Bluegrass players are mostly traditional-minded.
They want a big body with a big, boomy sound to be heard over all the
other instruments in a bluegrass band. A songwriter like Dave Gibson—who
does a lot of demo recording, and generally plays electric on stage
but likes to write with an acoustic—wants a smaller body with a more
focused sound."
Lanham confirms that his instruments have gotten better over the years.
"Sure, there’s been a progression," he says. "And there
is a tremendous amount of information sharing—good, accurate information—within
the instrument-building community. In the past five years or so, there
has been a renaissance in the handmade instrument community. As a result,
the craft as a whole has improved. We’re all making better instruments
than we did 20 years ago."
—Shelton Clark
JOHN AND BILL GILBERT
WOODSIDE, CALIFORNIA
When I first talked to John Gilbert about interviewing him and his
son, he asked, "Do I have to clean up the shop? Bill has got it
full of machinery for his new place, and it’s a shambles." When
I arrived at his house in the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco,
I saw what he meant. A two-car garage was packed with more than 30 years’
accumulation of tools and wood, with just enough wiggle room for access
to a couple of workbenches. John, whom I had met before at luthiers’
meetings, welcomed me cordially and introduced me to his son Bill. We
spent several hours talking guitar making and covered a wide range of
topics from the technical to the aesthetic.
John built his first classical guitar in 1965, shortly after going
to work as a tool engineer for Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, California.
A coworker showed him a slim volume entitled Make Your Own Spanish
Guitar, and it seemed like a fun project. At first, building instruments
was just a hobby for John, with a lot of repair mixed in, but by 1974
the response from players was so encouraging that he decided to build
full-time. By 1991 he had made 140 guitars that were played by a long
list of professionals including David Russell, Frederic Hand, Konrad
Ragossnig, and David Tanenbaum, to name just a few. At that point, John
brought his son Bill into the business to give himself more time to
develop a line of guitar machine heads he had invented. Bill has now
built 42 guitars under his own name, and John says proudly that customers
tell him confidentially that his son makes better instruments than he
did.
When asked for a description of the characteristic sound of a Gilbert
guitar, John’s response is very direct. "It’s neutral," he
says. "It responds to the way a guitarist plays instead of having
a certain type of sound. Our guitars have a wide range of tone color,
they project very well, and they’re very even on the first string. Above
the seventh fret, where a lot of guitars poop out, they stay strong."
What about left-hand action? "Playability is critical," John
says. "You can build the best-sounding guitar in the world, but
if it tires you out to play it, it’s useless. We go to a lot of trouble
to build a neck that is really stable, that will hold close tolerances,
so that we can do really accurate fretwork. That lets us bring the strings
as close as possible to the fingerboard without buzzing."
This kind of careful engineering and accurate measurement is evident
in all of the Gilberts’ processes. If there is one word that describes
their approach to making guitars, it is precision. John’s background
as a highly skilled toolmaker carries over into woodworking. The stiffness,
weight, and dimensions of the soundboard, the back, and all the interior
bracing are measured and recorded for each instrument. All of these
parts have to meet certain specifications that have been established
by years of experimentation. It’s no wonder that Gilbert guitars have
a reputation for consistency.
As John and Bill talk about the craft they so obviously love, they
seem more like buddies than father and son. Good-natured banter is the
order of the day. I ask Bill how they managed to transfer the business
across the generations so smoothly. "My dad made it clear that
I was either going to make instruments of the same quality that he did,
or I wasn’t going to make them," he explains. With this goal in
mind, Bill and John worked together for more than a year, cosigning
the guitars’ labels during this transitional period.
If customer response is any measure of Bill’s success in taking over
the construction side of the business, he is doing very well indeed,
with a three-year waiting list to buy one of his instruments. He is
currently building with East Indian and Madagascar rosewoods, and customers
have a choice of western red cedar or any of three species of spruce
for the soundboard. Bill continues John’s policy of satisfaction guaranteed.
When customers receive their new instruments, they have a couple of
weeks to try it out, and if they are dissatisfied for any reason they
get a complete refund, including shipping costs. In over 25 years, no
one has taken the Gilberts up on that guarantee.
—Brian Burns
STEVE GRIMES
MAUI, HAWAII
The road to Steve Grimes’ home and guitar workshop in the hills of
Maui isn’t an especially winding one, but you have to look out for packs
of cyclists coasting down from the Haleakala Crater, a popular activity
among the tourists. Grimes and his wife, Joan Mercer—who describes herself
as the only person in the world who makes a living creating arrangements
of dried, tropical protea flowers—can put up with the inconvenience.
In fact, Grimes deliberately came here from the mainland 15 years ago
to enjoy the Maui lifestyle and escape a run-of-the-mill existence.
When Grimes left his shop in Port Townsend, Washington, he’d already
been building instruments—mostly acoustic archtop guitars and mandolins—for
12 years. Although about half of the 20 instruments he builds each year
are still archtop guitars, living in Hawaii has had a definite effect
on his work. When Grimes met master slack-key guitarist Keola Beamer
in 1987 and heard his double-soundhole flattops, he was inspired to
design his own, differently braced version, and these instruments now
account for about half of his work.
"Slack-key players often tune the low E string all the way down
to C," Grimes explains. "By moving the two soundholes into
the upper bout, you generate a larger surface area to reproduce such
low notes. I sell a lot of two-soundhole guitars for standard tuning,
too. They’re loud, and they sound a lot different than a Martin!"
Building archtops takes up about half of Grimes’ remaining time. He
offers four models: the Kula Rose, the Jazz Nouveau, the Montreux, and
the Laureate. He also makes the occasional Tiny Grimes mini-flattop,
Bird of Paradise electric, or GS model. The GS, or Grimes-Steinberger,
is a guitar he codesigned with Ned Steinberger that puts no string tension
on the top, allowing it to be built very lightly and produce a lot of
sound. "The stress-free design uses a tailpiece, and the strings’
break angle over the bridge is so lateral that there’s no stress on
the top at all," Grimes explains.
Grimes' clients create an infinite number of custom guitars by choosing
their instrument’s size, woods, finish color, inlays, electronics, and
neck profile. "I enjoy getting into a real working relationship
with a potential customer," he says. "I take a lot of time
to explain to people what this model does that the other models don’t
do. The Jazz Nouveau, for example, has a flat back, so it gets a little
bit of that flattop guitar bass response that you don’t usually find
in an archtop. I’ll ask them how hard they play. Do they like a high
action? If they know what they like, I can duplicate or improve on that.
I used to do repair work and had four or five customers a day, and I
didn’t like that. Now I have 20 customers a year, so I really like the
social interaction."
Yet Grimes enjoys working alone. "I don’t want to build 50 guitars
a year and have five guys working for me," he explains. "You
become a manager; your whole job description changes. The stress level
would go up. If I’m in a bad mood [now], I’ll come in here and put on
ZZ Top as loud as I can get it. That’ll change my mood."
Grimes builds his guitars in batches of a dozen, nearly completing
two batches per year. Does building 12 guitars simultaneously make it
more difficult to customize each one? "I used to build two or three
guitars at a time, and I really enjoyed it," he says. "And
I thought, ‘I would never enjoy the production-line type of building
where I’m doing a dozen at a time.’ Until I tried it for the first time.
And I love it, I really do. I’ll set up to do necks, and I’ll
get out 12 neck blocks and all the little jigs and routers that I use.
The procedure is the same, but I don’t have to keep setting up. What
keeps it from being a production line is the fact that each one is
different and each customer is different."
Despite his efficiency, Grimes’ enthusiasm for the work keeps him in
the shop about 70 hours a week. "I work too much," he admits.
"I have fairly regular hours, but they’re ridiculous hours. But
I’m not really pushing myself. When I’m in here, I’m in a groove, I’m
totally zoned out. And that’s low stress. After 25 years, I still can’t
wait to get in here every morning.
"If I made guitars and they were being sold by a third party in
a store, it wouldn’t mean the same thing," he adds. "I like the personal
feedback." And it's the feedback he gets from his customers before
he starts building that helps them get the instruments they want. "The
most important question I ask them is, ‘Why do you want a handmade guitar?
What do you envision it doing for you that your Martin or your Guild
doesn’t do?’ Then I’ll tailor the guitar—the way it looks, the way it
feels, the way it sounds—to what the person wants."
—Simone Solondz
JAMES OLSON
CIRCLE PINES, MINNESOTA
James Olson is one of those overnight successes who took 20 years to
get there. After setting up as a full-time luthier in the late 1970s,
he earned a reputation as one of the Twin Cities’ best builders. Then
in 1982 he gained wider recognition when Phil Keaggy bought one of his
guitars. Since then, other professionals have discovered the impeccable
workmanship and distinctive sound of Olson’s instruments, and now you
can see the large O on the headstocks of guitars played by Leo
Kottke, Kathy Mattea, Paul McCartney, Sting, James Taylor, and David
Wilcox, among others.
This high visibility means high demand (even with the new $3,595 price
tag that went into effect in January of this year [1997]), and
Olson’s current backlog is 100 instruments, which translates to an 18-
to 24-month wait for a new guitar. Olson works 60-hour weeks with the
assistance of a single employee, and his output is about 60 guitars
per year.
The challenge for a luthier in Olson’s position is not figuring out
how to make great-sounding guitars, but how to make them efficiently.
"You have to [pursue sound] in the beginning," Olson explains,
"because you’re formulating a sound that you want to reproduce."
But, he adds, the range of individual taste and preference means that
there is no single, perfect sound to attain, although each guitar must
have excellent volume, intonation, harmonics, sustain, clarity, and
balance. "After you get all those things happening, it’s a good
guitar," Olson says, "and then you can chase it a little bit
this way or that way if you want to."
What all of his customers want, Olson believes, is consistency. "This
is the constant question: ‘How do I know that mine will sound like James
Taylor’s or David Wilcox’s?’ They want it to sound like the one
they heard. If you do something really different, then they don’t like
it. Basically, I’m building the same guitar and finding out how to build
it more efficiently, with less labor. That doesn’t mean that I’ve given
up on making a better guitar, but what consumes me most is getting orders
filled."
Olson works out of a barnlike former welding shop in a semirural area
north of Minneapolis. He has extensively rebuilt the shop’s interior,
and the lower level now houses the spray booth, buffers, and much of
the heavier machinery, including a massive, industrial-looking thickness
sander that Olson designed and built himself. This is also where his
stock of wood is stored: book-matched sets for backs and tops, as well
as piles of uncut rosewood, mahogany, spruce, cedar, maple, and walnut.
Upstairs, a spacious, well-lighted workshop and office is where most
of the finer shaping and assembling is done. For most of his career,
Olson has worked alone, and the shop walls are hung with tools, jigs,
and clamps that he has devised to help him work faster and more efficiently.
On one bench, for example, is a vacuum-operated rubber-and-aluminum
device that allows all the braces for a top to be clamped at once in
a single operation.
All these specialized tools point to the fact that a luthier is often
a problem-solver and a toolmaker. "I don’t think there is a handbuilt
guitar, actually," Olson says. "I use as many machines as
anybody else, if not more. But my hands make the guitar in its entirety;
it doesn’t take 50 different people to make the guitar. To me, handmade
means smaller production, with one person building it.
"I don’t think that a machine does anything but make the guitar better.
Anywhere I can use a machine to replicate something more efficiently
and perfectly, that’s the object. And most of the time your hands are
moving the machine anyway—instead of a chisel, you’re moving a router."
The other half of lutherie is taking care of business—buying supplies,
keeping the books, and dealing with customers. During my visit, the
phone seems to ring every few minutes. If Olson is in the middle of
a task, he lets the answering machine pick up, but as often as not he
takes the call himself and spends some time talking to a customer who
wants to discuss the details of a dream instrument or trace the progress
of a particular guitar.
Olson answers all the questions (including mine) patiently, but it’s
not surprising that he likes to work at night, when the phones and journalists
are quiet. In fact, he was up late the night before our interview, getting
the kinks out of a new jig for cutting the ledges for binding. It’s
still not quite right, though, and he is anxious to get it finished,
because there’s a batch of bodies lined up, waiting for their binding.
After giving his assistant some instruction on trimming up sets of
book-matched Indian rosewood boards that will become backs, he turns
to his big Bridgeport milling machine and starts cutting and drilling
the aluminum blocks that will hold and guide the router that will cut
the ledges. When the jig is finished, Olson will set it up, do the cutting,
and then move on to one of the hundreds of small operations that go
into the making of a guitar. And at each stage, he will be looking for
ways to improve the processes that make the guitars that make the music.
—Russell Letson
How to Shop for a
Custom Guitar
by Rick Turner
Consider why you want a custom instrument.
Can you not find the right guitar in a music store? Are you after something
really special? Having a custom guitar built will be a major commitment
of both your time and your money. Learn what you’re getting into. Consider
joining one or both of the luthiers’ organizations, the Guild of American
Luthiers (8222 South Park Ave., Tacoma, WA 98408) and the Association
of Stringed Instrument Artisans (PO Box 341, Paul Smiths, NY 12970).
Read up on how guitars are put together so you can understand why a
custom instrument might (or might not) be best for your touch and your
music.
Find a luthier who already builds instruments
like your dream guitar.
Don’t go to a classical builder for a dreadnought, and don’t go to
a builder who’s only comfortable working with fingerstylists if you’re
a flatpicker.
Check out the work of the luthiers you’re considering.
Ask for the phone numbers of people who own guitars built by the luthiers
on your short list. Call the lucky musicians and ask how they like their
instruments and how they liked the experience of dealing with the maker.
Find out if you can play some examples of the builders’ work. You may
be able to check out some luthiers’ guitars in retail shops.
Articulate your preferences.
At a minimum, most luthiers will want to know about what string gauge
and setup you like, how you play (flatpicking or fingerpicking, hard
or soft, style of music), whether you use low open tunings, etc. The
more you can put into words about what you like in a guitar and how
you’re going to use it, the more likely it is that you’ll get the instrument
you’re dreaming of.
Be ready to be patient.
Custom builders often have long lead times (as long as two years),
and those lead times can stretch.
Set a realistic budget, and consider how you
want that budget apportioned.
You may be able to afford the Brazilian rosewood upgrade (often a multi-thousand
dollar upcharge) but then be unable to afford the full abalone purfling
treatment. Would you rather have a simple guitar with the very finest
wood, or are you after something that will flash on stage? Don’t expect
an individual luthier to build you the D-45 you always wanted for the
price of a Baby Taylor. While going directly to a luthier does cut out
a middleman, the individual builder will put a lot more hours into a
guitar than a factory would, and small-shop overhead and tooling costs
are often a higher percentage of total sales than those in a production
shop.
Confirm the financial arrangements.
It is fairly standard to pay 50 percent up front and the balance on
receipt of the instrument, but make sure that you’ve talked this through
with the builder before he or she starts working. Also, check if a case
is included in the price. Consider a Calton or Mark Leaf road case to
protect your investment.
Discuss what happens if you are not satisfied
with the instrument.
With some builders, you may be stuck; with others you can expect to
get at least a partial money-back guarantee. Don’t expect a refund if
the guitar has your name in lights up the fingerboard!
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, August 1997,
No. 56.
