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 Guitar Maker 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.
