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And here we have it; the completed bass!

Thanks for watching, cheers Gary

In this video, the penultimate in the series, the bass gets the Karate Kid treatment and its various components re-fitted, ready for its final testing.

Cheers Gary 

The neck’s done, so in this video the body shaping is completed and a few other bits sorted out!

Cheers Gary

The second recent double top has an all-cedar soundboard with black limba back and sides. This is an interesting African wood, very light, rather similar to mahogany. The back and sides of this guitar are reinforced and stiff in a … Continue reading →

In 2024 I have crossed to the dark side twice, meaning i built two double tops. Of course, maximum volume at any cost has never been my goal, so on both I did my best to boost the response of … Continue reading →

With the fretboard/frets completed, the next stage is to shape the neck.

Cheers Gary

Now is the time to prepare the fretboard (compound radius etc.), install the frets and dress them. This isn’t the most exciting stage of the build but of course frets are pretty essential to any fretted instrument!

Very excited to have started my guitar no. 90. Coincidentally I am building it for a very close friend, who happens to have also commissioned my guitar no. 2 in 2008. The soundboard is 12 years old spruce from the … Continue reading →

With the first stages of work completed on the body and neck, they can be joined together and fretboard fitted

 I'm now on to the neck!

Thanks for looking, Gary

The conventional wisdom is that there are no shortcuts to becoming a good musician. On guitar, that is patently false. In this video, I share three…

Continuing on from last update, these “weeknotes” (ahem) follow the new neck I’m building for the second guitar I built. When I started writing about this neck in my notes here I couldn’t say what it was for, as it was a surprise present for my brother, who is the owner of t...

A recent delivery from last years build batch. Special quality Austrian spruce and Madagascar rosewood. Hauser hommage soundboard but with elevated neck and armrest. Audio sample from an early polishing phase. No reverb/enhancements etc, purely the dry sound from the … Continue reading →

Picking up a story of a neck build from a little while ago. This neck is actually a new neck for the second guitar I built, The Chuncaster. That build I made for my brother, and is the first guitar body I made myself rather than buying, but I still bought the neck, which is ...

This year was the tenth birthday for Liverpool Makefest, and I was delighted to be able to return as an exhibitor once more and attempt to explain guitar building to the people of Liverpool. I started exhibiting at Liverpool Makefest in 2017, having only just started buildin...

I've been working on the idea for this video for a few months. It started as a reaction to one of Rick Beato's livestreamed "the ultimate guitar fretboard…

Improvising solos over chord changes can be intimidating—but it doesn't have to be! If you can find one note by name, anywhere on the fretboard, you can…

Torres homage with Romanian spruce and maple, brass tornavoz, 640 scale. Figured Spanish cedar neck, Malaysian blackwood fingerboard, Madagascar rosewood headplate, bridge and binding, Gotoh premium aluminium tuners. Video recorded raw, without polish. Nylon strings, no reverb.

A Hauser hommage built with a highly rare figured Amazon rosewood body and Italian bearclaw spruce soundboard. Elevated neck of figured Sipo, African blackwood, Macassar headplate, stainless frets; wenge binding, NOS Fustero tuners. This guitar produced one of my most … Continue reading →

This technique was an epiphany. Once I figured out that you could shift pentatonic scale shapes up or down in response to chord changes, my melodic soloing…