Watch a Master Luthier Build a Guitar (from scratch)

I'm Michael bashin I live and build guitars in Fort Collins Colorado I've been at it for over 25 years welcome to my shop what I'm about to show you is my entire process of building an acoustic guitar from scratch from the actual construction to the finishing to the final setup the guitar that I'm building is my JM model this guitar is somewhere between an OM and a large dread knot Guitar I wanted some of the clarity and balance that you get out of an OM which is great for finger style and recording but I also

wanted some of the low-end presence and power that you get out of a larger guitar one of the first things you're going to do when you start building a guitar is choose the woods that you're going to work with and this will have a huge impact on how the guitar looks and feels and sounds I get my woods from all over some times I buy Woods from folks like stac there's also other great suppliers out there but I'm always on the lookout for boards or Lumber that I can process myself into guitar wood what I

think is a good combination for this uh JM guitar is an Italian Spruce top with some very old uh palero back and sides I really like working with palero now palero itself while not a true Rosewood physically does sit solidly within the Rosewood Camp of tone It's a dense tropical hardwood which is going to add some information around the fundamental of the note or it's going to add some warmth and some complexity and give it a little bit more depth of presence I was fortunate enough to come across a woodworker who was retiring who had

some very large Boards of palero that he got in the early 1970s they were still in board form so I was able to cut them up and get what's called a flitch match which is that the Back and the sides are cut off from the same board in sequential Cuts so you have a great visual match between the back and sides and it's a really nice clean homogeneous look to the guitar this is the topwood that I'm going to be using for this guitar it's Italian Spruce now Spruce is very commonly used on acoustic guitars

because overall it has a range of physical quality which makes it really suitable for acoustic instruments it's lightweight it's stiff And it's stable now Spruce really can vary depending on the species and even within a species in terms of its physical characteristics like density stiffness but for me Italian Spruce is the perfect choice for this guitar now we can begin the build I start by running the spruce top and the palero back plates through the sander to clean up the grain and get it down to a little bit more comfortable working thickness which for me

is about .145 In the next thing I'm going to do is handle the top so I can look for pitch Pockets or any anomalies in the top that I want to avoid and I want to detect those now before I get too far into the build so now I want to evaluate the uh book match to the top cuz I can join it together either this way or I could join it together this way in this case given that I have a little Branch here uh pitch pocket bear claw and the tighter grain here I'm

going to elect to join The Top This Way once I've chosen the orientation I'll mark that line as the joint and then I'll pass the two plates over my power Joiner then I will refine that joint with my Joiner plane I use a joiner plane in a way that's a little bit typical in that I'm moving the wood across the plane and not vice versa and what that does is it very carefully produces a joint that is superior to something you would get off the Joiner because you're getting one continuous Shaving and you'll get a

very fine well prepared joint after they come off the plane I will candle them on the window and make sure that I have a a light tight joint I glue the plates together with hot high glue there's only a few times where I won't use that say if I'm working with extremely oily Woods like cocoa Bola and in that case I would go with different type of glue like an epoxy that can deal with the oil content of those woods then To join the plates I use a series of blocks and wedges to apply pressure

along the joint from the side and I do this in the gobar deck to also put a little pressure downwards on the top to keep the plates from popping up and now we can see some of the squeeze out of the Hide glue as the two plates are clamped together I'll do the same exact thing to the back plates I'll line them up to establish a good book match I'll run the plates across my Joiner plane Get a good light tight fit and then I will join the back plates just like I did the top

once the glue has dried on the top and back plates I'll take them out of The Jig run them through my wide belt sander just to clean up the joint and now I can really see the grain of the top and the back then on the top and the back I'll decide which part of the plate is going to be up by the neck which part is going To be by the tail block and using a straight edge I'll mark a center line down the length of the plate so now I've got my index holes

drilled and the next thing I'm going to do is is inlay a back Stripe Right Down the center of the guitar this is something that matches up with my perling lines it's made up of black and white veneers and a center of bivan Rosewood what I'm going to do is just run this right down the center I need a Straight edge and a router and then we're good to cut the channel the back stripe isn't totally necessary although it does add some strength to the Joint but if the joint is well prepared you absolutely don't

need one I just like to do it because I like the way it looks it's a little bit more of a traditional look and there's some options to add some joinery where the back stripe meets into the purfling and I'm using epoxy to glue This in to apply pressure to the back stripe I'll do it in the goar deck I'll let the glue dry for about 15 20 minutes and then I will level the back stripee using a block plane I'm ready to start using those indexing holes now that I've just drilled and I'm going

to attach a JM template right into those holes so everything lines up these lines are actually much bigger Than the guitar back it just gives me some lines to cut to and I know as long as I don't go inside these lines I'm in a safe Zone and I'm not getting onto the plates of the guitar so what what the scraping does is it takes 120 grit surface and makes it much smoother something probably equivalent to a 320 grit surface or above and if you compare it this is 120 grit right off the wide belt

sander and you can see how it's a little bit more Dull looking because of the um scratches in the surface and again here's the scraped surface now I'll bring in a bracing template and this will help me locate the center of the rosette which I'll mark and prepare it to be cut first thing I'm going to do is wipe a little shellac on the top and that's going to harden the fibers and protect the surrounding Spruce and using programs that are Already written I will cut out just the inner and outer purfling rings of the

rosette these purling rings are meant to match the purfling that's going to be on the top and the back of the guitar I make all my own purpling here in the shop so I get good color continuity I use a series of veneers that are dyed and in some cases color but for this particular guitar I'm going with a fairly natural kind of earthy and warm Look so I'll hand bend the inner and out of purflings and after the channels get cut on the rosette I'll glue those in right on the CN SE machine into

the channels with a waterbased glue I've got the inner and outer rosette perling rings inlaid and now I'm just going to trim them down a little bit with a block plane before I do the next step which is to excavate out the center of the channel the interior of the rosette That's where it kind of becomes a playground for using various Woods maybe some additional inlays some sand torching and really kind of mixing matching the species and playing with colors and textures and just trying to give the guitar a visual focal point but at the

same time not having it be so powerful that you don't look at anything else on the [Music] guitar so this is a piece of box elder Burl it's actually in the maple family and this came from a local tree and I'm going to use this for some of the decorative elements on the guitar in the rosette and the headstock it's just uh got some really wonderful beautiful pillowy figure in here and what looks kind of like bird's eye and so this is going to make some really nice visual accents for the guitar so I'll be

taking a slice off of this burl and then we'll thin it out on the wide belt and then Finally cut it [Music] up and then I'll transfer that over to my table saw where I'm using a fret slotting blade and a jig that allows me to cut angles off center so I can now make pieces that fit together with complimentary angles of any length and pretty much any angle all around the rosette and I'll have a rosette workboard so I can actually put all these pieces in this is where a lot of Different designs and

aesthetic choices come into the guitar the design that I'm using for this guitar is what I call a compass point rosette which has little uh triangular features that are going to be at 3 6 and 9:00 of palero and then in addition there's also going to be some Burl features as well once all those pieces are cut out then I cut some of the triangles in half with a very fine curved saw and then I will do some sand shading on little bits of the Burl ends Just a little bit of a three-dimensional airbrushed effect

to the rosette and give it just a little bit of depth very carefully I start installing the pieces from the 6:00 position and then just work towards the top of the rosette in both directions so what I'm doing now is I'm going to put this little screwdriver right into this Gap in the rosette right here the fingerboard will overlay this so I'm not really concerned about these gaps but when I put the screwdriver in Here and I twist it this adds side to side compression and pushes all the pieces of the rosette together on their

sides really tightly the thing about this method is it's a dry fit so I'm not going to take it out to glue it I am going to glue it in place right now because everything is lined up and ready to go and I'm using a water thin CA glue which has enough capillary action that it'll Wick down into the bottom and the reason that I put the purflings in first With water-based glue is that that is not going to cause any discoloration on the spruce whereas the CA glue would cause potentially some discoloration so the

perings acts as a barrier and allows me to do this dry fitting CA glue technique so things look a little bit disheveled with the uh glue right now but once it all gets sanded out all the color will even out and we'll get a real look at what the the final rosette is going to Look like so it's time to pop out the sound hole and then I'm going to put in an inner ring on the edge of the sound hole of Bolivian Rosewood and be ready to sound it out [Music] [Music] [Music] now it's

time to move on to the sides of the guitar once again I'm using that flitch match pal faroh that I've already sliced up and now I'll sand it down to a Good working thickness which is about 80,000 of an inch then I'll mark which side I want to be on the outside of the guitar based on the most favorable grain pattern and I'll use a template to trace out the final size and then tape them together to roughly cut out the shape and then just like the top and the back I'll scrape the surface with

a scraper to get rid of the wide belt sanding scratches [Music] The bending process is basically a little bit of moisture and some heat and pressure doesn't require a lot of moisture I just Spritz some on with a plant sprayer then it goes into the Bender between two silicon heating blankets and those blankets are hooked up to a voltage regulator and that's how I can control the temperature every Wood's a little bit different but you know most Woods are going to bend in somewhere in the 270 to 320 range and Some Woods like a little

bit more moisture and some Woods like a little bit less then once it comes up to temperature the lignin in the wood tend to uncouple or start to break down and the wood becomes plastic and it's at this state at which you can bend it after that time is up I'll turn the heat off and let it cool down pretty much to room temperature which in my molds can take close to an hour hour and a half as the wood cools the ligman reh hardens And that's how the wood keeps its shape [Music] [Music] [Applause]

[Music] with the sides bent and in the mold it's time to add the neck and the tail blocks for the neck block I use mahogany and I'll glue this in with a regular PVA glue or tight Bond I like to use mahogany because it's a very stable wood so it's a great choice for the Block for the tail block I use Baltic birch plywood because it's very stable and it will never crack so if I add a pickup Jack or something the Baltic Birch can really take that kind of torque finally I will clean up

the squeeze out after the clamps are on and then I'll let it sit clamped up for a minimum of an hour but usually longer for the linings on my guitars I prefer to use a solid lining probably the majority of guitars are made with an Alternative type of approach called curing or cured Linings where you have a piece of wood and there's numerous small Cuts in the piece of wood and it becomes very flexible in both cases whether you're using solid lining or curved lining its sole job is to give some additional gluing surface to

the area so when you glue on the top and the back you're not just gluing it to the side but you have more surface area to glue those plates to I'm going to be taking Three slices off of this piece of hondur and mahogany and that's what's going to make up my solid Linings after the slices are cut they'll go to the wide belt taken down to their final thickness and then all three slices are bent and then glued up in a mold so these are the three pieces of mahogany that we bent up and

what we're going to do is put an even layer of glue between the layers and then we're going To clamp everything up in this mold and that'll give us a perfect fit of the Linings when the glue cures uh they're all interlocked and so it becomes much stiffer and more stable over the life of the lining than one single salad piece so I have my uh solid lining inside these two templates and this outer template matches the arch and the taper of the back and that's going to allow me to draw a line um onto

the solid lining so I know exactly how how to match the Arch and the taper of the back onto the [Music] [Music] lining so here you can see these two pieces for the back are not flat they follow the uh the arch and the taper of the back while as the ones for the top have an almost flat radius and they'll sit flat on the bench [Music] so now my back Linings are ready to be glued in I'll use a lot of small clamps Along the entire length of the lining to well distribute the clamping

[Music] pressure my back Linings are in and now it's time to do the same thing on the top the top and the back Linings are glued in in and they're glued in to be very close to the side but they still need to be leveled and here you can see the lining is just slightly proud of the sides so we'll go over to the radius Disc Sander which will get the rim Totally level and the radius dis sander contains the arch or the Dome of the back in the sanding platin itself so these are all

pieces of anglan spruce which I harvested myself about 25 years ago I like to use Angelman Spruce for the top bracing it's a low density Spruce and it matches the type of top wood that I like to use for finger style guitars not all Spruce is equal so for example on the back braces I like to use a stiffer denser Type of spruce like Sito or adarac and above the sound hole I want a little bit more structural support I might switch to a different type of spruce what's really important with bracewood is the cut

and you want well Quon material for example on this piece the growth rings are running this way so this is the cortison face right here so I'm going to split along the quarter right here it's looking pretty good you can see it's flat we don't have a lot of Twist but I'm going to divide this up into smaller sections so it'll be flat within each section so I just ran the split face across the Joiner which flattened it out so this is the cortison face and this is going to go up against the band saww

fence so I can now take slices off of The Quon face I like to measure the density of all of the wood we're going to take the height length and width then also measure the weight to do a simple Density calculation all right so I've got my density measurement this is right in the range that I like for my brace wood at this point I'm sawing out what will be the individual braces and then sanding them to a working thickness so here's an example of a very well cortison brace I'm looking at the end of

the brace and you can see how the Grain Lines are vertical they're not at an angle like this and then these Grain Lines continue straight all the way down The length of the brace The Jig that I use to profile the bottom of the brace is is a simple template jig I have the arch of the bottom of the brace for the tops of my guitars here and then on this side of the jig is the arch for the back these clamps hold the spruce down while I cut it and there's a template bearing on

the router bit and that just rides along the face of the jig just like this and that's all there is to it so I'm making the main xpray here and what this Jig does is it notches the xpray for me I have have a special blade in here which is the exact width of the braces I'm going to put the braces down on this arm which pivots so I can control how much I want the X to be open or closed I make one pass and I should have a well-cut notched X brace so that's

how I make the X brace uh the other braces are in the guitar basically go through the same procedure but there's some different Jigs and Templates that I use for example this jig I use to cut the upper transverse brace which is above the sound hole and then on this side of the jig I have a tighter radius for the back and a gentler radius for the top braces this is my setup for working with hide glue and I prepare a larger batch and then pour that off into ice cube trays and then when I'm

ready to use I just take a cube or half a cube out and then I'll pop it in my hot water bath [Music] once the bracing pattern is laid out with a template then I will transfer all those lines across the top lightly with a pencil and I will use hot high glue first to install one arm of the xrace after that's set up then I will glue in the other arm I'll put in the upper transverse brace then after those are dry I find it easier to do a rough profiling of the X brace

before I glue in the other braces I use a laminate trimmer with a modified foot that's set at an angle to carve the braces into roughly an a shape so once the xrace is profiled then I will carve down the ends of the braces just to give me a little bit more working room and the top then goes back in the gobar deck and I will now glue in the bridge plate the tone bars and the finger braces if a guitar top had no braces on it then either you would have to make the top

so thick that the guitar Wouldn't sound very good or if you did thin it out then the top would just completely disintegrate and fly apart so the braces perform several functions one is to add structural Integrity to the top so that it can withstand the tension of the strings for decades if and hopefully longer but it also just distributes the stresses and the vibration that's going on in the top in different ways so different bracing patterns will sound different to a Certain extent so that's something that most guitar ERS will pay careful attention to there

are other bracing patterns like radio bracing lattice bracing and all of these patterns work they all have a little bit of a different balance a little bit of a different EQ and in my opinion an under braced or even a lightly braced top it's a fine line you don't want to go too far because there's a point at which too much information can be introduced into The guitar top and it might not be that the sound that you're after I'm fitting The Sound Hole braces and I use a different species of spruce one that is

much stiffer than the anglan spruce this is Sitka Spruce and I'm using these braces around the sound hole because I do want more support I'm going to apply the first brace to the back of the guitar and this is called the back graft and I use a piece of quison spruce in this case the Grain of the back graft is running this direction which is going to be perpendicular to the seam of the top and this way it acts like a stitch to reinforce that back joint [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

as I do the final cleanup and preparation of the back braces I'm going to lower this back graft right in this area because this is where the guitar label goes so this way it'll sit just a little bit more nicely over this brace [Music] so once I have the braces glued to the back and the rim is done then the next step is I let in the braces into the Back Linings and that's a process of aligning the back very carefully along its Center Line and then marking all the brace ends where they go underneath

the lining once those are all marked there's a notch cut out to the exact height of the foot of the brace this further couples the back to the rim uh mechanically and as well as it's also glued on [Music] the back is looking good and now I'll do The same thing to the [Music] top I'll mark out where to let in the braces and carefully cut them out [Music] before the back is glued on the side braces are put in and those are put in at the same location as the back braces on this guitar

there's five side braces on each side I used hund mahogany for the side braces and cut both facets on the sides and the end of each side Brace and the side braces have several purposes one is to of course stiffen the sides which has an effect acoustically it adds a small and probably negligible amount of mass to the side so I don't really think that's a consideration here it's more an issue of adding stiffness the other thing that it does on a single side of the guitar is if a crack does develop somewhere in the

side it tends to run along the Grain and when that crack would hit a side brace the brace Should stop it so it's a little bit of insurance to keep any side cracks from running the entire perimeter of the guitar so right before I glue the back on I am creating a small Channel close to the perimeter of the neck block this channel is going to catch any glue that wants to squeeze out onto the outside of the neck block and the surface of the back cuz once I glue the back on I'm not going

to be able to clean up the squeeze out so I Want to be able to capture it in this channel I have the rim set all together and I'm preparing to glue the back on and now that I've got the blocks in along with the side braces and the solid Linings it now has structure it's it's really very rigid I've kept in this brace right here because I do get a small amount of flex but everywhere else it's very solid in the mold so I don't need to put any other braces in when I glue

the plates on Now we're going to take this out of the mold take some frequency readings and do the final voicing of the back and the method that I like to use is a combination of a frequency response of the back and so I tap on the back and I'm looking to get a certain frequency and I can lower it by shaving the braces and I intentionally come in a little bit higher above the frequency and then I lower the brace height down rather than having to add stiffness to raise the Frequency there's also a

lot of voicing of the top and the plates that go on but it's easier for me to work these back braces now in this state all right I could really use like just a 10-minute break at this point on the inside of the guitar I'll spray a thin coat of shellac and I'll do this to not only bring out some of the color of the wood but also to slow down the humidity exchange with the [Music] environment it's always a bit of a milestone in the build to sign the label put what number guitar it

is and attach it to the inside of the back [Music] I'm preparing to glue the top on now and I'll carefully Mark the outline and then on the band saw I'll cut to that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] line and then once the top is cut out to its final shape I can do the final shaping of the braces and I'll use a chisel to carefully sculpt some of the brace ends and then also some sanding to get the final brace Contours and then I will sign and date the top just before I glue it

On as a final step on the top I will seal around the sound hole with a coat of shellac when I do the Finish rub out on the guitar I do a wet sanding just in case any water wants to curl underneath on the inside of the sound hole and get on the top it's better to keep it off any unsealed Spruce so this acts as a little bit of barrier I'm putting a little Groove in these upper Spruce braces because I will have the truss rod access through the This brace and I just want

to provide a little bit of clearance for the trust Rod wrench at this point the top can be glued on it's done in the same fashion as the back the guitar is still in the mold with one spreader brace I use tight Bond I don't use hide glue for this operation because it takes a little too much time for for hide glue at least in the the way that I do it [Music] [Music] when the body does come out of the mold the the top and the back are flush routed or just routed inside a

bit of the sides and this makes it easier to sand the sides flat and this is something that is necessary both for voicing because the thickness of the sides matter and you want uh very flat sides before you cut the binding and purling channels [Music] I've made these witness lines on the guitar so as I'm sanding I can see my progress and I'm going to be using a hard block or a series of flat and curv calls to get into the waist to achieve this [Music] you have to flatten the sides because when they come

out of the Bender they're not perfectly flat they might be a little wavy and when we route for our binding and purflings we want a Perfectly flat side because the binding cutter index is off of the sides so now that I've sanded the sides out I just want to do a feel check with my hands and feel that the curves feel smooth and I'm not feeling any Jagged transitions between the waist and the lower bout or the upper bout and certainly don't want to feel any dips or bumps and this feels good I think I'm

ready to move on to the next step so what I've done is I've taken a Frequency response curve of the closed sound box of the guitar and this gives me an initial picture of the main modes and resonances and their frequencies it gives me sort of a baseline do I want to make any adjustments at this point they're easier to make now than once the guitar gets further along so in addition to doing the frequency response curves on the guitar I'm also monitoring the thickness of the top and on some of my guitars the top

is uniform thickness and On some of my guitars I vary the thickness in different regions of the top and this tool which is a magnetic electronic thickness gauge allows me to measure the thickness of the top precisely in any spot even when the box is closed this just helps me keep within a comfortable window where I don't want to make the tops too thin and uh I'm I'm not worried about leaving the top too thick um certainly but there are certain thicknesses that I don't feel Comfortable going below for the longevity of the guitar based

on the measurements of the thickness of the top and the frequency response curve I've made a voicing decision that I'm going to thin out the perimeter of this top probably about 2 to 5,000 and then I'll take the measurements again and see if I get the effect that I want so the voicing is much better a little bit of sanding a little bit of planing and I think it's going to be a More optimized guitar for it before the binding and purling is cut I spray a light coat of sanding sealer on the body and

this is really just to help keep the spruce clean and it reduces any adhesion of the glue to the wood and makes things a little bit easier to clean up I'm getting ready to process the bindings here and these are all shopmade bindings um so they start out as one thick Indian Rosewood board and then I Glue veneers onto each side the top and the bottom then they get sliced off into strips and the final two steps are to run these through the thickness sander and then cut these in half and get the final height

and the same process is also done with the purflings but these are already cut up guitars don't actually need bindings it does have a few functions it does close up the joint especially all the end Grain on the plates and if if the guitar takes its Lumps and bumps over the years then The Binding helps protect the corners of the guitar but there are plenty of great guitars made with with no binding the main function I think is actually aesthetic guitar maker can use this as kind of a visual signature feature in terms of their

layout of binding and purpling and it does help to visually frame in the guitar as well this Indian Rosewood is very oily so from the Heat and moisture of bending we've have some Spots that have colored the maple but as soon as the binding is installed and we sand and scrape this back all that Maple will clean right up [Music] I'm now routing for the engraft which like the bindings isn't really structurally necessary but it does hide the joint between the two sides where they meet at the tail block and it also gives a nice

way to connect the bindings and all the side purflings [Music] I'm now ready to install the binding and purfling I'm going to start on the top and I have cut a miter in the end of the perling just off center and I have prepped the miter on the bottom of the binding to fit or to match the miter on the end graph that we just cut [Music] [Music] so this is The Binding this is the purfling they each have their own Channel and it's cut in like a stair step and without too much pressure they

should just sit nice and tight against the top and the side with the end grab CFT installed I'm now cutting the miters on the side purflings and I'm using the reflection in the back of the Chisel to show me exactly what the proper angle is to cut [Music] [Music] now the back is a little bit more Complicated because I need to miter into the end graft both at the tail block and the neck block so I've got to do things a little bit differently on the back and I'll be gluing in the perling uh separately

from The Binding [Music] after the glue is dry on the bindings all the tape is removed I use a heat gun to help just release the tape cleanly and now I'm ready to scrape down the bindings there's some scraping there's Some sanding involved and this is a really great part in making the guitar because you finally get to see much closer to what the final product is going to look like and when I bent these bindings as I mentioned earlier this Indian Rosewood is really oily so there was some resin stains and there's glue and

tape residue and all that's going to get cleaned up now and we're going to start to see some of the real beauty of the woods it's a fun part it's a special Part of guitar making for me then I'll use a Pneumatic sander to sand down the bindings and purflings to the level of the plates and then I will clean up the plates using the pneumatic sander [Music] [Music] [Music] at this point I can set the body aside and I'm ready to start working on the neck up until about a year and a half ago

I made my necks the traditional way With power and hand tools but they were essentially handcarved from a series of templates and Jigs and then I switched over to carving my necks on a CNC machine and I still feel like the quality is the same either way but after 20 years of carving necks by hand I was ready for a new [Music] method this is how the necks come off the CNC I'm using a one piece hund and mahogany neck and on the CNC the channel Is cut for the truss rod which is right here

in the center these are two channels for carbon fiber rods and the back of the neck and the heel and the Tenon is just roughed out at this point so now I need to finish carving and processing of the neck I'm going to be gluing in these face grain Rosewood splines into the slots that I just milled in the Tenon the these will add some reinforcement to the neck Hardware that we're going to be Putting in in the next [Music] steps I am going to be using a a hand plane to now refine the surface

of the face of the headstock after it comes off the Saw which cut the initial angle once I have the face of the headstock true then I will thin out the back of the headstock to the desired Dimension and this is done with a safety planer in the drill press and finally the Volute is shaped using an Oscillating spindle sander [Music] sh [Music] [Music] I'm ready to insert the neck Hardware that will capture the bolts and this is going to get epoxied into the Tenon these holes will line up with these holes and then the

neck bolts will join through the neck block I put the bolts in at this point Just to make sure that the holes are correctly aligned this will also keep any epoxy out of the threads so when the epoxy's dry then I'll take the bolts out this is a piece of wood from the board that we got the back and the sides out of and I'm going to use this to cut the uh the face of the overlay on the headstock and so again we have the constant visual theme of this wood being used throughout different

parts of the guitar so I'll slice this off a little Bit oversiz and then take it down to the thickness I want on the wide belt sander [Music] this is some of the same box elder Burl that we used for the rosette and we're going to use these for additional uh accent pieces within the headstock so the way I do my headstock overlays is a mixture of CNC and hand workk I've cut out all the parts on the CNC and now there's a lot of hand assembly with uh sandwiching the pieces Between veneers some sand

shading and then a final routing all this is done slightly oversized because the assembly doesn't go together quite perfectly so it gets assembled and then routed down to its final shape similar to the rosette the headstock is also what I consider to be a visual signature for a guitar maker it's almost like a logo in and of itself just based on the shape of the headstock forget any colors or woods used Headstock shapes can vary wildly and there's certainly some considerations you don't want to get too wild you need to think about the weight and

the angle of the strings after they come off the nut but other than that you know you can pretty much do any shape that you want there's lots of options in terms of whether you want to do three tuners on a side or six in line even a slotted headstock or a a solid headstock like I've done on this guitar it's really Gives the guitar maker an opportunity to show their personality you know whether they want to put their name right across the top of the headstock in Pearl or Abalone or they have a particular

logo there's really no hard and fast rules here and it's a very fun part of the guitar to use as an identifier for my own headstock designs I've basically always stayed with a a tapered headstock or I think what some people refer to as a Snak head headstock what's really Changed over the years is some of the geometry of it so the amount of taper the length Etc these are incremental changes but I feel like my headstocks have gotten more refined and and better over the years but the basic shape has not changed right from

the start I've never put my name on the headstock that goes into my personal philosophy not that it's right or wrong of not putting my name on the guitar I want somebody to be able to look at the guitar and know By the design features that it's one of my guitars I use a little semicircular purfling line at the top and between that and the shape even if I have nothing else on the headstock people know that it's mine over the years I have done a lot of markety type wooden overlay designs and that's something

that I really prefer Pearl and Abalone certainly look beautiful on the guitar but it not really my aesthetic I prefer to concentrate just on the natural Beauty of the wood and all the different colors and textures that you have to work with before I was a guitar maker I had a totally different relationship with wood in that I studied forestry and uh worked professionally in the field for a while uh I was mostly doing kind of academic research on how trees grow in different soils and how the soils affect the trees and looking at Carbon

cycling and soils under different growth regimes for trees And also how climate change can potentially affect how much carbon trees put into the soil so I was very fortunate to work in a lot of different Forest types both in temperate forests and tropical forests and a lot of the woods that I use in my guitars I've actually been to where these trees grow and so I feel like I have a deep appreciation and connection to not only the wood but the trees [Music] Themselves for the back of the headstock again I'm using a piece of

palero and that's thinned out to about 50 th000 of an inch and then heat bent on a pipe so that it follows the Volute that was created on the oscillating spindle sander similar to the neck I use the CNC to cut my fingerboards as well and they come off the machine looking like this with the compound radius already milled in and the Fret slots are cut the slots for the Fret markers are cut as Well I'm ready to install the truss drive now and I use use a dual action truss rod which means I can

both add relief to the neck and take relief out of the neck and since my guitars often end up in Far Away places in different climates I prefer to prepare for all possibilities by using the double action rod after the glue dries this filler strip will get leveled with the surface of the neck Before I glue the fingerboard on I am going to put in the fingerboard inlays and my fingerboard marker serves as both a side Dot and a face dot at the same time it's a piece of perum boo that's wrapped in a white

veneer both on the sides and on the bottom side [Music] I'm using epoxy to glue in the carbon fiber rods that are installed into the neck I have to take my time seating these cuz there's there's a lot of epoxy Underneath that I want to get out from the bottom which you can see here and I use the same epoxy to glue on the fingerboard as well because it's a nonwater based glue and this way I can avoid adding moisture into the neck as I apply my first clamp I just want to make sure I'm

not getting any movement either away or towards the nut this really only needs light and even clamping pressure and over clamping this joint could be counterproductive in Terms of introducing some distortions into the neck or some tension I'll clean up a little squeeze out and we're good to go fingerboard is clamped overnight and once those clamps are removed then I'm ready to start carving the rest of the neck I usually start over on the band saw and I trim off the excess around the headstock and then I'll refine all of these on the oscillating spindle

sander using the spindle sander helps keep the Sides perpendicular to the face of the headstock from there it's quite a bit of hand tool work so I'll use use a block plane to True up the sides of the headstock and I'll keep checking it with a square to make sure that I'm staying at 90° the shape of the neck or the cross-section of the neck is really critical in terms of how the guitar is going to feel and play now neck shapes are like opinions there is no right or Wrong answer it's just very subjective

what feels really good to one player is going to feel just like an anathema to another player but there's some general guidelines which you can certainly stick to you know going too thin is actually uncomfortable in the hand as is going too thick for a new guitar maker I think they tend to make kind of chunky necks because they're afraid to that they're going to carve a neck too thin but with a a dial calber you know that's Certainly something you can easily monitor now the actual geometry of the cross-section of the neck whether it's

c-shape d-shape or more of like a vintage vshape you know that's where you can get a lot of different opinions about it for my guitars I do have a standard profile which is kind of a soft vshape but I also work with my customers you know if they have a guitar and they love a c shape then I will make a template of that and then carve the back Of the neck to their preference [Music] so these holes were drilled in the approximate location of the tuner holes but not the exact location these are really

just to index off of The Jig when we routed out the inside of the headstock so I'm going to fill these holes now sand out the face of the headstock get all the final dimensions and then we'll precisely locate the center of the tuning Machines for the tuners that I use it's a half inch in from the edge of the headstock let's drill these out to drill out the tuners I start with a/ quar in Brad Point bit followed up by a counter syn that will expand the hole for the ferals that go with the

tuning machines that I'm going to be using on this guitar [Music] [Applause] [Music] I've used this jig to cut the mortise for the neck Tenon and at the same time I've cut the truss rod access through the the neck block so we're at the point now where the body is done the neck is very close and we are getting ready to join the body and the neck for the first time some placeholder Frets have been put in the neck and I will attach just a placeholder Bridge which allows me to set the neck I have

to add the pitch to the neck So the saddle height and the string height will be in the correct positions and I need to make a slight adjustment on the yaw in order to do those things I am going to be carving away at the cheeks of the heel right here and I'm going to do a little relief carving first so I'm going to be carving away this material on the inside of the cheeks so I'm about done setting the pitch and the yaw of the neck and the pitch also known as the neck set

is how Much the neck is tilted either forward or back and the yaw is the side to side and it's all relative to the bridge and having a proper sdle height and I've made these adjustments by using a technique called flossing with sandpaper which pulls the Sandpaper between the neck and the body and that sets the pitch in order to keep um tab on things and follow the progress with some slight pressure here the neck pressed against the body I'm taking a straight edge and It's sitting on two um placeholder Frets and I'm projecting it

right above the front of the bridge on my guitars I want to see a little Gap there of about a 30 second of an inch it's not the same on every guitar I just know my guitars and how much the tops pull up and how much they settle in setting the pitch in the yaw of the neck is one of the more difficult tasks for a new guitar maker to master but it really just takes experience and some determination but It's definitely an important part of guitar making that should not be overlooked I'm reaching into

the sound hole to install the neck bolts and this is another milestone in the construction of the guitar as this is the first time that the neck is now mated to the body and now that I know the final position of the neck on the guitar I'm going to Mark the inter section where the fingerboard meets the top ring of the rosette and I can carve the facets In the end of the finger [Music] board the heel cap is mostly aesthetic but it also o does hide the bottom of the mahogany neck because really only

the cheeks or the outside of the heel is what's contacting the guitar the heel cap is cut so that it will match the purling Line Maple that's coming around the side of the guitar so it needs to be cut pretty precisely so it'll exactly line up so it looks like it's a Continuous perling line once the surface is cut then I'll glue on the maple veneer that's made with the same exact Maple that used to make the side purling and an Indian Rosewood cap on top of that that matches the Indian Rosewood that's used for

the bindings okay once the heel cap is dried then I carve it down with some sanding blocks hand plane couple different knives and then it goes back onto the guitar where the final fitting is done by flossing with Sandpaper and hopefully the purfling lines just match up just right and at this point I will have also carved the facets on the end of the fingerboard which match up to the top side of the rosette [Music] purflings and then I'll take the neck off and I will then round over all the bindings I usually start with

a scraper and just remove that 90° Edge and then I'll follow that up with a wood File and then finally I'll use a fairly soft call that'll Bend into a curve and I will will sand all the edges of the bindings both on the top and the back of the [Music] guitar no sharp edges it should feel pretty smooth to the touch at this point most of the woodworking is done on the guitar then it goes into a phase of what I call Fin sanding everything is gone over with a fine tooth comb all the

Surfaces are carefully examined and sanded to 220 grit the neck is resanded again I will wipe mineral spirits all over the guitar and look at it under bright lights to look for any stray sanding scratches any tool marks you know anything that I want to get out now before I start putting in the finish so uh some of this is done with power sanding and some of this is done by hand sanding there's some areas of the body that I will only hand sand like from the Top of the rosette up to where the neck

is because I really want to keep this area flat and be careful not to round over these binding edges cuz this is a junction right of where the the neck sits another area that I will hand sand because it's really important to keep absolutely flat is right here where the neck is so this is a hard block and this will not round over the corners at all [Music] [Music] and now with the guitar built and sanded we're ready to start the finishing process guitar finishing in and of itself is its own art form it's a

a new set of skills and in fact there are people who uh only finish guitars that's that's how they make their living some guitar makers choose to send their guitars out for finishing I like to do mine in house and I've used a variety of different finishes over the years There's lots of options for different types of finishes they all have their pros and cons but the common denominator with all the finishes is that you want them to both beautify and protect the guitar an important step is to take tape off the all the surfaces

that you don't want any finish in this case it's where the nut is going to go the surface of the fingerboard the underside of the fingerboard here and the neck joint and then on the body of the guitar I have The bridge area masked off as well as where the fingerboard is going to go I use a Precision masking tape to do this which does a good job of uh keeping any finish out and from any finish seeping under the tape for starting the finish on the neck of the guitar I treat that a little

differently from the body I first put on a sealer coat and what a sealer coat is is it just acts as a barrier coat so you can apply say color and it's not going to get into the wood itself It's actually going to sit on top of the wood so I apply a sealer coat and uh this can either be sprayed or rubbed on in this case I sprayed it on the neck for the body of the guitar the first step in finishing is really careful wood preparation so everything is sanded out to somewhere between

220 and 320 is usually just fine but at this stage really all the wood preparation needs to be perfect so no dents no dings no scratches no dirt oils nothing you want A perfect surface to work from Once I achieve that on my bodies I apply the first coat of pore filler on this guitar I'm using a clear two-part epoxy it's essentially squeege it on with a razor blade most of the epoxy is taken off the surface so there's a very very thin film on the surface and the bulk of the epoxy is residing down

in the pores when you have a guitar that has an open poured wood you need to do some kind of pore filling to achieve a flat finish you Don't have to achieve a flat finish it's just what people are used to seeing on acoustic guitars on this particular guitar the back and sides are what's known as a closed pore wood so it doesn't have any pores that I really need to fill it has a lot of very very very small pores which I could probably just fill with the Finish but the binding is Indian Rosewood

and that has very very large pores so I'm paying extra special Attention to the binding and making sure I get a good coat of por filler on these edges I use epoxy to por fill the back and sides of the guitar because I really want to protect these perling lines that I make out of Maple and you can see they're very fine if there's any you know little bits of unevenness in the surface of the maple it would pick up color from a dark paste oil filler and so the epoxy keeps everything really clean and

bright and crisp on the guitar And the dark por filler which I use on the neck is on mahogany and I don't have any purfling lines on the neck except for the headstock so I prefer to use the the dark pore filler for [Music] that so I'm going to start por filling on the face of the headstock and this doesn't need very much por filling because I've already done some pore filling with epoxy so all of the fine white purpling lines are well Protected and I'm going to rub on the pore filler in a circular

motion some people just like to to go straight across the grain but either way works once the headstock is done then I'll move on to the mahogany portions of the neck including the end grain and really try and force the pore filler down into the pores then once the pore filler starts to flash off it'll have a dull appearance and it's time to wipe all the Pore filler off of the surface so only what Ms is in the pores and it should be kind of hard to wipe off again because it's it's starting to dry

and you want to make sure not to leave any on the surface because this can cause some unsightly finish problems down the road so the pore filler is only in the pores and no longer on the surface the past pore filler really highlights or accentuates the grain rather than blending it in it brings it Out [Music] once the POR filler has dried overnight you can either move on with the finishing process or you can apply a second coat of por filler this mahogany is fairly deep grained open por so I'm going to apply a second

coat before I do that I just want to scuff sand the surface and make sure that I don't have any filler that's on the surface of the wood it all has to be down into the Pores and at this stage while I'm scuff sanding I want to be careful not to go through the sealer coat that might cause a little bit of a color shift in the wood uh in the final finished product so I want to make sure and avoid that so I'm just lightly scuff sanding [Music] [Music] this is the first coat of

epoxy por fill and I'm inspecting to see whether it needs a second coat or not again the the Backside Wood is closed por wood so that's probably fine I'm really more concerned with the binding areas which is an open poured Indian Rosewood and I'm really looking for any pores that are really showing like the epoxy is really sunk in it's going to need a second coat but I'm not seeing any and an area where you can usually really see it if there's going to be any sinkings here in the engraft the streaks on the surface

are Just from the application of the epoxy por fill and all of those will get sort of scuff sanded before the final coat of sealer and everything's really level um so it really just needs a light scuff I think we're good with the port filling on the body and I'm actually going to try and leave uh a thin coat of of epoxy just on the surface and uh so it's a little different procedure than we went through with the neck if I do have any little Lumps or Ridges of epoxy I do want to flatten

those out so I'll use a scraper or a hard block to get those out now so the top gets treated differently from the back and sides it has no sealer no por fill on it and at this point it's still just raw wood one of the things that I did was I took my glove and I was carefully putting down epoxy por fill right on the binding and even on the perling so I want to make sure there's no Ridge here of epoxy and then I'm Going to do a final scuff sand of the top

with 320 and then this will get a sealer coat prior to applying the L then the final step is going to just sand this curved part of The Binding edge with a softer call and make sure that this is all smooth and there's no shiny spots left on it now sometimes you can feel what you can't see so I'm going to run my fingers All Around The Binding just to feel for any little bumps or anything that I might have missed I'm in The final preparations for getting this guitar into the spray booth and I

don't want any finish to get inside the guitar so I'm going to put in a sound hole plug to protect this area this sound hole protector is just a lid from an ice coffee it's very nice that it's actually just the right size because I want to spray this vertical edge of the sound hole which is bound in Rosewood and I wanted the lacquer to actually be able to get this bottom ledge this lid is Just outside of that area so I can spray it and I won't have a problem when I remove remove this

I'll still get a nice lacquer line and then at that stage I apply a coat of sealer over the entire body of the guitar now I do this a little differently in that I don't spray the sealer on I wipe it on just with a paper towel and kind of use a French polish and I find that the epoxy not only pour fills but it also acts as a sealer on Itself and so I really only need a very thin coat of sealer and on the top of the guitar I only want a very thin

coat of sealer just on the surface and I find that when I apply it by hand using this method it uh doesn't raise the grain as much and I could get a whole lot less sealer on the guitar so the guitar is now ready for its first coats of lacquer depending on the time of year I may thin out the lacquer either with lacquer thinner or some Acetone in some cases I may add something to actually slow down the evaporation of the lacquer it's also known as lacquer retarder or butal cellu solve but one of

the nice things about lacquer is you can sort of control the chemistry for whatever your spraying conditions are so the first day I'll spray four coats of lacquer and I will double coat the edges meaning Around The Binding edges on the guitar those tend to need a little bit more lacquer Especially on the first day I'm spraying you know fairly heavy keep in mind that uh lacquer is only about 20% solids so most of what I'm spraying on the guitar is actually evaporating off it doesn't remain on the guitar I'll spray four coats about an

hour apart and then that needs to sit a minimum overnight but with lacquer the spraying schedule is pretty flexible so doesn't necessarily matter but what does matter is that it needs to be sanded back flat In general I'll start with 400 grit and this not only flattens the lacquer but it also opens up the surface to let some more solvents evaporate because you do want to allow the lacquer essentially a chance to breathe and blow off those solvents [Music] [Music] so I just sanded the body with 320 grit and it might seem a little counterproductive

in that it looked like I was taking off a lot of finish um and in some ways I was but really the goal here is just to have a very thin flat layer of nitro my goal at this point is actually not to leave a lot of finish on the guitar I'm trying to produce a very thin finish in the end so this was just a base layer so I sprayed it on kind of heavy and then I sanded it all off flat in terms of measurements I'm really only taking off a couple thousands despite

all the white powder that you see but Now I have got a nice base coat of flat lacquer and I can start spraying my top coats [Music] [Music] [Music] this time it's sanded to a finer grit either 600 or 800 and then you go in for for a final spray session when that's done the guitar needs to cure depending on your drying conditions minimum 10 days 3 weeks is good 4 weeks is better 6 Weeks with lacquer it's not going to hurt it either so there's no rush for it to be fully cured and really

the longer you can wait the [Music] better the guitar has been curing for about 4 weeks now what the curing process is is it's just allowing all the solvents and the Finish to evaporate off and there are ways to help speed The Cure like with hot air or fans in my shop I usually just it's all air drying And so four weeks is really a good amount of time to make sure that most of the solvents have evaporated off and the Finish is ready to be rubbed out the next step is to refine the surface

that comes out of the spray booth if you look carefully at this surface you'll notice that it's uh a little grainy uh or it's a little matte or satin finish it's also known as orange peel and what we're going to be doing is uh getting rid of all of that orange peel and flatten the Surface and bringing it up to a high gloss so I'll start sanding with a very high grit about 12200 grit paper and we're going to take this all the way up to 5,000 oh [Music] at this stage I've sanded the guitar

back out to 5,000 grit and now it is flat and it is reflective it's a little hazy but that's just the 5,000 grit scratches and now there's a couple ways We can go from this to an ultra high gloss either by hand or on a buffing wheel the neck and the body are now buffed out to a high gloss and I'm getting ready to put the neck on the guitar so I just want to check the final fit and make sure everything's good to go so this is a really big moment here I'm getting ready

to finally attach the neck permanently to the body I'm going to put just a little bit of removable lock Otite on the neck bolts and then for the fingerboard I'm going to glue this area down just with a regular wood glue or a tight Bond and that is also removable in the future if it needs to come off this is a joint that's very similar to what a lot of major manufacturers are using it is a very serviceable joint so if the neck does need to come off it can come off easily but it will

also not come loose unless you want it to now that I've got the fingerboard clamped down it Just needs to dry for about 40 5 minutes and I can take the clamp off and I won't be stressing this joint for another day or two so that's plenty time the neck is now attached to the body and I can proceed to the final fretboard preparation I'll make sure that the truss rod is working correctly and I will put some witness lines on the neck and I'll use a steel sanding beam to sand the neck completely flat

along the length of the strings while maintaining The compound radius of the neck one last check with the backlight and I will now refine the surface up to 600 grit and now I'm going to open up the Fret slots just a little bit with a fret slotting bit and an air die grinder this just helps me with putting in the Frets so that they just seat right into the Fret slots this is the fret wire I like to use it's a medium gauge gold wire and I like this gold wire because not only is it

a distinctive color but I feel like It goes with the woods on the guitar and it's going to go with the tuners that I'm planning to use on the headstock now you can get fret wire in all sorts of widths uh like jumbo narrow medium there's also different heights um and you can even get different shapes like pyramid shapes and there's different Alloys uh like stainless steel and different types of nickel Alloys they all have their pros and cons but this particular wire is the wire that I Like to use on my guitars next I'm

going to use this fret Tang Nipper to cut the Tang of the Fret so that it matches the length of the Fret slot and the crown will be left to match the length of the fingerboard I'm going to use a special grinding wheel on my drill press to shape the ends of the Frets into a hemisphere the Frets are prepped the board is prepped and now I'm ready to put the Frets into the board I like to Use a little bit of me medium viscosity super glue just a touch on the ends and one dot

in the middle and this will help keep the ends seated with future changes and humidity Etc that the guitar is going to experience and I use a combination of techniques where I'll be hammering in the Frets and then also clamping them down in multiples and I'm going to work different spots of the board and I'm going to put in the first 12 to 14 Frets and then stop and then Evaluate this upper part of the board with a notch straight edge and before I fret the upper part of the board we'll actually put the bridge

on the guitar and put it under tension so we can see how this is behaving Under full string tension we're ready to install the tuners on this guitar I'm going to be using Waverly tuners it's what I use on most of my guitars these particular tuners are a newer Edition they have a 1 to 21 gear ratio which I really like and These are the Gold Titanium finish I think these are going to look great on this headstock rather than require a friction fit with these bushings I've loosened up the holes a little bit I'm

actually going to use epoxy to put them in once the bushings are in then I'm going to use a jig to drill the two screws on the back of the headstock that's secure the tuner to the headstock I'm putting a little paste wax in the Holes here because the screws are wood screws and they're actually going to be cutting the threads into the mahogany this acts as a little lubrication so the threads will be cut cleaner I'm getting ready to glue the bridge on the guitar my bridges are made out of either Rosewood or eony

in this case I'm using a Brazilian rosewood Bridge from very old stock I rough out the bridge on the CNC machine it cuts the saddle slot the holes the outline of the bridge and Some of the features all of which is refined by hand and then the bridge is sanded out and Polished up to 2,000 grit I like to use hot high glue to attach the bridge to the guitar which means the operation has to be perform fairly quickly so I do a lot of prep I install a call on the bridge plate I have

some indexing pins that go through the saddle slot so the bridge gets precisely located quickly I have a top clamping call that I'll be using and I'll have all the clamps all ready and actually in the sound hole and ready to go so I've got everything in position and I'm going to heat up the parts and apply the glue and then just repeat the process I'll leave the bridge clamped up overnight and I would consider this to be the minimal amount of clamping time needed the string pull puts about 180 lbs of tension on this

joint and you really want to make sure that the glue Is absolutely dry before you start stressing this joint the next steps with the bridge are to drill out the bridge pin holes and use a tapered reamer to prepare the bridge holes to put the bridge pin PS in there is a backing call on the underside of the bridge plate so when I finally drill through the bridge plate there won't be any uh blowout from the drill bit exiting I use these Waverly Bridge pins this particular pin is Ebony with a mother dot in the

top And these are slotted pins and the pins have a 5 Dee taper but I just drilled a straight hole so what I'm going to do now is use this tapered reamer to give each hole a 5 Raper so the bridge pins will fit in nice and snug it's time to install the saddle on the guitar and I start with an oversized bone blank just cutting this rectangle here and I know the width and the length of my saddle slot so I'm going to do some sanding on this to prepare it to Just fit just

into the slot and then I will rough out the height and some of the intonation points on the saddle I'm not going to make the final saddle at this point uh all I want to do is get to a point where I've got a saddle roughed in and I can get tension on the guitar and the next thing I want to do is Mark out the two outer strings and Mark out the height of the saddle and then uh carve the top of this saddle down to approximately that saddle Height I like bone for a

couple reasons one besides it just being the traditional material I feel like it has good sound transmission it looks nice you can polish it to a high Sheen it's also easily repairable and also replaceable just like the saddle I need to rough in a nut blank and I'll start with an oversized piece of bone and I need to sand and Mill this down so it fits nice and snug in the slot I've got an outline of the nut here This bottom line represents the approximate location of the bottom of the nut slots and this Top

Line represents the location of the top surface of the nut there are other materials you can use for nuts and Saddles besides bone some are synthetic like Micarta or even graphite you can also buy bone blanks that are more pre-shaped and are closer to what your final nut would be um but still would require some final adjustments to make Them right the nut slots are all marked out with the last jig and now what I want to do is take nuts slotting files which are individually gauged to match the diameter of each string and I

want to expand these slots so that they match the string gauges exactly now that the nut slots are the correct size for each string I'm going to shape the top of the nut this won't be the final shape I'm just going to get it into its approximate shape at this Point the roughed in nut and saddle are installed and now I'm ready to put the strings on the guitar for the very first time this is a very exciting moment we get to hear the guitar and see if some of the choices that I've made in

terms of the top and the voicing and the back and the woods and the type of bridge material I use this is all going to start to come together and come to life first string up the guitar the setup is going to be a little rough because I Need to see what the guitar is doing under full tension and then I can make the final adjustments to the truss rod the nut and the saddle the Frets Etc and even the sound of the guitar is going to change pretty substantially over the first few days and

the first few weeks but I'll get some idea I'll get an inkling of what the guitar is going to develop into really excited to hear this for the very first time [Music] This guitar is about 10 minutes old now and I've had some time to strum around on it play some chords do a little finger picking and uh I'm very pleased with where the guitar is at it's a very young guitar I'm expecting it not to be at its full potential right now but there there's certain things that I'm listening for that I want to

hear here right now the guitar should have good response good power uh it should certainly play in tune and the setup Should be within roughly the window that I want it to be in there's still a lot of adjustments and fine tuning to be made to the guitar but this is the first time that I've had a chance to listen to it and I hear a nice complexity in The Trebles the low end is full and as the guitar changes over the next 24 hours several weeks months Etc it's going to change in ways that

are not entirely predictable but in general the guitar is going to become bigger more Powerful the low end will open up The Trebles will become more complex should become an even more responsive instrument so when I hear those things now in a guitar that's so young I'm very very pleased with that so the next steps for the guitar as you may have noticed there's there's No Frets up here I am going to evaluate the fingerboard with a notch straight edge and see if I need to make any corrections or changes in this part of the

board before I put the Frets In and then it's a process of basically just fine-tuning dialing the guitar in making any adjustments in the intonation finishing out the nut polishing out the frets really giving the guitar a fine detail going over the inside and the outside of the guitar and making sure that it's as good of a guitar as I can possibly make [Music] once you've been building guitars for a while I think it's easy to fall into Certain Lanes of thought for me personally I try and keep a student mindset about the craft that

there's always things to be learned there's always new avenues to pursue and really that's what keeps it interesting for me I'm not interested in just essentially turning the crank over and over and I think ultimately really comes down to two very simple Prem premises for me and the first is that I'm going to keep building guitars and the second one is That I try and make each guitar better than the last one in some ways that helps Propel me forward and keep things interesting and fresh [Music] a really cool aspect of being a guitar maker

is not only do I get to use Art and Science to make these what I think are beautiful objects but then this physical entity that I've created in my shop then I get to hand off to somebody else and they get to make their own art With it and create and so it's something that keeps on giving and creating and hopefully Inspire other people so it's not just hear what I do in the shop but it's also what happens to the guitar after it leaves the shop and it takes on a life of its own

[Music] there