Guitar Design

I have always designed all of my guitar body shapes. I started doing this on my very first guitar, when I was studying acoustic guitar design and construction at timeless school of lutherie in Canada.

Some guitar makers choose to use the existing designs that were mostly designed by the C.F. Martin guitar company. Doing this gives the guitarist a size and shape they know and may already be comfortable with. Doing this does not excite me at all.

I start by deciding what size of guitar and what scale length and what body joint I want to build. The scale length and body joint numbers are essential to the design as they dictate the positioning of the bridge, which in turn effects how the top is braced. Once this has been decided it is time to draw the outline of the guitar, and this is the part that can take months.

I draw my guitars full scale on a piece of posterboard. Just using a pencil and eraser to move the lines around on the paper until I like how it looks. This rough shape is hung on the workshop wall in a prominent place so I have to keep looking at it. Eventually I will see something I want to change or improve, and out comes the eraser again. After a while of this I will photograph my outline and transfer it to CAD and use that to clean up my lines. This is then printed out at full scale and hung on the wall again. Then out comes the pencil again.

The guitars I have just designed took about 3 months of occasional refinement until I found something that I thought was pleasing to look at. It is fundamentally important to me that the guitars I make are at the highest standard I can achieve right now. I am incredible excited to see how these latest guitars turn out.