It's a little strange for me to see this here, in that I live in a world of instrument makers and luthiers, being a folk musician in the UK, and therefore interesting luthiers are pretty much my normal exposure to instrument makers. I even go to what is technically a festival of luthiers in France, which is fun!
Instrument making is very interesting, in that automation and export of production to China isn't really hurting the artisan makers. Obviously no-one can hand-make a guitar in the west for £150 and turn a profit, but the fact those instruments exist allows more people to enter the market, and eventually some of them will yearn for something unique, tailored to them, and probably expensive :D
The guitar is easy to take up, and very affordable, which means there's so many musicians there to appeal to as a luthier. The instruments I play (diatonic accordion/melodeon and concertina) are unfortunately immensely expensive by comparison, but even still the market is very viable for small makers to get going and selling their own inventions. I recently bought one made by a guy I know who's here in Wales, which is very cool :)
Being able to build individual one-off instruments is something the big factories cannot do, and I know a lot of makers who are all doing decent business in that niche. They might never be rich, but the ones I know love what they do and take great satisfaction from it.
English melodeonist here, I've honestly considered learning how to build them just because of how prohibitively expensive they are -- especially if you want anything sufficiently light or in any non-standard tuning!
My plan is somewhat similar; once I no longer live in a tiny flat I'll start experimenting with some designs. I've restored and tuned a couple of old Hohners, which is good practice. Another 10-20 of those and I think I'll roughly understand how to tune the bloody things properly :|
I can highly recommend Emmanuel Pariselle's melodeon building course. I did it a few years ago in France when the pound was particularly strong, and had a lovely French holiday which just so happened to result in a new instrument at the end. It's more of an assembly course than an end-to-end build, but it is really useful for finding out some of the processes, assembly jigs, and just what you can do to the instruments.
Another annual visitor to of Le Son Continu and its predecessor (I'm guessing that's what you were alluding to) checking in. There are, indeed, dozens of us.
Dozens maybe, but apparently all on Hacker News! Clearly I've been looking in the wrong places to organise lift shares, when it could have been "Ask HN: Who's going to LSC?" ;-)
There are more than a few houses in the US leveraging the Eastern, mass-produced model for acoustic instrument components, and using assembly/setup in the US by qualified techs as the value add.
Eastman is a big brand doing that with violins, guitars, and other acoustic instruments. See a lot of those as intro models in the folk/bluegrass scene.
I have a Manuel Contreras classical guitar I bought in Madrid about 45 years ago; if I recall correctly, it cost me about $150. I can't imagine what a guitar like that would cost me today.
I've been following Sacha Dunable from Dunable Guitars for a while and I've been really impressed with the kind of guitars he's been putting out recently.
Guitar players, as a whole, are a very conservative bunch when it comes to their instruments. Most luthiers are simply building very careful copies of designs that have existed for over 50 years. This is true from both a visual and a mechanical/electrical perspective. We're inspired by our heroes, and want to play what they played.
I have a custom made guitar myself - an acoustic by Running Dog Guitars (now defunct, I think the builder retired), a quasi-original design modeled after certain Gibson models from the 1930s. Different woods, more careful construction, but... it's an acoustic guitar, with the same X-bracing that Martin developed over a century ago.
On the other hand, there's no good reason for guitar technology to improve, either. They work really well. Modernist guitars like these are still relying on traditional electronics - these pictures have modern copies of PAF pickups designed by Gibson in the 1950s! Even active electronics are something of anathema to most guitarists. Visually, these are modernist - but technically, they're not much more advanced than what Gibson and Fender were building 60+ years ago.
Even amplification, which unlike guitars, has improved since the 1950s, is pretty static. We still buy tube amps - often slavish copies of amps from 50 or more years ago. I personally play a 1977 Mesa amp, tubes and all. I can't find a modern solid-state amp that touches it tonally. But then again, my tastes are kind of conservative. I am, after all, a guitarist.
Metal guitarists seem to be largely unafflicted by guitarist conservatism. They're eager to play guitars with seven, eight or more strings, fanned frets and unusual pickups like Fishman Fluences or Lace Alumitones. They've embraced amp modelling and digital effects. They're the main buyers of headless guitars. They were the main buyers of Floyd Rose bridges back when they were exciting new technology and they're the main buyers of Evertune bridges today.
I think that's slowly starting to change. Over the last decade or so both headless guitars and multi-scale (fanned fret) designs have become semi-mainstream.
Sure, you won't see such designs from Gibson or Fender, but companies like Kiesel are making them widely available and relatively affordable.
I've personally also moved away from traditional amps to an all-digital full range modeler. The gap between modeling and tubes is pretty narrow these days.
Modeling suffers a lot from bad interface design. It's not the digital that's the problem, it's the interface.
I recently picked up a Boss SY-300 guitar synth. It sounds great, but I hate it. It's almost impossible to manipulate its behavior in realtime. It really needs a computer plugged in, and a lot of clicking around with a mouse. It's completely outside my music-brain. I don't have these problems with a traditional analog synth, with knobs for everything (I play an Arturia Microbrute regularly).
It CAN be done, though. I use a digital tape-modeling delay, and it works beautifully and sounds amazing. It just respects how we work things with our hands.
The Line 6 Helix UI is pretty great. That's the unit I'm running. Everything easily tweakable from the unit, or connect it to a PC via USB and use the their software which is even easier since you have a mouse, drag and drop, etc. Way way better than, say, Fractal.
This video shows what the UI on the unit itself is like...
A bandmate of mine was using a Helix (with an electric cello). He replaced it with a board full of cheap Chinese mini-pedals and analog amp sims. It definitely sounded better than anything else of its ilk I've heard, though.
I wish I could be there. But I'm too fussy about the tone of my drive systems (amp and pedals), and too into knob-level manipulation of delay and reverb pedals.
Actually for knob-fiddling the helix is great... you can have up to 3 expression pedals, and ANY parameter can be mapped to them - so you could have say delay time on one pedal (with user definable bottom and top range), and a wet/dry blend on another.
Also positively surprised to see this here. Beautiful work.
Since it’s HN, may a suggest to ones with the required skill: I think a lot of us would pay a crazy amount of money for a handcrafted, custom built to please all of one’s idiosyncrasys, keyboard. Computer keyboard I mean.
You might ask around the geekhack[1] forums. Some folks there do custom builds to order, others sell bespoke keyboards, kits, or small-batch production runs.
I love to see people pushing the design of musical instruments. In the guitar world I've been really interested in some of the newer pickup designs like the Fishman Fluence[0] and Lace Alumitone[1].
ah it's so fun when worlds collide. i own a strandberg (https://strandbergguitars.com/) - sincerely believe there is a huge amount of room for technical advancement in this space.
Surprised to see this here. Toone has been working on a production model for ~4 years now — hopefully it will arrive soon, as the customs are usually made of fine recovered woods, aluminum and unobtanium.
Although a Stratocaster (of any brand) can play perfectly—and every guitarist should own a strat—I'm very curious about drastic innovations. A guitar being a guitar, to make the smallest incremental progress in playability and tone, beyond what was achieved by the '90s, drastic things have to be done.
It seems to me that Toone breaks the cost/benefit threshold. However, I'm interested :-)
Very nice designs. It's been interesting to see the explosion of headless, fanned-fret guitars over the last few years. Kiesel and Strandberg seemed to be the only places to reliably find them a few years ago.
I just had a new Kiesel guitar delivered a month ago. They can make custom guitars for you, and since they are factory direct, you can get a great deal. They are made in Southern California in Escondido.
Carvin Guitar on Sunset was a truly unique store and concept. You walk in, play some guitars, and buy everything a la carte. They would mainly sell you the parts, and you'd go home and build it yourself (though I guess they'd build it for you as well?). It was definitely higher end and those Carvins have a rabid fan base.
I'm not really sure if they had guitars prebuilt, but I'm bringing this up because Carvin turned into Kiesel.
AFAIK the prebuilt ones they carry in stock are basically just particular configurations of what you could have got through the custom-build route.
I've got an LB75 fretless bass, which is a joy. Though in my case I bought it pre-owned, because one came up on eBay that was almost exactly what I would have wished to order from them, but at a third of the price. Ten years on, I still think it's the best deal I ever got.
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Instrument making is very interesting, in that automation and export of production to China isn't really hurting the artisan makers. Obviously no-one can hand-make a guitar in the west for £150 and turn a profit, but the fact those instruments exist allows more people to enter the market, and eventually some of them will yearn for something unique, tailored to them, and probably expensive :D
The guitar is easy to take up, and very affordable, which means there's so many musicians there to appeal to as a luthier. The instruments I play (diatonic accordion/melodeon and concertina) are unfortunately immensely expensive by comparison, but even still the market is very viable for small makers to get going and selling their own inventions. I recently bought one made by a guy I know who's here in Wales, which is very cool :)
Being able to build individual one-off instruments is something the big factories cannot do, and I know a lot of makers who are all doing decent business in that niche. They might never be rich, but the ones I know love what they do and take great satisfaction from it.