Rick Toone, Luthier
ricktoone.com
ricktoone.com
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.
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.
It's such a fun festival, though rather dangerous for your wallet.
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.
Ken Parker: http://www.kenparkerarchtops.com/
Michihiro Matsuda: http://www.matsudaguitars.com/gallery.htm
Ola Strandberg: https://strandbergguitars.com/
Linda Mantzer: http://www.manzer.com/guitars/
Last but not least, the Stradivarius of the steel-string guitar, Ervin Somogyi: http://www.esomogyi.com/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg4uUiJlbct/?hl=en&taken-by=duna...
[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.640....
Genuine pieces of art
Conde Brothers : http://www.condehermanos.com/
Alberto Martín: http://albertomartinluthier.com/
René Aguilera: https://reneaguilera.com/
Manuel Contreras: http://www.manuelcontreras.com/
it's more applied material science.
Multi-scale 7 string classical:
http://www.guitarrasfdc.com/2016/10/archive-guitar-no-37-cla...
10-string classical:
http://www.guitarrasfdc.com/2017/01/archive-guitar-no-42-10-...
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.
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.
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.
This video shows what the UI on the unit itself is like...
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.
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 :-)
I'm not really sure if they had guitars prebuilt, but I'm bringing this up because Carvin turned into Kiesel.
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.