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I realize there will be plenty of differing opinions on this topic, but I wanted to ask for thoughts.

I have built 7 Guitars at this point. To be quite honest I haven’t been super happy with any of them. I think my expectations are way too high for my relatively low experience.

I have 2 ready to build now. The tops are tough thicknesses and rosettes installed, but I’m stalled because o don’t want to create another mediocre instrument. Has anyone felt stuck like this? I really enjoy building, but there’s no sense in making junk.

So, how do I push past this speed bump and get better? I have a family and a full time job, so dropping everything for semesters of study is an impossibility at this point for me.

Should I seek out a luthier who does 2 week classes and that sort of thing? I’ve done some online classes, and learned a lot, but I’m the kind of learner who just does better w a real person.

I don’t mind investing time and money for such a worthy cause (imo).

I’m just tired of being disappointed with my builds.

Than for any experience driven advise guys.
B



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What, specifically, are you disappointed about?

This. Are we talking tone, playability, or appearance?

Ed,
You were right a year ago when you stated there is a multiplicity if things to get right. (Yea you said that haha)

I guess I’m just not happy with how things “end up”. As I gain experience I’m learning to do things a certain way in order for a process weeks down the road to fit into the whole solution.

I’m think I’m still trying to figure that process out from start to end.

I feel I can build a box that is reasonably responsive and I can b happy with, but much last that... it’s just meh. Setup, finishing (which i know is an entire other discipline).

Actually I’m glad you asked what you did...
Because it’s the neck. To be so simple ... there is so much that hinges on that neck! I’m not good with making a guitar neck and setup that feels “right”, as vague as that is.



This is my recently finished. Looks a LOT better on screen than in person ha.

Maybe I’m just frustrated at the natural process.
I know it take a lot of expertise to build a lovely guitar.



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My advice would be to skip every step that isn't strictly necessary in the utility of the instrument in order to further your progress in the things that are actually important.

Since it's pretty clear you're going to keep doing it, I also heartily suggest buying the Gore/Gilet books.

Keep em simple, concentrate on and master what's actually important to the guitar, and then worry about embellishment...

Take copious notes, begin deflection and resonance testing.

And if you do know any luthiers, perhaps they'd be able to help you with specific problems, such as your setup.

Beyond that, nothing beats experience...

In that case, you're probably better off getting advice in person. But first you need to find someone who actually has a good feel for necks (not all luthiers do). Obviously our retired forum member Hesh was one of the go-to guys, so if you live near Michigan, you might try getting in touch with him.

Another good way to approach such problems is to pretend you're taking it to an expert. Examine the neck and think of all the questions you want to ask them. By then time you figure out what you want to ask, you may have answered it yourself It's a common technique among computer programmers, called "rubber ducking" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

If it is the neck, and "player feel" that is leaving you unsatisfied then you have a target to work on. Find a great instrument that you really love to play and then analyse the heck out of why you love it. For me this is a Taylor Big Baby that I have had for nearly 20 years, but your ideal might be different. If you can identify this then measure everything, take neck profiles at various points, look at the angles and the frets and see what is different from your builds so far. You could take one of the builds that you don't enjoy playing and reshape the neck to see if you can improve it.

I am at about the same stage as you, having made half a dozen instruments. For me the thing that is sparking new interest is going for some unique design features. I know that I am unlikely to build a standard OM that is as good as the Collings that I could just go out and buy. So I have recently started building things that I know I can't buy anywhere. My last was a fan-fret 8-string bouzouki, but tuned like a guitar. My current project is converting an old 12-string that I don't like into a multi-scale 7-string baritone guitar, using falcate bracing and adding an arm bevel.

For me another great kick-in-the -pants was buying the books by Trevor Gore and Gerard Gilet, and attending a weekend workshop with Trevor on modal tuning and other build techniques.

I have built two guitars that I frankly hated the necks - both were way too chunky. After meditating for a while I pulled both necks off, took a spoke shave and started reworking them. It meant destroying finish (including some stain) which I never completely matched, but in the end both of those guitars are far more playable.

One of the big things I learned about neck making is to find guitars that I really liked and make some templates. I took some contours off of a friend's vintage Les Paul and I have made at least 6 necks with that profile - everyone who plays any of those guitars comments on the neck.

I've also pushed myself on each build - usually a new shape, size, configuration, wood. The only time I have built the same thing twice is when I wanted to give one away. Otherwise I pick a new size or something and see what happens.

edit to add, I also buy one new tool (at least) with each guitar - I think what would have made something easier or better on the last one and add it to my collection.

Snow, You obviously have skills. There is no question that to build an instrument is challenging. I have a tendency to be a perfectionist and I can get frustrated. My wife tells me that I should strive for excellence rather than perfection. I think that is good advice. I think that anyone that does this would admit that there are always opportunities for improvement. And there will always be builders better than you. If it were easy, there would be no challenge to it. Don't be too hard on yourself and strive to improve on your next one.

I have found either DVD or on-line classes can be helpful. I have found Robbie O'Brien's on-line classes helpful (although, he does some things I would never do, like carve a neck that is attached to the body...). If you can't go to a class, this is a good alternative.

https://obrienguitars.com/courses

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

Build some simple unadorned guitars out of cheap materials - A grade tops, locally sourced backs and sides and necks, cheap wood or plastic bindings and purflings, inexpensive chinese tuners, etc. and don't be afraid to push the envelope or test to destruction. Failures sometimes teach more than successes (but try to make them affordable).
When you look at the low end guitars it is not so much the materials that make them mediocre as the way they are put together. That is why even first rate materials in the wrong hands still produce a mediocre instrument. But to paraphrase a Martin mogul one person's mediocrity is another's holy grail.
As amateurs holding ourselves to boutique guitar or even high end Factory standards may not be reasonable. Finishing is one of the biggest bug-a-boos and an art in itself, and is where most hobbyists lack, and where guitar manufacturers have their own set of specialists doing it. Even many of the small Spanish shops have one person who is a "polisher" and not a builder.
I build a number of different types of instruments and had a number of different types of failures. I try to keep material costs below $100 per instruments.

For setup, this might not be what you want to hear, but.... get a relatively new “cheap” guitar with a truss rod. Meaning - don’t get something that you’ll be fighting with the truss rod itself because it’s an old clunker.

Take the nut and saddle out. Make new ones. Go too far on the nut slots. Intonate the saddle. Pull them out, do it again. And again. Etc.... Go through all the steps of setup each time. Take notes. This will last a couple weeks and be worth it.

Repetition has been a big friend of mine in this area. Nut and saddle blanks blanks are cheap. I have two mules and a pile of (seriously) 20 nuts and saddles. I could make a bit for the one instrument in my sleep I do believe.

Hope that helps.
Brad


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Insta - https://www.instagram.com/cbcguitars/
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I'm a big believer in a few things that (in my opinion) aid progress.

First, when you are trying to figure out where to spend your improvement time, fix the weakest link in your chain. Once you tackle that problem, and then some other problem after that (the weakest link at that point), and keep tackling the weakest link in your chain over and over, the overall quality of your guitars has no choice but to get better. You currently think your biggest problem is necks. OK; on your next guitar, focus a lot on the neck. Try to copy a neck you really like a lot. Look hard at what makes that neck feel right to you. Is it the fingerboard thickness (some are thinner, some are thicker)? Is it the curve of the neck (some are rounder, some are flatter, some are lopsided, but in a good way)? Study to the Nth degree what makes that neck a good neck. Then replicate that, as best you can.

Second, you do get better at something the more you do it. Repetition is the teacher, along with whoever or whatever else is teaching you that skill. That inherently means that the earlier work is not going to be as good as the later work. That's just the way it is. The good news is that your guitars look pretty good (according to the photo above), and you said above that they sound pretty good. Well, that's great! So you really just need to focus (for now) on making them feel good to you as a player.

I think that's a great situation to be in. Don't get into a funk. You can get there!

taking a class is a great idea but many classes are not custom to the individual. Knowing what you want to improve upon is a start. One question is do you feel it is your hand skill technique or just the understanding of the task at hand?
The one thing I see often is that people may not have a grasp of the physics and engineering. There is a mechanics to this and an art. learning where the two meet is important.
Many offer advice and not all of it is good advice depending on what you want to do. I would say it took me about 50 guitars till I could say I truly understood what a guitar is.

_________________
John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

If necks are a problem as far as shape find a neck you like (as already mentioned) and copy the profiles at the first and tenth frets. You can do this by making a rough template that is close and protecting the neck with saran wrap use a rolled snake of epoxy putty on the rough template pressed against the neck till it dries.

Shape the neck perfectly at those frets so the templates fit and blend the headstock and heel areas in with the usual assortment of rasps, chisels. hand drill drum sanders, ect. I like to use an air sander with 40G on a 5" firm disk to clean up the part between frets one and ten and blend it all together going to 80 G at the end and finishing up with a roughly 4X6" sanding block with 80G. I saw a video of Kevin Ryan doing that years ago and it has worked great for me.



Last step is blending the edge of the fretboard into the curvature of the neck and fine tuning the concavity of the heel transition so it is not too clunky. I don't like big clunky volutes either.

For finish sanding necks I have found nothing better than the Porter Cable Speed Bloc 330. The areas where the paper curles around the pads at the ends are perfect for sanding and smoothing the concave areas in the headstock and heel transitions

I am going on 80 instruments and I would say neck shaping has gotten pretty routine on only the last 20 or 30.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

I appreciate all the wisdom. It gives me something to move forward with.
Thanks guys


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This might be excessively metaphorical, but another scratchbuilding process I'm familiar with is building airplanes. Ask any homebuilder who built from plans about parts fabrication, and as likely as not, you'll hear that the builder had enough parts to build three airplanes by the time he finished. I think guitar building follows a similar model. Don't use a part you think could be better. Or that would require deviation from plan for parts further along the food chain. And that brings us to earlier comments to keep the projects simple and focus on quality, one part at a time.

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Peter Havriluk

The wisdom oft repeated in this shop is derived from pop psych writer Malcolm Gladwell's observation that it takes at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in a particular field of endeavor. The number is routinely disputed by others, and even Mr. Gladwell suggests that his rule does not apply to sports or other highly structured fields without fixed rule sets. Craft has very well established standards and a large body of reference work and practitioners, so 5 years of full time, deliberate practice to achieve a degree of mastery seems reasonable, given the sub-disciplines involved (e.g., design, joinery, process control, finishing, set-up, and thinking in a comfy chair with a whiskey close at hand).

The issue with that 5 years of committed full-time effort is the nature of deliberate practice. 10,000 hours of labor does not equate to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice - the model assumes that each of those 10,000 hours represents a willingness on the part of the student to push themselves to the limit of their current skill set to expand their abilities from day to day.

The good news for you is two-fold:

- Assuming your 7 guitars each took around 500 hours of aggregate study, focused effort, etc., you are over 1/3 of the way to mastery (assuming Mr. Gladwell is not full of hot air)

- You enjoy building and recognize the value in pushing yourself, so even with the inevitable errors, frustrations, and outright failures that characterize the learning process for most craftsmen, it's likely you will improve over time and gain some level of mastery simply by continuing to build

You appear to be well past the point where a 'build a guitar!' classes would be of benefit, so focusing on improving part-task skills by soliciting assistance in technique and process from mentors (e.g., Dr. Kennedy's mini-tutorial on neck shaping) would seem to be an effective strategy. As someone working through a similar process - perhaps with a bit more focus on repair work - having mentors readily at hand both here and in the shop is a fabulous advantage, and one that should be fully leveraged. You might seek out and cultivate these mentors both in your local area and online.

You might also commit to a few days on the road per year to spend time in other shops staffed by those with expertise in the disciplines you feel require focused effort on your part...most luthiers I have met are quite generous with their time when it comes to assisting a serious student.

I think Mr. Hall may have the gist of it - focus on the things you know are weak areas and otherwise keep at it.

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For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan

If it's any consolation, I've built over 60 guitars and I've never been happy with any of them either

In my case it's always the finish though.

You might try getting a CNC neck and studying it. I think the spoke shave is the best tool for making necks. Use a rasp to get the shape at the nut and the heal then a spoke shave with full long pulls from one end to the other making nice long curls of wood the same thickness. Like anything it takes practice. It took me at least ten guitars before I felt comfortable selling one and those first several after that were sold cheap.

Ditto on what Brad Combs said. I did that with a cheap Japanese guitar from the early 70s. It sounded terrible and played poorly with a neck like a 2 x 4. I shaved the neck and did three refrets before I got it right. I worked on setups, running through many nuts and saddle blanks until it played right. It still sounded terrible but played well and still does. It wasn't until 30 years later that I built my first guitar, and I owe its playability to that cheap Japanese guitar. Looking back, those were the most important lessons I ever learned about building.

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

if the neck is your issue get some neck templates
http://www.luthiersuppliers.com/products/p10.html

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

Lots of good advice so far. My dad was in production engineering and QC, and the key there was always to find the bottleneck and fix it. That will reveal another bottleneck someplace else, and so it goes.

The only thing I can add is the exhortation from a musician's group: "Never practice mistakes!" If something is not working the way you want it to, find a different way of doing it. Building your process around a bad step will just require more work later to fix it.

From a work habit standpoint I've found it helpful to remind myself to slow down. I'm already a pretty patient guy but I would catch myself trying to finish something up before dinner or whatever and ending up with results that weren't what I wanted. I've retrained myself to just let the jobs take as long as they need to take. If I'm not done then I just sit it down, lock up the shop and come back later. It has helped me to improve the quality of my work and eliminate many of the mistakes I used to make.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

work habits - - - I've saved myself no end of misery by honoring my 'ten o'clock' rule: No new work starts after ten pm and no work starts earlier than that which might roll past ten.

And fussy jobs are started early in a work session with no set deadline.

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Peter Havriluk

SnowManSnow:

I'm around the same place as you are -- working on my 7th guitar. I'm not going to be presumptuous and suggest what you should do, but I will note that in your initial post that kicked off this thread you indicated that you were doing something that I would NOT do -- you wrote, "I have 2 ready to build now. The tops are tough thicknesses and rosettes installed, but I . . ."

I have not, and will not, work on more than one guitar at a time. Two reasons: I have a hard enough time keeping the issues of a single build in my head, and I learn something (actually, many things) with each build. Each of my guitar builds has been better, in several ways, than the one that preceded it. With each build I've learned more about what to do, what not to do, how to fix what I did that I shouldn't have done, what a better order of construction would be, and so on.

One thing I haven't improved on is speed. It took me about 200 hours in the shop to build my first guitar. I'll be in the shop for at least 200 hours on my current build. I'm spending less time fixing mistakes or redoing elements, but my designs have become more complex, both esthetically and structurally, and my tolerance of defects has waned. (I spend about two hours reading (books and internet) what and how others have done for every hour in the shop.)

I have several books about making guitars and have found them helpful. Though I've taken ideas from every one, I have not followed the common (and, to my mind, uninspired) advice to choose a single guru and follow his/her lead. The Gore/Gilet book set and the Somogyi book set are both excellent (though expensive) and nicely divide their efforts into a volume on design and one on construction. Lots of useful advice and techniques. I use many of the methods they describe. The Cumpiano/Natelson book (which comes highly recommended on internet luthier forums) also describes many useful techniques, but is, fundamentally, a cookbook, describing a rote process for building a clone of a Cumpiano/Natelson guitar (the same could be said for the Gore/Gilet construction volume.). I don't find much nourishment there. (If I wanted a guitar that looked and sounded and was constructed like a Martin guitar, I'd buy a Martin guitar. It would certainly be less expensive -- even at minimum wage.)

How are my results? I'm still not satisfied, but I do feel that I'm making progress. I've had three people (independently and without solicitation) ask me to build custom guitars for them -- at whatever price I chose. So sound, playability, and appearance seem to be generally OK. (I've declined the offers. I had a job; now I'm retired.)

What should you do? It depends on what you want out of luthiery. You say "I don't mind investing time and money . . ." If you want the fastest path to a decent guitar that you've built with your own hands, invest money and a bit of time in a class. If you want to be the true creator of your own musical instrument, invest time (lots of time) and bit of money in developing your understanding, intuition, and workmanship skills. There's an incredible amount of good advice, examples, and direction on the internet. And, of course, a lot of other.

Judging by the many responses you seem to have hit a bit of a nerve! For me it has been the neck/body join geometry which I have only got fully right on number 7!

I don't think anyone has mentioned design. It is vital to work with a known good design. I would strongly endorse the suggestion of getting the Gore Gilet books. The design volume can be a bit offputting but the build volume is excellent and will take you through every step clearly. His falcate braced steel string design works really well even in the hands of an amateur. I am on my third and the other two I would say were pretty good - not because of my skill but down to the design.

Keep it going you will get there. Dave