NOTE: I'm not a professional, trained, builder. I'm a some guy who just started by myself, in my shed, because I wanted guitars I could not afford as a teenager, and thusly, pooled my skillset that includes, mechanics, electronics, woodworking, and build all those skills up over years to be able to do this, on my own. I had no prior "training" to speakof, all my research was books/internet/word-of-mouth, and I had little, if any, support from most people on this (I'm going to be blunt, most people think this is stupid). I was inspired to do this by rock musicians who I admired who built their own instruments - you can read about them in the influential guitars pages in this section of the site.

Okay, with the disclaimer out of the way, this is where we will talk about my process, how long it can take, and what it takes.

I emphasize "inexpensive" here, because we are talking as a guy who plays for fun on the internet, maybe on stage locally for fun, and does not have a decades long career of gold records, adoring fans, and a scrooge McDuck Money Bin to his name. A guy like me. The little local guy who enjoys what he does in this post-music-industry nightmare/dream we are living in, for better or whatever. We're not talking about buying $50-5000 endangered "Tone Woods" to create some kind of boo-teeky lookingthing a guy like Sting probably has sitting on a stand in his house. We're talking about spending $50-1000 max for a guitar that's made to go on stage, and rock, and do so night after night, without a problem, even if it's made out of some of the most abused woods this size of a Lowes dumpster.

This means you can be as derivative or unique as you want. Want to copy Van-Halen's Bumblebee note-for-note, go on ahead, want to make yourself something nobody's ever seen before, that's kosher too. When you scratch build, the sky is the limit.

So the first wave, I just make drawings and mockups of what I want to build. In the olden days, this meant sitting at a desk for hours with colored pencils, drawing guitars. People thought I was just "drawing" guitars because I liked em', hah, I was looking to buy or BUILD what I was drawing at some point. As I started to get home access to the internet, I started to do mock-ups using those old "Flash BuildeR" - some of which have migrated to newer technologies since Flash has become aNoNo for security reasons in recent years. Now I even use "The Gimp" for some of my designs to put them together. So there's a lot of different ways. I've even been known to use Graf-X II Pixel Art.

Another piece of the design process is figuring out what scale length I want, how many frets, and take that into consideration to the design. I even try to put that in my drawings if I can. I want to have something as close to the finished instrument as possible on paper/screen to look at as a reference, though I'll make adjustments while building. That last one is a big part of why I'm writing this, most luthiers say "stick to the design", but if you're building for yourself, what if you reveal a better way in the process o building? I tend to work like Bob Ross - Happy Accidents - unless there's something very specific.

Electronics are another piece of the design. For guitars, I tend not to use Schematics because its' easier to get lost with a simple circuit like a guitar with those, especially when it's a not-so-simple guitar circuit, like a Jaguar with 3-way coil split, phase on the neck pickup, a push-pull preamp, and a cartridge slot under the back for a home-built synth. Usually what I want to do, in my design style - yes, you develop a style after awhile, that's what sets guys like Leo Fender, Les Paul, Paul Bigsby, or Paul Dean from each other - each guy has their own style of build. Two guys can come up with the same thing, and have drastically different approaches to it. Mine is often a really complex electronic circuit under the hood capable of a whole lot of sounds.