Build Your Own Acoustic Guitar: Complete Instructions and Full-Size Plans

by Jonathan Kinkead

Every guitarist dreams of owning a handmade instrument, but for most, the cost is likely to be prohibitive. The alternative – building your own fine guitar – is not as difficult as you might imagine, given some skill, patience, and the expert guidance of a master luthier. Every step of construction is fully covered, from choice, selection, and preparation of woods, to consideration of size, bracing, and tonal qualities. Each step of the building sequence is clearly photographed in color, with variations to the standard design shown to enable you to personalize your instrument as you make it.

Briston, England-based Jonathan Kinkead has been building guitars for nearly 30 years. His craft is born out of experience and intuition rather than a strict following of technical detail. The resulting beauty of form and distinctive tone have earned him his reputation as one of the world's most respected independent luthiers.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2004

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is AWESOME and I highly recommend it!

First off the good points: it includes a lot of details about every part of an acoustic guitar, and includes a life sized set of plans (this is important because what you'll be doing is tracing or gluing a copy of it to plywood to take to your bandsaw for your templates.

So, that's pretty cool. Add to that the fact that it covers literally everything, and you are well on your way to get it started.

So why did I give it four stars? Well, the one drawback I see for this book is the plans are too comprehensive. It's nice to have all kinds of beautiful inlays, and bindings, and rosettes, but for my very first acoustic guitar I'm not going to do much for any of those.

That is where I feel this book falls down a bit. If you're already an experience woodworker, you might see some of the little details as a realistic challenge, but I think it's just overkill for an absolute beginner. Just stick with very basic bindings, and focus on mastering building an instrument first before you start hand cutting your own fretboard inlays.

Additionally, as an existing woodworker, a lot of the techniques are very clear to me, but I think they could be better explained. Also, there's certain places you can take shortcuts (buying a soundboard pre-sanded to thickness, buying sides that are already bent). If you have a woodshop, you won't mind doing some of these tasks, but for some beginners you'd be better off buying an acoustic kit from stew mac (they do most of the woodworking like cutting frets, thicknessing, and bending sides) and assembling based on that. I feel like the book could have pointed htis out better.

Still, if you have a phone-a-friend woodworker who is willing to mentor you a bit, this is a very, very, doable project.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a brilliant book on guitar building. Highly recommended. But also watch the multi part YouTube series on "the pedal show" where he builds a guitar using the methods in this book.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has great pictures of the process and is a helpful reference along the way.