8 ms·

Rick Toone, Luthier

106 points by hoosieree 8y ago

robotmay 8y ago
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.
- sourceless 8y ago
  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!
  - robotmay 8y ago
    There's dozens of us! 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.
- afandian 8y ago
  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.
  - WorkLobster 8y ago
    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?" ;-)
    - robotmay 8y ago
      Haha, I thought it might be obscure around here, but I suppose it's not too surprising to find out that computer nerds are also instrument nerds ;) It's such a fun festival, though rather dangerous for your wallet.
  - gpvos 8y ago
    I'll see you all there then (although I'm more of a dancer than a musician).
- cushychicken 8y ago
  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.
erric 8y ago
gorgeous. functional. art.
jdietrich 8y ago
Other significant modern luthiers: Ken Parker: http://www.kenparkerarchtops.com/ http://www.kenparkerarchtops.com/ Michihiro Matsuda: http://www.matsudaguitars.com/gallery.htm http://www.matsudaguitars.com/gallery.htm Ola Strandberg: https://strandbergguitars.com/ https://strandbergguitars.com/ Linda Mantzer: http://www.manzer.com/guitars/ http://www.manzer.com/guitars/ Last but not least, the Stradivarius of the steel-string guitar, Ervin Somogyi: http://www.esomogyi.com/ http://www.esomogyi.com/
- sitkack 8y ago
  Harry Mairson is a Functional [0] Luthier. [0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.640.2442 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.640....
- Griever 8y ago
  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. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg4uUiJlbct/?hl=en&taken-by=dunable_guitars https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg4uUiJlbct/?hl=en&taken-by=duna...
- migstopheles 8y ago
  I would add Teuffel to that list, too: http://www.teuffel.com/ http://www.teuffel.com/
- edmanet 8y ago
  Jersey Girl Guitar: http://www.jerseygirlhg.com/ http://www.jerseygirlhg.com/ Genuine pieces of art
- fasteo 8y ago
  Allow me to add some luthiers for Spanish classic guitars Conde Brothers : http://www.condehermanos.com/ http://www.condehermanos.com/ Alberto Martín: http://albertomartinluthier.com/ http://albertomartinluthier.com/ René Aguilera: https://reneaguilera.com/ https://reneaguilera.com/ Manuel Contreras: http://www.manuelcontreras.com/ http://www.manuelcontreras.com/
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mikepurvis 8y ago
For something a little more off-beat, see Matthias Wandel's experiments with a "home made" ukelele: https://woodgears.ca/ukulele/ https://woodgears.ca/ukulele/
- jaredandrews 8y ago
  And his wooden pipe organ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5baNcgIA8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5baNcgIA8o
  - fotbr 8y ago
    Or you can see what it could have become, if Wandel had any real passion for it: Raphi Giangiulio's home-built pipe organ. http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/ http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/
ryjm 8y ago
ah it's so fun when worlds collide. i own a strandberg (https://strandbergguitars.com/ https://strandbergguitars.com/) - sincerely believe there is a huge amount of room for technical advancement in this space.
tambourine_man 8y ago
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.
- hoosieree 8y ago
  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. [1]: https://geekhack.org/ https://geekhack.org/
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    Nice, didn’t know that site. Thank you
vondur 8y 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.
- dizzystar 8y ago
  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.
  - radiowave 8y ago
    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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
elvirs 8y ago
nice but irrelevant, this is not reddit. flagged
- sctb 8y ago
  > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
squozzer 8y ago
The bodies, though beautiful, look impractical. But some of the bridges and pickguards I find appealing.
obombration 8y ago
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.
beat 8y ago
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.
- TylerE 8y ago
  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.
  - beat 8y ago
    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.
Splendor 8y ago
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]. [0]: https://www.fishman.com/products/series/fluence/ https://www.fishman.com/products/series/fluence/ [1]: http://www.lacemusic.com/alumitone_humbucker.php http://www.lacemusic.com/alumitone_humbucker.php
- hoosieree 8y ago
  My favorite low-impedance pickup forum thread (which has been going on for almost 10 years!) http://music-electronics-forum.com/t5447-8/ http://music-electronics-forum.com/t5447-8/
Twirrim 8y ago
There's a good luthier subreddit if you like seeing interesting guitars: https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/
ramses 8y ago
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 :-)

106 points by hoosieree 8y ago

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.

sourceless 8y ago
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!
- robotmay 8y ago
  There's dozens of us! 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.
afandian 8y ago
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.
- WorkLobster 8y ago
  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?" ;-)
  - robotmay 8y ago
    Haha, I thought it might be obscure around here, but I suppose it's not too surprising to find out that computer nerds are also instrument nerds ;) It's such a fun festival, though rather dangerous for your wallet.
- gpvos 8y ago
  I'll see you all there then (although I'm more of a dancer than a musician).
cushychicken 8y ago
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.

erric 8y ago

gorgeous. functional. art.

jdietrich 8y ago

Other significant modern luthiers: Ken Parker: http://www.kenparkerarchtops.com/ http://www.kenparkerarchtops.com/ Michihiro Matsuda: http://www.matsudaguitars.com/gallery.htm http://www.matsudaguitars.com/gallery.htm Ola Strandberg: https://strandbergguitars.com/ https://strandbergguitars.com/ Linda Mantzer: http://www.manzer.com/guitars/ http://www.manzer.com/guitars/ Last but not least, the Stradivarius of the steel-string guitar, Ervin Somogyi: http://www.esomogyi.com/ http://www.esomogyi.com/

sitkack 8y ago
Harry Mairson is a Functional [0] Luthier. [0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.640.2442 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.640....
Griever 8y ago
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. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg4uUiJlbct/?hl=en&taken-by=dunable_guitars https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg4uUiJlbct/?hl=en&taken-by=duna...
migstopheles 8y ago
I would add Teuffel to that list, too: http://www.teuffel.com/ http://www.teuffel.com/
edmanet 8y ago
Jersey Girl Guitar: http://www.jerseygirlhg.com/ http://www.jerseygirlhg.com/ Genuine pieces of art
fasteo 8y ago
Allow me to add some luthiers for Spanish classic guitars Conde Brothers : http://www.condehermanos.com/ http://www.condehermanos.com/ Alberto Martín: http://albertomartinluthier.com/ http://albertomartinluthier.com/ René Aguilera: https://reneaguilera.com/ https://reneaguilera.com/ Manuel Contreras: http://www.manuelcontreras.com/ http://www.manuelcontreras.com/

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mikepurvis 8y ago

For something a little more off-beat, see Matthias Wandel's experiments with a "home made" ukelele: https://woodgears.ca/ukulele/ https://woodgears.ca/ukulele/

jaredandrews 8y ago
And his wooden pipe organ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5baNcgIA8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5baNcgIA8o
- fotbr 8y ago
  Or you can see what it could have become, if Wandel had any real passion for it: Raphi Giangiulio's home-built pipe organ. http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/ http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/

ryjm 8y ago

ah it's so fun when worlds collide. i own a strandberg (https://strandbergguitars.com/ https://strandbergguitars.com/) - sincerely believe there is a huge amount of room for technical advancement in this space.

tambourine_man 8y ago

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.

hoosieree 8y ago
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. [1]: https://geekhack.org/ https://geekhack.org/
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  Nice, didn’t know that site. Thank you

vondur 8y 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.

dizzystar 8y ago
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.
- radiowave 8y ago
  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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

elvirs 8y ago

nice but irrelevant, this is not reddit. flagged

sctb 8y ago
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

squozzer 8y ago

The bodies, though beautiful, look impractical. But some of the bridges and pickguards I find appealing.

obombration 8y ago

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.

beat 8y ago

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.

TylerE 8y ago
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.
- beat 8y ago
  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.

Splendor 8y ago

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]. [0]: https://www.fishman.com/products/series/fluence/ https://www.fishman.com/products/series/fluence/ [1]: http://www.lacemusic.com/alumitone_humbucker.php http://www.lacemusic.com/alumitone_humbucker.php

hoosieree 8y ago
My favorite low-impedance pickup forum thread (which has been going on for almost 10 years!) http://music-electronics-forum.com/t5447-8/ http://music-electronics-forum.com/t5447-8/

Twirrim 8y ago

There's a good luthier subreddit if you like seeing interesting guitars: https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/

ramses 8y ago

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 :-)