Wilson Burnham Guitars

A guitar based upon an ca. 1816 Jose Martinez guitar, original signed by Fernando Sor. The bridge is not a copy on the original, it is a "modern" bridge. It is made from rosewood and is fitted with an ebony saddle. The guitar is loud and sweet sounding with this saddle. Douglas fir top, maple back and side, Spanish cedar neck. 614 mm string length. A joy to play, it's voice surrounds you.

As promised, a photo of the Martinez and Lacote guitars. I strung the Martinez with light tension D'Addario strings and installed an ebony nut and saddle, the guitar sounds wonderful. I have been playing alot of Giuliani's music on it and sight read through Sor's famous theme and variations on a tune of Mozart. The music makes more sense, fingering wise, on a small guitar.

Ideally, the work bench should be situated near a large window that gathers north light. Irving Sloane, Guitar Repair , 1973 I see that this blog is getting alot of hits, can you folks tell me what you are interested in: slotting a new fret board or the new tool chest? I would like to know so I can create a new blog to answer questions. Wilson 7/8/11 I recently purchased a new fret saw from Stew-Mac, my old saw was getting very dull and I am having a difficult time in finding a saw sharpening business that is willing to resharpen it. The new saw arrived with the saw blade reversed so that the teeth would cut on the pull stroke, which is fine if the teeth are shaped like those on a Japanese pull saw. Western style teeth were designed to be cut on the push stroke. Anyway, I used the saw as it came to me and I failed miserably with it, all the slots were terribly angled off perpendicular to the fret board, I wasted a $20 piece of ebony. My solution was to tap the saw blade out of t

The Martinez-inspired guitar has an intimate size but a surprising energy of volume, while exhibiting a crispness that does not lose proper warmth. The guitar maintains its sweet tone even when played hard-but soft picking with the pads, rather than the nails, does not result in mushiness. The intonation is perfect, action as delivered just low enough for a convincing flamenco rattle while high enough for clean notes even "at speed". Amplification using Markley or Schaller transducers is not finicky and the finish gives up the traces of mounting putty easily. The slightly slender neck and comfortable scale make this a good companion for a steel-string player; it simply asks to be played. H.D.W I received this from the owner of the Martinez copy I made, he has performed on it all summer.

Life is for doing things slow, like trees. Makoto Imai, Japanese builder of Shrines I finally bought some water stones from Lee Valley and all I can do is ask myself why did I wait so long! These stones are phenomenal, the speed that they sharpen at and mostly importantly, they make plane blades sharp! For years I have been sharpening my tools on wet/dry sandpaper adhered to a piece of plate glass with decent results, but whenever I would sharpen freehand the paper backing allowed the edge to roll over. The last couple of months I pulled out a sharpening jig I bought years ago and have been using it with so-so results. That is why I also bought a Mark II honing guide from Lee Valley, I want my tools sharp and I want to be able to repeat the results. Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who gunsmiths for a hobby, he enjoys working on older double barreled shotguns, about sharpening, he is having a hard time getting his inletting tools sharp. I recommended that he read up on the

In Northeastern California, at the very heart of that magnificent mountain region of the southernmost Cascades, lies Lassen Volcanic National Park. Collins&Lind, Lassen Glimpses , 1929 "Peak bagging" yesterday, it was nice and cool here in the Northstate so my wife and I hiked up to Harkness Mountain lookout station to see our friend Rob, who is the lookout, and then drove an hour to Butte Lake to hike the Cinder Cone. We got to Butte Lake around 3pm and were pleasantly surprised to find that the day use parking lot was almost full-consider that this is the northeast corner of the park and you have to make an effort to get here. On the hike up and back we met over 20 people, families out for a nice hike and gorgeous views, again something we didn't expect because it seems like every one has to "scale" Lassen Peak. Cinder Cone is young, it last erupted around 1670, and is part of a dramatic volcanic field. Go and check it out!

You need very few tools to go into the woods and bust a chair out of a tree. John D. Alexander, Jr., Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood , 1978 94 degrees F. in my shop just now, a lazy Sunday afternoon with a high pressure sitting on top of Northern California. This morning, I glued in the last of the ebony binding on the maple guitar, this guitar is visually very striking, the contrast between the big leaf maple and the ebony. I am not sure that I mentioned that I got this maple from a friend in Estes Park, Colorado, his name is Leo Weber and he is a wonderful furniture maker and carver. Go to www.starroutestudio.com and click on "Artists" to learn more about Leo. He gave me this wonderful maple just so I could make something and he was trying to decrease the amount of wood in his wood shed. In the above photo I have just taped the binding end at the end seam and proceeding up to the heel. Now all I have to do is to make and install the fingerbo

I know just enough about wood to know what I do not know. Art Overholtzer, Classic Guitar Making , 1974 Thanks to all of you who have voted in my poll! Any suggestions for the next question? Next week is my last week of work at Lassen Volcanic National Park and I am very glad of that, I will have spent 2 months doing nothing but power washing old paint off of shake roofs and then repainting the shakes. When I am done I will start getting our household ready to move to Yosemite National Park, I have a lot of work ahead of me, please be patient with my blog updates. Check out Ottmar Liebert's diary, there is a blurb about how some computer designers are being taught to use their hands again, seems that all these people can do is move a mouse. How sad. (One of these days I will learn how to create a link to the article). Oh, the above photo is the peghead of guitar #3, western red cedar top and black walnut back and sides. Enjoy the rest of August and have a safe Labor Day weekend!

I do a fair amount of rework. No one ever has so much experience that he can do things right all the time. I tell my students, "The difference between good work and ordinary work is rework." Sometimes people will say, " Oh my, that's beautiful. How do you do it?" I reply that I do it over and over and over." Eugene Clark, luthier, "Building with the Spanish Solera" 2004 lecture Today I got at routing the binding rebates (channels) in the maple guitar. I used my trusty Dremel with base to rout out the rebates and you can see in the bottom photo I added a base to the base, a piece of rosewood adjusted to compensate for the doming in the top and back of the guitar. The idea is that the router bit can address the side of the guitar at a right angle, not canted because the dome pushes the front of the router up. When that happens you end up scraping away most of the bindings because the bindings lean out at the top. I did that on my 3rd guitar. Well,

All the efforts of the guitar builder, his attention to the shape, the materials, the method of construction, are for the purpose of producing an instrument beautiful to look at and easy to play, but primarily with these quality of tone. H.E. Hutting II, Guitar Review no. 28 , 1965 Today, now that I am 45 years old and have a few miles on the tires, whenever I play another classic guitarist's guitar I look at two things, how well does the guitar play and sound, to me they are one and the same. If it doesn't play well, or easy, as some would put it, why play it, and at the same time if it's voice doesn't make my heart sing it isn't my guitar. I really don't look at the purfling or soundhole rosette, to me, as a player, the construction of the guitar is secondary- the action and sound are all that I care about . Some guitars that I have played have necks that remind me of a Steinway grand piano, stable, playable and yet massive, others are more yielding and inti

Before any definite work can be done, a bench, or its substitute, must be obtained. Paul N. Hasluck, The Handyman's Book , 1903 The new shop, with the new work bench already hard at work holding the little Lacote. The timbers that make the stand I milled from recycled lumber, they were original boards and braces on the tank house. Of course, I am sure that my grandfather recycled those from somewhere else. The bench top is from the bench I had in my old shop, it is some ponderosa pine that I felled and milled on our property. The northwest corner of the shop, a mess as usual. That is a cedar/maple guitar, after Hernandez y Aguado on the tool box. A new tool box is next on my list, I need a larger one to hold all my tools for our move to Yosemite National Park.

In designing a building, the architect makes sure that its foundation is sufficiently sold to support the weight of the entire structure. Similarly, in learning to play the guitar, the student must first establish the foundation of his technique. Andres Segovia, preface, The Segovia Technique , 1972 The rosette of a cedar/walnut guitar that I need to complete the finish, I am using an oil varnish. I recently replaced the fretboard on this guitar, it originally had a Honduran rosewood fretboard, it was very striking, but it is a little softer than ebony and I had a hard time with the frets not holding as well as they should. There were also dead spots only the neck as one played it, I hope that a new fretboard and new frets will correct that issue. The new fretboard is African Ebony, a very nice piece of wood with some mottling that is very characteristic of that species and it added some weight to what was a light guitar. A new workbench is my latest project, I hope to have photos of

Making musical instruments is a most satisfying art and, as a reaction to our mechanical age perhaps, many people are eager to learn once more the old skills which gave handmade instruments their special value. Charles Ford, Making Musical Instruments , 1979 Remember this guitar from an older post? It's guitar #1, based upon an Martinez from the early 1800's, and it went to a musician friend of mine in Arkansas. He received it this past Friday and I received this email from him- I was off work this afternoon but came in at the close of business to see if the Martinez had arrived. it had, so I brought the packing case home, opened it and oh my goodness. All was well--no evidence of any damage from its trip. and it is a little gem. I've played it for a couple of hours tonight and am way impressed so far. Action and balance are superb and the shape just asks to be held onto and played a little longer. it feels tight enough (loud when pressed but not "boomy") so that

I know that I cannot paint a flower. I cannot paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time. Georgia O"Keefe, a letter to William Milliken , April 1937 A maple bridge for the Lacote. I made 2 out of padauk, but the handle bars kept breaking, and since this is a "concept guitar" for me, I figured I might as well go for broke and pull out some maple. This wood is not as brittle as padauk. I had a good allergy attack this morning, something in the air got me going and spent most of the afternoon sleeping in the Lazy Boy, antihistimines can knock me out. I received plans for a Barbero flamenco guitar and a Rodriguez guitar from GAL this week, I am very excited to start work on a Barbero-style flamenco guitar. I found it very interesting that the Barbero plantilla is almost exactly the same as the Hern

" I seldom measure much, although I do use patterns as a guide, varying them to achieve different effects. I bore most of the hole s by eye, although for the legs I use bevels. The result of working this way is that I have failures, chairs that are wrong. You can't have it both ways, and this is better than reducing the job to it's lowest common denominator." John Brown , Welsh Stick Chairs, 1990 Today I glued on the finger board. It's always a little nerve racking while doing a dry run, I checked and doubled checked that the center of the fingerboard would line up with the center of the guitar and that the frets will be square to the location of the bridge. Once everything is aligned I drive in the indexing nails and then pulled them out so I can apply the glue. Then I hammer the nails back in and start clamping down the caul. I am sure that I have mentioned that I pretty much use fish glue exclusively on my guitars now, it dries so incredibly hard that I have

"The many folk names of this tree (Umbellularia californica) tell a tale of the vivid impression it has made on the generations that have known it. To the Oregonians it is Oregon Myrtle, to the Californians it is California Laurel; though not strictly either a Myrtle or a Laurel, it is at least in the Laurel family and, like the classic Laurel or Bay (Laurus nobilis) with which ancient victors and poets were crowned, it has a spicily aromatic and evergreen leaf. Hence the name of Green Baytree, Spicetree and Pepperwood." Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of Western Trees , 1953 The neck is on and the cocobolo binding, too. The fingerboard is ready to be glued on. I love the "ice cream cone" heel. This guitar is made in the style of Lacote, I used padauk for the end graft to contrast the cocobolo bindings. The back of the peghead, I will install Grover friction tuners after I finish the guitar. There are many period guitars that used wing nut friction tuners,

" Though you may fret me, yet you cannot play upon me ." William Shakespeare, Hamlet  1601 Fretting, what an appropriate verb to use to describe working on the fingerboard for a guitar, and out of all the parts of a guitar, the neck and the fret board are literally the heart of a guitar. One can always pluck the strings of a guitar over the sound board, but you really "play" the guitar at the neck and fingerboard, that's where as a player you do the real work. Yes, one must look at the guitar overall as an instrument, it must play well and sound well, two things which to me are one in the same. If the guitar doesn't play wonderfully, it won't sound that way. I had a long phone conversation with Marc Culbertson of Gilmer Woods last summer about guitar necks and neck woods and got quite the education on fret work from him. What a great guy! I cut slots in a fret board with a fret saw that I bought from LMI back in the '90's that has a walnut hand

Yesterday, I shaped the back braces and sanded them to 220 grit and established a back arch on the sides with a sanding board. Today, I mortised out the pockets in the back lining for the braces with a 1/4" mortise chisel. Using a mortise chisel is much easier than Cumpiano's method (whose book is still worth every cent if you want to make a guitar on your own), I got the idea to use a the chisel from luthier Clive Titmuss's website. It made sense to me and proved to be a faster and far cleaner technique.  Working with the back today and trying to plane out the unconformity between the sides and the end blocks reinforced something that I have known for a long time-trust your intuition, trust your eyes and don't always trust the plans that you work with. I tried to make this a fairly close copy of a Lacote and tried to match the placement of the back bars with the plans I have. The brace closest to the tailblock is far too close and I had to lever the back down with cla

2 weeks ago we got a series of nice storms here in Northern California, by the time the sun came out we had gotten a total of 3 feet of snow. It wasn't the best weather to keep the shop warm. I have been working on a copy of a Lacote guitar. The top is old growth redwood reclaimed from a redwood water tank that once stood on our property. My grandfather bought the tank back around 1942 from an olive ranch down in Corning, he bought 3 tanks and sold 2 to pay for his expenses. I dismantled the tank in 1984, most of the wood was so rotten (yes, redwood does "rot" it gets really soft and won't hold any kind of fastener) I got very little usable wood. I have several pieces that I will use for future guitars, the tops will be four piece. The neck will be dovetailed into the body. The peghead is guitar shaped and I am going to use Grover Champion friction banjo tuners instead of tuning pegs. Why? You have to be fairly strong to turn the pegs to tune the instrument and fricti

Just wanted to show everyone 2 guitars that I put together and are waiting for me to complete the finishing process. Guitar to the left has a Sitka Spruce top, Eastern Black Walnut back and sides and a Spanish Cedar neck. The plantilla is based on Robert Bouchet's and the bracing is after Hernandez y Aguado's asymmetrical bracing. The guitar on the right has a Douglas Fir top with Honduran Mahogany back and sides with a Spanish Cedar neck. I tried to make this guitar a very close copy of a Hernandez y Aguado guitar, I used the same plantilla and the five strut fan bracing as per drawings from R. Courtnall's book, Making Master Guitars. They have wonderful tap tones and should be great sounding guitars when I get them finished. Here's the front of the walnut guitar, I got the Sitka Spruce from Stew-Mac. The back and sides were re-sawed from a board I purchased from Loren at the Wood Emporium in Loveland, Colorado when we lived in Allen's Park, Colorado. If you are ev