Official Luthiers Forum!

Hi, just starting out. Have an amateur woodworking background with no experience in making musical instruments. What books are recommend as a start, tutorials, any part time apprenticeships / courses in South Africa (Pretoria / Johannesburg area)? All advice would be welcome. Good idea starting with a bass, this what I play? Many thanks, Gareth

A lot of good books out there on building, but be sure and get the book from Stewart Macdonald on finishing..

Get a copy of Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar. He has very good chapters on materials, tools, finishing, and wiring, and an especially good one on thinking about the geometry of your instrument. Then he details building three instruments, electric guitars in both bolted and set necks, and a through neck bass.

And of course, all the great people here at OLF

Thank you Al / Freeman

Is it a better option starting with an acoustic to get the fundamentals in place?

Many thanks,
Gareth

I'm primarily an acoustic player so I built a number of them before my first electric. I think the acoustic is much harder - there are many more steps that require special tools and techniques but there are ways to mitigate that. Starting with a kit (I don't know what will be available in South Africa) gets around some of these - bending the sides, thicknessing the plates, mitering the fretboard, shaping the bridge and maybe the neck. If you want to consider an acoustic get Cumpiano's Guitar Making - Tradition and Technology

The simplest electric is some sort of flat topped solid body - Tele/strat/p-bass - with a bolt on neck. Almost everything is done with band saw and router. Next more difficult are carved top set neck instruments (Les Paul, PRS) - you do a lot with chisels and planes and the curves makes the geometry much more interesting. Hollow and/or arched tops are more difficult still.

I'm strictly an amateur builder but I have built most of them by now and have posted some build threads on other forums - if you are interested in a particular type of guitar let me know and I can point you to one of them.

Thanks Freeman

Please send some links to the bass guitars that you have built as this reads like a reasonable start.

Many thanks, Gareth

Sorry to confuse you, I haven't built a bass. What I meant is that I've built most of those styles that I talked about, here is a solid body bolt on (Fender)

http://www.harmonycentral.com/forum/for ... barncaster

A couple of carved solid bodies with set necks, this one happens to be chambered (Gibson)

http://www.harmonycentral.com/forum/for ... clip-added

A couple of semi hollow bodies, this is like an ES-335

http://www.harmonycentral.com/forum/for ... -an-es-335

And a bunch of different acoustics

http://www.harmonycentral.com/forum/for ... of-parlors

The construction methods are the same whether its a guitar or a bass. As I said earlier, Hiscock uses a through neck bass to demonstrate that style of instrument (one that I haven't built but several here at OLF have)