
Rick Toone, Luthier - hoosieree
http://ricktoone.com/
======
robotmay
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.

~~~
afandian
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
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
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.

------
jdietrich
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/)

~~~
fasteo
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/)

~~~
inetsee
I have a Manuel Contreras classical guitar I bought in Madrid about 45 years
ago; if I recall correctly, it cost me about $150. I can't imagine what a
guitar like that would cost me today.

~~~
jacquesm
Depending on the wood anywhere from a few thousand to ten thousand and up.
Really nice to see you still have it that many years later.

------
beat
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
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
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.

~~~
TylerE
The Line 6 Helix UI is pretty great. That's the unit I'm running. Everything
easily tweakable from the unit, or connect it to a PC via USB and use the
their software which is even easier since you have a mouse, drag and drop,
etc. Way way better than, say, Fractal.

This video shows what the UI on the unit itself is like...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-i_i1nrRy0&t=295](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-i_i1nrRy0&t=295)

~~~
beat
A bandmate of mine was using a Helix (with an electric cello). He replaced it
with a board full of cheap Chinese mini-pedals and analog amp sims. It
definitely sounded better than anything else of its ilk I've heard, though.

~~~
TylerE
THe thing I really like it not having to deal with a board full of pedals, and
all the cabling, power supplies, etc.

~~~
beat
I wish I could be there. But I'm too fussy about the tone of my drive systems
(amp and pedals), and too into knob-level manipulation of delay and reverb
pedals.

~~~
TylerE
Actually for knob-fiddling the helix is great... you can have up to 3
expression pedals, and ANY parameter can be mapped to them - so you could have
say delay time on one pedal (with user definable bottom and top range), and a
wet/dry blend on another.

------
tambourine_man
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
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
Nice, didn’t know that site. Thank you

------
Splendor
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
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/)

------
ryjm
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.

------
ramses
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 :-)

------
mikepurvis
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
And his wooden pipe organ!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5baNcgIA8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5baNcgIA8o)

~~~
fotbr
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/)

------
obombration
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.

------
Twirrim
There's a good luthier subreddit if you like seeing interesting guitars:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/)

------
vondur
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
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
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.

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

------
erric
gorgeous. functional. art.

------
elvirs
nice but irrelevant, this is not reddit. flagged

~~~
sctb
> _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)

