Handmade Guitars Why We Love Them

Handmade guitars offer guitarists the best in playability and sound. A handcrafted guitar offer many more benefits than a factory built guitar and we will explore them.

Hi, this is Anthony with a short article about handmade guitars.

Being in love with  guitars for a long time now, a couple of years back I had an electric handmade  guitar made for myself and wanted to share some thoughts on my experiences with you.

I’ve also got an interest in silvertone guitars, goya guitars, Stratocasters and  rose guitars but this was my first handcrafted guitar.

My older brother once owned several left hand guitars but doesn’t play anymore.

The guitar I had built to my specs was a beautiful Australian made “Belman” deep emerald green, double cutaway grand archtop electric.

Several months after purchasing this unique guitar the small Melbourne Australian based ‘Belman company’ was forced to close its doors due to the original manufacturer being unable to continue building these amazing guitars.

This has caused the prices of Belmans  to dramatically rise as they have now become a ‘rare’ item.  I think at their peak Belman was producing only around 20 – 30 guitars a month so you won’t find many of them around.

Before sharing more of the specs of my handmade Belman guitar I wanted to talk about why I purchased a handmade guitar versus a mass produced factory built guitar?

Fifteen or twenty years ago in Australia there was a hand full of people that could build handmade guitars from scratch to a high degree of quality. There weren’t a lot of people that even knew how to procure the materials needed for such an ambitious undertaking.

Today with the internet and the availability of just about anything you could want, anybody with any computer savvy at all, can find not only the materials, but the instructions to build just about anything.

All you need is some mechanical aptitude, mixed with a good eye for detail, the perseverance to get it done and you might be able to build yourself a playable guitar. This is one of the reasons why there are a so many web sites when you can do a search for handmade guitars.

Sometimes it seems like every man and his dog is building handmade guitars!

But that doesn’t mean that all handmade guitars are good!

Experience tells a good Luthier things like, cross grain stiffness in a board and how thick to make a top according to how it feels or bends in their hands, or how to tap tune a top by removing wood from certain areas of a brace or two.

This just doesn’t happen in a big factory.

Skill and experience tell a luthier what materials to use in the making of handmade guitars and how to get the most out of those materials.

No two handmade guitars are ever the same.

A well built handmade guitar will usually have a flawless finish, which requires year of experience and practice.

A lot of hand built guitars made in small shops are built by luthiers that play the guitar themselves and know what other players expect in a good set up. They know about issues concerning playability and intonation.

This can make a tremendous difference.

Have you ever wondered about those huge big guitar factories with all their modern computer controlled equipment?

Have you ever wondered who’s really building these guitars?

Sadly, it’s often hourly paid employees that are usually over worked and under paid.

They’re not really guitar builders, they’re machine operators. They know how to do a particular operation on a particular part.

They don’t really understand how a guitar works and many of them probably don’t care that much.

So how can we expect a mass built guitar to sound as good as a handmade guitar? To put it simply, we can’t.

Back to my handmade Belman guitar. I chose to have the body built using Brazilian mahogany with an Australian Queensland mountain ash top, rosewood fretboard and binding on neck, body and headstock.

That was all set off with and gold hardware with vintage tuners, a hot bridge humbucker  pickup and Belman neck pickup.

Being a handmade guitar I was also able to choose the type  of fret inlays and I chose a unique pattered Abalone  inlays.

How does it play?  Remember, you’re only as good as the limitations of your instrument and a Belman honestly has few limitations!

It produces a wonderfully warm thick tone and with a split coil push pull tone knob and 3 way switch selector, offer a wide range of total contrasts and colors from that beautiful dirty Les Paul tone to the higher pitched Stratocaster twang that we guitarists all love.

So, my experience with a handmade guitar has been a very rewarding one and in fact all this writing has me wanting to go and fire up my Fender Blues Junior amp (my office amp I call it!) and plug in my Belman. 

My next challenge may be playing double neck guitars as they look challenging or getting a handmade acoustic guitar.

Cheers

Anthony Buchalka