Product Description

Everything from the first steps of design to the final set-up of of solid-body, hollow-body and semi-acoustic electric guitars is covered step by step in this book. It contains a section about winding your own pickups and another on active guitar electronics. The last chapter is about visits to Steve Jarman Guitars (UK), Sadowsky Guitars (US) and PRS-Guitars (US)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #147708 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 236 pages

Review
"Kochuses the bare basics as a jumping off point, going on to describe electricguitarconstruction in a thorough and orderly manner" -- Book review in issue number 63 of American Lutherie, the quartely journal of The Guild of American Luthiers

From the Author
There are many different methods of designing and building an instrument. In this book, I am going to describe my personal approach and experiences. If work is carried out with great care and precision, everybody will in the end have a good-quality and nice-looking instrument to call their own. I would even go so far as to claim that a home-made electric guitar can well compete with expensive, industrially-manufactured makes; after all you can afford to select the best wood available and to buy highquality hardware as well as to tailor the instrument to fit your personal requirements. And, what's more, you can afford to invest a lot of time. I should also like to mention the special relationship with “your” guitar that you are going to enjoy, a feeling which you will hardly ever experience with a bought instrument.

Customer Reviews

If you buy only one book, make sure that it's this one!!!
(At the time of writing) I have yet to even finish reading this excellent book and I'm totally convinced that this is the one book that will guide me through the entire process of guitar building. I have read both editions of Melvyn Hiscock's "Make your own electric guitar" (and would also recomend them), however, I feel that this book ought to be the bench mark. The author goes into every detail of guitar construction (three guitars are detailed) in a manner that is easy to follow and understand. My only complaint (sorry Martin!!) is that the detail contained in some of the accompanying photo's is a little hard to pick up (although not impossible!!). Congratulations on producing an excellent and most informative book! My thanks also to the translater of the original work.

Good book, bad publisher
Martin Koch has compiled a lot of good information in this book. I haven't seen this much information about electric guitars in any one book. If you are only going to buy one book on electric guitars (why would you, really) this is a good one. He goes into winding pickups, various wiring ideas, and several building techniques. The problem (really the only one) is that the illustrations, while numerous, are quite small and poorly reproduced. You can see what each one is but there were obvious registration and focus problems. It looks like they used digital images of low resolution. The publisher should have taken more care. That said it's not enough to make me regret the purchase. This is a valuable addition to my library.

Whole lotta info...
Although I haven't really got to build my guitar I feel confident in recomending this book. After been playing for many years and doing things for myself (setup, maintenance and repair) I can assure that this book will provide the beginner with more than enough background information for the lutherie business or hobby. A big plus to this book is the frequent presentation of low-cost solutions to build a number of aparatus that would help in the absence of expensive and/or hard to find tools.
The author is clearly into the pleasure of the craft and concerned with the reader achieving the final goal: build an instrument.
I'd also like to recommend the author's new book on building lap steels. I haven't read it all the way, but it does contain lots of useful information. Pictures in the book can be downloaded bigger, in color and with better resolution from the web, and the shy beginner will found confort in building a very simple lap steel project and progressively go into building more sophisticated instruments.
5 stars surely isn't fair enough to the AUTHOR's commitment to the craft and to teaching it.