by Dr. Matthew Warnock.

Luthier's have long been the unsung heros of the guitar world. While they may not receive the lavish luxuries and press coverage that performers often do, the luthier is the backbone of the guitar industry and has been for hundreds of years. In the hands of a skilled guitar maker, a plain looking hunk of wood can be transformed into an instrument of beauty, an instrument that can remain a part of the public's consciousness long after its performer has come and gone. While the modest original workshops of builders such as Orville Gibson and Leo Fender have grown into global empires, there remains a devoted group of guitar makers who prefer to work in small shops and in close personal contact with the performer. Luthier Dan Koentopp is the perfect example of a small-scale luthier who is making waves with his custom-built guitars.

Dan lives and works in Chicago, where he maintains a small guitar repair shop alongside his luthier business. His workshop is located in an unassuming two-story house in one of the city's many suburban neighborhoods. From outside the house looks like any other on the block, but locked away in the basement is the studio of one of the country's finest up and coming luthiers. Shunning power tools, Dan prefers to work with his hands to produce every guitar he builds. Drawing on his years of training as a violin maker and repairman, and his finely tuned ear coming from years as a performer, Dan has an uncanny ability to create guitars with unique and significant voices.

I met with Dan recently at his workshop where we talked about guitar history, new innovations in guitar making and why, as his website proclaims, "the golden age of guitar making is now."

Matthew Warnock: When did you become interested in making guitars, or was it something you've always known you wanted to do?

Dan Koentopp: The guitar has always been a part of my life. When I was five I told my mom I wanted to learn to play the guitar. I received a guitar and took lessons. After a while I quit, but then started over again when I was older. A few years later, when I was in high school, my Spanish teacher showed us a video on Spain and there was a scene with two luthiers working with wood and making guitars. That was it for me.

After seeing the video, I kept thinking about what it would be like to make a guitar, to mold a piece of wood into a musical instrument. After a few weeks, I went to the local library to see if they had any books on building guitars. To my surprise, they had about two rows full of books on guitar making and I took out five books at a time until I had read through their entire stock. What I enjoyed about those books was that they talked about different styles of guitars, classical, flamenco, archtops, but each style had a basic connection that really drew me in.

Matt: After you started learning on your own did you study at a school or apprentice with another luthier to further your development?

Dan: I went to college to study guitar performance at a school in New York, where I was lucky enough to study with Frederick Hand. It was a conservatory, SUNY Purchase, where everyone is an artist but we were all stuck in the middle of nowhere. All there was to do was practice, hang out and not much else. After two years there I transferred to Columbia in Chicago where I majored in product design. My mom was an artist and my dad was an architect, so I always had artistic tendencies growing up. Product design seemed like a good choice for me since I would be learning how to draw and work with building models.

Matt: Did you leave guitar at this point or was it still a part of your life even though you were majoring in a different subject?

Dan: The brilliant thing about Columbia is that they wanted me to pursue my own interests within the program. Throughout the four years I was there, I majored in product design, but my major focus was guitar design. I had to take all of the general requirements of the degree but my research and thesis work was done on the guitar.

Matt: Were you also working with guitars outside of school at this point?

Dan: I had a cousin who worked at a violin shop in town. He was always bugging me to come down to the shop and check out the violin maker, Michael Darnton, and his work. For about a year I ignored him, but one day I made the time and went to check out the shop. I'll never forget my first time walking into the shop. It was only about the size of a walk-in closet and there were no power tools, but the level of Michael's work was just incredible. A few years later when I opened my own shop I actually took his idea and turned a large closet in my mom's house into my first workshop. [Laughs]

Matt: Did Michael take you under his wing at the time and have you work for him, or did you just observe for the first little while?

Dan: At first I just hung around and he would show me things. He kept telling me to come back every week and I did, with a list full of questions. One week I got up the courage to bring in a few guitars I had been working on. He looked at them but didn’t really say anything besides, "Ah, they're heavy." [Laughs] I told him I had a real interest in what he was doing and asked if I could work on an instrument for him. He agreed and had me fit a sound post into a violin. He told me, "If you can do this job, then you can do anything you want."

It took me about an hour and a half to get the sound post in place, but Michael approved of my work and he told me to come back the next day to work on another instrument for him. Over the course of a year or so I did repair and set-up work for him, pro bono of course. After the year was up he was happy with my work and offered me a paying gig, which I was more than happy to take. After I graduated from Columbia and began working for Michael full time, he started to help me with my own instruments and even allowed me to build a violin alongside him.

Matt: What is the biggest lesson you took away from this time spent in Michael's shop?

Dan: The biggest lesson I learned was that once I knew how to properly use a tool, especially the hand tools, I could achieve the vision I had in my head. Before this time I would have had a great design idea, but couldn't really bring it to fruition properly. After studying with Michael, I felt that I could take an idea from my head to my hands and then into the wood without struggling in between.

Matt: Do you still build all of your guitars with hand tools?

Dan: Yes. I do use a few power tools, but only when I'm taking a big piece of wood and bringing it down to a workable size. After that everything is done by hand. For instance, I can join two pieces of wood together with a machine to form the back of a guitar, and it will be flat and perpendicular, but if you look closely there will be a number of bumps from where the blade was spinning and came into contact with the wood. With a good hand plane I can produce a much smoother connection without putting much more time into the job. I use machines to get bigger jobs done quickly, but once I get the wood down to a manageable size everything is done by hand to insure the highest quality of workmanship.

Matt: Do you take a lot of what you've learned from violin making and transport it to the guitars you build or are those two totally separate approaches in your mind?

Dan: I'm pretty much coming at things strictly from the violin perspective. For example, I don't tap tune my tops, I feel them and I flex them, but I follow the violin tradition with this, not the guitar tradition. The greatest Cremonese violins are "dead," they don't have tap tones. Michael's philosophy, which I adopted, is that the sound board should be like a blank canvas that responds to the body of the instrument and the back should be like a trampoline that's going to push the sound to make the top move.

If you tune a top to a certain frequency, which a lot of people do, they tend to have a lot of "wolf" tones [essentially, artificial overtones; more info]. I do feel the wood and flex it. I feel the change in vibration as I carve it, which is why I make my instruments very light. The bracing I use now is similar to the parallel or x-bracing of the guitar, but how I dimension the braces is strictly taken from a violin or cello. It's designed to be very light, but has the same stiffness in the wood that it would have if it hadn't been carved.

Matt: Apart from studying and working with violins, have you also spent time studying the great guitar makers?

Dan: I studied guitar history and the popular historical makers. What I found was that a lot of the great guitars were overly heavy. Also, when I play a vintage or new high-end archtop, I always feel like the trebles are very crisp and clear, but that there's something locked in the guitar. The full extent of the sound is trying to come out, but I can't fully feel it. Old Gibson's have a great sound, but to me that has a lot to do with age as much as the build. Most of them just sound like "boxes" to me, there are no individual voices in each of those instruments.

The great thing about custom guitars and one of the reasons I don't usually build instruments unless they're commissioned is that they can be tailored to the player and, therefore, have a unique voice. Some people might like a classical guitar that is loud, or that has more high end in the sound, while others might want an archtop that is light, or heavy, or whatever. The key thing is that each player gets what they want when they buy a custom guitar. For me, this is one of the aspects about building that I like the most. Connecting with a player and producing an instrument that brings out the best in their performance.

Matt: How much do you work with a player when they order a guitar? Do you have a certain set of questions when you begin to work with someone, or do you prefer to hear and see them play? How does that process unfold?

Dan: I do have a series of questions I like to ask people when they order a guitar. I like to know what style of music they play the most. Do they use a pick, fingers or both? Are they going to amplify the guitar and, if so, will they do that through an amp or through a PA? These questions, and more, can help me get an idea of how a player plays, what kind of sound they want out of their instrument and the dimensions that would best suit their body type. Though these questions can help me in my design, I really prefer to hear or see, at least a video, of someone playing before I work on their guitar. What happens sometimes is that people will describe all of these things for me, but we have different perspectives on what they actually mean.

For example, I had a guy order a guitar whom I spoke to at length about what he wanted from the instrument and how he played, etc. After getting an idea in my head about what design, wood and electronics would best suit his playing style, he came over to try out a few of my older guitars. Immediately I knew that the guitar I had in my head wasn't going to work for him. We just had different mental images of how he described his playing style and tone preference. Hearing someone play before I build them a guitar is ideal. That way I can ensure we are both on the same mental plane as far as what their guitar should be.

Matt: It seems that you prefer to work very closely with each player and not spread your attention too thin. How many guitars do you build at once? Do you have a few on the go or do you prefer to focus on one guitar at a time?

Dan: Right now I prefer to work on one guitar at a time. This might change in the future, but I feel that if I'm focusing on one instrument then I can really devote my full attention to that guitar. I can also get it turned around quicker than if I was working on ten at a time.

Matt: Since you are only making one at a time, how long is the building time for one of your guitars? If I called you today and ordered an instrument, how long would it take from this conversation until the guitar was in my hands?

Dan: Right now I have three guitars that I have lined up to build. So, if someone ordered a guitar today I could start working on it in four to five months, and they could probably have it within six to seven months depending on the type of guitar, classical, archtop or solid body, they ordered.

Matt: You also build solid-body guitars?

Dan: Oh, sure. Most of the guitars I build are archtops, and I have an order I'm working on for a classical right now, but I have built solid-body guitars in the past. It all depends on what people want. While I enjoy building acoustic instruments, partially due to my training on violin and cellos, I'm looking to build more solid and semi-hollow guitars in the future. I think there's a market for reasonably priced, high-quality, custom solid-body guitars. That's one thing I've always been conscious of with my guitars, the price. I've always felt that it is better to offer my guitars at an affordable price, though I make less money on the deal, than to sell them at premium prices and have fewer orders. I really enjoy making guitars, so the more orders that come in, the more guitars I get to build.

Matt: I think that's something that drives people away from the custom guitar market, the price. A Les Paul is an expensive guitar for most people, but it's at the low-end of the custom archtop price scale.

Dan: True, but the highest-end custom archtop is at the low end of the violin market. So it's all relative. [Laughs] It is what it is. I'm sure it would be great to charge double for my instruments, and I probably could, but I want to make my guitars affordable to people. I want people to look at a Gibson guitar and then look at one of my custom guitars and think to themselves, "Well, I could buy a factory guitar for X amount of money, or Dan could build me a custom guitar for the same price." Those are the people that I want to reach with my guitars. The most satisfying thing in my line of work is seeing someone play one of my instruments; it's not the check that they give me for whatever the guitar is worth.

Links
DK Custom Guitars
Michael Darnton, Violin Maker