Customer Reviews

Building Electric Guitars: How to Make Solid-Body, Hollow-Body and Semi-Acoustic Electric Guitars and Bass Guitars

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

(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.

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.

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.

This book consists of 2 sections. The first section describes guitar components and guitar making tools. The second section describes various steps used in building a variety of different guitars. The book also lists vendors of guitar parts.

This book is very detailed and comprehensive. There are many practical suggestions and the writing is clear. There are no actual detailed plans. You are required to develop your own design. There are many guitar plans available from the internet so this is no problem. You must have some minimum wood working skills.

I give the book a 4 star rating because the small black and white photos are difficult to see. For any future edition, please use better quality photos to illustrate the work done. Also for any future edition, it would be interesting to include design ideas for pickup coil auto-winding devices, custom bridges, custom tailpieces and custom designed headless tuning systems.

This is a great book about guitar building. It covers a lot of areas on the subject, from the basics of woodworking (how to season your wood, some router jigs etc.) to more advanced features such a winding your own pickups. If you are interested in the subject this is a great starting point. All subjects are very well covered but not necessarily always in depth; they are focused towards guitar building. Also the author is european and it shows through the book; you get to have a slightly different point-of-view on woodworking compared to most american books.

The thing that is pretty bad about the book is the editing. It doesn't really have a well defined organization and its difficult to browse; it lacks structure. I think the book is self published and in that case its very good work, but a real editor would have helped a lot.

All in all, I think this book is one of at least a few that are musts if you are serious about guitar building. What's the cost of a book compared to a guitar anyway?

I've only skimmed through this book over the last week or so. That said, I've seen enough to give you the following report. This is a detailed, technical how-to book with a wealth of information. -- BUT --

1. Incredibly, the book lacks an INDEX, so you'll have to read the whole thing to find whatever information you might be searching for. This is unacceptable for a reference book.

2. As other reviews have said, the photos leave a lot to be desired. (Black-and-white photos don't bother me; however, most are simply too small to pick up on the important details...)

3. If I were the author, I'd hire a different proofreader -- I found at least one chapter with multiple paragraphs repeated. If I were the author, I'd hire a different proofreader -- I found at least one chapter with multiple paragraphs repeated. Repeated. Repeated.

The author certainly knows his subject and, content-wise, this is a great book. But its simply not in the same class as the other classic electric and acoustic guitar-building books. And without an index, my copy will most likely stay in excellent shape, sitting on the bookshelf unattended.

Yes, you definetly could build an excelent guitar with this book alone, but I wouldn't want to try. Everything you're gonna want to know is in there, but the subjects are not arranged logically and the author did not group seperate things into seperate paragraphs. You really have to read every sentence carefully because it is easy to miss things. It is not terribly useful as a reference if you are looking for specific information because it is as often as not put in an unrelated chapter.

It was also as many others noted horribly edited.

He does not really go step-by-step through the construction. He also stressed the use of the most expensive power tools on the market. He actually states in one part that you can not hope to make a guitar without a plunge router. (hear that. That's the sound of real woodworkers falling over laughing.)

On the plus side it has the most complete finishing section I've seen in an electric guitar construction book. The pickup section is also good, although most of it is composed of articles borrowed from other authors.

I strongly recomend buying Melvin Hiscock's book and a chisel.

Get this one through inter-library loan.

Im 15 and built a guitar from the help of this book i would reccomend this to anyone with the interest of building guitars

I bought this book and the Hiscock book so that I could build an electric guitar from scratch, not as a kit. It is possible with just this book. However, it reads like a textbook more that a how to, "step one: step two:" kind of book. If you think you are going to buy this book, follow a simple step by step procedure and build a guitar then this is not the book for you. If you want to learn both the how and why of guitar design in order to design and build your own instrument then this is the right book.
I am almost done with the two guitars I designed and built based on the information in these two books and the help of [...] and I would give the potential first time guitar builder (like me) the following advice...

1) You need at LEAST: a bandsaw, a drill press and a table saw. I also used my chopsaw, vertical belt sander, jointer and planer.
2) I have been woodworking for 25 years and selling my stuff for 15 and I found building a guitar neck to be quite challenging. It was fun, but challenging. So if you are a first time woodworker, heads up.
3) Knowledge of CAD or drafting is a big plus since you need to be able to create full size templates. Also drawing things accurately and full scale is the best way to figure out some things like the depth of the neck pocket.

So, in a nutshell, if you want to design your own guitar from scratch and are confident in your woodworking skills this a must have book.

I have all three of what are probably the most recommended books on building electric guitars and if I had to keep only one, this would be the one. That's the main good news! Other positives include fact that almost exactly half of the 200 plus pages are dedicated to discussing the various factors that go into deciding the how/what/why of building your own custom creation. Martin goes into the various decisions regarding wood selection (body & neck), elctronics, scale length, neck construction, peghead style, finish type, etc., etc. He also goes into details, with a separate section on each, for specifically building the bodies for a solid body, semi-hollow body and hollow body type electric guitar. While he does show various stages of construction on numerous guitars, he does not show construction of a particular guitar start to finish. He does however offer two guitars plans on his website (one is shown in greatly reduced format on page 234 with a photograph of the finished version on page 213). Based on having his book and the information detailed on either of the two plans (Yes, I bought them, inexpensive at 10 Euros each) anybody who can work a saw without cutting their finger off could build their own guitar.

Negatives are, as mentioned in some of the other reviews, all photos are in black & white, relatively poor quality and small (because they've tried to include too many photos - do we really need seven photos showing how to get your solid body blank cut out of a log plank). Other than that, this is an excellent book and one you could use by itself to make yourself a very nice guitar that wouldn't look like any other guitar! That's the reason to get this book! If you're just going to make another Telecaster/Stratocaster/Les Paul clone, you might as well just look for a good used model of one of those and buy it. However, if you've seriously wanted to "make your own" and do all the exotic electronic wiring options you've heard people talk about, while making it out of some exotic wood you couldn't afford any other way, with a wild transparent "burst" finish - this is the book for you! Enjoy the ride!