John Guilford Interview: Design, Quality, and Custom Axes

By: Rick Landers

The entrepreneurial spirit continues to have a place in North America, with hundreds of high quality, low production boutique guitar builders designing and making instruments in small workshops around the country. We caught up with builder, John Guilford, who’s making a name for himself with his line of U.S.A. made, custom built electric solid body guitars.

At the moment, Guilford Guitars sits in Illinois, but John has plans to move to a better working climate and to grow his company in the heart of Texas. In a world of tough competition that reaches beyond the U.S. and into countries such as Korea, Japan and China, Guilford has found that you can’t just build a fine guitar and expect customers to show up at your doorstep. He’s a savvy businessman and has worked the marketing arena, gathering celebrity guitar endorsements, as well as visiting and showing at major music instrument trade shows, like NAMM and the Dallas International Guitar Festival.

In 2010, Guilford Guitars introduced 16 guitar models, including the Steve Blaze model, a Ty Tabor model, the Damon Johnson HB-1, and the Atlas series. But, if you ask, John will work hand-in-hand with clients to build them a custom guitar, based on their design and musical interests.

As a 1988 graduate of the Guitar Institute of Technology (G.I.T.), John developed a career track that moved him from guitar playing to guitar building. Over two decades later, he’s now armed with a fine array of handmade guitars that are gaining the attention and admiration of guitarists and fellow luthiers worldwide.

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Rick Landers: A lot of kids interested in guitar start out just wanting to play, but a lot of kids don’t get into the mechanics of it, especially the design side of making guitars. What personality traits do you think it takes to steer someone toward building guitars and what do you think in your background highlighted that you would move in that direction?

John Guilford: Right. I think it starts with a person that has some artistry in their blood. You’re gonna need a very creative individual and on top of that you have to have somebody that’s interested in guitar and music in general. That alone will make the background personality traits for an excellent luthier.

Rick: So, you basically grew up playing guitar before you moved into actually building guitars, right?

John: Exactly. Yeah, I started very early on in life just being an artist. I did a lot of pencil and paint art work and such. It wasn’t until, oh, I guess in my early high school years when I started to play the guitar, and so all that creativity shifted from the canvas to the guitar.

Rick: Were you in a lot of bands, rock bands, or other groups?

John: I wasn’t in a lot of bands myself. No, just a few. By the time I spent a year down in Hollywood after I graduated high school, that really fueled a lot of the band years that I had been in.

Rick: What were the steps that you had to take in order to become a professional builder?

John: Well, it was a long journey for me. I built my first instrument back in 1987 during my year at G.I.T. and I had taken up some work at a local music store in my hometown for a number of years. That was a music store that allowed me to gain a lot of background knowledge in guitar repair and the music industry as a whole, as far as servicing the dealer base and what distribution was like. But, in my off hours I found myself in my basement building my own guitars, just pursuing a passion.

Rick: Were you putting together guitars where you got parts from other places? You can get parts from Warmoth and different places like that and you can build a guitar, or did you actually carve the guitar bodies yourself?

John: For me, I did it as much as possible from scratch. I never was a kit builder. I never really did like to buy somebody else’s neck and body, so I began right from square one doing as much of it as possible. Building the necks from scratch, for instance, figuring out how truss rods work, the fret layout, all of that stuff. That’s the stuff I wanted to do. I didn’t want to just put together a kit piece, so from my beginning they were complete guitars.

Rick: The guitar business tends to be pretty traditional, I’ve found, pretty conservative really. With a lot of guitar builders these days, their style in the guitar’s based on designs of Stratocasters, Teles, and Les Pauls. Not all, but a lot of them. Does that seem to be a good place to start and is that what you did, or did you take some other unique approach to your own designs?

John: There are many builders, some of which have found niches taking the Stratocaster or Les Paul or Telecaster platforms and making that niche their own, or saying, “I’m going to build a Tele, but do it in my own way.”

I find, myself, that I wanted to build a guitar line that encompassed a lot of my influences in the industry, but I didn’t want somebody to look at a Guilford guitar and say, “Ah, it’s a Tele, but different,” or “It’s a Les Paul, but different.” I want them to look at the design and say, “That has a little bit of this in it or that, but I just don’t know what it is,” and therefore I’ve found an identity. That’s really what I wanted to create was an identity in the music industry, but that a player who likes Les Paul could say, “There’s something in that that I like,” or that the Tele guy would go, “You know, I kind of dig that guitar but I don’t know why.”

Rick: As far as weight, what do you think your guitars are most close to, because all those three guitars actually have their own kind of different weights, with Telecasters being the lightest.

John: Weight is a big issue for some reason. I don’t know why because for me it never was a bother to strap on a heavy Les Paul and sit through a couple of hours of playing time. My guitars, they’re just pretty much average. I’m not striving for especially lightweight guitars. I’m not building them heavy. They’re gonna land right at about eight pounds, I suppose, right on average.

Rick: That’s not bad. What about balance in the guitar?

John: I think that the Atlas model that I produce is a very well-balanced instrument. I don’t like an instrument that is either body-heavy or neck-heavy. It’s got to be balanced, whatever the shape, whatever the scale length. However you’re setting in the neck, it’s got to be balanced or it’s no good for anybody. So that’s what I do strive to do. It’s a very critical point to address.

Rick: I think that building guitars starts out for a lot of people as a hobby, but then it becomes more of an obsession. And after that, then it becomes, if somebody’s pretty good at it, it becomes a business, if you want to eat. Did you have the business acumen when you first started or did you learn that from being in the guitar shop, you know, number crunching and distribution and shipping and all those things that were all rolled into making it a real business.

John: I would say that the years that I spent at that music dealership gave me a lot of experience in shipping guitars and all of the business acumen, what it takes to satisfy a dealer and understand their needs. Really, you look at any business, especially in the music industry, if you want to be a guitar manufacturer, you have to understand that you are a piece of a puzzle, that you’re somewhere in line, if you will.

Once you understand your place in that chain, you’re gonna be more effective in what you do. In other words, you’re going to be more profitable, but it’s not an easy thing at all to, in this day and age, hold up your hand and say, “Well, I’m an American guitar manufacturer and I want to make a living. I want to have a business and be profitable.” [Laughs]

It’s like you’ve got two or three strikes against you already in this economy. But, if you’re fortunate and you’re skilled, if you’re building a product that people want, if you’re determined and you just don’t take no for an answer, you’re gonna find a way to continue to exist. And so that’s really the challenge, I think, is surviving this economy, positioning your company for a brighter tomorrow.

Rick: Finding your right market niche, I think, as well.

John: Absolutely. It’s so critical.

Rick: Have you been to trade shows? Do you go to NAMM and show your wares?

John: I’ve been to, let’s see, summer NAMM ’09, winter NAMM, January of 2010 and then the Dallas Guitar Show, which was fantastic for us. That was in April [2010].

Rick: That’s great. So you didn’t go to Nashville?

John: No, I didn’t go this summer. I’ve got too many things to do. But I do plan to attend January of 2011 and the Dallas Guitar Show, 2011 as well, in April.

Rick: You find those to be the best venues really for you? Because summer NAMM doesn’t seem to be shakin’ very much compared to winter NAMM.

John: I’ve learned that when I went, for the first time that I attended a trade show, NAMM was at it’s 25-year low as far as attendance and business volume. So I just started right from the ground up, you know. You spend a number of years building up your company to a point where you’re able to attend that show, and when you go, you find it’s at its 25-year low, it’s not very encouraging.

But, that’s the reality I found myself in and so these are just hurdles that you have to overcome. I love Nashville. I love the vibe. I enjoyed being in that town and the trade show is something that I want to continue to do. I guess it has to be the right time for that to happen again. And it will. I’m sure I’ll find myself again there exhibiting.

Rick: It’s a great town. How does a small builder come up with price points, in order to gain a reasonable profit from all the work that’s involved?

John: You have to set the dreamer in you aside and really take a look at…I mean, that’s business. If you’re talking pricing, you have to look at it strictly from a business perspective. It helps to understand the market because there’s no point in setting a price on something unless you understand whether or not your price is going to be competitive with everything else.

So you have to have that framework set up, but it helps to, if you’re going to offer a line, you’re going to need to look at establishing price points that make sense even in your own company. And I believe it’s a challenge, but it’s something that if you really look at honestly, the numbers present themselves.

Then you’ve got to balance out the volume of sales not only that you need to break even, but also the volume that you can actually handle from a workload perspective.

Rick: With all the pickups made out in the marketplace, what drew you to Seymour Duncan?

John: It turns out the very first guitar that I used was a Kramer Baretta, American made from Neptune, New Jersey. I must have played a million plus notes on that guitar. It happened to have a Seymour Duncan JB in it, so right from the beginning I always liked the Seymour Duncan sound and I find that their product line is something that fits. They have a lot of different choices and I find that their company and their products are a very good fit for the array of models that I offer.

Rick: I guess they’ve got the quality there as well.

John: But, you know what? Having worked with them as well, I mean, the folks there, I’ve just enjoyed my association. People like Frank Falbo and Seymour Duncan himself, the lady who handles my account in-house, Dewey, they’re just terrific and they’ve been so supportive right from the beginning. They handled an unknown guitar maker like me and made things possible. They were easy to work with and I intend to keep using them.

I find that I could take a lot of my time and say, “Okay, I’m gonna be a boutique guitar pickup wonder,” and that’s gonna take a lot of research. It’s gonna take a lot of time. So I find that they’re an established company. People know their name and I have no problem putting their products on my guitars.

Rick: My next question was gonna be have you thought about building your own pickups, but I think you just answered that.

John: I would say that there will be opportunities in the future. As the company develops, there will be a need probably for more proprietary equipment on the guitars and those are things that…it comes down to all those issues begin to tie in, like pricing, marketability. As the company grows, there will be a need for more proprietary hardware like my own bridges, my own tuning machines, my own electronics, inside volume, tone pots, all of these things as well as the pickups themselves, but I don’t think that the Guilford guitar line will ever forego the Seymour Duncan pickups, at least for the foreseeable future because I love them. They’re a great pickup.

Rick: Tell us a little bit about how some of your endorsees came to support Guilford.

John: I got in touch with Steve Blaze. He was Guilford Guitars’ first endorsee through a guitar tech named Chet Hahn who was very helpful. We just had a very simple agreement, Chet and I, but I would build him a guitar and he would, in turn, turn me on to some notable players and help my brand become noticed. So Steve Blaze was the relationship that developed from that, and one thing leads to another.

Dealing with endorsees taps you into a network of people who know people and so you find that through Steve Blaze, I’ve enjoyed meeting a number of people that have been very helpful so far and it continues to develop. Down the line from that, it’s amazing what’s developed.

Rick: I would think that that network extends beyond not just other celebrity guitar players, but other people in the business.

John: Absolutely, and once you find that you’re in the stream, there are lines…it’s amazing what the trade shows will do, for instance, as far as networking yourself and finding out who’s who and helping you steer your company in the direction you want it to go.

Rick: Have you found that there is a competitiveness between you and other builders or more of a collaborative culture?

John: I know historically luthiers, old-school luthiers were very secretive. Then I think there was a spirit of openness and creativity. I would say that began, at least from my perception, began to develop more throughout the ’90s, I suppose, and it’s a spirit that continues today.

I think that there are folks like the Stewart-McDonald Company and Luthiers Mercantile that promote that openness through the guitar festivals and things that they put on. I think that there have been some successful collaborations. You look at Bob Taylor and, oh, let’s see. Steve Kline, he did a bass collaboration that was fairly successful and there have been moments when guitar builders bring their minds together and have successful projects.

Myself, I haven’t done it yet, but there may be opportunities for that. I know that there are builders out there who I admire. I look at Jason Schroeder as a builder. You could say he’s a competitor, but I admire what he does. There may be an opportunity, but I haven’t even contacted him. I think the idea of sharing information can go a long way, but I also think that there are things that you want to hold onto, because information is power today.

So, if you have something that you know how to do or that you are offering in the market that nobody else does, you should hold onto that and probably not share it. It’s blunt, but it’s good to share some things. You could look at any company, anybody, and you’ll find that there are just some things that they recognize as their own and they need to hold onto and that’s the point.

Rick: You’ve got to keep the competitive edge along with the collaborative spirit, I think.

John: Sure.

Rick: Some of the larger companies, Fender, PRS and Gibson, they’ve kind of tied into the Daisy Rock thing and they’re beginning to look a lot more closely…I know Fender’s gonna start something very soon with women guitarists as endorsees. Have you looked around into that?

John: Here’s the thing: as a guitar maker, I came up through the ’80s, so everything from that era, I’m very passionate about. There’s been a lot of time that’s passed by. There again, my school of thought and my passion is the ’80s, but I recognize that’s a long time ago now. I find myself building in the year 2010.

I know that if my company is going to continue to exist, I’m going to have to find young builders. I’m going to have to offer models that are appealing to different genres, women included absolutely. I think it’s just, if anything, genres continue to do nothing but multiply. It’s all about filling those niches as genres continue to expand.

Women have been significant, Orianthi, the young Australian lady, Orianthi, who was Michael Jackson’s guitar player. She’s an example of a young lady I admire. I wish I were in contact with her in building a guitar for her or some young ladies like her. I think that would be really cool to do. I think that it’s important to include anybody who’s young, anybody that can continue to work with Guilford Guitars and help us build a future together. That would be great.

Rick: When testing your guitars during their development, what kind of amp setup do you use to make certain that you get the tones you want with consistency?

John: Well, I’m kind of old-school in that way. When I finish a guitar, I plug it into a 1959 Super Lead Plexi half stack and I crank it up because I regard the instruments I make as being professional that are going to be on big stages. I try not to lose any hearing in the process, but there’s just something about that. I think it’s very important to do is crank it through a loud amplifier. You’re gonna find out a lot about the quality of the guitar, how it sings, how it plays under that environment, so that’s what I do.

Rick: How about giving us a quick rundown on the various Guilford models that you’re now building?

John: I’ve got about on average eight to ten different models, but they’re all based on this Atlas platform. If you look at the shape that I consider the Atlas, the profile shape, it’s something where you can add almost an infinite amount of different changes that you can call a specific model. I’ve got a carved top model. That’s pretty much the heart and soul of the company right there, an Atlas carve top. It extends out. Our Ty Tabor model is doing very well – people love the shed neck and the tone vents. Damon Johnson’s HB-1 guitar is incredible – a really warm and versatile guitar with black limba and carved maple.

I’ve introduced things like the Tenon series of instruments. There’s an Atlas Tenon, an Atlas Tenon plus, Atlas Tenon Exotic. I’ve done some work with the SSS series which has expanded to the Atlas PSS with the P-Rails pickup and single coils. That’s something I’ve done with Gary Hooker, the guitar player for Brad Paisley, and I think it’s a very cool Nashville kind of guitar that has a lot of appeal. I love that model. That’s one avenue that I want to continue to grow and expand on.

The Atlas Blues is a really cool guitar in and of itself. It’s basically got a very interesting combination of pickups and an unusual body choice with walnut which I lighten up. It’s one of those things that a lot of builders don’t do, especially on a large scale. So I think that’s a very unique guitar, but there’s a very special instrument we make called the Crown, and it’s basically a double-cut shape that’s very familiar to a lot of players. I consider that to be one of our most high-end guitars. It’s something that a lot of people like.

Rick: What about the Steve Blaze guitar?

John: The Steve Blaze instrument itself, it’s expanding. Working with an artist like Steve who’s got a lot of requirements, we started with square one. We built him an Atlas platform. Basically the Blazes model was derived from the Atlas model and the carve top, but we’re working with a new shape that he’s enjoyed called the Redeemer and it’s nothing like the Atlas at all. It’s basically an evolution of the Flying V, if you will.

I could talk to you at length about why I think that shape makes more sense, but if you want to talk about a guitar that’s balanced, the Redeemer is it. It fits perfectly and it’s a little bit better, I think, in terms of where the neck joins into the body. Most Flying V’s are very narrow. They don’t afford a lot of body mass where the body joins in, but the Redeemer has a lot more muscle at that part of the guitar and yet it stays balanced.

I’m very excited about that guitar and I think it’s got a lot of potential in the market, especially for the younger crowd. I plan on working with the Redeemer. I plan on seeing what else comes up in design. I think that’s an avenue that we’re gonna go down and see what we can create.

Rick: Do you build each guitar yourself or do you have a group of people and you kind of farm out the work and you oversee it.

John: I build each guitar myself although I have enjoyed some sporadic help from some people who have come by, but as far as employees go, I don’t have them building guitars yet. The company is looking at a move down to Texas and perhaps by the end of the year I’ll have a team of young builders, fresh arms, fresh muscles that are willing to sand. [Both Laugh] I’m not getting any younger, put it that way. I recognize I’m at a point right now in business where I need to have some people that are doing some of the tougher, labor intensive tasks.

Rick: Do you see a time when you’ll have to expand your business in order to leap forward or are you trying to keep things at a level where life doesn’t crash around you by running some huge business?

John: I want the business to grow, but I want it to grow sensibly. I’ve heard a lot of stories about companies that get crushed with expansion, especially in this day and age. You don’t know when you go to market with a product, especially at a trade show, if it’s something that’s going to excel beyond your capacity to supply. So I’m aware of those issues, but I don’t think that, given this economy and given the products I offer that that will be a problem.

Put it this way: I’m very passionate about American manufacturing. I want to expand my company to a point where it is still 100% American-made, but it’s as big as it’s gonna be as far as the factory goes, and at that point I think I would want to maintain. I don’t know that I want to expand to the size of what Fender Guitars and Gibson Guitars or maybe even Paul Reed Smith Guitars has been able to obtain.

It may be possible as time goes on, but in my mind’s eye I see a company with maybe 50-100 employees, all American-made and doing terrific in the marketplace and I look at companies like Mesa Boogie that have magically found a way to continue to remain all American and they haven’t sold out. That’s really, as a goal, which would be what I want to do. What happens? I don’t know. There may be opportunities that present themselves at times that make sense. It is a business, so we’ll see where it goes.