Lutherie Info Home Page

General Lutherie Information

This section contains a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and answers, a list of recommended books, links to other high content lutherie information sites, and information for first time builders of stringed instruments, including some tips and a list of essential resources for those that want to build their first stringed musical instrument.

Technical Information for Instrument Designers

Formulae, data tables, and other technical information and resources for designers of stringed musical instruments. Discussions of some important concepts such as string tension are in this section. A number of the formula pages include javascript calculators for your convenience.

Lutherie Materials, Parts and Supplies

Luthiers use a lot of the same materials as other woodworkers (wood, glue, etc.) but we also use a number of materials, parts and supplies that are either specific to lutherie or are used by luthiers in ways that other woodworkers don't. Articles about materials and reviews of parts and supplies are collected here.

Lutherie Construction Techniques

Some specific lutherie operations are detailed here, such as how to carve a neck and how to make a bolt-on neck joint. Info is available for guitarmakers (both electric and acoustic) and makers of other stringed instruments.

Lutherie Tools, Jigs and Shop Techniques

Lutherie is one of those areas of woodworking where a number of jigs and fixtures are required to do the job. This section details construction and use of these fixtures and jigs and also provides information on other commercial and shop built tools and fixtures that can make the job easier, quicker, and/or more precise. Some general woodworking tool techniques are covered, such as how to sharpen a number of the tools used to make stringed instruments. And there is a sub section on CAD/CAM/CNC - Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools, Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) tools, and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines. Included in this sub section are downloadable CAD drawings of some common instrument hardware, in AutoCAD 2000 .dwg and .dxf file formats.

Some Stringed Musical Instruments and Plans

Descriptions of some of my original instruments. Some are practical, some highly experimental. Full sized downloadable plans are included for most of these. There are solid body electric guitar and bass plans, archtop acoustic guitar and bass plans, flat top acoustic guitar and bass plans, and electric upright bass (EUB) and some others as well.

Pickups, Transducers, Preamps and other Electronics

Construction details and general information about pickups and transducers and related circuitry. Mostly for the guitarmaker and bass guitar maker but there is also info here on pickups for some of the bowed instruments.

Lutherie Myth/Science

Discussions on the science behind a number of commonly held lutherie beliefs, as well as some outright debunking of lutherie myths. This is a very popular section.

Bibliography

Bibliography of my published materials on the topic of stringed musical instruments.

Contact

How to contact the author of this site.

A former engineer, R.M. Mottola began building stringed instruments in 1994 after an illness left him unable to work in his original profession.

Since then he has been involved in a number of activities, including research oriented instrument design and construction as well as formal research in the areas of instrument acoustics, psychoacoustics, ergonomics, materials and construction. He is a member of the local lutherie group New England Luthiers and is the technology editor and a contributing editor for American Lutherie, the journal of the Guild of American Luthiers. The GAL is the largest, oldest and most respected organization of stringed instrument makers in the world. He is also editor of the Savart Journal, the online research journal of science and technology of stringed musical instruments. And R.M. is a guitar maker, a bass maker, and a font of guitar making theory and practical information. He has provided editorial services for many popular books on stringed musical instruments and stringed musical instrument construction. R.M. lives in the Boston area.

By the way, the word Liutaio is Italian for luthier. I am American, don't speak Italian, but I am of Italian extraction and like the vibe. You can tell that Liutaio Mottola is a small time enterprise because no American in his or her right mind would use a word which is as seemingly unpronounceable (to non-Italians in any case) as Liutaio. It is pronounced (more or less) lew-TIE-oh (rhymes with Ohio).

This site is both composed and hosted on the cheap. Yeah, I know, it shows. The pages here are directly-edited HTML and CSS and are built on top of Twitter Bootstrap. The site is mostly static but there is a bit of PHP here and there. There are some nice jQuery features. The site displays well on mobile devices but small phones are best held horizontally.

If you find the contents of this site useful please consider the following:

• Buy one of my books: Building the Steel String Acoustic Guitar and Mottola's Cyclopedic Dictionary of Lutherie Terms.

• Make a monetary contribution.

• If you have a website or blog, or if you post to the lutherie forums or contribute to Wikipedia, or if you use any of the social bookmarking sites I would greatly appreciate a link to this site and references to the pages here. Links make the world go 'round. I can't tell you how important this is. Lutherie is a pretty esoteric topic, so just getting the search engines to fully index this site requires there to be some solid links to it. Thank you!

• This site is edited by the author, which is always a recipe for disaster when it comes to errors of fact and errors of omission. I depend upon readers of this site to serve as editors. If you find anything wrong or awkward, even small things like typos and misspellings, please let me know. Thanks!

This site is dedicated to the memory of Jim Mouradian, the Boston area luthier that got me started in lutherie. His knowledge, skills and generosity continue to inspire me.

The contents of this site are copyright © 2004 - 2024 by R.M. Mottola, including all text, images, scripts and calculator results. Site contents and the downloadable instrument plans and CAD drawings of instrument parts are made available for non-commercial use and may not be redistributed nor used to train AI systems. This means that copying these plans to sites like scribd, the sole purpose of which is to make ad money from other peoples' copyrighted material, is in violation of copyright. Please do not copy whole pages of this site to discussion groups - that is also in violation of copyright. Please link to those pages instead. Do you know that pinning an image from this site (and most other sites) on Pinterest actually makes a copy of the image onto the Pinterest servers and therefore is a violation of copyright? Now you do. Please don't do it. Copyright laws are complex but the basic rules of copyright and fair use are real simple. Want to quote something from this site? As long as it appears in quotation marks and appears with attribution and is not too long, that's fine. Want to copy images, scripts, pdfs or whole pages of text from this site to another one? Sorry, that violates copyright. Your cooperation with these requests (and the law) increases the likelihood that folks will continue to provide useful free information on the Internet.

Information on this site and calculators and other tools are provided "as-is," without any express or implied warranty. In no event shall the site author be held liable for any damages arising from the use of information or tools on this site.

Check out the privacy policy for this site here.

I provide a number of commercial services to individual luthiers, guitar manufacturers, authors and publishers, and guitar and guitar product retailers. Some of those services are described here.