Bouzoukis          Citterns          Octave Mandolins My approach to making instruments is informed by 30 years of musicianship and 20 years of instrument building. An inspiring sound is everyone's first consideration, but I never neglect an exacting, player-specific setup and design/assembly methods that allow for lifelong repairability. As a one person handcrafting shop, all aspects of an instrument's design are customizable. That being said, every builder's experience and taste will give them certain strengths. The following are features I favor when making a bouzouki: The right body depth: If you are moving from guitar playing to bouzouki playing the bouzouki can seem weak in its low end. A deeper body coupled with a highly responsive top and back helps tremendously with this. Maybe sharp attack and and staying out of the guitar player's range is important to you; a slightly shallower body is called for. Flat tops with good doming: Carved tops allow for more three dimensional wood sculpting and are very visually arresting. Nonetheless, flat tops braced into a slight dome shape are my choice for sustain and a sound that is lush, colorful, overtone rich and dynamically responsive. The right scale length for your fingers and playing style: scale length affects tone and playing comfort. The photos illustrate the greater distance you have to reach as the scale length increases. Very generally speaking, a longer scale length will have a richer low end and a shorter scale length will be brighter. My stock scale lengths are 25.4", 24.9", 24", 23.5", 22.6", 22.2", 21.4" and 20.9", but any length is available. The best instrument would be made of rebar-reinforced concrete and sound like a 1000 voice choir. In the real world, weight, stiffness, responsiveness, practicality and instrument endurance have to do a complex dance. Before I add the 8 or 10 tuners to my bouzoukis, they're nearly floating away. I like the feel of a light instrument, and this has all kinds of practical sound-enhancing benefits, too. But 170 pounds of string pull, humidity changes, dropped instruments, baggage checking and gigs impinge on all of us, so the instrument is made as stiff and as strong as possible without overbuilding. They come with a lifetime guarantee. Hide glue has proven itself over four thousand years of use. It doesn't creep the way yellow glue does, it pulls joints together as it dries and makes repair work much cleaner and easier. Hide glue is not gap filling and has to be made fresh, so it calls the woodworker to a higher level of joint fitting and patience. It dries to a crystalline hardness that is beneficial to the instrument's sound. It is completely non-toxic. Red spruce: My red/adirondack spruce top and brace stock was hand harvested and split in the early 1990s and is some of the lightest, stiffest, singiest spruce there is. I use Red, European, Engleman and Sitka spruces for tops, as well as cedar and redwood, but I always use Red spruce brace wood. Wooden bindings help make a more secure glue joint where the top, sides and inside kerfed lining come together. They are more work than plastic binding and they look great! A truss rod is handy: as a repairman and builder for the last twenty years, I know this well. However, it means hollowing a relatively large channel out of the center of the neck (decreasing strength and causing a small loss of tone) and then adding a heavy, tone absorbing, potentially rattling metal rod. It also limits the shaping of the neck profile. Think of it this way, which would you rather have, an electronic keyboard or an acoustic grand piano? The electronic keyboard is the clear choice. It has 100 different, selectable voices, 100 drum rhythms, it's portable, it never goes out of tune, and it's inexpensive. It's features clearly outshine the one-trick, pricey, grand piano. An adjustable truss rod is like this facetious example: a great and handy feature, but not necessarily a component of a fine concert instrument. That being said, I add graphite and ebony stiffening rods to my necks and take full advantage of the stiffening capacity of frets sized slightly larger than their slots. I offer bar frets as an option (see below). For those who require an adjustable truss rod, they are of course available. Bar frets were used on Martin guitars up until the early 1930s. They are made from solid, rectangular fretwire stock. By driving these into precisely sized fret slots, and in combination with careful fretboard profiling, the relief of the neck can be adjusted without reliance on an adjustable truss rod. A bar-fretted neck is also super stiff. Bouzouki tunings and string gauges are not as codified as those for guitar, so we'll work together to come up with the perfect string gauge and action set up for your tuning, scale length, and playing style. Tuners: As the luthiery world matures, there has been a concomitant blossoming in the world of fine, handmade tuners. In my own shop and as production manager at Somogyi Guitars, I attempt to try them all and bring you the smoothest, lightest and most visually appealing. I also install Schaller and Gotoh minis.

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