From a very early age, I have had a fascination with guitars.  I love everything about them; their beautiful shapes - so sculptural in nature, the detailed inlay work, the absolute exactness, the many different sounds that they can produce, the hidden bracing patterns engineered precisely for strength and to best promote sound, and most of all - created from one of this earths greatest resource and eternal friend of mine, the Tree.

There is a wonderful quote which I read the first day I started to study Guitars, I'll never forget it.  It was inscribed on an Elizabethan lute, and it sums up the relationship between the tree and the instrument.

I was alive in the forest,
I was cut by the cruel axe.
In life I was silent,
In death I sweetly sing.

I began properly playing guitar at age 16.  I was no virtuoso, but I loved to workout songs that were playing on the radio at that time.  Unfortunately by the time I could play them, they were ancient history.  Never the less, from listening intently, I developed a good ear.

I studied Art at school, design, sculpture.  Funnily enough I hated woodwork, yet I began to use wood in my sculpture bending it and shaping it in a way that seemed quite impossible.

At age 21, on my way home one day from a leisurely afternoon playing all the guitars in every shop I could find, I happened to come across a book at the library, How to Build an Acoustic Guitar.  "Hmmm, how hard could it be?"  I asked myself; to which 3 months of painstaking labour intensive, mentally challenging energy was the answer. But I loved every minute of it.  What a feeling to finally string up your very own creation, and to strum it for the first time.  That was that, I was hooked.

I had to earn a crust, and settled on building furniture.  I achieved my trade certificate, and fell in love with wood. Wood and I were meant to work together, that's all there is to it.

Guitar making is the most natural thing in the world to me.  It combines all of my passions, music, design, wood, guitars. I am truly blessed to be able to make my passion my career.  I would do this whether I got paid or not; I simply love it.