Almost every guitar maker puts a page like this on his site.  This is where he tries to distinguish his brand in some way; to set himself apart from the herd.  I’m fortunate in that I can let my customers speak for me.

What Makes the Best Guitar?

First off, get the idea of “best” out of your head.  There is no such thing as a luthier who makes the best guitar.  What makes a guitar the Best Guitar changes from person to person.  Each person, whether a casual player or a professional musician, has his or her own set of likes and dislikes that go toward defining the best guitar.  One person may think that there is nothing better than a Telecaster for form, fit, and sound, whereas another will think that the Tele’ has the ugliest body style they’ve ever seen.  It’s way too elemental.

Consequently, anyone who tells you that he/she makes the best “insert style here” guitar is selling you a line of garbage.  They can’t possibly know what the best guitar is because you haven’t defined it for them yet.

What Sets the Smokehouse Guitar Apart?

One of my earliest efforts

While I have no illusions of making the best guitar there is, I do believe that I make the finest quality cigar box guitar available today.  This wasn’t always the case, of course.  We all have to start somewhere and my early efforts were humble to say the least.  After years of honing my skill, however, I’m finally at a point that I can make a statement as bold as this with no concern over being able to back it up.  This is something I’ve been working towards since I started making guitars.  I defined the criteria for myself early on: to build professional grade instruments that could compete with the other big names currently on the market.

I’m not in competition with other cigar box guitar makers.  I’m in competition with the big boys.  Obviously they have me well licked for sales but I don’t care about the sales.  My goal is to make the perfect guitar for whoever it is that I’m making it for at the time.

Over time I came to demand more of myself.  When I made the jump to six stringed instruments I started by ordering premade necks.  I made a few guitars this way before I stopped and decided I would never do so again.  The problem with putting a premade neck onto a guitar is that you are no longer a guitar maker.  All you’re really doing is assembling a guitar.  No offense to anyone out there who does this but that’s really what it comes down to: skilled factory work.  When it comes to the feel of the instrument, how well it plays, and how well the musician connects with it; Jesus, all of these qualities are defined by the guitar neck.  They’re not influenced by the neck.  They ARE the neck.  If you buy a neck from somebody else and stick it on your body then it’s actually that person and not you who played the major role in making that guitar a success or failure.

An early guitar made with an ordered neck.

I know some people will want to argue with me and talk about the skill necessary in attaching the neck correctly such that it has the proper action, alignment, and angle but you know what?  Just save it.  I’ve done it both ways.  I know what kind of effort and skill go into each method.  I know that if I get a neck from someone else, I can slap together a guitar in less than two weeks.  If I carve the neck myself by hand from a hunk of wood, that time suddenly jumps to about a month and a half minimum.

However you want to cut it, I’m more impressed by the guy who slaps a poplar stick on a box with toothpick frets than I am with your authorized Fender replacement neck.  At least every part of that guitar will be indisputably his and not the skilled work of some CNC machine.

When You Order a Smokehouse Guitar, You Get the Finest Quality Cigar Box Guitar Available.

Let me be frank.  Not everyone out there understands what I’m doing here.  They look at the instruments I make and scratch their heads.  They don’t understand why someone would put this kind of effort into something that has a cigar box for a body.  If this is what you’re thinking while reading this and looking at my guitars then I am clearly not the guitar maker for you.  Some people feel that an authentic cigar box guitar is supposed to be rickety or tough to play.  These people are not necessarily wrong or right; they have a valid opinion.  For them, the old school bolt bridge CBG is the perfect guitar.  Again, if this is you, just go ahead and hit the back button on your browser right now.  You won’t want any of what I have.

Now, if you’re like me and you want craftsmanship, quality, precision, and amazing mind blowing tone I would ask that you do the following:

Go to eBay and do a search for “cigar box guitar”.  Do the same thing on Yahoo or Google.  Look at every picture or example that you can find that isn’t one of my guitars.  Here, I’ll even give you the links:

Ebay Search

Yahoo Search

For the Yahoo search, go to as many sites as you care to of other makers and see what they have.

Now.  Look at this:

This is not an assembled guitar.  Every part of it was made or carefully selected by me to make up a cohesive, unified instrument.  I selected the neck woods and hardware to compliment the box.  The neck itself started out as a simple board.  I put in the truss rod, I carved it with hand tools, did the inlay, dressed, leveled, and polished the frets.  All the wiring is mine.  The body is a solid slab of wood with a cigar box wrapped around it (I wanted this one to be a true solid body) with all the routing that implies.  Several weeks worth of concerted effort (when I wasn’t at my day job) were painstakingly invested in this guitar and it shows.

This is the kind of skill and dedication you will get if you contract me to make you a custom guitar.

The Smokehouse Experience

Every one of my customers, whether they order something simple with three strings or they order a six string monster with multiple pickups, board effects, and complex wiring can expect the same experience from me.  When I start work on your guitar, I create a private account for you at my web site that allows you to log in and access the customers’ section.  Here you can view a photo journal of your guitar as it takes shape in my shop.

All of my customers enjoy a personal relationship with me as I work on their instrument.  You are invited to take advantage of this fact as much or as little as you like.  In some cases, I only ever communicated with a customer maybe two or three times throughout the process.  In other cases, I’ve remained in contact with customers well after the fact and continue to chat with them today.  Your level of involvement is entirely up to you.  If you’re interested enough, I’ll explain in detail what I’m doing and why.

Once your guitar has been delivered to you it doesn’t stop there.  Support for your guitar, assuming you need help with minor issues, is free with no time limits.  Obviously if the guitar has somehow become so damaged that it would need to be completely rebuilt or replaced that will cost money.  But for other issues like a cracked part, busted wiring, replacement nut, etc, etc just send the guitar back to me and I’ll fix it up.  I handle such issues on a case by case basis.  This offer includes any damage you may have done to the guitar through the normal act of playing it, ten weeks or ten years down the line.

When I ship a guitar, I always make sure that it is insured for the full value.  That way, if there is ever a problem in transit or the guitar is lost or destroyed, the payout from that insurance will fund your replacement.  There may be issues tracking down a box of the same type.  Such a scenario hasn’t happened to me yet but if it does we’ll be ready for it.

Reasonable Price

I’m obviously not going to be cheap, that’s to start.  But you might be surprised to find that I’m not the most expensive there is either.  My prices are fair.  On one hand, they reflect the amount of work that goes into my instruments and the high quality parts and materials I use.  On the other, they also reflect the fact that I don’t have to spend a lot of cash on body woods.

There are some guys who charge so high for what they do and, looking at what they do, I’m honestly at a loss as to where the money goes.  I guess there are people out there who will pay that amount (aren’t there always) but that all goes down to sales, which I’m not that good at.  If a guitar plays poorly (action/setup) or sounds like crap (components) I don’t try to sex it up by describing it as “Dripping with Mojo”.  I don’t know how the word Mojo became the used car salesman catch phrase of the cigar box guitar but it has, regrettably.  Oh well.