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"I miss Rick Turner. RIP."

Me too! He helped me a lot!

I use a 3/8" wide aluminum U channel from the hardware store with 320 self stick sand paper. you can get directly under one string as needed & it's inexpensive, and you can cut what ever length you...

Wonderful to see that Don's mandolin is in good hands with people that will care for it. Great job Jonathon & thank you for the great video! I worked with Don at GM & he's the guy that got me...

Several years ago Tom Thiel developed a chemical process to blacken persimmon all the way through and it was beautiful. The problem was the chemical bath only worked for one use, making the cost...

I recently picked up a relative's guitar to take to him in the hospital and it needed new strings which I took along, but he had no picks. I googled "music store in Champaign" and The Music Shoppe...

Bill was a hometown boy, from the St. Louis area. I had the pleasure of interviewing him several years ago. When I was in New Mexico a few years ago
I gave him a call and spent an afternoon in his...

All those Esquire copies Brad Paisley plays have a neck pickup under the pick guard.

Graham's book is a great place to start. One of the fun and scary things about building octave mandolins is that the "rules" for building them haven't been set in stone. It's not like building an F5...

As I was once told, by a great builder "People hear with their eyes." Prettier doesn't necessarily sound better, but the human brain is a complex & confusing thing.

I picked this one up today. The owner had an appointment in St. Louis so we met. It's very clean and structurally sound, but does need a significant amount of work. The bridge has a few cracks, any...

Rick is a fantastic resource, he's helped me many times.

What Adrian said.

I think think the joint would be less compromised by having some long grain across the joint, plus fingerboard removal is going to entail quite a bit of touch up. It could be a pretty small window....

I've done neck resets on two Guilds, I will never attempt it again. I've since been warned by several well know repairers to never attempt a neck reset on a Guild. In the case of the two I did, it...

Sorry to hear this, Ken is a good guy, met him at Mandofest 2005, I believe. I bought a nice mandolin from him years ago and remember his "Mandolin Tasting" CDs. Keep us posted if there is a way to...

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Irene, the one with the dark top is redwood, w/ black walnut back and sides, the other one is red spruce with padauk back & sides.

I picked up this piece...

Oh my! Rest in peace John. Thank you for the music you gave us.

I worked with Don Brown and his sons Denny and Don Jr. for many years. I was put on the same team with Don Sr. at the Wentzville GM plant. I liked Bluegrass before I met Don and had bought a mandolin...

What a way for a songwriter to go, in the middle of a song, on stage. My wife and I had the privilege of sitting about 5 feet away from David at the Bluebird Cafe a couple of years ago. It was...

The store owner who brought the guitar to me stopped by with more repair work on Monday. He told me the man's daughter picked the Hummingbird up over the weekend and was very happy with it and a bit...

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I finally got this one back together and playing. The Microban seems to have done the mold killing job very well. There's no odor of mold, though some stains remain. I...

MAG-ic Probe. magicprobe.net, or a Hacklinger gauge.

I don't have any sound or video clips of that one. The sound wasn't vastly different, I just thought the C string in particular had a "better" tone and projection on the longer scale. I have large...

Yes it is. That's the one.

Matt (Mandowalt) and I talked about the scale length a lot before we decided to go with 27" on the advice of Rick Turner and Paul Hostetter, and others. Tone was the big factor in going with 27"....