Notes · Craft
Why I Build Guitars Instead of Just Buying Them
On choosing the difficult version of something you love — and what it teaches you that the easy version never could.
I play a lot of electric guitars. I own more than I probably should. I love the variety of them — the history, the quirks, the way a good one responds to how you touch it. If guitars are a hobby, electrics are the comfortable part of it.
So when I decided I wanted to build one, I went acoustic. Not because it was smarter. Mostly because electrics felt too straightforward — bolt-on necks, solid bodies, a lot of room for error — and I didn’t want comfortable. I wanted to understand wood as a living system, not just a material.
That was probably wrong as a strategy. Acoustic guitar building is legitimately one of the more demanding forms of woodworking. The tolerances are small. The top has to be thin enough to vibrate freely but stiff enough to hold up under decades of string tension. The bracing pattern underneath shapes the voice of the instrument. Get it wrong by a few thousandths of an inch in the wrong place, and you’ll hear it every time you play — if it holds together at all.
What the Work Actually Is
Most of acoustic guitar building is patience. You wait for glue to cure. You wait for finish to harden. You sand, and sand again, and then sand the thing you thought you were done with. There is no rushing any of it because wood doesn’t negotiate.
My third build — the one I’m most proud of — is an OM-style body. Spruce top, rosewood back and sides, mahogany neck, herringbone binding and rosette, tortoiseshell pickguard, and a side soundport that lets you hear the instrument from the player’s position in a way that a standard guitar doesn’t. I put a Chickenhouse Guitars logo inlay in the headstock. It plays. It sounds like a guitar I made with my hands, which is a genuinely strange thing to say.
The Ukulele for Oakley
I also built a ukulele from a StewMac kit for my niece Oakley. That one has a Chickenhouse Guitars label inside and a hand-painted chicken scene on the neck block — which I am told is exactly right for its intended owner. It fits in a case way too large for it, which makes it look very official.
What It Teaches You
Building something this demanding changes how you listen. I hear guitars differently now. I notice things I didn’t used to notice — how the treble strings speak compared to the bass strings, how the sustain decays, whether the body is resonating evenly or carrying more energy in one register than another. That’s not a skill you develop sitting on the couch watching someone else build on YouTube.
I think this is true of a lot of things. Understanding how something is made — really made, with your hands, through failure and iteration — gives you a relationship with it that you can’t shortcut. You don’t just use it anymore. You know it.
I have no idea what build four will be. Something harder, probably. That’s kind of the point.
Carlton D. Houston is a Senior Infrastructure & Security Leader based in Roswell, GA. This is his personal site — a place to write things down when they seem worth writing.