Introduction

                                     
JUNGLE GUITARS has been operating for ten years. A lot has changed in those years and I have learnt much from the guitars I’ve built myself and also from the people taking part in the courses.  I have heard the saying that a good teacher is one that learns from his pupils ( I must be a great teacher).

The course is designed for you to build a professional guitar, no woodworking experience is needed. I’m not by any means saying that building a guitar is easy but when it is broken down into its various stages, nothing is beyond anybody’s capabilities

 In the last ten years I have taught almost a hundred people to build guitars, steel string and classical.  People have come from all around the world and it is a great experience for us all.

When I built my first guitar (photos above) I was under the impression that it was going to get easier as I built more and it is true that the process of building has of course got easier but I doubt if I was building guitars for a hundred years that I could learn all the nuances and subtle changes to the tone of a guitar that can be made by adjusting the profile of the braces or the shape of the body or what happens when we use different woods (every wood has its unique tone) . This is the beauty of guitar making there are endless possibilities!

When I first envisaged the guitar making course I wanted the guitars to be completed entirely using hand tools (inspired by the craftsman of India who with very little resources create amazing things), and that was how it started. As time went by, I realized that by using some power tools, primarily a router and a drill, the improvement to the quality of the guitars was worth the sacrifice of my initial vision.    The course is still very much hand tool based and most of the tools used can be picked up at hardware stores.

I have experimented with many different kinds of wood yet rosewood is still my favorite and seeing as one of the main suppliers of rosewood guitar parts to the world’s leading guitar makers is only a seven hour bumpy bus ride away, it makes sense..  Saying that though, the wood I use for the soundboards are imported from America, Sitka spruce for the steel string and red cedar for the classical.

The course is fifteen days run over three weeks (five days a week) around five hours a day starting at ten am . A maximum of four people in a class.

The build of a classical guitar and a steel string guitar have obvious similarities but the main difference is that the steel string guitar is built in two parts- the neck and the body being built separately.  I have experimented with many different possibilities of joining the neck to the body and have found that the bolt on neck (developed by Taylor guitars) is the one that is simple and rewarding and gives us that advantage of an easy neck reset if it is ever needed. A two way adjustable truss rod is also fitted in the neck.

The classical guitars sides are slotted into the heel of the neck. The steel string soundboard is constructed using the X bracing design invented by martin and the classical using a traditional style of fan bracing. People often ask me which is the easiest guitar to build.  It’s a hard question to answer but I would say that because of the classical guitar slotted headstock and the way, in which the body and neck are joined, the classical guitar takes a little more time but not harder. Apart from building the guitar we also need to finish and set up. For the finish we are using nitrocellulose lacquer ( the choice of most guitar manufactures) the advantage of lacquer is it dries fast creating an egg shell like protective coat that does not soak into the wood and that can be rubbed down and buffed the next day. This gives us the glass like finish most of us expect from our guitars. The last day of the course is what we have all been waiting for and is the day we make the saddle and the nut. These are made from bone. Last step is to crack open the strings and set the guitar up to play our dream.


All the best, hope to see you some day in the jungle,

Chris.