These Guitars Take DIY To A New Level
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These Guitars Take DIY To A New Level

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When making guitars out of wood (like everyone else) got boring, these luthiers challenged themselves to create something completely new by working with concrete.

 

In the first video, Brian Epley explains how some left over concrete (‘mud’ in tradie terms) inspired his creation. It led to him creating a lap steel guitar in the iconic Flying V shape. However, you’d probably need thighs of concrete to play this guitar in your lap, and it’d be much wiser to keep it on a stand like Brian does in the video.

 

 

Whilst Brian claims to be the only person in the world to have thought of making a concrete guitar, he may not have been the first or only guitar maker to have done so. The video below shows luthier Larry Lashbrooks’ creation, which he made to show off his new bridge system. The guitar is played by Tony Smotherman from Vision Sound Records, and he seems genuinely blown away by the quality of the guitar.

 

 

This third video showcases a guitar built by Rob Glossop using Cotswolds stone. He runs through a few different sounds, including overdriven lead tone and clean neck pickup tone, to show off the variety of the guitar, playing both a screaming solo and a very pretty rendition of The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ in the same video.

 

 

So when making plain old wood guitars gets you down, look to these videos as inspiration for your next project.