Biography - Randy Lucas

The initial phase of this journey was spent repairing hundreds of guitars. I learned that a great deal of tone and playability could be gained if a guitar just had a proper neck angle and set-up. Replacing nuts and saddles with bone material and intonating the saddle made a huge difference alone. Many of my clients brought me brand new guitars just to get these modifications.

More importantly, I noticed that some designs were consistently prone to the same problems. Some of these repairs could have been easier to correct if only the manufacturer had made them more repair friendly.

Sadly, many builders skip the process of learning repair skills and go right into building new guitars. I think reading textbooks and trade publications are great learning tools in any endeavor, but it was my repair experience that helped forge my career as a guitar builder.

I also restored several vintage pre-war Martin and Gibson guitars. I still have the notes, drawings, and photos of those fabulous instruments. I invested hundreds of hours analyzing and restoring them because I wanted to find out why they sounded so good. This experience helped me formulate a correlation between design and tone. With over sixty years of use and abuse these designs proved the test of time. Especially when you consider that these instruments endured many of those years under the tension of heavy gauge strings. A tip of the hat goes out to those who came before me!

For the last ten years, I've focused building traditional models of vintage guitars. My attention to detail led me to use Adirondack red spruce for brace wood and guitar tops. Almost all Martin and Gibson instruments built before 1945 used this wood in the construction of their guitars. (For more on this subject go to "MY THOUGHTS ON WOOD.") The results of using this wood have proven so successful that I now use it on almost everything I build. It has recently found favor by other builders as well.