Columbus Guitar Society

Gary Demos is a luthier located in Hilliard, Ohio. A very prolific builder of fine classical guitars, he has also been an accomplished carpenter and craftsman for over 30 years. Gary has made harps, dulcimers, classical and steel string guitars.

Peter Cary has been building and repairing guitars since the age of eighteen, and has improved quite a bit since then! While having never “apprenticed” or taken any formal courses, he always read voraciously on the subject and has been quite willing to experiment with the building process and (with much more caution) the repair process.

He builds and repairs both nylon- and steel-string instruments but is particularly fond of the flamenco guitar with its quick response and strong upper-midrange sound.

He embraces a somewhat puritan building philosophy, admiring beautifully appointed guitars, but prefers to build an instrument that is elegantly simple. If ornament doesn’t make it sound or play better, he prefers not to spend too much time on it! His most recent guitars use a soundhole both on the front and upper side of the instrument, and he has been experimenting with lattice bracing and lattice/kasha hybrid bracing on soundboards.

Chadwick Neal began instrument making in the summer of 2000 after a recital he heard of the Bach violin sonatas performed on 13-course baroque lute. Actually, he had been thinking of building a guitar before then, but after hearing the lute, his path had been altered.

A graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design, his formal training was in the visual arts. He was already proficient at fabricating miscellaneous things, so took it upon himself to study luthiery. Fortunately, UK luthier David van Edwards had completed a CD-ROM with a set of plans on how to make a lute.

In 2002, he met Michael Schreiner, a lutemaker in Toronto; since that initial meeting, Chad has been making tuning pegs and carving lute rosettes to help Schreiner’s work flow and to gain additional shop time for himself. He has also learned from doing seemingly endlessly necessary lute repairs, often taking a very long time trying to figure out just how to go about it. He finds repair more difficult, but uses lessons learned from inferior instruments to guide his building regarding what not to do.

Chad’s initial inspiration was the craft of making a magnificent object, which has been replaced by the more fundamental aspects of how to craft magnificent sound.