Meticulously handcrafted in the Himalayas
OUR STORY.
“We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me…. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech.”
During the early months of 2010, in a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, a few young locals became friends with a luthier from Tennessee named Dave.
We spent much of our time making music and trading stories.
Before long, we decided to try making a few instruments. We went down to the local wood market to look for materials and found out that you couldn’t buy lumber — you had to buy the whole log.
We went shopping for materials for four guitars and came back with enough for forty.
Those first few were built entirely with hand tools on the kitchen table - just for fun, just for us. But after sharing photos of our handiwork on a makeshift website, we had people contacting us to see if the guitars were for sale. In a few we had booked ten custom orders and were thrust into the realm of guitar-making entrepreneurship. We rented an old rundown storefront and transformed it into a fully-equipped workshop where we devoted ourselves to honing our skills and refining our craft. Our first several orders were for friends and family, and they were exceedingly patient and gracious, as we did our best to deliver the most responsive, beautiful instruments we could.
So we rented a rundown storefront, built out a woodworking shop inside and began to train intensively together in the art of building world-class custom guitars.
Early on, each one was designed for the client from the ground up. Each was a labor of love, involving dozens of hours of design work, with construction taking 150 man hours or more.
It was a great education in guitar making and design, a great way to make our customers happy with completely unique, once-in-a-lifetime instruments. While this approach wasn’t particularly lucrative, it sustained a dozen builders for over a decade.
Five years in, Dave’s family was deported from the country without warning or due process. Despite this setback, the local team remained resilient and continued to lead the company through the next chapter, while Dave & family filed a lawsuit petitioning for the right to return. This was a challenging time, but it was also a great triumph, as the the team persevered and kept building faithfully right up until the early months of 2020.
The Covid-19 pandemic added another layer of difficulty, but despite the odds, Dave was eventually able to return to India and reunite with the original team. Today, we are focused on our favourite three designs and remain committed building high-quality instruments while supporting one another through thick and thin…as the
Dehradun
Guitar
Company
DESIGN
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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Since almost all our instruments were custom designs, we tried just about everything at least once…from Spanish-style nylon string guitars, to electrics, to 12-strings, a 10-string baritone, modern fingerstyle cutaway SJs, banjo-killer dreadnoughts, and 12-fret parlor guitars. We’ve done Laskin bevels, Ryan bevels, low-profile bevels, Manzer wedges, intricate inlays all up and down fretboards and bodies, hand-rubbed sunbursts, sprayed sunbursts, blue ocean bursts, elevated pickguards, multi-scale fretboards, stereo output, midi-compatible pickups with 7 outputs…honestly, in terms of design and function, we’ve probably done too many things.
The steel string acoustic guitar presents a myriad of challenges, because you have so much stress acting on such thin structures. In fact, the lighter you build those structures, the more resonant the instrument. So if you want to make a truly responsive acoustic guitar, you’re constantly walking a tightrope. Early on, we experimented with offset soundholes, tailpieces, elevated fretboards, double tops with space-age nomex cores, double sides, laminated braces, lattice bracing, rim struts, adjustable neck angles, sound ports, passthrough bridges and carbon fibre reinforcement.
We still incorporate some of these innovations.
INNOVATION
Just as important, we learned to let a lot of them go and focus on what really works.
That’s why most of our acoustic guitars are built with an elevated fretboard and carbon fibre struts spanning from the headblock to the waist. We still offer the passthrough bridge and tailpiece as a custom upgrade, because they allow the soundboard to relax and relieve much of the stress acting on the rim.
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