Meet the Makers - Adrian Lucas

Based in Lincolnshire, Adrian Lucas is yet another of this country’s guitar making “national treasures” making instruments very much of his own design and also championing the use of reclaimed and domestic grown woods. I met Adrian very early on in my guitar making career and he has been a friend and great help to me since. I caught up with him to chew the cud on instrument making.



Dave: What drew you into the world of acoustic stringed instruments and what enticed you into wanting to make them?

Adrian: Before I started to make acoustic instruments I was primarily interested in electric guitar as a player. One day I saw a poster for a local evening class in guitar making and was very interested so I went along to the first night. The class was offering the building solely of classical guitars, which wasn’t really what I wanted to do but making a classical guitar was better than not making a guitar at all. So I signed up and after a few weeks (building only a couple of hours a week) I was really getting bitten by the bug.

It took a year and half to build that first guitar. During that time I illustrated a book that our tutor, Roy Courtnall, was writing – Making Master Guitars. This exposed me to a lot of ideas and theories which I was keen to explore. I made a couple of electric guitars and then several classical guitars. A friend asked me to build him a steel string guitar in the style of a small Martin 0 size. I acquired a copy of Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology and using a combination of the techniques in that book and what I had learnt building classical guitars I made my first steel string.

Once I had begun to make acoustic guitars, both steel and nylon string, I became much more interested in the sound of them. Previously most of these that I had encountered had been plywood-topped factory guitars and hearing the sounds coming from hand-built instruments was a revelation, so I began to play them.


Dave: How did you turn that passion into an occupation?

Adrian: I was in a useful position when I began guitar building in that I was already self-employed and working at home. I was running an architectural business and had an office in the roofspace of the house. I put a bench in there and began building guitars when there was a gap in my schedule. I started selling a few classical guitars through a local guitar teacher and each sale gave me money to build another. I was able to juggle the balance between my architectural work and guitar making to accommodate these commissions and gradually the balance swung in favour of the guitars without me having to make a great leap away from one job to another.

Selling locally through a teacher was a great start for me and that teacher, Rob Johns, was very encouraging as well as providing some very useful feedback on how the instruments were working. After four or five years I felt secure enough to wind down the architectural side of the business altogether. Since then I have also supplemented my business with spells of teaching guitar making: firstly taking over the night class where I had first learnt guitar making, and later teaching electric guitar making at Newark College a couple of days a week. In the last five years I have been teaching a couple of days a week at the same college on the classical and acoustic guitar making course. As of this September I’m winding that down to one day a week to allow for my increasing workload.


Dave: Your steel string guitars are very unique in their design - how did this evolve?

Adrian: My first attempts at designing guitars really happened when I came up with the radial classical guitar. This was based around the idea that the bridge should be in the centre of a circle, which would be the lower bout. This would give an equal distance from the power source (the bridge) to the edges where the diaphragm (soundboard) was fixed.

I have been working with this concept ever since on my classical guitars and I have built a few steel strings with this design. However, when I wanted to design a guitar with a lower bout wider than 360mm I found that using this principle put the waist far too far forward towards the neck. I shifted the centre point of the circle back behind the bridge and squashed the lower bout behind the bridge into an elliptical shape so that the guitar body was not too long. This became my Pavilion model and I feel that this closeness to a round shape for the lower bout is an efficient shape for producing sound.

My Arbour model is the same shape scaled down by 5% to give dimensions close to a Martin 000. Because of my architectural background I tend to work with CAD when I’m designing guitars. Because of this, when I come up with a new design it’s often derived from editing a drawing of an earlier design. I also find that geometry plays a strong part in the shapes and lines in my designs. For me the lines and forms of the guitar have to sit comfortably together in a balanced way.


Dave: You have used native woods and woods reclaimed from furniture and other sources long before it currently became fashionable to do so. Was this something you brought with you from your architectural business or did it evolve as you made musical instruments?


Adrian: I don’t think this came from my involvement in architecture. I’ve always hated waste and using available reclaimed wood seemed an obvious thing to do on every level: it’s often better quality than freshly cut timber on offer; it’s usually many decades old and therefore thoroughly seasoned and stable; it doesn’t involve the felling of a tree and it’s usually cheap and sometimes free to acquire.

My first encounter with using reclaimed wood was when I replaced the back door on my house. The bottom 6” had rotted and so it was no longer useful as a door. I noticed that the softwood door had very fine, straight grain and ascertained that it was Douglas fir and very stiff along the grain. The door dated from when the house was built in the early 1930s.  I began using it for bracing and have done ever since. This became the first Douglas fir door of many I acquired. There were a couple of others from inside the house that were not needed and then I got some more that neighbours were throwing them out. I have made a few guitars using this wood for soundboards and it has worked very well.

The other wood that I have used exclusively from reclaimed stock is South American mahogany. In the UK this has been a staple of furniture making for centuries and there is a lot of very high quality mahogany being disposed of regularly. Having used reclaimed mahogany for a long time I am sometimes contacted by friends who are getting rid of damaged furniture. Other sources are auctions and skips. The larger my mahogany stash becomes, the more choosy I can be about the wood that I use.

Another interest that I have is to work with locally grown woods. Again this makes a lot of sense at a time when we must be careful about keeping the energy used for transport to a minimum and the sustainability of tropical logging practices can be questionable. I also like the vibe of an instrument built from woods grown in the area where the instrument was made. English woods that I’ve used and found good to work with include cherry, pear, yew, walnut, holly and laburnum. Holly and laburnum generally don’t come in sizes large enough for back and sides and I’ve used them for things like fingerboards and bridges. I do use tropical hardwoods like the rosewood family but I think, with the possible exception of Indian rosewood, these are going to become scarcer as time goes on.


Dave: You make quite a range of models - both steel string and Classical - can you talk us through them together with and idea of the different playing styles they might suit?

Adrian: I began my guitar-making journey building classical guitars. I started out making a fairly generic Torres/Hauser type design. In thinking about the design it occurred to me that the most efficient place to put the bridge might be at an equal distance from all the edges of the body i.e. in the centre of a circular lower bout. The only way to satisfy this curiosity was to be build the instrument so this became my first radial classical guitar. I braced the top from the centre outwards like the spokes of a wheel. I have developed this design over many years through trial and error and still build it today. I still believe that this bridge placement within the circular lower bout is highly efficient. This model consequently has a lot of power and makes a good concert instrument.




I do also make a more traditional-looking model of classical guitar based on the outline of a Santos Hernandez guitar, which I call the Santos model. Inside this uses the same semi radial bracing pattern as the Radial model.


My first forays into steel string acoustic guitar making were small slotted head guitars with 12 frets to the body. This was not too much of a departure from the classical guitars I had made up to that point. I still make this kind of instrument calling it a Parlour model although strictly speaking they are probably a little large for that as I base them on Martin’s 0 and 00 sizes.

I really like this format: it gives a lot of clarity to individual notes and therefore is great for fingerpicking. I’ve made a few of these with mahogany top, back and sides and with a mahogany neck this gives a great even resonance and sounds great for country blues/ragtime type stuff.


It seemed a logical progression to try the radial system with steel string guitars and I built a few of these with 14 frets to the body. Because the bridge had to remain in the same place on the body, the body was two frets shorter. I recently revived this idea, having not made a steel string radial for several years, with the PLAN guitar (after our combined initials). This was a collaborative project that I undertook with a luthier friend, Nick Perez. We brainstormed the design in a few sessions and for the body shape I suggested the 12-fret radial that I use on my classicals. We used this but with X-bracing this time as I was never entirely comfortable with the radial bracing for steel string: the bridge would still be driving the top from the centre of the lower bout. We built the guitar very lightly and incorporated a soundhole in the bass side of the upper bout, half in the top and half in the side. This meant the vibrating part of the soundboard was not interrupted by the soundhole and its position on the ‘corner’ means the player gets a vivid view of the sound. The result is a very lively instrument with an extremely responsive touch.


My ‘standard’ steel string guitar is the Pavilion model. This is a small jumbo with overall body dimensions akin to a dreadnought, although not as deep, with a much curvier shape and a shallower body. To some extent this evolved from my Radial design.

The Radial is a small guitar with a lower bout width of 360mm and with the Pavilion I wanted to create a much bigger instrument with a 400mm lower bout. Using the radial principle of having the bridge centred in a circle this would have made a huge guitar with a ridiculously high waist so I shifted the centre behind the bridge and flattened the lower half of the lower bout into an ellipse. 

The bridge is still working in a broadly roundish diaphragm. This is a good all-round guitar having great warmth and a strong bass as well as a well-defined treble helped by a fairly tight waist. Because this is a larger instrument I offer the option of a wedge body, with the depth shallower on the bass side than the treble and this allows a comfortable fit.

Another option for this instrument is the sweep cutaway which is a curve that begins on the bass side of the neck and flows across it to form the cutaway on the treble side. This gives access to the highest frets with 18 frets clear of the body on the treble side.


I also make a baritone version of the Pavilion. This uses the Pavilion body and still has 14 frets to the body but the scale length is 735mm. This means the bridge falls at the widest part of the body as it does on many 12 fret guitars.

Another model, the Arbour is essentially the same shape as the Pavilion but with the body size scaled down by 5%. It is also slightly shallower. The overall dimensions of this model are similar to a Martin OM.


I have made a few one-off instruments and I guess these would become ‘models’ if there were further interest. I have made a Weissenborn-type lap steel acoustic, various solid and semi-solid electrics and a short scale 12 string alto guitar.
Apart from guitars I have made a number of mandolins - both flat-top and carved and a couple of ukuleles.




Dave: Do you find that you need to bring different "mindsets" and approaches to making steel string and classical guitars?

Adrian: When I started making steel string acoustics I adapted what I had already learnt building classical guitars. Thus I built using a Spanish heel on a solera and have continued to do so ever since. I wouldn’t say that I bring different mind-sets to the two types. The same principles of resonance and strength apply, it’s just that the actual resonances and strengths are different. Even within each type these can vary quite a bit depending on what kind of instrument is required. I find that if I approach fretted stringed instrument making with an open mind but carrying with me the experience of all the instruments I’ve built and the understanding gleaned from them I can be flexible in the way I approach each one and adapt the construction to what is required.


Dave: I know that you are more than a casual player and play in a band or two - do you find that being a player helps with your instrument making?

Adrian: I do think being a player, however basic, informs how you approach instrument making. Knowing what it is to play a guitar and feel the subtleties of all the resonances and how the instrument responds to each nuance of the way it’s played, as well as the difference a tiny adjustment to the setup can make a big difference to the feel, helps to put you as a maker into the shoes of the player.


Dave: Where can people see and maybe play some of your instruments?

Adrian: I don’t have any instruments with shops or dealers at the moment (apart from a classical guitar with a dealer in California). I generally build to order and sell directly to the customer. The best place to see and play some of my instruments would be to visit me in Lincoln. If that’s not possible or convenient I have various customers around the country and further afield who may be willing to show their guitar to interested parties.


My youtube channel: www.youtube.com/user/AJLucasLuthier

I have a presence on Facebook as “A J Lucas Luthier”