Guitar Development & Production - 2nd Year Program

For almost 2 years now we've been planning & developing a full second year of our guitar program here at Southeast Technical College in response to student feedback from over the years that it would be nice to expand our offerings & get more training in the subject of guitar repair, design & building. Also with new technology making its way into the guitar industry there is an increased demand in trained workers that understand the guitar making process and have used computer numerical controlled (CNC) machines and computer aided drafting (CAD). Currently industry has to find workers to run their CNC machines and know CAD then hope they pass along enough understanding of how a guitar is made to bridge the gap.

Above:  Our custom made CNC machine getting the final touches before being delivered to the college.

In the second year of guitar students will build their first archtop instrument choosing a guitar, mandolin or even a violin if they'd like to with the Archtop Construction class.  Some of the courses will work together as they design their own original instrument using Rhino 4.0 CAD software, a CNC class for making templates & molds culminating with the building of their instrument in Advanced Guitar Construction.  All of the planning stages will be done in a new Instrument Design course.  

High tech finishes have been more and more a part of guitar making today reducing the amount of time it takes a finish to cure and reducing VOC's (volatile organic compounds).  With the new Advanced Finishing class students will be able to learn popular guitar finishing techniques and use high teach coatings like 2k urethane, polyester and UV cured polyester.

There will also be another repair course covering more involved and/or complicated repair techniques not covered in the first year of the guitar program and an inlay course where students will expand their skills by incorporating a variety of materials and engraving techniques for inlay work on their instruments.

We'll be announcing here and on our facebook page when the information becomes available.  This program begins fall of 2010.