Building the Ergonomic Guitar

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Welcome! Building the Ergonomic Guitar is now on its own hosted domain at https://buildingtheergonomicguitar.com! Please take a moment to update your bookmarks to reflect the change. Email subscribers need not take action – your subscription has been updated and you should start receiving updates with this post. With the move to the WordPress blogging engine, […]

An acoustic electric guitar design by Jerome Barde, the Bardophone is one of the most outstanding examples of guitar design for ergonomics. Where many other guitar builders have taken only small evolutionary steps, Jerome starts with a clean slate “reconsidering the whole concept of the guitar body (proportion, volumes, shapes, balance, angle) and by looking […]

While Building The Ergonomic Guitar has focused primarily on electric guitars, many of us enjoy playing the acoustic guitar where ergonomics is no less of a concern. Fortunately, several acoustic guitar makers address ergonomics in their designs as well. Noted luthier Linda Manzer of Manzer Guitars, the originator of The Wedge©â„¢ tapered guitar body, is […]

R.M. Mottola, former engineer turned non-profit luthier, wrote an interesting article on the value of making guitars that address one of the bigger health risks among guitar players – tendonitis. While Mottola focuses on bass guitar design, his thoughts are just as applicable to building electric guitars – Tendinitis Among Bass Guitar Players: An Instrument […]

Building The Ergonomic Guitar Blog, with its focus on guitar building and guitar design in service of human factors, officially turned a year old on March 1rst! It’s a belated birthday for my guitar blog but better late than never. It’s been a very exciting year for me on many levels. Making an electric guitar […]

Any guitar player suffering from musculoskeletal ailments such as back pain or Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) or a guitarist trying to practice prevention should consider the weight of his or her guitar. Whether it’s a production guitar or a custom guitar, a guitar maker or luthier can effectively build a light weight guitar using a […]

I’ve worked very hard on Building The Ergonomic Guitar spending countless hours researching guitar building and guitar design in the process of gleaning a better understanding of guitar ergonomics. As a consequence, I’m rather protective of the effort I’ve put into my blog. Yesterday, it came to my attention that Anders Rodland, of t3blogs.com, was […]

The electric guitar, as evidenced by its two greatest icons, the Stratocaster and the Les Paul, has essentially remained frozen in time. Both guitars date back to the fifties. Meanwhile, despite a growing understanding of how the body works, guitarists have continued to suffer with a variety of ailments related to their art. Building The […]

Reader PJ Doland recently completed a beautiful Klein Electric Guitar replica. PJ was inspired by Bill Frisell’s Nashville album which was recorded largely with a Klein. As you can see in the following images, the first time guitar builder did a marvelous job! For his electric guitar, PJ chose the following: 1. Swamp ash body […]

The Planet Waves Dare Guitar Strap is designed to improve guitar playing ergonomics by distributing the weight of the instrument across both shoulders as seen here: Available for several years directly from designer Troy Dare, effective this month it is being distributed through major player D’Addario’s accessories arm – Planet Waves. This is a great […]