Why should machines have all the fun?

At D’Lorenzo guitars, the emphasis is on handcrafted guitars, custom built to meet the requirements of serious guitarists. Although most of our custom orders are based on familiar solid body or archtop instruments, we are a true custom shop and are therefore open to any workable idea.

• We don’t have a marketing or sales department.
• We don’t have much overhead to factor into the price of the guitars.
• We don’t have any investors or partners- we are a family owned and operated business.

And most importantly, we don’t have much of the machinery you would expect to find in a modern production facility. No CNC carving/routing machines or automated woodworking machinery, just the most basic woodworking machinery that any high school shop class would have. Visitors to our shop are amazed at how much is done with simple hand tools such as chisels, planes and scrapers (Archtops are all handcarved, all acoustic sides are roughsawn on the bandsaw, then hand planed to final thickness with an antique Stanley #4 ½ smoothing plane). Is this the most efficient and productive way to build a guitar? Probably not. Is it the most enjoyable way to work wood? We think so. As D’Lorenzo Founder/CEO/Shop Boss and Head Floorsweeper Scott Lawrence says, “The simple fact is, I enjoy working with hand tools. Why should machines have all the fun? I have zero interest in becoming another guitar factory.”

As a result, D’Lorenzo Guitars emphasize the timeless beauty of wood, elegantly simple design with minimal embellishment or “bells and whistles”, and respectful awareness of the needs of serious and professional guitarists. These are not entry level instruments, but neither are they gaudy over-decorated showpieces intended for the collector market. For the working guitarist, D’Lorenzo guitars have “Everything you need, and nothing you don’t”.

Another motto in the D’Lorenzo shop is “Reinventing tradition”. What we mean by this is respecting tradition, but not being a slave to it. Several basic guitar designs (whether acoustic or electric) have withstood the test of time, and have essentially become the definitive subtypes that comprise guitar design. These guitars have evolved through a process of “form follows function” rather than a marketing based design process. Many guitar builders (or factories) hope to capture the public’s attention through flashy/ trendy designs, rather than an understanding of the practical and functional requirements of a quality instrument. These instruments rarely become treasured “vintage” guitars.

On the other hand, few guitar builders ask themselves the two fundamental questions of design: “Why?” and “Why not?”. There are many unexamined traditional practices in the craft of guitarbuilding, two that spring immediately to mind are:

Why does virtually no one finish or at least seal the inner surfaces of acoustic guitars, despite the fact that “finish both sides of the board” is one of the first rules of woodworking? This is done to minimize warping, shrinking, splitting of wood due to changes in humidity. There may be some reason not to do this, but there seems to be little or no discussion, it is simply not done because of tradition.

Take a look at the position markers on the neck of your guitar. They seem to start out with some relation to natural notes/keys, ie: G-A-B, then arbitrarily (or perhaps to maintain an every other fret pattern) skip to C#! What’s with that? Would it not make more sense (and be easier and more intuitive to recognize) to follow the “natural scale” of G-A-B-C-D-E etc.?

We hope this brief discussion will give you some insight into our way of thinking and working (I believe they call it a “Corporate Mission Statement” these days). Feel free to e-mail us with your questions or comments.