The Luthier's Workshop, School of Lutherie; Lutherie instruction.
The Luthier's Workshop explores the possibilities of new woods and designs for guitars, violins, and other string instruments. Thomas Knatt makes unique instruments, repairs difficult breaks, and teaches how to do these things.
Welcome to Pete's Violin Making Site.
What to do if there is nothing interesting on television
Build fiddles!
What's it all about?
Primarily it's about satisfying curiosity. Until you build a musical instrument the process of making one is a mystery. Even after you build one many of your questions remain unanswered.
After following the plans and instructions for a few months (or more!!!) you suddenly have a familiar looking box with strings stretched across it. Despite the time it took, the change from a pile of carefully made parts to a playable instrument is sudden ...
You can find on this site basics about sound and how a guitar works, and some more detailed information about our work related to guitar acoustics.
musical acoustics, acoustics, guitar, decibel, physics, science, music
full and partial schematics (circuit diagrams); overdirve, wah pedal, pickup wiring and switching ideas ...
Many different elements combine to make up the sound of an electric guitar:
Guitar woods and construction,
Strings types and ages,
Pickup types, placement and combinations,
Quality and length of cables (or radio system),
Stompboxes, pedal and special effects,
Amplifier designs, tones and overdrive,
Speaker types and speaker box construction,
Your playing environment and volume level,
Most of these are covered in my guitar pages, which I have split broadly into:
Guitar Amplifiers
An explanation of guitar amplifier design, and why they are so different to 'standard' amplifiers. There's information on valve and transistor designs, history on overdrive (or distortion) trends, and some overdrive circuit diagrams for experimenters ...
CCycloid is a program to generate graphs of Curtate Cycloids, which are the curves produced by a point within a wheel, when that wheel is rotated. The intended users of ccyclid are makers of stringed instruments, but the program is available for anyone to use. CCycloid creates the graphs in PDF, PostScript, or DXF format ...