The Authentic origin of the Luthara Guitar, From 1970-2021. Original Drawing + Build History

Описание: Thank you for your interest in the Luthara and the story behind its design, spanning more than 50 years of its evolution from 1970 to today. This video traces the origin and evolution of the instrument, beginning in 1970 when I built my first guitar during my freshman year of college.

One morning I awoke from a vivid dream of a guitar with a different profile: corners at the bouts instead of curves. Inspired by violins and the way their corners couple the top and back, that idea became the seed of my earliest design experiments and led to a steel-string model in 1971—the first Luthara. (This predates the introduction of the Giannini Craviola in the US by a year.)

For those who haven't already seen the Luthara intro video: the background music in this arrangement is “Ashokan Farewell,” composed by Jay Ungar for Ken Burns’ Civil War. It showcases the warmth and sustain of the Luthara guitar in Matt Thomas’s remarkable fingerstyle performance, included here as an illustrative example. You can also see Matt playing it in the video The Only Guitar of its Kind in the World.

BACKGROUND
From 1970 to 1974, I built four guitars from that concept. Two eventually caved in and sat untouched for decades until I restored them in 2020. That restoration rekindled the question that started it all: how do an instrument’s geometry, mass, shape, and bracing influence its timbre and projection?

In 2020, I planned to make another one like the 1971 model, but the design no longer felt right to me. Instead, I refined the original idea into something more sculptural, ergonomic, and acoustically responsive. That redesign became the Luthara. The name blends the French lut (wood) and the Greek kithara (lyre), reflecting the instrument families that influenced the build. I renamed the original model Genesi. The early steel string version simply rounded over the lute side, keeping the corners of the Genesi classical on the other side.

In this video, I share early sketches, photographs from the 1970s, instruments I built along the way—including a lute and a cello—and the first drawings of the older and new Luthara models. You’ll see how influences from different instrument families shaped its profile: a lute-like sweep on one side, a cello-inspired contour on the other, united within a distinct internal guitar structure, not common to steel string guitars.

That combination, along with its unique internal bracing and voicing, makes the Luthara unlike any other instrument in the world.

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