So what got you interested in making guitars?

KP: Well, I was a carpenter about the time I got out of high school. Building houses, carrying two-by-fours and I was also a guitar player. That meant at some point that those two loves would merge. I had kicked around the idea for awhile and saw a hand-built guitar for the first time and knew I wanted to build a guitar for myself.

What was your first guitar like?

KP: The first one I built? (chuckle).. It was an anchor. Over built, heavy, thick neck ...the only value in it now would be just for historical purposes. As an instrument, it was, in my opinion a failure. I remember, I was walking home with it, I just couldn't wait to show it to a neighbor, so proud of it.. but now of course...I'd be ashamed of it as an instrument.

Where did that shape come from?

KP: I saw an article by Grit Laskin, probably seventeen years ago. In the article Grit was talking about building a steel string and he had a picture of his, and I had never seen a shape quite like it. Having been a dreadnaught guy my whole life, just like all of us had been, it was just an epiphany to me that you could have a cool looking guitar that did not have to look like a dreadnaught. So that made me think a guy could design his own shape. The shapes that probably had the most influences on me are the Gibson J185, which I think is one of the prettiest shapes ever designed and the Santa Cruz FS model. In those days Jim Olson was already beginning to be famous with the Olson SJ, and that had a profound influence obviously.

So who were the earliest influences of your guitar making?

KP: Richard Hoover [founder of Santa Cruz Guitar Co.] and Jim Olson. Both of them great people and very willing to share. And like any young guitar builder I was so thirsty for information. I was bold enough to actually go visit Richard Hoover, who turns out to be just a tremendous guy and very generous with his knowledge and obviously a fabulous guitar designer/builder. And then legendary Jim Olson, I called Jim out-of-the-blue, and knowing what I know now, I realize how generous Jim really was with me. Even in those days, he had no business taking phone calls from another guitar builder, as he was so busy.

I know you are from Ohio originally and you moved out to the West Coast, why don't you tell me a little more about Kevin Ryan the person?

KP: I would say that my childhood was unique. My parents (pause)...I just love them both like crazy, they both are a little bit eccentric (mostly my dad) and artistic. I think from my mom and dad I inherited two things. Dad's side...he's very analytical, he's an engineer...science, math and all that. A genius, really. And my mom is the artist. Mom is sensitive and literary—she instilled in me the love of books and music and a love for home. So, those two influences landed in me, and make me partly who I am today.

Now, is Ryan , Irish, Scottish , English, what is the background of the name Ryan?

KP: Ryan is Irish I think. I understand there is a town in Ireland where everyone is a Ryan, so, I suppose we may be from there. My pedigree is a little bit, what's that word....a pound dog?? Swedish from my paternal grandmother, Irish and English from my mom's side and I understand that there's a little bit of Native American Indian in my past some where.

I have seen your library .. you are quite a reader, what are some of the literary influences in your life?

KP: Clearly the biggest literary influence would be C. S. Lewis...me and a million other people! G.K. Chesterton is probably near the top of the list, as for a great influence. Other great influences have been Dietrich Bonhoeffer (my son's middle name is Dietrich) Thomas Merton, an American mystic, a monk, a Trappist monk. There are Lewis' friends J.R.R.Tolkien and Charles Williams. If it's children's literature, Kenneth Graham in "Wind in the Willows". I grew up hearing about those books, reading those books, even as an adult, and to this day, I love children's literature. I am introducing James to the world of Ratty and Mole and Mr. Toad.

And your family life, what's that all about?

KP: We have a little 7 year-old boy, James, and Barb is my wife. We have been married 25 years in September. As with any marriage it's something we have had to work at, but we could not be happier. I'm more in love today than I was the day I got married. The biggest joy of my life is my little boy. Home is filled with a lot of activity—reading of books, playing games, baseball, wrestling on the floor...the home is filled with joy.

Back to the guitars, what do you think has brought you such critical and popular acclaim?

KP: We intended do something unique from the very start. I knew that to be able to compete my guitars would have to have a very clear focus, and for me it was clearly going to be a fingerstyle guitar. We were also lucky enough to come to the attention of many of the world's finest fingerstylists. Designing the instrument from the ground up to be a fingerstyle instrument and thinking in really innovative ways has been the most important. And having many of the worlds greatest guitarists wanting my guitars hasn't hurt, has it? 

What do you think brought that list of notable players to your guitars?

KP: Well, I think it was partly that their technique really was so advanced. I think Peter Finger, Laurence Juber. Pierre Bensusan—guys that were really redefining the acoustic guitar and I really believed it then and believe now, that the instruments that existed at that time, just really weren't designed to do what they needed the instruments to do. And then there's the element that these guys talk to each other, they tour with each other, and the biggest thing of course is they can see each other's guitars. Peter Finger is one of the early artists who noticed me, and of course Peter not only influences a lot of amateur players all over the world, he has probably a remarkable influence on a lot of recording artists as well.

Let's talk about your guitar's in general and later we can be more specific. How do you go about designing a guitar?

KP: Well, for me it always begins with a size. That's the primary driver when sketches start to be made. After that its portions that I care about—classic proportions that have been known in the world since the days of the Greeks. One would be called the "golden rectangle" and its proportions of nine-to-five. Those dimensions are in my mind as I start to lay down the parameters given a size. By size, I almost always mean the width of the lower bow at the widest point. Everything else is more or less triggered by that dimension. I don't believe in just one flash of brilliance...it just has never worked for me. It's always been: make a sketch and start modifying that sketch. Of course, the computer now has made that so easy for me, as I use CAD/CAM all the time in my designing shapes and parts.

How do you go about designing on a computer?

KP: There are such sophisticated programs that allow you to draw very organic curves. Now, you also can do it by hand. In fact, a lot of the sketches start that way, where we will just come up with maybe 10 to 15 iterations of a proposed design until we get something we think has promise and then it gets committed to the computer. The beauty of the computer is that you make a design, save it, then modify it under a different name and then modify that under a different name, so that you have this running history of the evolution of that design. The other thing of paramount importance is that a design has to make an immediate dramatic appeal. But its also got to have staying power; it has to look as lovely and fresh a month later, a year later. Some designs are just great, and then in the morning I say "what in the world was I thinking?" So it has to have a freshness and beauty that is both memorable but easy to live with. In other words, it has to wear well. That, in my thinking, is the greatest challenge for any guitar design. The Cathedral went through about 50 designs in a slow evolution to get to that point. The Nightingale almost as many. I still have all the old drawings, the evolution of those models.

How do you go about recommending wood combinations?

KP: Well, the primary goal there is try to find out what the needs of the player really are. Sometimes they'll describe to me what kind of music they play. What kind of music they like to listen to? Do they listen to Laurence Juber, Pat Donohue? That gives us an indication right there, the kind of sound a client likes. Based on that we can generally make a recommendation of what woods they should have. One of my jobs is to help them decide what's best for them. Although I do have personal favorites and I need to carefully factor that out of certain conversations.

What would be your personal favorites?

KP: I love Western Red Cedar. I love the way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it even smells. But that's because cedar has this kind of sound that I personally love—it's open, it's rich, it's complex, very responsive, and its warm ,but bright...almost a contradiction in terms. But some of the spruces that we are using now come to my mind, like Swiss Spruce is a wonderful spruce...Adirondack, of course, is always a perennial favorite for good reason...but I also think that Sitka Spruce is the most underrated of all the top woods. It is beautiful, it's responsive and acoustically it's stellar.

Presently you have four models: the Abbey Grand Parlor, the Mission Grand Concert, the Nightingale Soloist, the Cathedral Grand Fingerstyle—where do you go from here?

KP: It's a great question. I think one of the things that has been of prime importance to me, in designing new models, is that I won't just introduce a new guitar just to say I have another shape. I never believed in that and will never do that. I played a dreadnaught for most of my guitar life and I have a respect for them and I think we could bring that into the fingerstyle world with some of the other things we have done, perhaps introduce a bevel on it.

The Nightingale and Cathedral have a bevel. Tell me about the bevel.

KP: Grit Laskin has his arm rest and we have great respect for Grit as being one of the pioneers of this golden age of guitar building. In the guitar world one inspiration leads to another, so, we were inspired by Grit's brilliance. Our bevel, being continuous from the waist through and past the centerline of the soundboard at the bottom, is undeniably comfortable. But there is an acoustic component to it, also. There is no way to prove this in the "court of guitar law" but, our feeling here in the shop, that there is a... component of bass frequency that is largely a function of the sheer volume of the box. And yet, the trebles and midrange I think are really driven by the bracing and by the size of the top. So, adding the bevel allows us to have a guitar that has larger interior volume and yet, we are able to have what is effectively a smaller soundboard. The bevel let us achieve that in a dramatic and attractive way. The third thing that was driving the design of the bevel was that I just love beautiful and sensuous, flowing lines. I also think of the bevel as kind of edgy...in the sense that its asymmetrical...if you look carefully at the bottom it doesn't stop at the center at the tailblock; it goes beyond, so it creates sort of an asymmetrical tension in the soundboard which we love and just a clean elegance where you can't take your eyes off of it.

Tell us about the development of the Cathedral and why it took so long to complete.

KP: We didn't really have a clear idea how to build the bevel and even how to do our Florentine cutaway which is, as you my notice, fairly unique. Difficult to bend, difficult to route and bind, everything was harder about the Florentine cutaway. However, the main delay was the bevel—having the bevel be continuous and the purflings and binding uninterrupted. We loved the idea of that because then the player won't have to have his arm resting in any particular spot to take advantage of it. To make the binding and purfling appear to be continuous along the bevel was probably the biggest difficulty in designing it. And it's the thing that really held me back from the final design for probably six months. I just simply didn't know how to do it, and you know, one night I had a flash of intuition and I knew what to do.

So once you had that worked out with the Cathedral—the bevel which also exists on the Nightingale—was it easy to accomplish?

KP: Right. The biggest difficulty was how to achieve the bevel in the real world, in a real shop environment. Once we discovered that secret then the matter of integrating it into other new designs was simply the matter of making the special tooling for them.

So, you might introduce the bevel in future guitar shapes?

KP: Absolutely, I can tell you that the response here, in the shop has been overwhelming. Most folks who play it feel that they are now spoiled and they never want to play guitar again without a bevel.

So, if we look at your take on the bevel as an evolution in guitar design, what other evolutions might you see in future models?

KP: We are driven by two different things in thinking of ideas for the future: one is our own intuitive sense of what we think the guitar ought to be, because we don't think the guitar has reached its pinnacle and perhaps never will reach its pinnacle of design efficiency, and also being driven by these sophisticated players that are demanding more and more of guitars. A good example is having Pierre Bensusan coming to the shop—the basic shape of the Nightingale was designed with Pierre in mind, even to the smallest details that I studied, photographs of how Pierre would hold his guitar; how he would caress the guitar—it was kind of a starting blueprint of what the shape ought to be. Certainly the bevel for Pierre makes sense because of the way he cradles and caresses the guitar while playing.

Back to guitar generalities...what is the most satisfying aspect of your profession?

KP: (Laughter)...doing and succeeding at something that is really, really hard.

What is perhaps the least satisfying aspect of you profession?

KP: Guitar building is extremely physically demanding. And I work very long hours that can cut into my family life if I am not constantly vigilant about it

News groups from time to time bring up the topic "one man" shops versus factories and what really makes, or what denotes a handmade guitar from a factory guitar. What's your response to that?

KP: Well I'd probably be considered a heretic here, but I think it's kind of a false dichotomy. There's a continuum between the guy over in Spain that builds a nylon string guitar with a few chisels and some sand paper, and Taylor Guitars with computers and every imaginable cool bit of technology. All of us hand builders are somewhere on that continuum in the use of technology. I personally love all that hi-tech machinery and tooling. But the most important element will always be the quality of the craftsman doing the work.

As you were influenced by the masters before you, Hoover and Olson and some others, a lot of young builders have started to call you up and ask you questions. How do you respond to them and what would be your advice to up-and-coming builders?

KP: I believe what goes around, comes around—these great builders have been generous with their time—and I think it's my duty to be generous with my time, as much as I can. There is a circle of friends that I have that are builders and it really gives me a sense of joy to see them succeed. As far as advice to someone wanting to enter this craft, you got to be a real self motivated, self starter. The work is extremely difficult and you have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and really work hard for years before your work is recognized. The other thing I would say as far as being successful at it, it's one thing if you just want to have it as a hobby to build a guitar occasionally than if you want to make it your vocation. Then, you've go to have a way to differentiate your instruments from everyone else. You have got to be able to do something that's different, but different with a reason.

Do you think you'll ever build the holy-grail of guitars?

KP: Chuckle .....that's great...that quote is from an earlier article, early in my career. You know I'll be daring enough to say, "Yes"—I think that we will—I guess, if I didn't believe that somehow we ultimately could I would want to close up the shop. It's a great hope, but there is also humility in me that wants to say maybe we won't even know if we built it!

What have been some of the highlights in your guitar building career?

KP: The one that always comes immediately to mind is that Sunday morning so many, many years ago when I got a call from a friend that Peter Finger was staying with him and Peter wanted to come over and see my shop and look at my guitars. And Peter Finger was one of my favorite guitarists on the planet.

So what happened that Sunday afternoon?

KP: Well, Peter came over and of course,
you know, I'm as nervous as a long tailed
cat in a room full of rocking chairs. It
was almost like waiting for royalty.
Peter showed up and of course anybody who
knows Peter knows he is just as classy as a
person can be. Peter just walked around,
and it was my parents garage at that time,
and he looked at a few woods and looked at
this and that and of course I'm just ...I'm
just having an ulcer, thinking I couldn't
have been more excited to have James Taylor
or Eric Clapton in the shop because I knew
that Peter was one of the finest guitarists
the world has ever seen. But Peter said to
me, "I'd like you to build me this guitar
with this wood." It was just the moment I
think, I could never capture it again, but
it was pretty magical for me.

Any other moments?

KP: When Laurence Juber called me the first time and I knew that he wanted an instrument...that was great. Working with Pierre Bensusan feels like being in a story, almost part of a legendary chapter of acoustic guitar history! The night that I got the first call from Jackson Browne, it was late in my shop and I was working. I think I was a little discouraged that night-working long hours-and I got the phone call from Jackson and he introduced himself and said he had played one of my guitars that my dear friend Bo Radis owned, that he flipped over it and he would like me to build him one! . And the first thing I said was said, "Are you really Jackson Browne?" (laughter)

Other players like Muriel Anderson, Pierre Bensusan, Pat Donohue, Jamie Findlay, Brian Gore, Eric Lugosch, Woody Mann, Franco Morone, Isato Nakagawa, Al Petteway and Amy White, Tim Sparks and Sean Weaver, these are names and upcoming stars that have either made it, or are on their way to making it in the finger style arena. Each I'm sure have their own story with you, any one particular?

KP: Well, one thing I can say truthfully
about nearly everyone is that they have
brought to the table needs and insights
about the instruments that were unique to
them. We just could not overstate how
important it has been for us, both
personally and professionally, being
aligned with these kinds of artists. But
also, on the level of designing guitars,
the input from these folks is just
enormous. I would say, probably along these
lines one of my great moments was a number
of years ago, when I got a flyer in the
mail about a very prestigious German guitar
festival and they were advertising ten
headliners and a lot of other guitarists,
but of the ten headliners—you know, the
finest guitarists on the planet—six were my
clients! I think that might have been the
first moment when I was just able to stand
back a little bit objectively and say,
"Wow! We've accomplished something here."
Yet, we are still driven on to that Holy
Grail!