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When I first came to Kauai many years ago I wanted to continue my Classical Guitar lessons and learn to play the beautiful Hawaiian Slack Key music.

I had an old classical guitar that I had bought in Germany in 1964 that was made of East German Maple with a spruce top. It had a strong mid range for chamber music. It had traveled the world with me and been through at least four hurricanes so needless to say it was in need of serious repair.

Because of the sentimental value attached to it I was very reluctant to let anyone attempt to fix it. So it sat for many years in need of serious fixing. While looking for a person to repair it I met a elderly retired luthier from Arkansas whose specialty was building Classical Guitars in the tradition of Herman Houser and Ramirez. He encouraged me to learn to fix it myself and became my mentor. Through the years he has literally guided me by the hand and basically encouraged me to just do it. I began by reading everything I could find on string instrument repair and  putting what I learned to use by doing minor repairs to guitars.

One day a very dear Hawaiian friend brought an old Martin Ukulele to me for repair. I repaired it and in the process decided that I would like to build that instrument as I really liked the sound. So using my friends old Martin as a master, I  built the jigs and started building Tenor Ukuleles but in the style of the Houser and Ramirez classical guitars.

I remember watching a movie The Red Violin and in this movie they had a violin that they were testing in a laboratory. I was fascinated by how they were testing the violin and decided to set up a electronics test lab to test Classical guitars and see what made one so much better than the other when they both looked exactly alike.  I was trained, as an electronics engineer so was able to understand what they were doing and incorporate those techniques to help me get the sound that I have from my instruments.