About our classes

We offer weekly classes 4 hours in duration with a choice of morning and evening times. Students generally come once a week to the same class. There is always an interesting mix of guitars underway at various stages of the build.

We also offer a limited number of casual classes for those who can’t make it to a regular weekly class.

The time taken depends on several factors. Everyone works at their own pace on the guitar they choose to make. So your skills and capability play a role along with the complexity of the guitar you choose to make. You will have the support of experienced instructors to achieve your build.

You can compare approximate build time across different type of guitar builds at What we build.

There really is no “best” wood for making a guitar, but there are a large range of great woods with a multitude of characteristics that will suit different guitars differently. Our preferred supplier offers a range of excellent woods sourced predominantly from Australia. For a first guitar, we recommend using good quality tone wood that has been selected for guitar making. This wood will be quatersawn, well seasoned, dimensioned well and categrorised with most obvious faults already culled. The variation in sound comes from not only the timber but the build process and of course the style of guitar. Without reference to other factors and focusing solely on the timber, the vast majority of the sound is predominantly the soundboard. This however is of little effect compared to the type of guitar and build style.

The short answer is “lots of help”. The school and your instructor will support you the whole way through the process and you can trust in our guarantee that as long as you work towards the end goal we will ensure you succeed. Each class has between three to five students with a minimum of one instructor per session who circulates around the class frequently. Our instructors are very good at managing the class workflow and ensuring each student has tasks while they are occupied with demonstrating or instructing. As there are many different parts to a guitar build you will often find everyone working on different sections of their guitar and therefore the instructor can support each person individually. There is very little idle time in a class and when there is, it is also an opportunity for observational learning, especially for upcoming processes. Students are also very welcome to observe the instruction given to fellow classmates.

The Brisbane Guitar Making School is located on the south side of Brisbane just off the Centenary Highway. Our physical address is Unit 5, 101 Jijaw St, Sumner Park Brisbane, 4074. See map.