I am Luthier from Sweden but also one of the founders of ProGuitar.

I have a background as an engineer but the guitar has always been one of my top hobbies, either playing or building . I built my first guitar when I was 15 years old and that got me really hooked. Since the day I first strum a chords on this guitar I have never been able to leave the thought that I some day would have my own guitar making workshop.

During my time at university I also got interested in guitar acoustics. Together with my friend Peter Bergholtz I wrote the graduate thesis "A Study Of The Guitar With The Finite Element Method". This work was the beginning of a wish to deeply understand what parameters that is of importance in the perception of a good sounding guitar. Through out the years this wish has rather evolved in a desire to fully understand the guitar.

I enjoy the art and craftsmanship in the guitar building process even more than the theoretical aspect and all the elements that this includes. Just working with beautiful wood is a dimension in itself but building a good sounding guitar that will be used to make art by a future owner is really something special.

I got the opportunity to spend full time building guitars for three years at The Academy of Musical Instruments, Stockholm, Sweden which resulted in a B. Sc degree in guitar making.

In the autumn 2014 I was fortune to live and work with the awesome luthier Gregory Byers, California US. During the time I tried to learn as much as possible from the really experienced luthier Greg. Beyond that, we also worked with a pretty extensive guitar experiment. We made scientifically measurements and subjective listening test on over one hundred common combinations of bracing systems, thicknesses of top, back and sides. I hope we will be able to publish some results from these tests on ProGuitar in the near future.

Except spending time in my workshop I will try to build up the ProGuitar Community. Hope that you will find our community useful!

Kind Regards,
Johannes