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Free forever to explore and contribute · your contributions are community-owned · we never sell your data.
Makers and luthiers, brands, models, the individual instruments and the hands that played them, parts, tonewoods, schools and events — gathered into one verified, living graph, and connected so you can see how it all fits together.
Free to explore · every contribution editor-verified · owned by the community that builds it
So much of the guitar's history lives in places that don't last: a luthier's memory, a brittle catalog, a forum thread, a handwritten ledger, a single photograph. When a builder retires or a brand changes hands, that knowledge can quietly disappear.
Guitar Family Tree gathers it into one place and, just as importantly, connects it — every maker to their teachers and students, every model to the people who designed and built it, every instrument to the players who gave it a voice. Contributions are checked against real sources before they publish, it's free to explore, and it belongs to the community that builds it.
Built by the guitar community, for the guitar community — not a guild, a ranking system, or a gatekeeping body. The facts layer stays open: anyone can submit names, dates, relationships, sources, and corrections. A maker's place in history never depends on the ability to pay. Free Facts · Paid Visibility · Peer Credibility.
To gather the scattered knowledge of the guitar world into one verified, connected, community-owned map — and keep it open and free for everyone to explore.
A world where no part of the guitar's story is ever lost — every maker, instrument and idea preserved, connected, and within reach of anyone who wants to learn.
Anyone can explore the graph, read verified profiles, and contribute — no account needed. And when you join the family with a free account, you switch on a deeper set of viewing & research tools.
A first-time buyer, a collector and a luthier can look at the very same instrument and each see something different. Pick a lens and the whole graph re-focuses around what matters to you — the connections it draws forward, the detail it brings into view, the depth it goes to. It's a twist of the focus ring, not a locked door: switch lenses anytime.
Guitar Family Tree began with a simple conviction: the knowledge that lives in builders, collectors, players and historians deserves a permanent, connected home. A small founding team — with deep roots in the guitar community — is building it alongside a growing circle of contributors.
Curator of the Boutique Guitar Showcase and host of the Life With Strings Attached podcast, Jamie is a thought leader working where guitar culture, design, innovation and community meet.
Co-founder of Boutique Guitar Showcase, Roberta plays a central role in building community, supporting makers, and helping connect the people and stories that shape the guitar world.
Former President & CEO of Cosmo Music — North America's largest single-location music store — and creator of CosmoFest, with decades of music-retail leadership and deep industry relationships.
Former COO of Cosmo Music, Rudi spent over 40 years immersed in the music industry, developing a deep appreciation for the people, history and passion that make the guitar world unique.
Whether you build, collect, play, research — or you're just curious — there's a place for you here. Explore what's already mapped, or add the piece only you know.
Browsing is public and free. Create a free account for the full graph, profiles, watchlists, the timeline and the map.
Get notified as the family tree grows — new makers, features and verification updates.
The Guitar Family Tree is a community-owned historical record for the guitar. Submissions are welcomed from builders, brands, estates, families, schools, historians, collectors, players, writers, and members of the guitar community.
A submission does not automatically mean a profile is verified, complete, endorsed, or historically settled. It means the information has been contributed to the shared record and will be marked according to its current review status.
The goal is not to create a popularity contest, a guild, or a paid gatekeeping system. The goal is to preserve names, relationships, influence, training paths, instruments, companies, schools, and contributions so the history of the guitar can be better understood over time.
Add anything to the guitar world — fill the guided form, paste a document and let us parse it, or bulk-upload a spreadsheet.
Add as much as you like — it all helps preserve the record and is stored now. These richer presentation fields become publicly visible once the profile's owner is on the matching plan (or higher). They never affect credibility, ranking, or verification — paid options change presentation and archival depth only. The free facts layer above is always public.
These display once the owner is on Curated or higher.
These display once the owner is on Full Story or higher.
Tribute wall, community memories & moderated photo uploads are opening soon — you can note memories now.
Add founders, artist endorsers, signature/product models, parent or sub-brands, schools, students, mentors, influences — anything connected. We create or link each one on approval.
Please choose relationship types carefully — working at a shop, studying at a school, being influenced by a maker, and apprenticing with a maker are different forms of connection.
When they join and confirm, your sources cross-verify each other — strengthening everyone's data. We'll queue them an invitation.
By submitting you confirm that, to the best of your knowledge, the information is accurate and that you have the right to share it. A submission is a contribution to a shared, community-owned record — it does not by itself make a profile verified, endorsed, complete, or historically settled.
Every submission is reviewed by an editor and labelled with its status (e.g. Community Submitted, Source Supported, Peer Reviewed, Disputed). Labels describe how information has been reviewed and where it came from — they never rank people, brands, schools, or instruments. Relationship types are kept distinct (working at a shop is not the same as apprenticing there).
Information may be edited for clarity, accuracy, and tone. The public lineage and basic profile remain free. Paid options affect presentation and archival depth only — never credibility, verification, ranking, or the handling of disputes. Anyone may suggest a correction or raise a dispute, which is handled openly and neutrally.
Do not submit confidential information you are not authorized to share. The full Community & Contribution terms are available in your account once signed in.
The guitar is a five-century European story that branched out of a handful of workshops into a worldwide family tree. This is that story — and every name in amber opens the maker, brand or tradition behind it. Free to read; free to explore.
BEFORE · 1800 — OUD · LUTE · VIHUELA
Long before the guitar had its modern shape, its ancestors travelled the Mediterranean: the Arabic oud carried into Iberia, the European lute, and — in Renaissance Spain — the vihuela and the four- and five-course Baroque guitar. For three hundred years these were courtly, gut-strung instruments, smaller and quieter than what we know today. By the late eighteenth century the guitar had settled on six single strings, but it was still a parlour instrument waiting for the maker who would give it a voice big enough for the concert stage.
TORRES · THE MODERN CLASSICAL GUITAR
Everything modern about the classical guitar begins with one man. Working in Seville and Almería in the 1850s, Antonio de Torres enlarged the body, fixed the scale length, thinned the soundboard and perfected fan bracing — proving, with a guitar whose back and sides he famously built of papier-mâché, that the top is where the tone lives. He set the template every classical guitar still follows.
From his example grew the great Spanish schools: the Madrid dynasty founded by José Ramírez I and his brother Manuel Ramírez — whose workshop produced the guitar a young Andrés Segovia would carry to the world, built by Manuel's gifted foreman Santos Hernández. In Barcelona, Enrique García and his pupil Francisco Simplicio formed the Catalan school. Carrying the Spanish ideal into Germany, Hermann Hauser I built what many call the finest classical guitar ever made. The line runs on through Ignacio Fleta and the scholar-luthier José Romanillos, and into modern revolutionaries like Greg Smallman and Matthias Dammann, who reinvented the soundboard itself.
FROM VIOLINS TO ARCHTOPS
Italy's gift to stringed instruments is older still. In Cremona, Antonio Stradivari brought violin-making to a peak that has never been surpassed — and the violin-maker's art of the carved, arched, tuned top would, two centuries later, give the guitar an entirely new voice.
In turn-of-the-century America, Orville Gibson applied that violin logic to fretted instruments, and the archtop guitar was born — soon refined into a precision instrument by Gibson's acoustic engineer Lloyd Loar. Italian-American masters John D'Angelico and his successor James D'Aquisto turned the archtop into high art in New York, while Mario Maccaferri lent his name to the guitar that became the very sound of Gypsy jazz.
VIENNA · MARTIN · THE AMERICAN CENTURY
In Vienna, Johann Georg Stauffer built elegant guitars with a distinctive scrolled headstock — and trained an apprentice who would change everything. C. F. Martin Sr. emigrated to America and in 1833 founded Martin Guitar; his X-bracing made the powerful steel-string flat-top possible and seeded the entire American industry.
From that root grew the brand Friedrich Gretsch founded in Brooklyn, and — at mid-century — the electric revolution led by Leo Fender, whose mass-producible solid-body and Paul Bigsby's vibrato tailpiece remade popular music itself. The Germanic line is the trunk of the modern steel-string and electric world, running on to Bob Taylor, Bill Collings and the whole boutique generation.
THE FOURTH ROOT
Portugal's stringed heritage — the Portuguese guitarra and the resonant, open-tuned traditions it helped inspire — forms the fourth root of the tree. Its echoes reach makers such as Hermann Weissenborn, whose hollow-neck Hawaiian guitars carried the lap-style sound around the world. It is the youngest branch in our record, and the one we are actively growing.
THE BRANCHES CONVERGE
Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries these four roots intertwined. A new generation of master builders — among them Jean Larrivée, Linda Manzer and the steel-string voicing authority Ervin Somogyi — trained the apprentices who define lutherie today, and the boutique movement returned hand-building to the heart of the craft. The guitar is now a truly global family.
“The data is the asset.” Every maker, every lineage, every instrument — connected, verified, and owned by the community that builds it.
Read it above; then see how it all connects.
Admin design workspace. A low-fidelity blueprint of the live screens and where they're heading — a shared reference for redesign discussions (e.g. with Jamie). This page is visible to admins only. Drop new mockups, Figma links, or notes here as the redesign progresses.
A standalone, login-free page that documents every screen, every button, every button's outcome, the full site map and page-to-page link map, and a cross-reference to the design requirements doc — black & white, no images. Built to send directly to the designer without exposing the rest of the site.
Public URL: guitarfamilytree.com/wireframes.html · not indexed (noindex) · no login required.
guitarfamilytree.com/m/<brand> as an official, indexable page for paid profiles.
Paste Figma embed links or screenshots as the redesign progresses.
This is a living scratch page — tell me what to add (real wireframe images, Figma embeds, a clickable prototype, or notes) and I'll wire it in.
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How every part of the Guitar Family Tree works. You're seeing the sections available to your account.