About Stuart Newman - Master Luthier
Making Guitars since 1992.
Graduate, Irish School of Luthiery, 1994.

I love my job. I have been building guitars for 17 years, and it has been a colorful, winding road. I was born into a family of artists and craftsmen, in fact a long line going way back to James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine and our unit of power. I still use his tools building the instruments today. I arrived at luthiery as a logical conclusion to my very diverse skill and interest set. I served an apprenticeship with Master luthier Paul Doyle (maker for U2 , Hothouse Flowers, The Pogues) in Galway, west coast Ireland 92/94. Then I worked with Chris Kinman of Kinman Guitar Craft (maker of the famous Kinman pickups).

I have worked in everything from gold and diamonds to Vacuum bagged foam core epoxy/ carbon fiber. From military encryption electronics technician to Hi Fi speaker designer.

And much more.

Design is what keeps me up at night, trying to balance; mass, tension, stiffness, resonance, Helmholtz frequency, material durability, acoustic warmth, harmonic clarity, volume, sustain, projection, player ergonomics, construction possibilities, intuition, system tunning.

And all of this has to be made with my strong sense of the aesthetic, it must be stunningly beautiful. Ease of construction is not a design criteria and in fact each evolution is bringing more complexity and construction difficult., Lucky I am up for a challenge!

PS: There is room on this website for an apprentice, so -if you are up for the challenge -contact me.