My very first attempt in guitar building.
Hi. My name is Martin Koch and I write guitar building books.
The desire to build my first guitar started 1983 after reading several articles about British bass builders in a German music magazine. I loved to work with wood and I loved to play guitar and the interviews inspired me to do something I never thought of before - building a guitar. My very first guitar was a fretless and headless bass guitar simply because I didn't know how to calculate fret positions and the headless design simplified building. The hardware is selfmade, only the pickup was bought quite expensive at a local music store.
My next project was an acoustic steelstring guitar. I went to bookstores looking for guitarbuilding literature but at that time there wasn't anything available in Europe. Then one day I noticed an ad in the American magazine "Acoustic Guitar". A book called "Guitarmaking - Tradition and Technology" was offered. I tried my luck since it also could have been a book full of guitar pictures, history and so on. And how lucky I was. This book was exactly what I needed: Clear and thorough step by step instructions and lots of photos and illustrations. My acoustic guitar project was saved and a lot more guitars followed.
The very good experiences with the book mentioned above made me to write a German book about building electric guitars. When the manuscript was finished I sent it to a German publisher. "Too especial", "no market" was the answer and the start of my self publishing carreer.