DestroyAllGuitars New Orleans Guitar Company

~ New Orleans Guitar Company ~

Vincent Guidroz, founder of New Orleans Guitar Company worked as a sculptor for fifteen years before trying his hand at lutherie. Vincent did sculpture work in sizes ranging from jewelry scale to monument scale, in both direct and indirect carving and casting. He got into building guitars just like a lot of luthiers, as a hobby, and eventually found himself absorbed. Vincent has been building guitars full time since about 2000, and he feels it's been a real nice ride. He meets some really wonderful people in this business and he gets to build some of the finest guitars around.

The New Orleans Guitar Company shop is an old brick warehouse in mid-city New Orleans, not too far from the quarter. The shop is crammed with vintage woodworking equipment and there's sawdust on just about everything. Vincent has a couple of guys that help out in the shop, and for now, they're still doing things the old way. Not that Vincent has a problem with the newer technologies, but for a lot of the work involved in building guitars he thinks it's imperative to know how to execute perfect joinery by hand efficiently. Even though he plans to adopt some of the newer tools someday, he still feels there's a lot of valid technique in traditional methods and that you can do some amazing things with simple tools while not being strapped to traditional design.

The New Orleans Guitar Company shop is like a clubhouse sometimes. Artists and musicians drop by all the time, just coming by to see what's new. Vincent solicits a lot of input from people of all different backgrounds and all different perspectives. He listens to the guys that are making a living playing music and it shapes his designs. Guitars, in Vincent's eyes, shouldn't be solely collectible because they're nice to look at. The guitars that he builds are tools, tools designed to do a particular thing well. "We dress them up with beautiful woods and finishes so they'll sell, but at the core is a solidly built, sturdy, finely tuned precision tool that can handle the rigors of professional use. We've gotten some attention because our work is well executed and we use some really beautiful cuts of wood, but I think that there's a lot of beauty in understated simplicity. Straight-grained quarter-sawn cypress is every bit as beautiful as the most highly figured burls, each has their own distinct sound and appeal." - V.

As a builder, Vincent gets to know the design of his instruments intimately, every line, every curve, the way things should look, the way things should feel, which wood combinations produce what kind of response. It's an intuitive thing. During the build, he gets an idea of what a guitar is going to sound like just by feel, then Vincent tries to tie the aesthetics into the whole picture. What he brings to the table is his eyes and ears and years of developing his craft.

New Orleans Voodoo Custom

The Voodoo Custom is New Orleans Guitar Company's workhorse solid body. It's a single cutaway electric with a neck-through design for the player who wants an incredibly responsive guitar in a road worthy package. The book-matched, opposed grain, 5 piece neck provides superior stability, and the two way truss rod makes fine tuning relief a breeze. A spine is carved at the rear of the headstock to ensure against accidents breaking the headstock, and it also really helps with tuning stability...