Smith and Fison guitars are built on spec. That means I build whatever I think makes the most sense to build next and then make those guitars available for sale on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you are interested in buying a Smith and Fison guitar, the best thing to do is add your name to my mailing list or get in contact with me directly.
Here’s how it works.
- New guitars are first available for one month to people on my mailing list.
- Then guitars are placed for sale on my website to the general public for six months.
- Finally a guitar is sent to a boutique guitar shop.
How much do your guitars cost?
Guitars start at 5000 Euros (2025).
Why don’t you build custom guitars?
Custom ordered guitars don’t make sense to me.
The standard industry model for guitar builders and buyers of “boutique” acoustic guitars is to commission and build custom guitars. The builder has a range of models, woods, levels of decoration, etc. and the buyer can pick and choose what he (it’s almost always a he) wants. The buyer pays a down payment, gets a spot on the builders waiting list, and dreams of the guitar to come. The buyer gets exactly what he wants and the builder has a secure waitlist. Everybody’s happy.
So I don’t build guitars to order. I think it’s a bad deal for both parties.
For the buyer I think it’s a bad deal for the simple reason that the guitar that he imagines in his head, the one he’s trying to design by detailing every specification possible, is not the guitar he’s going to get in the end. He’s going to get a different guitar. It might be right in some aspects, it could be better in others, and worse in yet more. But it will not be the one he has been dreaming of from the moment he began the commissioning process.
Maybe the size of the guitar is actually a bit bigger than you remembered a similar model being. Maybe the neck isn’t quite right. Maybe the design choices don’t fit together quite as well as you’d imagined them. Most likely the sound is different from what you had in your mind’s ear, as I call it.
Now, many buyers are apparently just fine with this delta between expectation and reality. But it strikes me as very strange that people who have the means to get exactly what they want and almost certainly possess several other guitars they want the newest one to compliment are willing to put up with this discrepancy.
Whether custom building is a bad deal for the builder I think depends a lot on the type of builder. Many builders have designs for their guitars that they have developed over years and settled on. Various small aesthetic changes such as wood choice or a rosette don’t alter the basic validity of that design, and hence they are happy to build a custom variant of that design as the buyer sees fit. For these builders custom building and full, long wait lists are great. Like writing an amazing piece of music you’re happy to play over and over or developing a dish you’re pleased to present to new people until the end of your days, this model works for those more-or-less settled design perfectly.
But other builders, myself included, experience building guitars as a process that can never be constrained in that way with any satisfaction. Building guitars is always a practice that is unfinished. Every aspect of the design and process are open to change, open to reconsideration, open to experimentation, open to the whims of intuition or fancy. In some important sense, every guitar is essentially a practice-run for the next guitar, trying things out to see how it works or doesn’t. And then having another go at it next time.
This manner of building guitars was, it seems to me, the predominant way of building before advent of workshop instruments and then factory instruments after them. Standardization makes life much easier and faster and cheaper. In many ways this is good. But it also deprives us of spontaneity and life. The individual builder before standardization was always dealing with new materials and new buyers within a production process that allowed for spontaneous changes. Hand tools are much more flexible than jigs and the machines that are often incorporated with them. And much modern guitar making is focused around jigs, jigs, and more jigs. These jigs make it easy and quick to do the one thing each jig is designed to do, and difficult if not impossible to do something different. And once you’ve sunk time, money, and space into building a jig the temptation to keep using it is very large. Here, wanna use the jig you know will work perfectly, easily, in very little time or maybe try something completely new that might fail and take god-knows-how-much time to complete? You’re probably going to reach for the jig.
I use several jigs too, but I approach them with caution precisely because of how the constrict freedom in the workshop. Which gets us back to why the custom-order paradigm makes so little sense for my way of building. I don’t want to build a guitar that is a recipe of this shape plus that wood plus that binding plus, hey, can you inlay my wife’s birthday on the twelfth fret? I want to build whatever guitar gets me a step or two closer to understanding how the many, many elements of guitar building can sometimes, very rarely, come together to create a truly sublime object.
Finally, when I’m in the workshop I feel it’s my pleasure and duty to pay as much attention to the project at hand. That’s how I can be most aware of what I’m doing, consider its effects, be open to other possibilities. This openness is almost impossible for me when working to order. And even when it is it poses problems because I then have to think of the person for whom I’m building the guitar and try to decide whether it fits not only my intuition at that moment, but also their wishes. I hate this and find it very distracting.
In the end, I’m willing to admit that my criticism of custom ordering is a combination of objective factors and personal ones. Objectively, I truly believe that the best way for a player to acquire a new guitar is to find one in person, take it in their hands, and fall in love with it. If they love that guitar, that’s it. Custom orders are like a prisoner’s last meal – you might think all these dishes will be the best meal of your life, but once it comes around, who knows? Personally, I have no desire to be a mini-factory that builds standardized guitars with an agglomeration of extra features. Nor am I interested in building guitars for other people in particular, because I find it stressful and distracting.
I don’t build custom guitars because I think the process is less than satisfactory for both the builder and the buyer. Custom orders distract me during the building process from making the choices that I think would be best for a particular guitar. And I don’t understand why anyone would want to spend thousands of euros on an instrument they’ve never held in their hands and played first. I want, one, to build the guitar I want to build and, two, for people to pick up a guitar I built and fall in love with it (so they have to buy it).
If you have a specific request regarding scale length or nut width or something that directly effects the playability of a guitar or its suitability for certain styles of playing, then get in touch with me and we can see if I can make a future guitar that suits those parameters. I am not open to discussions about choice of woods or decoration etc.