Contact William(Bill) Gilbert at 805-239-9080 wgilbert@surfari.net
William Gilbert is building with, Cedar , Engelman Spruce and Indian Rosewood back.
He is building the same Guitar he built with his father
but is a little more flexible than John about Wood selection and Scale length.
Williams Guitars are "Classic Gilberts" that so may players have sought after.
They are available without lengthy waiting.
Bill is also happy to take orders or questions personally.
An editorial note.
William Gilbert is a faith-based man who believes in quality and integrity.
His Guitars are built with the hope and dedication to a Higher Power.
A recent article From Acustic Guitar About Gilberts'
When I first talked to John Gilbert about interviewing him and his son, he asked, "Do I have to clean up the shop? Bill has got it full of machinery for his new place, and it’s a shambles." When I arrived at his house in the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco, I saw what he meant. A two-car garage was packed with more than 30 years’ accumulation of tools and wood, with just enough wiggle room for access to a couple of workbenches. John, whom I had met before at luthiers’ meetings, welcomed me cordially and introduced me to his son Bill. We spent several hours talking guitar making and covered a wide range of topics from the technical to the aesthetic.
John built his first classical guitar in 1965, shortly after going to work as a tool engineer for Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, California. A coworker showed him a slim volume entitled Make Your Own Spanish Guitar, and it seemed like a fun project. At first, building instruments was just a hobby for John, with a lot of repair mixed in, but by 1974 the response from players was so encouraging that he decided to build full-time. By 1991 he had made 140 guitars that were played by a long list of professionals including David Russell, Frederic Hand, Konrad Ragossnig, and David Tanenbaum, to name just a few. At that point, John brought his son Bill into the business to give himself more time to develop a line of guitar machine heads he had invented. Bill has now built 42 guitars under his own name, and John says proudly that customers tell him confidentially that his son makes better instruments than he did.
When asked for a description of the characteristic sound of a Gilbert guitar, John’s response is very direct. "It’s neutral," he says. "It responds to the way a guitarist plays instead of having a certain type of sound. Our guitars have a wide range of tone color, they project very well, and they’re very even on the first string. Above the seventh fret, where a lot of guitars poop out, they stay strong."
What about left-hand action? "Playability is critical," John says. "You can build the best-sounding guitar in the world, but if it tires you out to play it, it’s useless. We go to a lot of trouble to build a neck that is really stable, that will hold close tolerances, so that we can do really accurate fretwork. That lets us bring the strings as close as possible to the fingerboard without buzzing."
This kind of careful engineering and accurate measurement is evident in all of the Gilberts’ processes. If there is one word that describes their approach to making guitars, it is precision. John’s background as a highly skilled toolmaker carries over into woodworking. The stiffness, weight, and dimensions of the soundboard, the back, and all the interior bracing are measured and recorded for each instrument. All of these parts have to meet certain specifications that have been established by years of experimentation. It’s no wonder that Gilbert guitars have a reputation for consistency.
As John and Bill talk about the craft they so obviously love, they seem more like buddies than father and son. Good-natured banter is the order of the day. I ask Bill how they managed to transfer the business across the generations so smoothly. "My dad made it clear that I was either going to make instruments of the same quality that he did, or I wasn’t going to make them," he explains. With this goal in mind, Bill and John worked together for more than a year, cosigning the guitars’ labels during this transitional period.
If customer response is any measure of Bill’s success in taking over the construction side of the business, he is doing very well indeed, with a three-year waiting list to buy one of his instruments. He is currently building with East Indian and Madagascar rosewoods, and customers have a choice of western red cedar or any of three species of spruce for the soundboard. Bill continues John’s policy of satisfaction guaranteed. When customers receive their new instruments, they have a couple of weeks to try it out, and if they are dissatisfied for any reason they get a complete refund, including shipping costs. In over 25 years, no one has taken the Gilberts up on that guarantee.
6107
wgilbert@surfari.net
