I’m quite young. And reaching the stage of having to decide what I’m actually going to do with my life. One of the options I’m looking at would be to try and become a professional luthier. I was wondering how easy it is to get a good apprenticeship, and is it a profession one could actually survive on?
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Apprenticeship.
- Thread starter FergusMc
- Start date
With fewer and fewer venues that have live music let alone bands, with fewer kids learning to play guitar/bass, with economics being what they are and people having less disposable income, I'd say becoming a luthier would be a great hobby.
Check out what Phil Jacoby in Baltimore has to say on the matter (I highly recommend him for anyone in the area BTW).
He is pretty approachable and seems always willing to talk about the business side of the trade so I bet if you email him with anything that isn't covered he'd be willing to answer it.
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He is pretty approachable and seems always willing to talk about the business side of the trade so I bet if you email him with anything that isn't covered he'd be willing to answer it.
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not to be discouraging, but if you're willing to live the life of a starving artist anything is possible.
imo, start off in repairs then move into custom builds. you need to offer either something that everybody needs or something that no one else can do.
if you really need an apprenticeship, choose your master carefuly. repeating a legacy of bad craft and bad business can totally screw-up your growth.
imo, start off in repairs then move into custom builds. you need to offer either something that everybody needs or something that no one else can do.
if you really need an apprenticeship, choose your master carefuly. repeating a legacy of bad craft and bad business can totally screw-up your growth.
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Q: How can a luthier make a million dollars?
A: Start with two million.
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Financially, you might do better to be a plumber or electrician with a musical interest. Beats being a fry cook with a contemporary music degree - you can actually afford your musical interest (playing and building), for one thing. And you can get work wiring up the restaurant for the robot that will replace the fry cook.
The sad fact of almost any highly skilled hand-craft is that you are lucky to make minimum wage doing it. I can see it being a very satisfying side-hustle, as long as you aren't planning on feeding a family with it. There are just too many incredibly skilled custom builders out there competing for a shrinking number of commissions. Even inexpensive mass produced basses are pretty good these days, and the mid to upper range instruments are largely superb compared to the "bad old days", which makes it ever harder for most players to justify a hand built instrument, which is essentially a work of art.
There is a critical shortage of skilled trades people. Electricians, plumers, and carpenters specifically. You could get into carpentry as some of the skills tranfer directly into being a luthier.
I don’t know where it is, but @Bruce Johnson has a short post he has put up a couple of times about the actual financial realities of building custom instruments for a living.
A friend, who was partners in a guitar shop for 20 years, told me that a luthier friend had told him as he was starting out to focus on repairs. That's where the money is. And after all that time he agrees, the guy was right.
Best thing you could do is read a lot on the luthier part of the different forums. Buy good tools. Buy a bunch of cheap guitars and practice the usual work that will make you money (fret jobs, nut work/replacement, bridge re-glue, neck resets). Then, after you are doing an acceptable job on those things, offer to work on your friends gits.
Or you could spend thousands of dollars at a school and still have to do paragraph two to learn what you need to know...
Best thing you could do is read a lot on the luthier part of the different forums. Buy good tools. Buy a bunch of cheap guitars and practice the usual work that will make you money (fret jobs, nut work/replacement, bridge re-glue, neck resets). Then, after you are doing an acceptable job on those things, offer to work on your friends gits.
Or you could spend thousands of dollars at a school and still have to do paragraph two to learn what you need to know...
The luthiers I respect the most, they all make a living by thiving in their craft. What I see in common is originality, innovation and delivering the best customer experience.
I think there will always be a market for people that focus on these values and offer something unique. I would build my strategy on top of the best you can find around and think about ways to surpass it and keep a distance.
All the best!!
I think there will always be a market for people that focus on these values and offer something unique. I would build my strategy on top of the best you can find around and think about ways to surpass it and keep a distance.
All the best!!
Yes, when I read FergusMC's post, I let out a small sigh.....Being a Luthier is a lot of fun as a hobby, but it's very tough as a business.
Here's a summary post from 2015; a thread called Hobby or Business. It's a quick summary of the original post, back in 2012 or so:
The full thread is here: Hobby or Business?
Here's my post about the grim financial realities of being a Luthier:
This is from a thread a few years back, in which TB readers were arguing about how much money Luthiers "should" make. Here's the first post that I wrote, which has been reprinted on several other forums too:
I'm a pro Luthier/Builder. Most of you would consider me successful at it. I've been doing it nearly full time for 21 years, I have a good reputation, and I usually have a waiting list for my basses and services. But let me enlighten you with the ugly financial reality of this business. The net income numbers some of you are tossing around are pure fantasy. Most of us Luthiers make a net hourly pay less than minimum wage. When I visit my tax accountant every year, he shakes his head and tells me to shut it down and go get a real job. I'm not kidding.
First things first: I've set a basic rate of $45 per hour. This is not my "pay", it's what's called an Hourly Composite Rate for the business. I need to make an average of about $30 per hour for 40 hours per week, just to pay the overhead (rent on my building, utilities, insurance, etc.). Those are fixed costs that have to be paid each month. So, if I charge $45 per hour, and complete 40 hours of Billable Work (see below) in a week, my actual pay is really only $15 per hour. That's $600 per week, which is less than most people with real jobs make.
But here's the missing part: Trying to complete 40 hours of Billable Work in a week is much, much harder than it first appears. I only get paid $45 per hour for time spent actually at the bench, working on an instrument to be sold. I don't get paid anything for answering the door, talking on the phone to customers, writing e-mails, writing on forums, sweeping the floor, sorting lumber stock, ordering parts, driving to the lumber yard, etc., etc. I get paid $0 per hour for all that time, but yet it's all completely necessary to run the business.
For those of you who've never run your own business, that's the fundamental difference between having a job and working for yourself. At a job, you automatically get money for every hour that you are there, almost regardless of what you do or how hard you work or how many parts you successfully make. Working for yourself, how much you make per hour is completely dependent on how many parts you successfully complete per week. You can seemingly bust ass all week and end up making almost nothing. In reality, I work about 80 hours per week, every week, and I'm doing well if I actually complete 40 hours of billable work. That's a 50% ratio of Billable hours to Total hours, which isn't bad for a small business. Many small businesses have a much lower ratio than that, like 20%-30%. But what it means to me is that I actually get paid only $7.50 per hour, for all those hours, and only if I complete those 40 hours of billable work.
Now, most "real" businesses charge a much higher hourly rate. For example, most small auto repair shops charge $75-$100 per hour. The mechanic working there makes $20 per hour if he's good. The rest of it is for the fixed overhead costs and that ratio of Billable Hours to Total Hours, like I described above. By any standard small business model, I should be charging $75-$100 per hour. When you think about it, my business is very similar to an auto repair shop in the size and costs. My next door neighbor used to be a one-man Porsche repair shop, and we used to compare notes. He charged $75 per hour, which he said was the minimum he needed to pay the overhead and take home a modest wage for himself. He thought I was completely nuts to be only charging $45 per hour. I mean, we had identical size shops, with the same overhead rates. I'm older than him with much more education and experience. I even used to be a Porsche mechanic!
Okay, so why don't I charge $75-$100 per hour, like I really should? Because you guys (the customers) won't pay that much. It's as simple as that.
Look at it from the cost side:
A hand-made custom bass neck takes 8-12 hours to build. I'm not speculating. I've built hundreds of them, and I keep very accurate time records. The raw materials (wood, metal, and fretwire) cost about $60. So, at $45/hr plus materials, I price a 10 hour neck at $510 plus shipping. That's just for a basic custom bass neck. If I charged $75/hr, it would be $810. At $100/hr, it would be $1060. So, how many of you would pay $1060 for a custom neck? Just about none. But is that unreasonable? It's the same quality of neck that you'd find on a $2000-$3000 bass. But if you read TB, you'd know that any neck over $250 is waaaay overpriced and not worth it. That's the way this business is. Most instrument customers are completely spoiled by two decades of very cheap imports, and don't appreciate the work and costs that go into building a custom bass. That's the main reason why I no longer build custom necks at the retail level. It doesn't make any sense financially.
Full instruments are the same way. My new AMB-2 Scroll Bass, which I've just developed and introduced this year, takes me about 60 hours each to build. The materials costs are $320: (Case: $110; wood: $50; metal: $30; purchased hardware: $90; plating: $40). So, with those materials costs and charging $45/hr, I need to sell them for $3000. That's about right for the market (I hope!), in terms of what customers are willing to pay. But at $75/hr, I'd have to get $4820, and at $100/hr I'd have to get $6320. It would be very hard to sell them at those prices.
And that's my simpler, lower-priced model. My fancy Series IV AUB-2 models that I built from 2006-2011 took 110 hours to build with about $400 in materials. I was selling them for $3900 and losing my ass on every one. That's why I stopped building them. If I priced them at $100/hr, they would be $11,400. That's nice to dream about, but not realistic.
Now, I'm a little unusual as a builder, because I build almost everything myself. I make most of my own metal hardware (bridges, tailpieces, etc.), plus I build my own pickups from scratch, and do all my own painting, in addition to the woodworking. So, my cost numbers have higher labor hours and lower materials costs than most builders. If I were to offer a custom made high-end Fender-like bass, using purchased hardware and pickups, and still painting it myself, the costs would be around $700 for materials and 35 hours labor. At $45/hr, I'd have to sell it for $2275. To me, that's about as low as you can go, a minimum realistic price for a custom made, basic pattern instrument. To me, any builder who sells for less than that hasn't really counted up the labor hours. Or they have a shop situation with no overhead. More likely, they are trying to set their prices based on what customers are telling them, and not understanding how much money they are losing.
Again, that's the nature of the business. Being a Luthier is a "Glamour" business. Lots of guys want to do it because it looks like fun. And it is fun and rewarding building basses. As a hobby or a tax-writeoff sideline. But trying to do it as a rational business to make a living from is just nuts. The finances don't add up.
If all of the above isn't depressing enough, that all assumes that everything goes great. Unfortunately, this business also has an enormous risk factor. When building an instrument, there are hundreds of ways that you can make a small mistake, and end up ruining weeks or months of work. A small slip in a router fixture, a bad piece of wood, misreading a dimension, dropping a tool on a finished paint job, forgetting some feature that the customer asked for, etc., etc. These tiny things can instantly cost you an entire weeks' worth of billable hours, or more. Remember, this is a fixed-price business. If I agree to build you an AMB-2 for $3000, that's assuming that it's going to take me 60 hours to build. But that's the best case scenario, with no mistakes. If I get a couple of spots of contaminant in my spray gun and end up having to repaint it twice to get it right (a true story), I end up spending 90 hours on that instrument. And nobody is going to pay for those extra 30 hours. While I'm repairing that damage, I'm not working on other billable hour jobs. And the overall problem is that there are so many fussy steps involved in building an instrument, that it's nearly impossible to go all the way through the process without making any mistakes. Only after years of making the same instruments do you eliminate most of the mistakes. The financial penalties are huge, and you can easily get into a position where you've already lost so much money on an instrument that it seems pointless to finish it. If you know that you're going to make less than $5 per hour, and you still have a long way to go, is it even worth it? Meanwhile, the customer is calling you every day asking if it's done yet. See the thread about MikeysWood.
Also, custom build jobs always have ten times the potential for mistakes and labor over-runs. Trying to do custom builds on fixed prices is setting yourself up for huge losses. There are so many ways for things to go wrong and wipe out any money you would have made. That's why I stopped doing custom builds a long time ago. Happy customers, beautiful basses, and $5 per hour. Most Luthiers, if they survive more than a few years, eventually move to building only their own models with a fixed set of options.
I hope this helps you understand how the finances work in this business. And why we Luthiers can sometimes be cranky and evasive and refuse to answer the phone.
To go back to the original posters' question: Most small shop electric bass Luthiers effectively charge $35-$45 per hour. That's driven by the market; what customers are willing to pay. Established guys like me get "paid" $15 per hour at best. Guys getting started are usually making approximately nothing. You can usually make better money just doing repairs, with some careful management. The setup guy at Guitar Center makes more than I do.
So, you're probably wondering why I keep doing this. In 1995 I was making 100K at a corporate job. Last year, I busted ass all year and grossed about 55K. On paper, my "pay" was less than 5K, for the whole year! I barely paid the overhead and the groceries each month. I work 7 days a week and hardly have any money left over to play with. I couldn't possibly support a family or a wife doing this. But I'm okay with that. I'm a hermit mad scientist wacko type, and I've chosen this lifestyle. It's just me and my dog, in a building full of machines, making cool stuff day and night. This is how I want to spend the rest of my life.
There's some basics for you to think about. Here's a follow-on post of mine, related to this but about why Foderas are sooo expensive:
Absolutely. Fodera doesn't charge $10K-$15K for a bass because they are greedy and evil. They have to charge that much, because that's what it costs to build them. When you step up from being a solo Luthier to being a small High-End Bass Company, the cost structure is just as tough, and even more unforgiving. Fodera and Ken Smith are good examples of shops that build expensive basses, with just a few employees.
As soon as you hire real employees, you get hit with a whole new layer of laws and costs, such as Worker's Comp and OSHA requirements. You have to pay those costs, or you are in big legal trouble. But thing is that, as soon as you have employees, you are now obligated to pay them, regardless of whether they successfully completed Billable Hour work. The guy doing your painting may have worked hard all week spraying a group of basses, but on Friday he makes a careless mistake and messes them up. As the boss, you still have to pay him for the week's work, plus next week's work when he has to redo them all. But you only get to collect the billable hours for painting them once. Out of the company's income, you have to pay for ALL of the mistakes and ALL of the non-billable hours. It's real outgoing cash, not just wasting some of your own time. Because of these factors, you have to set an Hourly Composite Rate for your company that is 2-4 times what you actually pay your employees.
I'm guessing here, but Fodera probably works with an hourly rate of around $100/hr. Their employees probably make $15-$30/hr, a decent living, but not a whole lot of money. Their instruments are probably in a similar range of materials and labor to mine; $300-$400 in parts and materials and 50-75 hours of labor. So, as an example, a low end bass would be $300 in materials plus 50 hours at $100/hr. That's $5300. That's what it actually costs Fodera to build it and have it sitting in their warehouse. Built into that is a certain amount of rework of mistakes and wasted unbillable time.
But now you have to sell the bass. As soon as your production level moves above a couple basses per month, you have to add people whose job is selling. Those are the dealers. They need to get paid too, or they aren't going to do it. A dealer likes to make 100%; that is, sell it for twice what they pay for it. That's what they need to cover their own overhead and wasted hours schmoozing the tire-kickers. On a high end bass, they may settle for less, but not too much. So, the dealer buys the bass from Fodera for $5300 and tries to sell it for $10,600. If it sits for a while, he may sell it for $8500. So, the dealer paid Fodera $5300 up front and made a profit of $3200. That may sound like a nice chunk of cash, but remember that his overhead keeps ticking away and he has to keep steadily selling those basses, or he goes home with nothing that week.
My point here is that, when you move up into the small company range, then numbers add up and the business model works. It's still risky, but it adds up. But, they have to operate with a composite hourly rate in the $100/hour range. If Fodera tried to operate at $45/hr, they would go broke.
The pricing of a Fodera is rational and reasonable. No one is being greedy or making outrageous profits or getting rich. If you looked at Vinnie Fodera's tax returns, I doubt that he makes very much money from the instrument business.
The irrational part is us one-man Luthier shops selling basses for $2500. We're nuts.
Another little bit:
Yeah, I know. I need to stop reading my own posts about business too. It's depressing. But it's the cold reality. Our customers value our products at about 1/3 of what they actually cost to build, by any normal business model. We can juggle numbers and kid ourselves, but that's the truth. Unless you have nearly zero overhead, and some cash reserves to get you through the rough spots, you can't make it work.
A few years back, a young sharp luthier came to me for some advice. He was trying to go for a small business bank loan in the conventional way, to open up a shop. They required him to submit a business plan, and he was attempting to do that with one of the pre-made software kits. But when he plugged in all the numbers, it wasn't adding up. It kept telling him that he needed to charge about $12,000 for his basses. I tried to help him fudge it, but we couldn't make it work. The math didn't work.
Those of us who have been at it a while are driven by a need for creative craftsmanship. And we find some way to do other things to pay for that need.
I hope this doesn't depress you too much....My advice is to keep your day job, and build up your Luthier business as a sideline. Be very careful with your money and keep really accurate records of your labor hours and costs. Price your instruments based on what they actually cost you to build, not what your customer buddies think they should cost.
^^^this
I was a kid in the heyday of live music retail, 80's-90's, before electronica and hip hop were minting millionaire (billionaire) kids on youtube left right and center.
Music education in public school was common as an elective bc computer science wasn't even a thing.
There was no shift toward STEM by my baby brother's middle school tenure, kids born in 1980 were the gap in public school focus. They just didn't have anything, so he was the one that 100% went to private school. Those kids all aspired to work at hedge funds with a bridge to real estate investment.
I had a large pool of guys that all seemed to have learned tube electronics in the Service. There were even guys who spent 4 years in the Marine Corps playing Big Band and March. The push in San Francisco and LA at the time yielded a lot of ex-Alembic, Chandler, and Modulus guys north. South were lots of ex-Fender, Ernie Ball, BC Rich, Tom Anderson, Valley Arts, etc. You had amp guys from Mesa and GK north. South you had the old standby big name retail shops.
I got to hang out in these mecca full on experience stores mentioned in magazines (yeah right ?), and pick these dude's brains over fixing or making my junk suck less. It never was an actual job. Someone liked you, or you proved to them you could make them $. $ was always a problem unless you hooked up with a big act like Satriani, Metallica, etc etc etc. You hustled if your behind was supposed to be in a chair wrenching on gear. It gets to you, bc it's less about ART and more about PRODUCTION.
Gotta pay the bills, and as a kid I started to understand why these dudes were basically on the verge of something failing. They were rarely business orientated people. They had damaged ego's to salve. They had habits to feed. There were reasons why they got fired from their big name music industry gig.
I learned some of those habits wrenching on gear, and I broke them at 25 when I put on a suit and tie.
I got a job, I became someone that met my demons head on, and I know how to work on my gear myself for the most part.
I'm the kid that grew up at a small airport that now owns a plane and flies for fun.
I'm the kid that grew up on a dock that owns a boat and sails for fun and sport.
Instead of asking or begging someone for a job wrenching on gear just go do it.
Spend your own $, wrench on gear you don't mind destroying, hustle until you know you can wrench competently.
Try not to get stuck with craigslist gear you can't flip and be tapped out, that's how music retail dies.
Hook up with every band you can find and be the guy that makes a show happen, however you have to do that.
If you do it right one day you'll feel a little dead and empty inside. Old emotions that pushed you to ask for anything are gone. You either do, or you don't, but very little of anything in the beginning can't be learned through wash-rinse-repeat.
FergusMc;
I hope that we didn't completely discourage you from becoming a Luthier! Designing and building instruments can be very fun and rewarding. That's why I've chosen to be a Luthier as my semi-retirement business.
But, it's really hard to make a decent living as a Luthier. You read in my depressing dissertation above how bad the financial calculations are. That's what you will be dealing with if you go into the business by yourself.
And that's about all there is. Almost all Luthiers are self-employed, struggling along financially. Few have any real employees, because they can't afford them. And most aren't willing to take in helpers/apprentices. Most of us are helpful towards young Luthiers, in offering advice and referring jobs to them, or giving them some subcontract work. But actually hiring someone is too complicated and expensive.
The larger and mid-sized guitar manufacturers do have employees and will hire people sometimes. But these days, most of them are struggling or contracting, so new job openings are scarce. And there are a lot of people lined up.
Becoming a pro Luthier is all about building up your own small self-employed business. Which is a separate thing from learning how to build instruments. You start doing it as a hobby, move up into a sideline business, then make the jump into full time. Success or failure will depend on your discipline as a businessman, not your skill as a craftsman. It's a tough road, but it can be done.
I hope that we didn't completely discourage you from becoming a Luthier! Designing and building instruments can be very fun and rewarding. That's why I've chosen to be a Luthier as my semi-retirement business.
But, it's really hard to make a decent living as a Luthier. You read in my depressing dissertation above how bad the financial calculations are. That's what you will be dealing with if you go into the business by yourself.
And that's about all there is. Almost all Luthiers are self-employed, struggling along financially. Few have any real employees, because they can't afford them. And most aren't willing to take in helpers/apprentices. Most of us are helpful towards young Luthiers, in offering advice and referring jobs to them, or giving them some subcontract work. But actually hiring someone is too complicated and expensive.
The larger and mid-sized guitar manufacturers do have employees and will hire people sometimes. But these days, most of them are struggling or contracting, so new job openings are scarce. And there are a lot of people lined up.
Becoming a pro Luthier is all about building up your own small self-employed business. Which is a separate thing from learning how to build instruments. You start doing it as a hobby, move up into a sideline business, then make the jump into full time. Success or failure will depend on your discipline as a businessman, not your skill as a craftsman. It's a tough road, but it can be done.
BassHappy
Supporting Member
Hey Fergus
While I totally relate to nearly everything posted here - I feel compelled to at least mention the other side of the coin. If building instruments is in your DNA and that dream is real for you -pursue it with all the vigor and enthusiasm you can muster. Putting your intentions out to the Universe, as you are doing here, is a great start.
Many people who write great songs do it because if they didn't they might jump off a bridge somewhere. They are compelled to write songs. It's not contrived or pre-meditated with the greatest of songwriters. The great ones are not trying to write a "hit" they are trying to express what's gnawing away at them, what is in their heart, what is in their gut. Is "making it" hard? Of course, it's next to impossible. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. The truth is - the odds with being a world-class luthier in my book aren't much different than a young baseball player trying to make the Major Leagues, a football player aspiring to play in the NFL, or even a basketball player committed to making the NBA. It's not much different than a band or a songwriter trying to crack the hit parade. True greatness is found in a very small percentage of the population.
Dreams and aspirations are all part of the same emotional, mental and even spiritual process. Of course there are overwhelming odds - and the deck is generally stacked against you. But so what? Does that mean you shouldn't pursue your dreams? Does that mean you shouldn't give it a shot? Of course not. But if you do go for it - be sure to give it everything you got. When you learn enough to be dangerous, design and develop your own original concepts and ideas. Don't be a copycat. That is what the world is starving for. Be original and be thorough. Think of everything and talk to everyone.
Paul Reed Smith became my good friend in 1975 and he didn't even have the concept of starting a guitar factory in his brain until 1985. I had the good fortune of being his friend, confidant and well, even his customer - as we envisioned a bass together which he built for me in 1976. Now he is the 3rd largest guitar company in the world, behind only Fender and Gibson. Of course, there is a pretty big drop off after the first two - but last I looked Paul's annual sales were around 43 million. You know how he got there? By cultivating great ideas through trial and error - and being uber talented, determined and relentless, in his pursuit of excellence. He also has the luxury of making custom Private Stock instruments that start at $25K, and there is always a demand and a long waiting list.
I spent a week in Deidesheim, Germany with Jens Ritter a couple of years ago, and I was amazed at how small his operation really is. At the time, his basses started at around $6K and you had to get on a waiting list of about a year, just to write him a deposit check. All the guitars he brought to NAMM in January sold the first day of the show and he grossed well over $100,000 in selling less than a dozen instruments. If you are talented enough, determined enough and smart enough to be reaching for that brass ring - the financial rewards are out there.
I read all of this gloom and doom and I end up scratching my head. There is always room for a world class player in any arena, and yes, the odds are not great - but the cream always rises to the top. The best advice I have for anyone is simply this - figure out what you DON'T want in life and chances are what you DO want will magically appear before you.
Be inspired. If it's really your dream to be a world class luthier - you will find a way to move forward, apprenticeship or not.....
Keep us posted.
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