Welcome and thank you for visiting the Melville Guitars website. Within these pages you'll find information on my guitars with a good selection of quality photos and enlargements. Also some testimonials from both enthusiastic owners and professional musicians, who have either purchased, played or recorded with my guitars. Not to mention a bit of ‘history’.  Please feel free to call me with any questions. You will find the contact details on the ‘Contact us’ page.

Chris Melville Guitars...

My back pages...
People have often asked what made me start making guitars. The answer that springs to mind is connected to my upbringing. I loved playing the instrument but couldn’t afford a good one. So in 1988 I decided to have a go at making my own. As a child I had pretty much grown up in my Grandfather’s workshop, which was full of all kinds of wonderful and mysterious tools that he used to build or fix all kinds of things. Some people have begun playing an instrument at age 7. Me, I was building things! It was from him that I learned that if you couldn’t afford to buy it, then build it yourself, as he had built nearly every item of machinery in his workshop! I remember spending hours just playing with bits of wood and metal that my grandfather would help me fashion into a boat or plane etc. He was, you could say, my first mentor.

Tiger Moths and Guitar making?
My grandfather had been an aircraft engineer on “Tiger-moth’s” before WW2 and for the time had a fairly unique qualification of being able to fully dismantle both airframe and engine, then rebuild the aircraft and fly it. He was a man who had a very good eye for detail and I remember being taught well that there was always a correct way to do something.

The start of my passionate career…
After researching as much information as I could, (which wasn’t much in 1988) I proceeded to carefully build my first guitar. In those days there was no such thing as a kit containing pre-shaped parts etc, so everything was built from scratch using a minimum of tools. I went on to build one after another, each time learning more and adding my new insights to each instrument. All my early guitars, though somewhat rough around the edges, are still in use and play very well.

But it was hard to make a living building hand made guitars in Brisbane, Australia in those early days.

An apprenticeship with one of the world’s great guitar innovators…
A few years later I was offered a job with a local repairer and electric guitar builder by the name of Chris Kinman. One of the things I discovered from working with ‘CK’ was the difference between good and excellent. Chris or ‘CK’ was obsessed with attention to detail. Close enough wasn’t good enough. It had to be perfect!

Over the next 6 years I worked on all the major US brands and quite a few handmade guitars from other builders both in Australia and the US. I soon learnt of all their strength’s and also their inherent problems. I have been told by others that I am a bit of a ‘problem solver’, which certainly sounds fair enough as I love ‘fixing things’. Repairing or setting up a guitar that someone else has built certainly took the “mystery” out of it for me, as I would be constantly assessing construction style and the ‘family’ sound of the various makes that would come in for one reason or another.

Could there be a better way?
My desire was to build my guitars in such a way as to be able to extract from them as much dynamic range as possible, but with almost boring reliability. This requires a completely different approach to either mass made production guitars or even ‘hand made’ guitars that are built in large numbers.

Although the guitars I build are in the traditional X brace style, they are also very ‘contemporary’. This is not just in the way they sound but also in that they incorporate design features that although not obvious to the casual observer, become very obvious when played.

Over the years I noted that a lot of new high-end guitars would come into the workshop with a multitude of afflictions such as uneven fretwork, a neck with a slight twist, a ski jump at the body join, or a sunken or bulging top to name just a few. The owners of these guitars were in most cases unaware of the impact of these inherent problems. All they knew was that the guitar was hard to play and would not play in tune with itself, not to mention being mystified that the 'dream guitar' they had spent the price of a car on could play so poorly.

For this reason every one of the 10 or so guitars I currently build each year is constructed with an obsessive consideration regarding the choice of woods. I am very critical of the quality of both the Top and Brace wood I buy, as these are the key ingredients of a guitar sound that will not “flab out” with age. In addition to this the standard neck on my guitars is slim and comfortable, yet strong and stable and can cope with multiple tension changes i.e. from concert pitch to DADGAD and down to C tuning without the neck bending less or more. Combined with precision fretwork, this means it can be adjusted for optimal playability, for a multitude of playing styles and has phenomenal resistance to twisting over time.

So how do they sound?
OK, now please bear with me while I attempt to describe that most elusive and essential element called 'Tone'!

My approach is that if I could only afford to buy one truly good guitar that I had to play for life, how would it sound? The guitar must possess a genuinely large dynamic range. What that means is that a guitarist can play soft and the instrument is immediately responsive yet full, or the player can dig into the strings hard, especially the treble and instead of thin metallic scratchiness, the guitar just gets louder all the while remaining clear and full. Many guitars can sound quite OK when played softly but when dug into, there is no real increase in musical volume, only an increase in extraneous noise. The guitar must be able to stand alone as a true "Solo Instrument". In the world of "Concert Classical" playing, the guitar is often representing the entire orchestra, so it must be powerful, project well and sound full. This is the same approach I have adopted for my steel string guitars, particularly my 000 models.

The birth of Christopher Melville Guitars
Six years later I left to begin my own business and CK kindly referred all the repair work to me, as he wanted to concentrate on a new noiseless Stratocaster and Telecaster pickup that he had invented. (These pickups by the way are quite incredible. Check out www.kinman.com ).

I have now been building and repairing guitars full time for over 18 years, and have pretty much seen, played and repaired most of what is available. My desire has always been to improve the sound, playability and long term reliability of my guitars by gaining as much understanding as possible. This understanding is found by critically assessing and carefully listening to all the different guitars which come into my workshop for one reason or another as well as attending guitar shows when possible to meet, talk and compare notes etc with what other builders are doing.

Further to this I would rather build only a small number of what I feel are truly exceptional guitars and continue in repair work than adopt the production approach of seeking to build in larger numbers with a "cheaper" model. Most builders I have met are keen to avoid repair work as much as possible so they can devote their time to their own instruments (which I can at times appreciate), but I find that repair work has provided a much better foundation for achieving the level of quality for which my guitars are regarded.

Just one of many testimonials…
The proof of the pudding is always in the eating and it would be no lie to say that the most immediate thing an experienced but first time player of one of my guitars hears is always the level of Volume, Clarity, Fullness, Sustain and Harmonic richness. This is quite apart from the next revelation, that my guitars are so easy and effortless to play. If I may quote from a player whom I consider to be one of the world's great hidden treasures of finger-style acoustic music….

It is without doubt one of the very finest instruments I've ever seen. The neck feels great, fingerboard width perfect, design is restrained beauty itself...What can I say, except it sounds incredible too. I'm not great at the flowery descriptions of how an instrument sounds but there is a level of sustain, depth and clarity to this guitar which is just out of this world. I'm so happy!
Tony McManus
("One of the worlds greatest and most innovative guitarists"
- The West Australian)
www.tonymcmanus.com