Swiss-born Gil Carnal
was a professional classical guitarist when he met luthier Kenny
Hill in the late 1970s. Carnal had a longstanding interest in
woodworking but had never built a guitar. After working with Hill
for 20 years he opened his own shop in Soquel, California, in 2000
and dedicated himself to pushing beyond the bounds of conventional
guitar-building techniques. “I felt that the traditional design of
the classical guitar had reached its potential,” he says. “As a
luthier, I saw it as my function to find a way to make guitars with
more volume and sustain to respond to the demands of the music.”
Throughout his
career, Carnal has experimented with many approaches, discarding
those that didn’t pan out and keeping those that worked. By 2009, he
had combined several innovative ideas into a single concert model, a
design that he continually reassesses and strives to improve upon.
“If your design has too many variables, you’ll never understand what
worked and what didn’t,” he says. He finishes one guitar a month,
and his waiting list is about six months. Prices for his guitars
start at $7,500.
Carnal’s design
blends old-world violin-making concepts and contemporary guitar
design features such as lattice bracing and raised fingerboards. “My
idea at the beginning was to adopt Thomas Humphrey’s ideas about the
angle of the strings over the top of the guitar,” he says. “Humphrey
found a way to make his guitars sound more punchy by creating a
certain angle of incidence over the top. Having the fingerboard
raised above the top is a consequence of the string angle he
wanted.”
All of Carnal’s
guitars include that string angle and raised fingerboard, as well as
his unique lattice top bracing, laminated sides (rosewood outside,
Spanish cypress inside), rigid internal frame, cedar or spruce tops,
two soundports on either side of the heel of the neck, and an easily
removable bolt-on neck. “I felt the guitar needed to be an
instrument you could open to make repairs or adjustments,” Carnal
says. “I had worked with a violin maker in Europe and saw that he
could open instruments, make an adjustment, and reglue them all in
one day. In 2009, I developed a design with a neck and top I can
take off almost as easily.”
