Made to measure
Your guitar, decided together
What makes a guitar truly yours is a long list of small decisions: the outline, how the neck sits in your hand, how it sounds, how it looks. With me those decisions are yours to make, and I help you make them.
Shape and feel
A classic outline as a starting point, an original silhouette, or something in between. Weight, balance, comfort for rib and forearm, where the strap buttons go.
Neck
Scale length, profile, thickness, width, fret count, radius. The most personal part of a guitar, shaped for your hand and not for a trend.
Wood
Reclaimed wood first, chosen for stability as much as for story. We look at grain, weight and origin together.
Sound and electronics
Pickups, controls and wiring based on how you play. More controls rarely make a better guitar, so we only add what you will actually use.
Hardware
Bridge, tuners and the small parts, chosen for reliability and repairability rather than for a brand name.
Colour and finish
One see-through colour, mixed for your guitar only. Want a different finish? Ask. I will tell you honestly what works.
Want to try a shape yourself? With Sixto Forma you sketch a body and a headstock in a few minutes, on your phone or laptop. It is free, and your design stays on your own device until you send it. Like what you made? Send it over and we will look at it together.
Open Sixto Forma
Not everything is possible. If a wish falls outside what I can build with my tools and techniques, or would hurt the stability of the guitar, I will say so and we look for another route together.
A made-to-measure guitar starts at around €1,500. Most land between €1,500 and €3,500, depending on construction, hardware and finish.
About the maker
From a renovation to a workshop
During Covid I renovated a house that had belonged to a carpenter. Besides a lot of MDF he had left behind, the renovation released the structural timber of its timber frame. My discovery of wood came more or less with the purchase of the house, and I found out how much I love working with my hands. The garden house that came with it became my workshop, and some of its wood now lives on in my guitars. I had played in bands for years, and like many of my generation I taught myself a new skill from YouTube: building guitars.
Six years later the hours are in. I have been to workshops in Flanders and the Netherlands, visited guitar building shops and gathered a lot of knowledge. Since December 2021 I haven't stopped building, repairing and rebuilding, my earliest builds included.
Along the way I realised this was not an end point but a beginning. Every build has to contain at least one new element, feature or experiment. My journey has only just started, and I can't wait to get going with the ideas that come my way.
The wood is where each guitar starts telling its own story: an old wooden floor, reclaimed beams, material that had already lived a life before it became a guitar.
"Your guitar doesn't exist yet. Together, we'll build it."
