John Slobod builds about fourteen guitars a year, by himself, in a shop in Maine with no windows. His company is Circa Guitars, and he makes vintage-style, Martin-inspired acoustics: OMs, 00s and dreadnoughts.
Earlier this month he sat down for almost two hours with luthier Max Monterosso on the Looth Group’s Acoustic Guitar Builders Club and walked through how he builds, start to finish. There’s a lot of shop talk in there, but a few parts are worth hearing even if you’ve never picked up a chisel.
Where he learned
Slobod started in 1993 at the Timeless Instruments building course in Moose Jaw, Canada, and then went to work for Dana Bourgeois in Maine. According to his website, he did the binding and final voicing on almost 4,000 guitars there. He also spent a couple of years with Julius Borges building Martin-style guitars for Eric Schoenberg’s shop, trying to make them the way Martin did in the 1920s and ’30s.
His advice to young builders is to go work in a small factory first. You learn on somebody else’s dime, he says, and you see a million guitars in a year instead of five.
The humidity trick
This is the part I found most interesting. Before a batch, Slobod stacks his wood with spacers and lets it sit for a few weeks in a room he keeps at about 38 percent humidity. He braces the tops and backs at that level too.
Then, when it’s time to glue the top and back onto the sides, he raises the humidity four or five percent. That builds a tiny bit of doming into the top and back, and he says it’s a really good way to keep guitars from cracking.
He got to test it by accident. A batch of his guitars was sitting at the Bourgeois shop over a winter break when the humidity there dropped. The guitars in the room flattened out. None of them cracked, but his moved a lot less than the others.
Wood moves with the air around it. That’s true for a handbuilt guitar and it’s true for the one sitting in your living room. When the heat comes on this winter, the air in your house dries out. A soundhole humidifier and keeping your guitar in its case go a long way. If your action suddenly feels lower or your fret ends start poking out the sides of the neck, dry air is usually why.
A few other things he said
He doesn’t trust wood to tell him much. He kept notes for years on how different tops turned out and says the main thing he learned is “you never know when the guitars are going to be good.” Wood he thought would be bad made great guitars, and wood he loved sometimes didn’t.
He skipped the traditional dovetail neck joint and uses a bolted joint like Collings does. His reasoning was that he’d watched some of the best builders around complain about dovetails, and Collings had already proven the bolt-on worked on thousands of guitars.
And he called pore filling, the step where you fill the grain before finishing, “the bane of my existence.” Good to know even the pros have a least favorite job.
Why a 12-fret 00?
In a Fretboard Journal shop tour, Slobod said the 12-fret 00 is “almost the perfect design for the way I build” and that it always comes out great. I play a 12-fret Martin, so I’m biased, but I agree. Smaller bodies are comfortable, sound balanced and are great for fingerpicking and songwriting.
Sources
- AGBC: The Process, with John Slobod (Looth Group, Oct. 15, 2026)
- About John (Circa Guitars)
- Circa Guitars Shop Tour (Fretboard Journal)
