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Paul McGill started making guitars at 17, on a bed frame no less, with no formal training and no particular reason to think it would work. Within the year he was at Charles Fox’ s Earthworks School of Guitar Making in Vermont, absorbing the principles that would organize the next five decades of his working life. By 1978 he had a shop in a basement in Wisconsin, repairing guitars and building them for local players. There he became acquainted with Robert Ruck, one of the finest classical makers of his generation, who would let the young luthier use his tools.
Nashville came next, and with it Gruhn Guitars, where McGill spent time in the restoration shop working on the some of the most significant vintage American instruments in existence. George Gruhn’ s operation was, and remains, one of the serious places in the guitar world, where the standards are exacting and the historical knowledge runs deep. That grounding gave McGill a calibrated sense of what greatness actually sounds like, and what it feels like to hold it in your hands.
■ UPPER IMAGE: Paul McGill( right) with Guy Clark looking on. ■ LOWER IMAGE: Ben Shaw at the board in Ocean Way Nashville Studio B.
From there, he began building classical guitars, and the relationships that followed were consequential. Earl Klugh recorded his Solo Guitar album on McGill instruments. Chet Atkins played three of his resonator guitars across a period of years, including the 1996 recording Almost Alone, with the guitar featured in Me and My Guitars, the book that documented Atkins’ s lifetime with his instruments. Smooth jazz stalwarts Peter White and Marc Antoine both adopted McGill’ s Super Ace, the innovative acoustic-electric design he developed after encountering Richard Mc- Clish and his individual saddle pickup concepts in 1996.
What McGill was building toward, through all of it, was a specific understanding of how a guitar generates its sound and what happens when that sound has to travel through electronics to reach an audience. The resonator work had taught him things about energy transfer that conventional steel-string building hadn’ t required him to think about. The classical designs pushed him further: high-amplitude construction, body structures op-
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