Welcome to Lutherie, in South Bend Indiana U.S.A.

I am Bob English, sole proprietor of Lutherie.  I have 40 years of experience in the field of lutherie serving the greater north west Indiana (Michiana) area for over two decades now, and have been active in the field of lutherie in one capacity or another since I was 20 years old.

08-11-2025 Announcement:

I have been repairing guitars, basses and other stringed instruments since ~1979 now, but alas, all things come to pass:

I am reducing repair service significantly in order to build instruments of my own design; which was my plan all along (more below), and am doing so as follows:

I will only take in repairs from past clients, meaning they had actual work done by me in the past, and are in my client address book:  You know who you are. Note:  I never kept anyone's information who made a mere inquiry, nor does that qualify anyone as a client.

For my actual clients there are also restrictions that will apply:

I am restricting service to only the less invasive and time consuming work on any instrument especially acoustics, meaning no brace work, crack repair, neck resets, major break repairs, or anything like that.  You can run it by me, but I may very well not want to take on the job, which will depend more on whether I have time for it.

Why the big change?

When I got into this business, my aim was always to design and build instruments to my own technical prowess and artistic vision, not so much repairing instruments made by others, especially not seeing the same shortcomings for decades on end, knowing it doesn't have to be that way.  Sadly since building instruments from scratch is quite the investment, and so the repair business was my bread and butter for utility, but really prevented me from pursuing my real passion, and I barely found the time to get any instruments made, but did manage to do much of the engineering, design, and what not and so do have more than a few in various build stages, some more normal, and a few more on the far out side.

So I intend to finally work on my own designs, and hopefully get them in the hands of a few great players, and maybe leave a small, but significant mark on the world for having the opportunity to be one of it's inhabitants for a while.

There will be more on the subject soon, and this whole site will be replaced by a new one, which is a lot of work, so if you care to, please stop by every once in a while to see what's cooking, but expect this old site to be in transition, and may have a few dead links... until it looks entirely different.  That will be the new site.