Collings Guitars

Bill Collings moved from Ohio to Houston in the mid-1970s, more interested in guitars and engineering than the pre-med path he'd left behind. He took a job in a machine shop and built his first guitars on his kitchen table with a handful of hand tools; coming from a family of engineers, he had the hands and the curiosity to improve quickly. Before long his instruments were in the hands of local players — Lyle Lovett among them — and Texas musicians began seeking him out. After some fifty guitars in Houston he set out for California to build full-time, detoured through Austin, fell in with luthiers Tom Ellis and Mike Stevens, and stayed. A 1989 commission from Nashville dealer George Gruhn for two dozen custom guitars brought national exposure, and the one-man operation grew steadily into one of the most respected shops in the business. The Collings voice is often called modern: crisp attack, strong note separation, even balance across the registers, fast and precise without turning brittle. It's a sound that sits in a mix without fighting other instruments, which is part of why it shows up so often in studios. The list of players who picked up Collings flat-tops and stayed with them is long and varied — Lyle Lovett, Pete Townshend, Joni Mitchell, Brian May, Pete Huttlinger, and Chris Eldridge among them. The range widened well past flat-tops, too: mandolins from 1999, electric guitars from 2006, a short-lived line of ukuleles, and Waterloo, a separate line of vintage-inspired guitars built to capture the character of Depression-era instruments. The Traditional Series, added in the 2010s, dials the modern crispness back toward something woodier and more pre-war, for players who want the build precision with a different tonal personality. Bill Collings died in 2017. The company he built carried on without a drop in standard: the management team he'd assembled, led by longtime general manager Steve McCreary, along with the craftspeople he trained, kept production right where he'd set it. Collings still builds flat-tops, archtops, mandolins, and electrics in Austin, alongside the Waterloo line — all of it recognizably his work, all of it carrying his name forward.