Froggy Bottom Guitars

Froggy Bottom Guitars started in 1970 in Michael Millard's Lower East Side apartment in New York City, where he built his first instrument by bending the sides over the heat riser running through his kitchen. He was working at Gurian Guitars on Grand Street at the time, where he had absorbed the free-form classical-guitar tradition of building without a rigid mold — a method Gene Clark, David Rubio, and Manuel Velazquez had brought to Bob Gurian. Michael's first Froggy Bottom was a Gurian-shaped jumbo built for the bluesman George Gritzbach; the bracing pattern was already his own. He moved with the Gurian shop to New Hampshire in 1973, left to go full-time on Froggy Bottom in 1974, and eventually settled in Newfane, Vermont, where the shop has remained. The Froggy Bottom philosophy was fixed from the first commission: build the guitar for the individual player, not a fixed model. Every component of every guitar — top thickness, brace cross-sections, neck profile, scale length, body shape — varies to the specifications and feel a particular musician asks for. Construction follows classical roots: the guitar is built face-down without an exterior mold, sides clamped into shape free-standing, bracing voiced by ear under repeated tap-tone checks. Modern CNC tooling sits in the shop but is used sparingly — fret-slot cutting, rough neck stock removal — never displacing the handwork. From thirty feet away a Froggy Bottom looks like any traditional steel-string of the last 120 years; the difference is invisible until you play one. The shop has stayed deliberately small for fifty-plus years. A five-person team — Michael, Eric Goodenough, Andy Mueller, Mark Burds, and Chris Bavaria on finishing — builds around 75 guitars a year, each one custom-spec'd to an individual player. Every member of the team has built a Froggy start to finish, plays guitar seriously themselves, and is capable of every task in the build. Custom heelcap engravings by Petria Mitchell and later Glenn Carson have been a signature personalization for over 25 years. Build queues run long, and Froggy Bottom is candid that they're not for everyone — but for the players who can describe exactly what they want and can't find it anywhere else, the shop has spent five decades doing exactly that one thing.