Irvin Guitars

Wayne Irvin Johnson builds under his middle name in Springfield, Missouri, and arrived at the bench by a route that took thirty years. His father bought him a Silvertone from Sears in 1967, when he was six. Two summers of hay-field work at ten cents a bale bought a Martin D-28 in 1978. The turn came in 1995, when he set out to learn what kind of acoustic Phil Keaggy played, found the answer was an Olson, discovered it was James Taylor's guitar too, and eventually toured James Olson's shop — after which, by his own account, he was smitten and began dreaming about building. Years later he found Sergei de Jonge's School of Lutherie and took the course; he calls it life-changing and credits it with the confidence to launch out on his own. The shop was on Washington's Kitsap Peninsula when the Fretboard Journal filmed a tour of it in 2020, and is in Springfield now. The catalog is four body shapes, all sharing the same string spacing — 1¾" at the nut, 2¼" at the saddle. The SJ small jumbo is the versatile one, drawn with the fingerstyle player in mind but with body enough to let a strum hang in the air. The SD is the dreadnought, built for presence in rhythm and enough headroom to dig into a lead. The SB Signature Baby is the SJ reduced by about a quarter — his smallest, and voiced not to sound like it. The SP Signature Parlor is a 12-fret-to-the-body small guitar on a 24.9-inch scale, aimed at clarity on every note up and down the fretboard. Underneath all four is a stated refusal to hurry: Johnson says he takes extensive time listening to each piece of wood before working it, and doesn't build quickly on purpose. Two other things sit alongside the building. Johnson teaches what he was taught — the Irvin Guitars School of Lutherie runs a four-week, roughly 160-hour course in his own shop, taking a student with little or no woodworking experience through bending sides, carving a neck, shaping bracing and voicing a top to a guitar they build by hand and take home. (It is paused at present while he catches up on builds.) And he collaborates: the Sean Hall Signature Series SJ was worked out with the percussive fingerstyle player it is named for, down to a twelfth-fret logo inlaid by Larry Robinson. Johnson also names a wider circle of luthiers who gave him advice along the way — Tom Doerr, James Olson, David Wren and Chris Ensor among them — a reminder that the de Jonge course is where the building started, not the whole of what shaped it.