Kostal Guitars

Jason Kostal didn't come to lutherie young. He grew up studying fingerstyle at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, then became a US Army officer, then earned an MBA at Emory in Atlanta — where, on the side, he met Kent Everett of Everett Guitars and got his first introduction to building. After the military he took a Fortune 500 management job in Salt Lake City, kept building on the side, and eventually walked away from the corporate world for Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in Phoenix. He stayed on as an assistant instructor in the acoustic program for three and a half years after graduating, teaching while opening his own shop and building the first Kostal Guitars. In November 2008 he attended Ervin Somogyi's voicing class, and Ervin offered him an apprenticeship that started the following February. He closed his Phoenix shop, moved to Oakland, and spent thirty months building under Somogyi's tutelage. That period reshaped his work; the MD — Modified Dreadnought — that anchors his line takes its shape from Somogyi's proprietary Mod-D, and Kostal has spent the years since refining it in his own direction. His signature model came later: the MDW, designed with fingerstyle player Michael Watts and carrying his initials. The guitars are heavily customized for each client, built from base specs that include Honduran mahogany necks, Gotoh 510 tuners with ebony buttons, Hoffee cases, and a Stained Glass rosette signature. The base model is $26,000 on his own price list, before tonewood upgrades — most figured back-and-sides options add $1,200 to $6,000, with Brazilian rosewood the outlier at $18,000. Among the small community of buyers who shoot between top-tier boutique builders — Olson, Ryan, Traugott, Greenfield, Manzer — Kostal sits squarely in that conversation. Michael Watts and Willy Porter are both vocal owners; AGF build threads track his guitars closely. Jason builds 25-30 instruments a year, and the wait list is measured in years — he put it at seven in 2022. He builds now in Queen Creek, Arizona — back in the Phoenix area where he started — and the work has not slowed: he is still the only builder on the bench, still working through commissioned builds one at a time, and still — as he puts it — taking pride in instruments meant to last a lifetime and play incredible music for generations.