Preston Thompson Guitars

Preston Thompson came up through American luthiery the long way. He started at the School of the Guitar Research & Design Center in Vermont under Charles Fox — the first guitar-making school in North America — then spent the 1970s at Randy Wood's Old Time Pickin' Parlor in Nashville, the gravitational center of the city's bluegrass jam scene. By the early 1980s he was building custom acoustics under his own name, and the top flatpicking and fingerstyle players were paying attention.

Preston Thompson came up through American luthiery the long way. He started at the School of the Guitar Research & Design Center in Vermont under Charles Fox — the first guitar-making school in North America — then spent the 1970s at Randy Wood's Old Time Pickin' Parlor in Nashville, the gravitational center of the city's bluegrass jam scene. By the early 1980s he was building custom acoustics under his own name, and the top flatpicking and fingerstyle players were paying attention. For three years in a row, his instruments were selected as the winner's prize at the National Flatpicking Championships at Winfield, Kansas — the genre's most credible endorsement. The defining collaboration of Preston's career was with Charles Sawtelle of Hot Rize. Sawtelle owned an unusually deep collection of pre-war Martin dreadnoughts and gave Preston access to measure and study them in detail.