Ryan Guitars
Ryan Mission Grand 2003, Natural
2003 · Listed by Carter Vintage Guitars · Nashville, TN
Photos hot-linked from Carter Vintage Guitars’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Cedar Western Red
- Back / Sides
- Figured Mahogany
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- Mission
- Scale length
- 25.5"
- Nut width
- 1.75"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- Yes
- Condition
- Preowned
- Year
- 2003
About Ryan Guitars
Ryan Guitars are built in Westminster, California by Kevin Ryan — a former Northrop Aeroscience Lab engineer who started prototyping acoustic guitars in 1987 while his day job built jet fighter scale models for transonic wind tunnel testing. The engineering background shows up everywhere in the work: the Ryan Bevel (the original integrated armrest, since widely copied), Acoustic Flutes sound ports, laser-sculpted bracing patterns, a spherically-arched back. Ryan's catalog reads less like a pre-war tribute and more like a thirty-year argument that the acoustic guitar could still be reimagined through precision tooling and materials thinking. Acoustic Guitar Magazine named Kevin one of the most influential builders of the previous thirty years in 2010 — calling the guitars "a blueprint for scores of other builders" and "a modern classic." The catalog stays small and the queue runs long; each instrument is hand-built in Southern California.
About Carter Vintage Guitars
Carter Vintage Guitars sits at 606 8th Avenue South in Nashville, opened November 2012 by Walter and Christie Carter — each with twenty-five years in the vintage guitar business before they put their names on a shop. Walter spent a decade as Gibson's in-house historian and has authored a dozen books on vintage instruments, including "Gibson: 100 Years of an American Icon" and "Gruhn's Guide to Vintage Guitars"; Christie's focus was the high-end vintage market. The shop's reputation is built on full-disclosure transparency around condition, originality, and provenance — a standard set early and still held to. The catalog leads with vintage — pre-war Martins, original-finish Gibsons, vintage Fender — but the new-boutique acoustic side runs deep alongside it: Collings, Bourgeois, Santa Cruz, Huss & Dalton, Goodall, McPherson, Lowden, and Furch are anchor brands, with a rotating long tail of smaller US luthiers (Boucher, Pre-War Guitars Co., Beauregard, Sexauer, Tippin, Kevin Ryan, and others) passing through. Carter became part of TNAG Global in 2022 — the parent holding company that also acquired Norman's Rare Guitars in early 2026 — but day-to-day curation has stayed centered on the original Carter team. Worldwide shipping; in-person browsing on 8th Avenue South.
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