Ryan Guitars
Kevin Ryan Nightingale Cocobolo Glacier Sitka Spruce 25th Anniversary
Listed by The Fellowship of Acoustics · Dedemsvaart, Overijssel
Photos hot-linked from The Fellowship of Acoustics’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Sitka
- Back / Sides
- Cocobolo
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- Nightingale
- Scale length
- 25.5"
- Nut width
- 1.75"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Condition
- New
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 The Fellowship of Acoustics
The Fellowship of Acoustics (TFOA) is a destination acoustic shop in Dedemsvaart, eastern Netherlands, run by Rudi Bults and his family since 2001 — what started as a barn-side business has grown into one of Europe's largest specialty guitar shops, housed since 2015 in a former town hall ("Villa Dina") that holds upwards of a thousand guitars. From the start, TFOA bet on selling worldwide in English from a small Dutch town, focused entirely on quality handmade instruments rather than mass-market volume. The villa houses retail, a luthier workshop with their "Gold Standard" setup and a PLEK machine for precision fret work, plus a small theatre and a music school under the same roof. Their boutique acoustic shelves run deep on Bourgeois, Collings, Santa Cruz, Lowden, Furch, Goodall, and Huss & Dalton, alongside a strong vintage and consigned catalog.
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