Froggy Bottom H-12 5A Koa Limited Edition Acoustic Guitar (1995)

About Froggy Bottom Guitars

Froggy Bottom Guitars are built in Newfane, Vermont, by a five-person shop Michael Millard has led since 1970 — when he built the first one in his Lower East Side apartment while serving as shop foreman at Gurian Guitars in New York City. The shop never grew by choice. Today's team builds around 75 instruments a year, every one custom-spec'd to an individual player and built face-down in the classical-guitar tradition Michael learned from Gurian. The Froggy Bottom signature is more in the methodology than the silhouette: from thirty feet away the guitars look like traditional steel-strings, but every component of every build is varied to a specific player's needs, bracing voiced by ear and necks finish-carved by hand. Build queues run into years; Froggy Bottom buyers tend to know exactly what they're going for and find it nowhere else. …

About Elderly Instruments

Elderly Instruments has been a Lansing, Michigan institution since 1972 — founder Stan Werbin opened the shop in East Lansing with fifteen used instruments and no cash register, then spent fifty-plus years growing it into one of the largest specialty music retailers in the country while keeping it family-run (Stan still leads; daughter Lillian is the next generation). The store moved to its current home in a renovated old lodge hall in Lansing's Old Town district in 1983 and runs today with about forty employees, many tenured 20+ years. Their catalog is famously broad — Taylor, Martin, Fender, and Yamaha alongside Collings, Bourgeois, Lowden, McPherson, Santa Cruz, Goodall, and Atkin — and the in-house repair shop, a separate 3,000-square-foot space with a spray booth, inspects and sets up nearly every instrument they sell. A specialty music store that's outlasted every shift in retail and stays known for its repair expertise and customer care.

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