The Gurian line

Michael Gurian learned the free-form craft of classical guitar building — construction without confining jigs or forms — from luthiers Gene Clark, David Rubio, and Manuel Velazquez, and adapted it to the steel-string guitar in his Grand Street workshop in New York. Michael Millard joined that shop in October 1970, bringing a boatwright's training that began in a Connecticut boat works at age ten, and moved with Gurian to New Hampshire before leaving in 1974 to build Froggy Bottom Guitars full time. His first instruments were, in his own telling, essentially Gurian shapes with significant adjustments — lighter bracing, and the high, thin, highly arched back braces that became a Froggy Bottom trademark. The free-form method is still the foundation of the Vermont shop's stated approach: maximum flexibility to build for the individual player. The line now runs a second generation — Adam Buchwald founded Circle Strings in 2005 while head repairman at Retrofret in Brooklyn, moved to Vermont in 2008 to teach at Vermont Instruments, and built at Froggy Bottom from 2010 before moving his own shop to Burlington in 2012, where he shares a workshop with Dale Fairbanks. A method learned on Grand Street, half a century on, still passing bench to bench in Vermont.