2010 Kenny Hill "Performance CD/SP" CD/IN

This 2010 Kenny Hill "Performance CD/SP" is a double-top classical guitar – cedar outside, spruce inside – with Indian rosewood back and sides, made in his California workshop – the model heard in "Bitola" by AlmaNova on this page.

The "Performance": Modern Top, Spanish Build

Built in the Hill Guitar workshop in California, the "Performance" puts Kenny's modern soundboard into an otherwise classic Spanish guitar, as a more accessible sibling of the Signature model. Spanish heel construction meets a modern top here: the soundboard is a double top of cedar over spruce, braced with a lattice, and there are two soundports in the side of the upper bout.

Response and Color

With cedar as the outer layer of the double top, the sound is harmonically rich and textured. Very responsive and punchy thanks to its lattice bracing, it is also powerful, with a wide range of color and a highly expressive dynamic range. Overall, an extremely good concert instrument.

Kenny Hill: Guitarist and Guitar Maker

Kenny Hill was born in San Jose, California, and is a performing guitarist and composer as well as a guitar maker. Largely self-taught, he began building guitars professionally in the 1970s in Santa Barbara. In the 1980s he set guitar making aside to raise his four children – though he never stopped performing – and in 1989 he returned to the workbench with copies of historic instruments by Torres, Fleta, Hauser, Rodríguez and Panormo: the beginning of his "Master Series".

From Soledad and Paracho to the Santa Cruz Mountains

In 1993 a grant allowed Kenny to set up a guitar-building shop at Soledad State Prison in California. Two years later he traveled to Paracho, Mexico, as a writer for Acoustic Guitar magazine, to cover a master class led by José Luis Romanillos, and in 1996 he established a workshop there, spending five years building a market for Paracho's guitars. Out of this work grew workshops in California, Mexico and China: his "New World" guitars are made in Guangzhou, China, in a factory of which he is a founding shareholder, and he is designer emeritus and a long-time consultant for Cordoba Guitars.

Kenny's own Signature and Performance models – with double tops, lattice bracing and sound ports – are built by hand in his workshop in Ben Lomond, in the mountains near Santa Cruz, California, by a team of about six craftsmen that includes his son and son-in-law. In 2015 the Guitar Foundation of America honored him with its Industry Leadership Award.

Kenny Hill Guitars at GSI

Many Kenny Hill guitars have passed through our doors, from his Master Series replicas of the great historical makers to his modern Signature and Performance models.