2013 Kenny Hill "Signature Standup CD/SP" CD/IN

This 2013 Kenny Hill "Signature Standup CD/SP" is a double-top classical guitar – cedar outside, spruce inside – with Indian rosewood back and sides, built in his California workshop to be played standing, with a strap.

The "Standup" Version of the Signature

Hill "Signature" guitars are custom-made using the most up-to-date designs, methods and materials, for the highest quality of playability, projection and volume. This particular guitar is the "Standup" version, with a slightly altered shape of the back and sides so that it can be "worn" with a strap, much like an electric guitar: the body is tapered, narrower on the upper bass side, so the guitar lies back against the player and stays stable on the strap. Kenny designed it for himself, after years of sitting in the classical position began to tell on his back – you can read his story in his interview on our Kenny Hill page.

A Nomex Double Top

The soundboard is a "double top", a design first pioneered by Dammann, Wagner and others, with two very thin skins of wood – cedar outside, spruce underneath – and a core of Nomex between them. Light as it is, the domed top stays stiff – the key to both its responsive sound and its stability – and the idea comes straight from ultra-light aviation technology. It is lattice braced, and outwardly looks like any cedar soundboard.

Other features include dual soundports and a raised fingerboard.

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.