2014 Kenny Hill "Signature SP/CD" SP/IN

This 2014 Kenny Hill "Signature SP/CD" is a double-top classical guitar – spruce outside, cedar inside – with Indian rosewood back and sides, built in his California workshop.

Kenny Hill's "Signature" Classical Guitar

The "Signature" is Kenny's top model, custom-made with his most up-to-date designs, methods and materials and aimed at the highest quality of sound, playability and beauty.

A Nomex Double Top

Kenny makes the top from three layers: an outer leaf of spruce, an inner leaf of cedar, and a core of Nomex, the ultra-light cell material that makes a "double top" (pioneered by Dammann, Wagner and others) so light. 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 spruce 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.