2019 Kenny Hill "New Century" SP/IN

This 2019 Kenny Hill "New Century" is a double-top classical guitar – bear-claw spruce outside, cedar inside – with Indian rosewood back and sides, built in his California workshop – heard in Barrios' "Sueño en la Floresta" by Cristobal Selame and in Kenny's own "There and Gone" by Johannes Moller.

New Century: Signature Features, Hill Workshop

With the "Signature" established as a celebrated modern guitar, the Hill workshop in California added the "New Century" series: guitars made from the best hand-selected tonewoods from around the world, each one built and finished by hand with meticulous care. The New Century offers the key ingredients of the well-known Signature model – lattice bracing, a double top and sound ports – for extraordinary sound and playability. As a guitarist himself, Kenny has long put the range and quality of the player's sound, and physical ease of playing, first.

Double-Top Construction

Instead of a single solid plate, the top is a laminate of thin bear-claw spruce and cedar around a Nomex cell core – the "double top" concept that Dammann, Wagner and others pioneered. 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 bear-claw spruce soundboard.

Add to that dual soundports.

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.