2025 Kenny Hill "Signature CD/SP" CD/IN

This 2025 Kenny Hill "Signature CD/SP" is a double-top classical guitar – cedar outside, spruce inside – with Indian rosewood back and sides, built in his California workshop – heard in Kenny's own performance of his composition "Stolen Moments" in the video on this page.

The Kenny Hill "Signature" Model

Hill "Signature" guitars are custom-made using the most up-to-date designs, methods and materials to produce the highest quality sound, playability and beauty.

A Nomex Double Top

It features a "double top" (pioneered originally by Dammann, Wagner and others): a Nomex core – an ultra-light cell structure – "sandwiched" between two very thin layers of wood, cedar on the outside and spruce on the underside. This makes for an extremely light and efficient soundboard, and it is domed to maximize stiffness at the same time – important for both the sound and the structural stability. Outwardly it looks like a normal cedar soundboard; the technique is borrowed from ultra-light aviation. A lightweight lattice of braces keeps it durable but flexible.

Other features include dual soundports, a raised fingerboard, a truss rod for easy neck adjustment and a 20th fret for players who need a high C natural.

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.