Meet the college student crafting vibrant electric guitars from scratch

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College sophomore Ian Vanveen, 20, got into woodworking as a way of budget management. “I didn’t have a whole lot of money,” he says, “so I decided to build what I wanted myself.” The mostly self-taught craftsman started off making furniture, but was eventually itching to do more.

So Vanveen took a carpentry class to learn about different woods and their properties. There, he discovered things like how different kinds of wood can vary in density, and how wood’s fibers can expand or shrink depending on humidity. He then decided to combine his newfound knowledge with his building skills and start making electric guitars.

“That’s when things got interesting,” he says.

A high schooler makes his first electric guitar, kind of

The first electric guitar that Vanveen handled was his dad’s old band guitar: a blue, semi-hollow body, Gibson ES-355. A high schooler at the time, Vanveen immediately felt a connection with the instrument, and got it in his brain to make his own custom-made six-string.

Boy with dark hair in a blue button down shirt holds a blue electric guitar. — Ian Vanveen first got the itch to make a guitar after handling his dad’s blue, semi-hollow body, Gibson ES-355. *Image: Ian Vanveen*

So he set up shop in his family’s Wisconsin garage, and got to work building. He took a bunch of pine two-by-fours left over from a home deck project, “and just cut it up and glued all the pieces together,” he says. “It turned out really bad.”

A second attempt at a DIY guitar

Vanveen took a couple years off before he started crafting a second guitar, though this time he went in with a bit more planning and forethought. While a fan of the iconic Les Paul guitar shape—which is slightly asymmetrical with a rounded top and larger, rounded bottom—the student found it “notoriously thick, and really uncomfortable.”

He decided instead to create the thinnest guitar possible without having it warp over time (slimmer guitars are more susceptible to changes in humidity, temperatures, and high-string tension). Another non-negotiable: Vanveen wanted the instrument to sound loud when he played it even when it wasn’t plugged into an amp. “I was really adamant about this.”

His first step was sketching a model of the instrument using Adobe Illustrator. “I didn’t have any of the dimensions, really,” says Vanveen. “I just figured that out as I went.”

For this project he used maple, a stiff and dense wood that’s known for its stability. He then took a couple of weeks to test its strength and see how thin he could get it while still withstanding maximum string tension. “I got it down to an inch and an eighth,” he says. “If I went any lower than that, the whole body would bend over time.”

A boy with purple hair wearing a colorful sweatshirt holds a guitar with a blue body and yellow-orange neck. — Vanveen made his first guitar in high school. “It turned out really bad,” he says. *Image: Ian Vanveen*

Vanveen used a miter saw—good for making quick and angled crosscuts—to cut individual wood boards, creating what would become the guitar’s rough shape. He then used a jigsaw power tool for hollowing out the piece and contouring, and a drill to make holes for the electronics. These include adjustable potentiometers (“pots”), which are basically electrical components that allow a musician to control the instrument’s volume and tone, and a capacitor to filter its frequency (the speed at which its strings vibrate) and shape its tone.

Since Vanveen wanted his guitar to sound loud even without plugging it in, he hollowed out the entire instrument (other than its center, where its wiring is now located) using a handheld router.

“The idea was that the sound would reflect a little bit more within the holes,” he says. As with standard acoustic guitars, the hollow chamber allows the guitar’s wood to vibrate and air to move around inside more freely. This in turn amplifies the sound.

When it came to wiring, Vanveen bought the “cheapest stuff” he could find off of eBay for about $15. The pre-assembled kit contained both potentiometers and a capacitor. It also came with a selector switch to choose guitar pickups, which are electromagnetic transducers arranged in various configurations to determine the “color” of a sound. For example, one pickup might produce a tone that’s “bright and crisp,” while another could be described as sounding “warm and gritty.” It also included all the necessary wires for the electric instrument.

The guitar features a black-and-white color scheme, which Vanveen says was inspired by a photography class he was taking at the time. It’s also specially crafted for left-handed people. “They don’t really make left-handed electric guitars,” he says, “and I’m left-handed. So this was a big moment for me.”

Close up a black and white electric guitar held by a boy wearing an orange shirt. We don't see the boy's face. — Vanveen plans to make more improvements to his handmade guitar. *Image: Ian Vanveen*

The finished product

Overall, the piece took Vanveen about five months to make. This involved two months of planning and three months of cutting, crafting, wiring, sanding, painting, and assembling. He typically put in more than 20 hours a week, working mostly on weekends. All said, Vanveen worked more than 200 hours to put the guitar together.

Although Vanveen hasn’t made any new guitars since he started college in fall 2024, he’s still looking for ways to improve his 2.0 version.

Earlier this year, he learned to use an operational amplifier (op-amp), which allows him to further manipulate and control the instrument’s tone. He’s also created a digital circuit simulator that can bypass the guitar’s capacitor, aka its frequency filter, and utilize other capacitors connected to ground.

“Most guitars have only one capacitor,” limiting the instrument’s ability to shape tones, says Vanveen. Instead, his simulator connects a variety of outside capacitors to the guitar’s potentiometers, or volume controls. Vanveen can then get a whole different tone depending on which one he chooses.

“This summer I’m gonna build a new guitar with these switches,” says Vanveen. But it has to wait until he’s home from college. “I make everything in my parents’ garage.”

In The Workshop, Popular Science highlights the ingenious, delightful, and often surprising projects people build in their spare time. If you or someone you know is working on a hobbyist project that fits the bill, we’d love to hear about it—fill out this form to tell us more.