Guitar building began in 1989 simply as an interesting and challenging father-and-son project. Bob was a pharmacist and Orville a retired building inspector. Orville brought years of woodworking experience as well as his years spent as a piano technician during the 1970’s to the luthiery work. Orville played classical guitar for most of his life and passed on the love of the instrument to Bob.

To them, luthiery is an interesting balance of art, craft and science. They don’t believe that any one simple, formulaic method is very useful, but do believe scientific methods are the key to repeatable, successful instruments. Careful observation can lead to the development of a hypothesis. Well-designed experiments can then be used to test an hypothesis. And the results of these experiments can be incorporated into new instruments. In this context they don’t look at any one instrument as an end-point but rather a point along a continuous path of learning and refinement.

Every Milburn I’ve played has been sweet, strong and very musical.