Matt Quick | Handmade Bamboo Guitar

We love finding out about our team’s talents and what interests them outside of working at Amalgam. For example, this is Matt – he’s one of our senior model makers (architecture) and he loves working with wood. He also loves a challenge and we discovered that in his spare time recently, he decided to make a guitar. From scratch! We caught up with him to find out more about this hidden skill…

Not quite a ukulele

Matt has made a couple of ukuleles in the past, but never a guitar. He wanted to try his hand at making a guitar because he wanted to learn how to play one. Nothing like making your own rather going down the shops and just buying one we suppose.

Following some patterns on the internet, including some templates to show him where the frets go (on a CNC tooled fret board by the way), Matt spent around 20 hours crafting the instrument out of bamboo. There were some challenges along the way and a few adjustments were made, but he got it right pretty much first time.

The finish is beautiful and the sound pitch perfect, so Matt’s looking forward to pushing on beyond beginner in no time.

In his day job Matt is one of our senior model makers and works a lot with our architect team on timber models.

Please look out for more stories about the hidden talents of our people coming soon.