Ryan Guitars
2005 Ryan Nightingale, Cocobolo/Spruce
2005 · Listed by Dream Guitars · Asheville, NC
Photos hot-linked from Dream Guitars’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Cocobolo
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- Nightingale
- Scale length
- 25.75"
- Nut width
- 1.75"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- Yes
- Condition
- Preowned
- Year
- 2005
About Ryan Guitars
Ryan Guitars are built in Westminster, California by Kevin Ryan — a former Northrop Aeroscience Lab engineer who started prototyping acoustic guitars in 1987 while his day job built jet fighter scale models for transonic wind tunnel testing. The engineering background shows up everywhere in the work: the Ryan Bevel (the original integrated armrest, since widely copied), Acoustic Flutes sound ports, laser-sculpted bracing patterns, a spherically-arched back. Ryan's catalog reads less like a pre-war tribute and more like a thirty-year argument that the acoustic guitar could still be reimagined through precision tooling and materials thinking. Acoustic Guitar Magazine named Kevin one of the most influential builders of the previous thirty years in 2010 — calling the guitars "a blueprint for scores of other builders" and "a modern classic." The catalog stays small and the queue runs long; each instrument is hand-built in Southern California.
About Dream Guitars
Dream Guitars sits in Asheville, North Carolina, in what may be the most photographed shop in the boutique acoustic world. Their inventory runs deep across the modern fingerstyle and bluegrass spectrum — Kostal, Bashkin, Goodall, Bourgeois, Pre-War, and many others — and the staff has earned a reputation for knowing each instrument in detail and matching buyers to the right one.
See 52 more from Dream Guitars →