Hill Guitar Company along
with Carmel Guitar Society and Friedman Eye Center presents:
Eva Beneke with LeChic Duo Guitar Concert on Friday, March 22 at 7:00 PM
Eva Beneke Master Class on Saturday, March 23
Eva is an
internationally acclaimed soloist, chamber musician and published
arranger, with a free-spirited virtuosity and enormous talent for
improvisation. She is a true musical find.
Renowned
classical guitarists Iren Arutyunyan and Sofia Gleeson have combined
their talents to form the LeChic Guitar Duo. Iren and Sofia met
studying guitar at the Flora L. Thornton School of Music at the
University of Southern California in 2009, and went on to form this
cutting-edge duo in 2010. LeChic Duo
Vineland Branch Public Library
1450 Blossom Hill Road
San Jose,CA 95118
Kenny will be hosting this enjoyable evening, as well as entertaining with a couple original Hill pieces and sharing works of Johannes Moller which are sure to delight.
About the Open Mic:
Everyone is welcome! Audience and performers of all levels: beginner to professional: all are warmly received and encouraged.
Finger picking nylon string styles (leave the Les Paul at home). Soloists and ensembles of any combination.
10 minutes maximum per performer, coordinated by a different guest host each month.
Tropical juice and coffee provided by the SBGS. Fruit, cake and cookies are welcome: please bring enough to display and share.
We've returned from NAMM
2013 safe and more or less sane, a week of packing and carrying guitars,
travel, selling, socializing with customers, vendors, friends, partners
and family. Overall the mood of the show was intense, upbeat, with most
people well involved in their businesses and lives, with not a whole
lot of the lament and woe that we've heard in the previous couple of
years. Our own guitars get great reviews and are moving well, and our
company is enjoying a good reputation and fine friendships around the
world. It's a real privilege in this business to know and connect with
many different characters from around the entire globe, a vivid example
of how beautifully woven modern international relations and commerce
truly are. The world could learn a lot about international relations
from hanging around at NAMM, and in fact, we do.
Simon & Quillan Hill
Colt Valenti
For me the most important development within this years NAMM was the
efforts of my sons Simon and Quillan. This year I threw much of the
responsibility for the mounting the show into their laps. They had to
pack the instruments and display booth, drive it down, unload and set it up,
and at the end undo the process. What they also did beautifully was
occupy the booth assist with sales and hosting for all four days of the show.
They met people, old customers and new, vendors old and new, and
attracted some very fine young musicians, spontaneously playing
beautiful music in our booth. These kids are youth magnets, reaching new
people I would never meet no matter how many shows I attend. Simon and
Quillan are smart, energetic, funny, personable, good looking and young!
They seemed to slip into the role of the face and the work of the
company quite naturally, and I am very, very proud of them. I hope they
enjoyed being there as much as everyone else enjoyed them. I am also
very grateful for the presence and efforts of Jessica Stark, who keeps
everything going smoothly, makes friends easily, and reminds us to mind
our manners. She's great. We're all back at work now, making guitars, making music, and getting
them all out to the world. Thank you to everyone for your support and
interest. I am grateful to be in such a rewarding field, surrounded by
so many good people and projects. It feels like we are just getting
started.
BEN
LOMOND -- Kenny Hill oversees a sophisticated global operation that
manufactures classical guitars on two continents, with materials from
around the world, to sell to customers in several countries -- and he
does it all from a converted house among the fog-shrouded redwoods of
the Santa Cruz Mountains.
"World headquarters in Ben Lomond!" Hill
says, marveling that his complex enterprise is centered in a place
better known for logging than logistics.
Hill is the founder of
Hill Guitar, an outfit that makes about 150 top-of-the-line instruments a
year in a small plant with six workers just down the hill from world
headquarters and an additional 50,000 a year that he has designed for
more modest budgets
in a factory halfway around the world in Guangzhou, China."Our business is as complicated as Honda or Mercedes," Hill says.
When
I set out to explore manufacturing and its future in the Made in the
Bay Area series, I didn't expect to be making a trip up the winding road
from Silicon Valley to Ben Lomond. The series has looked at how rising
costs in China, increasing automation in the United States and growing
globalization have made the decision about where to produce goods more
complicated. And it turns out Hill's operation is an ideal illustration
of another byproduct of those trends: More than ever, companies need to
look at individual products when deciding where in the world they can be
most efficiently made. Hill makes
his most expensive guitars close to home, where he can literally take a
hands-on approach with the meticulously crafted instruments. In China,
he relies on an assembly-line operation in a factory of 200 workers to
provide economies of scale for guitars that sell for much less than his
Ben Lomond models. And he's helping launch a plant in Oxnard that will
produce guitars priced between the Ben Lomond and Chinese models and
that require a level of hand-crafting greater than the Chinese products
and less than the high-end guitars. Click here to view the entire San Jose Mercury article
Kenny Hill, founder of Hill Guitar Company plays one of his high-end
custom-built acoustic guitars at his showroom in Ben Lomond, Calif. (Gary Reyes/Staff)
We just completed a custom Performance Model instrument for Jonathan Braun, a good guitarist and old friend from Marin County. He asked me to make very special instrument designed for comfort and ease, a Performance Model guitar, but with a Stand Up style tapered body, an ergonomic arm rest, and a 615 mm string length. The very short 615 string length was the biggest departure for me. I have built guitars a small as 630 mm, and I've also had guitars even shorter, but generally those instruments are smaller body, designed for children or other small people. In this case we were pushing the limit if how- short-can-you-go. The best way I know to discover what a "limit" is, is to pass it. I thought maybe this would be past the limit, but no. This 615 scale concert guitar is really magical. Honestly, the bass, the volume, the trebles and the overall presence are completely acceptable, wonderful actually, with no obvious sacrifice of sound. What is unusual about this guitar is the incredible playability because of the shorter fret spacings, and the a remarkable sustain, kind of supernatural, due I suppose tot the low tension on the top.
Wedge
Whatever it is, the overall affect is very appealing, and it extends the horizon of what's-possible once again. There's nothing like a good old 650 mmm concert classical guitar, but more and more we are finding variations that suit a lot of special desires, needs or curiosities, and sacrifice nothing in the process. Pretty cool. I'm going to make a couple more similar guitars right away, both to test some further variations, and to discern whether the magic of this guitar was a lucky anomaly, or whether it is a reliable formula. Keep in touch. Kenny Hill
November 2012
Jonathan tries his new custom 615mm Performance at the
Hill Guitar Showroom Ben Lomond, CA
Renowned
classical guitarists Iren Arutyunyan and Sofia Gleeson have combined
their talents to form the LeChic Guitar Duo. Iren and Sofia met
studying guitar at the Flora L. Thornton School of Music at the
University of Southern California in 2009, and went on to form this
cutting-edge duo in 2010. 
