ETSU Guitar Building

12/31/2025

ETSU' faculty members Holger Olesen and Trey Hensley representin'.
2026 SPBGMA nominees (https://bluegrasstoday.com/2026-spbgma-nominees-announced/)

12/31/2025

Congrats to our talented colleague, Holger Olesen, for his nomination for SPBGMA Best Dobro Player and best wishes going forward into 2026.

08/21/2025

Over the last couple of days, we been witnessing the slow disassembly of the 's steamplant's 'ETSC' smoke stack. I hasn't been used for over a decade when natural gas-fired furnaces replaced the old, obsolete coal systems. But it has been a landmark at least on the northwest side of campus.

08/08/2025

Fiducials are marks placed on an object to help with analysis. In discussing some possibilities of multi-camera video analysis, we realized that we needed to laser etch some fiducials onto the soundboards to help with photo and video post-processing of the various plates for scaling and orientation. The vertices of the two mirrored 3-4-5 right triangles fall in the 'spaces' of all ten (10) of our acoustic bracing footprints. In theory, it should work.

07/18/2025

To celebrate this artist's storied career, we are putting together an tribute band. What songs should be in the set list? I mean other than "West Texas Dreams" and "No Signal in the Valley?"

07/17/2025

...and, BOOM!
Introducing ARTIST Project Test Article #2: an acrylic LDR-550 ladder-style braced, 1.5mm (0.059") thick acrylic soundboard.
Spoilers! It makes 'appropriate guitar noise.'

07/17/2025

07/16/2025

Holger Olesen gives our prototype ETSU DT-1860 de Torres-style braced acoustic guitar an introduction and a quick play.
This bracing design is a steel string variant of Antonio de Torres' classic 'classical guitar' lower bracing design (AKA 'the cow-catcher') adapted for use in the STEM Guitar Project's Acoustic Kit. This guitar also sports the prototype 'ET Copperhead' semi-straight pull laser-cut headstock and companion CNC-routed fingerboard of leopardwood with rosewood fret markers.

07/12/2025

ARTIST Project Phase II Milestone-level: Achieved

07/12/2025

Holger Olesen spearheaded the effort to mount the neck onto the ARTIST Project Framework and then epoxy a bridge onto the 1st test article braced acrylic soundboard, a Standard Mod 05 Martin-style X-brace design.

07/12/2025

After a busy early summer, we are back in the lab continuing work on the ARTIST Project research effort. We finally got the 2nd internal stress testing test article fabricated: an acrylic ETSU-designed LDR-550 ladder-style bracing assembly mounted onto a thinner (0.063") acrylic soundboard.