About Us

We are the developers of Luthier Lab. There are two of us, both retired software engineers. One of us is an active luthier hobbiest.

How Do We Make Money From Luthier Lab?

We don't. Luthier Lab is free to download. There are no ads, and we don't collect any personal data. We don't make a penny off of Luthier Lab.

What kind of business model is that? It is a terrible one. If you totalled up the time we spent on development, we would lose money even if we sold a copy to every luthier in the world at $100 US. So why do it? Because we enjoy working on it, and find it to be a useful tool for our own luthiery projects.

The History of Luthier Lab

My partner was learning Android programming just to keep her skills current. She was looking for an application that she could take all the way from inception to release. I suggested a fret calculator and laid out what it should do and the formula for calculating fret spacing. She implemented it for Android and released it. It's still on the Play Store (see Fret Calculator).

At around the same time R. M. Mottola wrote some articles for American Lutherie ( issues #97, #99, #103) describing an arc and line approach to specifying guitar shapes. I thought it would be fun to write a Windows desktop program that implemented his algorithms. My partner said that desktop programs are passé and that it should be an Android app.

I'm a student of Al Carruth and use his methods to measure the properties of my instruments. I was unhappy with the tone generator that I was using and decided to add one to my nascent app. It is at this point that Luthier Lab as an idea was born. I made a list of test and design tools that I would want in a luthiery app and we started implementing them. I discussed with Al and other luthiers what features they would like in such an app, and how the features should work. I took many of their suggestions.

Luthier Lab is a classic example of "feature creep". If an idea appeals to us, we implement it. We've received many good suggestions from users as well, and are always interested in new ones (see Contact Us).

iOS Support

Often the first question we get when someone sees Luthier Lab is: "Does it run on an iPhone or iPad?" The answer is no. We'd have to rewrite it almost completely to port it to the iOS environment. We have no interest in doing that.